By the time of this move our family had taken in three girls. Jerry Ann was actually my cousin from my mother's side of the family, and she joined our family when she was twelve and I was nine. She was very close to Dennis' age, a difference of about seven months, and this always had to be explained to other people in Provo, who assumed Jerry Ann was a biological child of the family. Jerry Ann would become one of my closest friends and a loved companion for many years of my life. Later on this would all change, but our earlier years together were very happy, and we shared many wonderful moments together. Sherilyn, born in November of 1947, and Darlene, born on my birthday in 1951, were blood sisters that came into our family at a very early age. I grew to love my new younger sisters very quickly, and my life was immediately much more interesting and fulfilling because of their presence in my life. This love for them has continued to this day.
As the school season began, just days after our move to Provo, I entered the seventh grade at Dixon Junior High, where Dad had been hired to teach some of his classes in music. My junior high years turned out to be a very enjoyable and exciting time for me. My first year was spent getting to know the other kids in my class, not an easy task for someone whose total friends and acquaintances my age in Manti numbered probably less than twenty. Now I had at least a couple hundred new faces to get to know, and from them to choose the friends that would compliment my own personality. Sometime during this year, I met and became friends with Allan Staker. We started spending a lot of time together, and we even fell for the same girl. Her name was Susan Wellington. She was not exceptionally pretty, but she was pleasant looking and a lot of fun to be with. We spent many hours at her house, mainly out on the patio of her house laughing and dancing and talking. Both Allan and I thought that Susan was our girl, and this went on for quite some time. Then one day I noticed that on the inside of one of her shoes she had inked in both of our initials. We then realized that she had been playing this game with us all along, telling each of us in the other's absence that we were her boyfriend. We both dropped her the very same day, and from that point on I never followed what happened to her. I don't even remember her going to school with us after that. Possibly she and her family moved away or something. I guess I will never know.
Allan had a paper route, and therefore more spending money that I had. Wanting to have the same financial resources that he had, I soon had a paper route myself. The income from this route was about fifteen dollars a month, and this, to me, was ample money to go on occasional dates and have spending money for other desires. I had this route for a couple years, but then I began to have difficulties with the financial side of it, and Dad thought it best for me to quit. This was the first indication in my life that finances would always be a difficult thing for me to manage, and left to my own devices, I would always find a way to get myself into difficult financial circumstances. Later on, in my second marriage, I would finally find a solution to this dilemma. I turned the bulk of my income over to my wife, and she managed the money. During that marriage, the financial hardships I experienced were at least minor compared to before. At least, during my second marriage I never had to go hungry for lack of money to buy food. But between that first paper route and my second marriage, my use of money would prove to be my own personal undoing time and time again.
In the eighth grade I experienced my first real love. Her name was Francis, and I totally flipped over her. She, like Pauline, had long blond hair, and she was really a bomb shell. She was a seventh grader, and she immediately took a liking for me, which very pleasantly surprised me to no end. We started dating, going to all of the school dances, and to the Mormon stake dances on the weekends. I was completely enthralled with her; she literally made my young blood boil when I was with her. However, when close to the end of the school year, she started to distance herself from me. I think she found that she had become very popular with many of the other boys, too, and she wanted to "try out" a few of the others. It was very difficult for me to see this development in her. Francis gave me my first long kisses on the lips, my first long and tight hugs, and then she broke my heart. I thought my life would end, and I had continual daydreams of Francis finally coming back to me. The dreams and thoughts continued into the summer when one night a friend of mine called me on the telephone and informed me that Francis had been killed in an automobile accident while out riding with her brother. She had been thrown from the car and had died at the scene. I was devastated, and I sank into a stunned depression that lasted for weeks. I couldn't bring myself to go to her funeral because my emotional makeup would have caused me to simply break down and fall to pieces. I eventually got over this, but I remember very vividly how utterly grief stricken I was during those times.
After Francis, I began dating several other girls through the rest of my junior high school and my senior high school years. Some of these girls were: Susan Duffin, who I would date off and on over this entire period, and who would later marry my brother while I was away on my LDS mission; Paloma, who would for a time be the girlfriend of one of my high school buddies and who would become a long time friend of mine, and who also would play a large part in my life at the end of my first marriage; Mary, who would also become a long time friend as a result of our casual dating and neighborhood association; and finally Jessie, who became my second real and intense love since Francis, and whom I had to leave behind only two or three months after falling in love with her to go on my mission. Jessie also had blond hair, and to me she was one of the most beautiful girls I had ever laid eyes on. She was only sixteen when I left on my mission. By the time I got back, two and a half years later, she had grown two inches taller than I was. She had also been wooed by a more recently returned missionary, and soon after my return, she married him. Throughout all my years leading up to my mission I had dated all these girls, and I had attended the majority of dances and other social events offered by the schools and the church. These were very fun years for me, but all of my dating still didn't prepare me very well to make sensible choices in later girlfriends and in the choice of both my first, and my second, wife. The details of those stories will follow in a later section of this writing.
Later on, after my mission but before joining the army, there would be Bunny (Sheila), who had beautiful, dark "cat-like" eyes, and tormented me with them every time I was around her, and later on I would ask her to marry me and be declined; Irene, whom my parents thoroughly disliked, my dad so much that he would become nauseous when he saw us together, and whom I would ask to marry me while I was in Germany with the army, would agree, and then a week before my flight home for the wedding, would call off the marriage, and in future years I would completely lose track of; Nina, who, of all the girls I ever dated, probably loved me the most, and who probably would have made a wonderful wife for me if I had been sensible enough to realize what I could have had with her; and several other girls that I dated only once or twice but never developed any further interest in. I was a very good student through high school, and I graduated with honors. I still had a year to wait before my nineteenth birthday and the time when I could then go on my church mission. I think the decision to go on this mission was not really made out of a conscious effort and thorough consideration of what it really meant to be a missionary for the church I belonged to. It was more of a simple assumption that I would go, and it was just part of my future life that I looked forward to. Anyway, during my "waiting year" for the mission call, I enrolled at BYU to get one year of college behind me. This year was a scholastic disaster. I have never figured out why, but I simply could not apply myself in a school situation anymore, and the future would prove to be the same. In any case, shortly after I turned 19, I left for two-and-a-half years to Austria to fulfill a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as the Mormons.
