Brigham D. Madsen, Salt Lake City, Utah: an interview by Winston Erickson, January 21, 2003: Saving the Legacy tape nos. 546 & 547

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Brigham D. Mad en 21 .January 200 WE: Nineteen thirty-two. Did you have plans other than g ing t w rk? Did y u want to go to college? BDM: Oh, yes. Both my father and my mother, my father as I said never had a chanc to learn much in grammar school. His father kept him out for the spring planting and for the fall harvest and he was lucky to get three months of schooling a year. But he always had a desire and two different times went to what's now Utah State University, saved his money, went, and the first year he had about a quarter and came down with typhoid fever and it wiped out his savings and he had to quit. But he didn't give up. He went back the next year and again had some kind of illness and had to go to the hospital and had to quit. He always had the desire, and I don't know where he got the desire or the motivation, so he always said to me, "You are going to college" because of his background, because he failed to do it. And my mother the same way. She grew up in Santaquin, Utah, and each of my parents was one of twelve children, so I have hundreds of first cousins; some of them I've never heard of. The principal of the school at Santaquin was so impressed by my mother that he made a special trip to her parents and asked them to send her to Brigham Young Academy in Provo and they didn't have the money, so she never went. So both my parents, because of their background, I received a lot of encouragement to go to college. It was just an accepted fact I was going to do it. WE: And they were able to send you during the Depression to college? BDM: Well, I went to two years, like I say, at what is now Idaho State University because I couldn't have gone any place else. I had to stay home, had free board and room. WE: Did you continue to work for your father? 7