When I knew better than my mother. . .

This is another story from Lu Penrose Bond that she told to Marji in a recorded interview in 1982.

"When I was around seventeen and knew much more than my mother could ever learn, two of my friends and I thought it would be fun to go from Salt Lake to Ogden and have lunch and go to a show and then go back to Salt Lake. And I asked my mother for permission to go, and she said, 'If you want to go to lunch and a show in Salt Lake that's fine, but I would prefer that you didn't go to Ogden.'

"Well, because I knew so much, I thought, 'Well, we won't leave until after my mother's gone to work, and we'll be back before she gets home from work, and nobody will ever know the difference.' So I went.

"We were in a car that belonged to my friend Marion Nesbitt's boyfriend and there was another girl with us, Merle Taylor. So, we set off to go to Ogden for lunch and a movie, but we never got to Ogden, because, after we left Farmington, we were going along and we came close to a place that everybody used to call Dead Man's curve. It was a big curve in a two-lane highway, and as we rounded the curve a tire blew out, and it flipped the car, and we rolled three times, came to rest with one of the car doors open on the ground and the other car door up in the air. And we were all piled on top of each other a the bottom. And we had an awful time getting out of the car because the only door we could get out of was up above us and it was hard to push open. But when we got out we saw a farmer that we had noticed riding his plow in his field - we had noticed him just before the car flipped - was still on his tractor, with his arms folded and looking down at this wreck of a car with three teenage girls trying got get out. And he never moved off that tractor.

"I don't know who called the Highway Patrol or the ambulance, but they did come, took us to the hospital. I'd lost one of my shoes and I lost my hat, and I had an enormous bump on my head and a black eye, a concussion, and all the ligaments in my left arm, torn. From which I still suffer to this very day, because I knew more than my mother did.

"Anyway, we didn't get home until about 9:30 at night and it was in the car of the Highway Patrol and our mothers were all frantic, because they didn't know where we were all this time. The worst punishment I ever had in my entire life was walking in to that house. My mother didn't say one word to me, like, Where have you been? or What has happened? My arm was in a sling, I had one shoe on, my head was bandaged and I was a sight! Marion had a few little bruises and Merle got hysterical because she had a run in her new stockings. Marion and I both got really disgusted with her, she was screaming, 'Oh my stockings! I got a run in them!' Anyway, my mother didn't say a word to me, she just helped me in to the bedroom and helped me get undressed and put me to bed and covered me up and went out of the room. Ohhhh! Terrible!

"The next morning she took me to the hospital to have x-rays of my arm, my head, well, my head had a small concussion. I had to stay quiet for a long time, that cleared up, but out of that knock on my head I had two of the blackest eyes, and it came clear down under my cheekbone. First they went black, and then they turned kind of purple and then a sick yellow and for about six weeks it took my face to get back to normal, but I still have trouble with my arm.

"So, I think that was the only time when I asked my mother permission to do something and she said no, and I went ahead and did it anyway. It was a hard lesson to learn.

"I forgot to say that the reason we were brought home in Hoighway Patrol cars in that Al Gulen's car was demolished, from rolling over three times. There was nothing decent to salvage. I guess Al really loved Marion because they eventually got married and had four beautiful, intelligent children."