What I remember about grandpa. It all started when I began converting one of the type written diaries by his father, William Lyle Stewart, into a word processor document. This diary contained a lot of information about everything his father was involved in. I learned that grandpa was a tough old bird. One time he was shot in the hand and it had almost healed by the time his father found out about it. They sent a wagon up to get him but he refused to come down from the mountains where he was helping to watch the family sheep herd. 

His favorite expression was "Hey Fire!". That was as close as I ever heard him come to swearing. The family in the early days of Utah were involved with everything from a herd of cattle and sheep to a Salt Company that recovered salt from the Salt Creek area of Warren, Utah. His father was one of the director's of the water company that was responsible for getting water to Warren. There was not an abundance of water and based on comments in his diary, his father was on everyone's love/hate list. If they got enough water, they loved him; however, if they had received more than their allotted share, their dam was removed and he made their hate list. At some point in the week they loved him and a couple of days later they hated him. Because of William Lyle's involvement in so many activities, his children were fully involved in the family businesses. If the family had three or four train boxcars of animals to sell, one of the older children accompanied the animals to Kansas City and negotiated with the meat packing companies there for the sale of these animals. These kids were in their early 20's. I never heard about him leaving Utah and then I find out some of the things he did when he was pretty young. He had been to see the city but was content with being on his farm.

We knew he was fully retired when we were able to get rid of the sheep. I did not share his love of sheep. I was old enough to be dropped into the large burlap bags that the wool was sold in. I remember them being around 40 inches in diameter and 96 inches long. Once you were dropped in, you had to pack the bundles of wool as they were thrown in until you could climb out. Then, it was some one else's turn to pack wool. This was usually another kid and there were only two of us. Most people don't realize how much oil is carried in the wool but anyone that has packed wool does. You get covered in it. You also smell like it for a long time. I still hate the smell and it been 40+ years since I packed wool. The wool processor's remove the oil and then package it in skin creams. Sheep Oil doesn't sound very nice so they gave it a much nicer sounding name called Lanolin. I have a negative reaction every time someone walks by with even the faintest smell of Sheep Oil. I was 50+ years old before I found something based on Lamb that I could eat. I was introduced to a Greek Gyros lamb sandwich, which tastes really good. The restaurant was really close to the Cray facilities in Minneapolis, Minnesota and was visited at least once on each trip there for a class.

One of grandpa's tricks was to test the electric fence which kept our animals on our property. The wire ran down one side of our property and was around a mile or so long. You really needed to test it once in awhile because if an animal got into the wrong field, it could be deadly. Grandpa's skin got drier and drier as he got into his mid 80's and he had to do some funny things to test the shock from the wire. The electric fencer had a clunk, clunk, clunk sound associated with a jolt of electricity being sent down the wire. One day a weed shorted the line out. Finding the short required a lot of my father's time and so he replaced the electric fence device with one of the new "fancy ones" that would literally burn the weeds right off of the fence. That was when we found out about grandpa testing the line. The new machine must have straightened his hair out when the first shock hit him. If he had grabbed the wire really badly, each jolt would have cramped his hand around the wire. A couple of days later he asked us if we had replaced the electric fencer and was told that we had a new weed burner model. That was when we started to learn what he had been doing to test the electric fence. It turned out that he had been removing one of his shoes and sock and dig a bare toe into the more moist dirt. I was obviously more conductive because I didn't even have to take my shoe off to be shocked. I don't know if he ever touched the fence after that but we assumed that he was MUCH more careful about what he did.