--- title: Improvement Era description: Monthly periodical of the Mormon church, 1897 onward. This library holds the issues of November 1897 to December 1930. authors: - Arnold, Frank R. collections: - periodicals tags: - magazine - improvement-era periodical: Improvement Era volume: 20 number: 12 published: 1917-10 publisher: Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations publisher_place: Salt Lake City language: en type: magazine reference: 'Frank R. Arnold, "My Boy Joe," *Improvement Era* 20, no. 12 (October 1917): 1091–1093.' source: url: https://archive.org/details/improvementera20012unse transcription: Transcribed from the Internet Archive scan of each issue (the item for each issue is named in the issue's own source); unnumbered advertising leaves are omitted, printed page numbers are kept as page markers. identifier: improvementera20012unse start_page: 1091 end_page: 1093 rights: status: public-domain basis: US publication 1930 or earlier (published 1917-10) source: https://archive.org/details/improvementera20012unse publication_year: 1917 note: The Internet Archive item metadata carries a blanket "© Copyright by Intellectual Reserve, Inc." notice. The library owner judged it inapplicable because this issue was published in 1917, before 1931; a scan-level notice does not restore copyright. --- # My Boy Joe My Boy Joe By Frank R. Arnold Until I got a wife and children I always worked to please father. But now I've got to think of my own family and I know it will be a bitter disappointment to father if I quit teaching and go to ranching. But there is more money coming into a ranchman's pocket and less going out than there is in a school teacher's. Father thinks because I went through college and got to be a high school teacher that I'm a big man. I do know more than they do in those cow counties I came from and where father has always lived. They think a school teacher is only a little lower than the angels and could easily hold his own with the president of the United States just because he's different from them. They always call him professor and would even call him doctor if they had ever known of a doctor who didn't heal the sick. They call them cow counties because they are just one big range, and people do nothing there but raise cattle. They have good grain land but they let their water run to waste and import their flour. The last corners of the primitive west are there. The Navajos come up every summer to exchange blankets for horses and if a cowboy doesn't like you, you only have to say something to hurt his feelings and he'll draw a knife on you. Father was always proud of me. Before I was six he'd have me read out loud whenever anyone came to the house just to show them how well I could do it. And then I got to reading books like Log Cabin to White House and Poor Boys Who Have Become Famous, and I began to share father's opinions of my talents. I thought surely I would arrive at the White House because I was starting on the same road that these men had traveled. The route couldn't possibly lead anywhere else. When I got through the grades father sent me away to school. We had just been buying a ranch and the family funds were low. Father is the kind that will never buy a thing until he has money in his pocket. He thinks credit is a curse rather than a blessing, so when I went away to school he could give me only sixteen dollars a month and out of that, fifteen had to go for board, leaving only one for current expenses. It was before the days of movies or I never should have made out. One month I had to have the seat of my trousers patched and the tailor charged me fifty cents. I remember how one of the boys laughed at that 1092 IMPROVEMENT ERA patch one day when I was working at the board. I fixed him after the class so that he didn't get mirthful any more when I stood up to recite. That month it was harder than ever hitting the economy trail. All the same I reached home that summer with a nickel in my pocket, though I didn't have any breakfast before I took the stage for the forty mile ride home. Then came college. Of course it was the state college or none. After a year of the agricultural course which was so easy I could pile up many credits in a year, I fell in love with a girl at home, decided to put off being president of the United States for a few years, married and went to teaching. That pleased father. I had the best school in the county and that first year I was elected school superintendent for the county. That pleased father more, though it was really his doing. There aren't more than 2,000 people in the county and it's bigger than Rhode Island but he's so well known and liked that his son can get anything he wants politically. County superintendent of schools sounds big until you know the county, and all the time a college diploma was becoming to me and after three years I went back for it. I put the three remaining years of college through in two years by taking extra courses and summer work and I was so busy I didn't think much about the presidency. You don't dream so much about yourself after your first son is born. Your dreams are all for him. When commencement day came I wanted father to come and see me get my diploma. He was proud of me and I thought he would enjoy it. He thought so, too. He was so happy over me that he came three hundred miles just to see me sitting in my college gown with sixty others, and filing across the stage to get our degrees. We call it "taking out" our degrees. Well, father came up to see me take out my degree thinking it would be the happiest day of his life, and it turned out to be the saddest, for he learned then the inevitable lesson that most fathers must learn sooner or later. Just think, I was the first boy from our county who had even gone through college. I was also the first of our family to do it. I had done it in three years. I had also acquired a wife and child en route, but that's nothing in the West. Father thought the professors would all be falling over themselves to grasp him by the hand and tell him how well his hoy Joe had done, how smart a boy must be to do four years work in three. I even believe that he privately expected the college president would take him aside and say, "I'm getting old. I'm not what I was, and when I'm through with my job, your boy Joe shall have it." Poor father! It didn't work out that way. Not in a single detail. I introduced him to president, deans, and professors. They were nervously "glad to meet him" and rushed on with MY BOY JOE 1093 their little axes to grind with the board members and million- aires who were to receive honorary degrees. Not a word did they say about the altogether extraordinary attainments of the boy Joe. There were at least two hundred other parents and relatives present and I introduced him to some of them. They all had Toms and Wills of their own and no over-weening in- terest in the boy Joe. Father's swan had become not exactly an ugly duckling, but anyway a very ordinary chicken. Father is the quiet kind and doesn't say much. But I knew what he was thinking about and tried to explain that it was but natural that I should loom larger on the horizon of my home town than on the college campus. A natural fact, indeed, but a new one, a terrible one, and one not to be assimilated in a day. I don't think father ever did take it in wholly. I am sure he looks on that commencement day as a horrible nightmare, for all he said to me that night was, "I'm going right home tomorrow morning, Joe. I can believe in you there." Well, I suppose the same lesson is coming to me some day when young Joe grows up. By the way, you just ought to come over to the house some day and hear him read Wild Animals I Have Known. He reads out loud as well as you or I can, and he's only six. Logan, Utah Waterloo, Granite Stake, Scouts Busy in Their War Garden of the Utah has many scout gardens this year; and through the efforts Scouts hundreds of formerly idle acres have been made to yield toodstutts in abundance.