From 1946 to 1950 the painting business was not very good and we had to save our summer wages to carry us through the winter when work was scarce. I remember one December when I only worked Two days and made $17. In 1953 we bought our first house, on Telyea St. next door to my sister Dorothy, at a cost of $731.10 it was financed on a GI loan through the local bank. We moved there December 3 and it was a warm sunny day at 63 degrees, a perfect day for the three of us and our cat "Betty" to move. In 1948 the three of us, known as R.G.Benson and Sons started working part-time during the winter doing all the painting at F.F. Thompson Hospital which made it easier to buy a house. I had had a garden on Mason Street and made quite a large one in the lot on Telyea Street. I have managed to have a garden every year since then although some of them were small. I also inherited a love for flowers from my mother and have always had flower gardens and plants.
During the late 1940's when Lynn was small we took a trip to Utah in the month of December and we only got as far as Lancaster, south, of Buffalo, when we ran into a terrible blizzard and the roads were closed. We got into the parking lot of a closed summer motel with a number of other travelers. They opened up the motel so we would have a place to spend the night in the lobby and some of the rooms. There was no heat and we were awake shivering all night. Lynn was in the bed between us and it was so cold her cheeks were frostbitten by morning. Early in the morning I put the chains on the car and we were able to get started. We decided to take the southern route and we had snow piled up on the car until we got to Oklahoma, where everyone wondered where we had come from.
We made another trip to Utah a few years later and went via the northern route. I am unable to remember exactly which events occurred on which trip so will relate them as I recall them, without much regard to the year.
The first trip during the winter was the year they had the hay lift for the farm animals due to the severe winter weather. One morning the temperature was 45 degrees below zero with so much frost in the air that you couldn't see the mountains to the east. One week it only got up to 14 below, but the cold was more bearable as the air is so dry. Mrs. Clark used to go out and hang up the washing in a short sleeved dress when it was down to 10 degrees above zero. The farmer who was a friend of Jimmy Clark's was a sheepherder and he was stuck with a flock of sheep way out an the prairie with no feed for the animals. We took a load of hay in Jimmy's truck and his friend had a big bulldozer which he used to make a trail through the snow from the road ending to where the herder was. He had a little clearing in the deep snow and about half of the sheep were laying around it frozen to death.