By SHERON HAFEN
As youngsters, we always wanted Daddy to tell us "The Elevator Story".
It was always a favorite with all of us.
When Daddy was going to the University of Utah to school he worked at the Purity
Biscuit Company to support himself and even with that the wages were so meager
that he had a hard time keeping food in his tummy. Many a day, he said, all he had to eat would be a few cookies and crackers he could take home from Purity Biscuit. He lived with Frank Crosby who had a saxophone and when money was tight or non-
existent Frank would take this saxophone down and pawn it for a few dollars, daddy
would bring home a few cookies and usually in the end somehow Aunt Ann would be in
tune enough that a check from her would arrive to bail them out, one more time.
Anyway, Daddy tells of the night he was on shift at Purity Biscuit and he got on the
elevator to go up to the next floor. It was a freight elevator designed without a door so that they could load and unload without being hindered with a door.
He said the elevator didn't stop at the second floor when he pushed the button so he
rode it to the next floor and it didn't stop. He was concerned but rode to the next
floor still he couldn't get it to stop. I believe he said the building was six floors so when he got to the fifth floor he knew it was not going to stop so as it passed that floor he quickly jumped out, sprang to his feet and ran up the stairs to arrive at the sixth floor just as the elevator reached the top of the cable works, crashed into the pulleys that held the mechanism, broke free of the cables and crashed to the bottom of the elevator shaft.
He said he was horrified! His first thought was what was his boss going to do to him
when he found out the elevator was ruined ... then he thought what if he had stayed on it and been killed. When his boss came in the next morning, Daddy said he was anything but angry with him but greatly relieved that Daddy hadn't been killed ( and nowadays he would have been afraid of being sued).
Dad said that his job was to add up the invoices each night and prepare the paper work for all the orders for the previous day. This is where he learned to add a column of four numbers at one time in his head. He would place his four fingers across the column and add each four numbers to the next until he reached the end of the column then jot down the total. He was always suspect of my calculator when I added a column and would double check it, in his head, to be sure the answer was correct. He loved math and numbers and was truly proficient in this area.