Kenneth R. Madsen, Salt Lake City, Utah: an interview by Winston Erickson, February 5 - 8, 2001: Saving the legacy tape no. 178 to 182

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NET R. MADSEN F bru 2001 aft r-well eighteen years after I was born. What I was reminiscing about there for a minute was that when my next to older brother went to school I didn't think it was fair that I couldn't go. So my mother, who had been a schoolteacher, taught me how to read and write. She taught me all the things that he was learning in the first grade. Two years later, by the time I was ready to go into the first grade, I already had the first grade behind me, but my mother would never let any of her children skip a grade, so I went to the first grade and then I went to the second grade right on through. Going back to the Depression years, they had a dramatic affect on our family. As I say, Dad had full-time work, but he also had eight children. We never experienced the Depression as far as feeling like we didn't have clothes and things like that because we did. We had clothes and we had enough to eat and we had no financial problems thanks to the most wonderful financial planning team I ever heard of-my mother and my father. As I say, we went to work. That was expected of us. We all went to work. We worked on farms, at least I did. My next older brother did until we both started to go to college and then there were other activities. My brother just older than I, from the time I can remember, was going to be a doctor and, from the time I can remember, he was the doctor for all the kids in the neighborhood. Instead of running home to their moms if they had an accident, or cut themselves, or anything like that, they came to my brother and he would fix them up. The reason I mention that is because he wanted to be a doctor and at that time he thought surgery might be his interest. He was concerned about injuries to his hands that might make it difficult for him to follow that course. With my parents, 11