Happy NEW YEAR!

Here's another one of those "had to be there to believe it" moments of my life... experiencing the Rose Parade live and in person with Aunt Kathy.

Mom always got up early to watch it as a child, and I remember joining her... mostly begrudgingly early in life, but later I learned to love the tradition. Being there and seeing it first hand is something I'll never forget!

We left her house AFTER it had begun (I was horrified we'd missed it!) and she drove us the 45 minutes from Yorba Linda to Pasadena, and found ROCK STAR parking within a few hundred yards of the parade route (which she seemed completely unamazed by regardless of the hundreds of thousands spectators who mostly arrived hours and HOURS earlier). We then walked just a few blocks to "her" spot along the parade route... unsurprisingly the homeowners not only knew her but were also glad to see her and offered us a premium curbside viewing location. To this day I don't know which was more amazing... the parade, or the fact that she had found the perfect parking spot and viewing location.

I'd seen the parade (as mentioned before) for years, but until you see it first hand... you'll never believe how amazingly beautiful it all is. The thing that amazed me the most was the horses, something I've always poo-pa'd at local parades. The flower's adorning the horses necks and saddles put every wedding bouquet I'd ever seen to shame. AMAZING!

I'll never forget the time I saw it live.

Tonight I'm going to bed early tonight so I can watch it live albeit from 1,000 miles away, and I'm probably not alone...

Happy New Year Everybody!

XO,
Charlie

On-Air Broadcast Schedule

Thursday, January 1, 2009 - All Times Pacific

4:00 a.m.	119th Tournament of Roses Parade (encore of last year's parade)
6:00 a.m.	Backstage at the Tournament of Roses Parade
7:00 a.m.	Tournament of Roses Parade Countdown
8:00 a.m.	120th Tournament of Roses Parade
10:00 a.m.	120th Tournament of Roses Parade (encore broadcast)
12:30 p.m.	120th Tournament of Roses Parade (encore broadcast)
3:00 p.m.	120th Tournament of Roses Parade (encore broadcast)
5:30 p.m.	120th Tournament of Roses Parade (encore broadcast)
7:30 p.m.	120th Tournament of Roses Parade (encore broadcast)

Things I remeber - Marjorie Harris Ward

My memories of wiring the Portage home with electricity by Marjorie Harris Ward as related to Doug Ward


In the mid twenties Portage began to catch up with the rest of the world as it received electricity. Today we jump in a car and drive miles without thinking about it; in my youth we didn’t leave Portage often, as a trip to Malad was considered a big trip. We knew bigger towns like Tremonton had electricity but I don’t remember seeing it before it came to Portage. Our home to that point was lighted with kerosene lamps, ours were better than lots of other homes. Kerosene Lamps gave good light but they could cause fires as one of ours did during my youth. I was awakened during the night and I remember calling to my brother Virgil (also known as Virgie but mostly Virg) that the house was on fire and then running around yelling “the house is on fire”. Virg said “Stop bawling and screaming Marjorie and get some more water” which I did. We saved the house but the fire burned the ceiling of the new house as well as a beautiful piece of furniture that contained lots of family records and a couch. My mother and father were out of town when this happened and they were appreciative that we saved the house. For years afterward mother would say “Marjorie saved our house from the fire”. I do know this that we had waited so long for that new house that if we had lost it in the fire it would have been devastating. We lived in a Log house before building our nice new house and we loved the new house so much. My mother wrote in her history about the new house: “it seemed like a Palace to me”. My mother always made do with what she had but I kept after dad until he built the new house. After all, Dad’s brother, Uncle Bob Harris, had built a beautiful new house; one of the nicest in Portage so I worked on my dad to build us a nice one too. I guess he finally tired of listening to me because he found a contractor to start ours.

When electricity came to town we were one of the first to install it in our house. We were so excited anticipating electrical power coming to our house. We knew when we got power that that would be the end of having to fill the lamps and cleaning their glass chimneys.

When the time came to wire our house Dad bought me a new pair of bib-overalls (these were the first pair of pants I had ever had … girls wore dresses and bloomers, never long pants) He had asked me to help our cousin and his nephew, Loyal “Loy” Harris, who was a self-made electrician, to pull the wires through the attic in the top of the house. I think I was about 10 or 11 years old. Loy had me pull wire into each room to where a hole had been cut in the top of the ceiling to receive the wire and then he would drop a braided speckled wire into the room where he attached a socket to hold one light bulb at the end of each wire. Every light was switched on and off; right at the light … there were no wall switches. We didn’t have any electrical outlets because we didn’t have any electrical appliances to plug them into. For instance, we continued to heat our “sad irons” (the forerunner of electric irons) on the wood stove long after we had electricity. Later on we bought an electric washing machine. The only part of that machine that was electrified was the agitator, everything else was hand powered. But having the agitator electrified was so much better than the hand agitator we had previously.

Because electricity was new and pretty expensive dad was always after all of us to turn off the lights when we left a room. Because of that I’m still pretty good about turning lights off today. After all, things you learn as a child stay with you the rest of your life.

This is the first of what I hope to be many of Grandma's memories about her life. As we get them all together we will publish her life's story.
Dad

Logan on the little screen

Logan made his second appearance on the news (the first was 19.5 years ago to the day), I thought you all might like to see his performance.
http://www.abc4.com/mediacenter/local.aspx?videoid=89972@video.ktvx.com&navCatId=462

He has been an extra many times, so I am not sure how many times he has been on the little or big screen, but I think this is the second time on the news.