LINDA YEAGER BACHMAN

I was born on June 18, 1953, in Durango, Colorado.    I arrived six weeks early. Mom didn't make it to the hospital so I was born at home in a log house my father had built.  I was the youngest of seven children.  Our parents had three children then waited 12 years to have the second three.  In the center they adopted Tom.   My three older brothers and sisters married and left home the year I was born.

My mother was a homemaker, Minerva Benton Yeager; my dad was Gerald Yeager, a forest ranger in the San Juan National Forest of Colorado.  We had a wonderful childhood because of Dad’s job.   He worked in the forest as chief in charge of a crew of college kids, constructing trails, camp grounds and other such work.  We kids became junior foresters because we lived in the mountains each summer.  That was where I celebrated my birthdays. We didn't have a lot of friends other than siblings.

The family had all been born and raised in Colorado.  I went to school in Durango at the same school, Animas, where my grandparents, Mom and Dad had gone.  We chuckle that it is now a museum.

Things like that tend to change your whole belief system.  In some ways it had shaken our faith, but we believed in each other. It brought the three of us closer together.  It formed a really close bond between us. It also made us realize for the first time that Dad had a problem.   He was a handsome, wonderful funny man with a great sense of humor but he had a problem with monogamy.  As time went on, we talked to our older siblings and discovered this had happened throughout our parents' marriage and Mom understood.

Our family was of the Reorganized Church of Latter Day Saints in which eight is considered the age of accountability. That is when we were baptized. Our mother was a very strong spiritual guide and I believe in my heart this is why we were able to overcome some of the obstacles.  Looking back from a more mature perspective, we can see how things come together to make up a person.  In the face of adversity, some people fall apart; but, in our case, it strengthened each of us.  We all became very determined to make our marriages strong.  We are not going to let anything like that happen to us.  None of my brothers have Dad's weakness.

I was 13 when the divorce took place. The proceedings required that I stand in court and tell who I wanted to live with.  I chose Dad but he didn't want his children. He didn't think he could take care of us.  From that time on, I didn't have a relationship with Dad until after I was married, when Warren felt it was important.  Dad developed Alzheimer’s disease and for the last seven years was very ill. He didn't remember me.  He knew everyone else, but not me; and I have been told that victims of this disease often forget the youngest child.

I went to see him when he was on his deathbed in a nursing home. The whole family had gathered, including his wife.     I stood by the bed with my hand on his arm and was talking to him. Suddenly we heard this terrible noise.  Nurses were alerted and were flying around.  My sister pointed out to me that I was standing on his air hose.  With his sense of humor, he'd have laughed about that.  He passed away on March 18, 1993.

The divorce was the end of a chapter. It left my brother, sister and me with Mom.  Rick went into the Navy.  Mom put my sister and me in the car and we started driving.  We ended in a beautiful place, Newcastle, Wyoming, but the situation was difficult. People don't realize how divorce laws have changed. At that time child support was $20 per child per month for children under 18.  My brother had turned 18 so our monthly income was $40.

Mom had no formal education.   She struggled to find a job. Her options were house­ keeping or waitressing, both of which paid little.  I remember that one week she had just gone to work in the housekeeping department at a hospital and she, my sister Coleen and I had only a bag of potato chips to last for one week until she got her first check.  I can still see her doling them
out one at a time.  But in spite of or because of the hard times, these were some of the best years. I remember because I grew so close to my mother.

I finished my sophomore, junior, and senior years in high school in Newcastle.  Between high school and college, I was a member of America's Youth in Concert, an all-nation choir.  I'd been in all-state all four high school years and they sent an application for me to try for this.  I auditioned four times for their board, mostly by tape rather than in person.  When I was accepted, Newcastle raised funds for me to go. We sang in Carnegie Hall and in nine different countries in Europe as well as for President Nixon in the White House when he signed the 18-year-old vote amendment.

In the winter of 1997 Warren and I went to California to the Nixon Library. I asked if there was something about the signing of the 26th amendment for 18-year-olds to vote.   They had a video and I am in it! It was weird seeing myself 17 and skinny, standing right behind the President.  He turned and handed one of the pens to our director and he handed me the box.  I still have the box.  I told the attendants about it and they asked, when I returned home, if I would send memorabilia that they could put in the library.  President Nixon was proud of that amendment.

After graduation it was quite natural for me to go to Graceland College, our church school in Lamoni. During the summer after my freshman year there was an incident that changed me more than anything that has ever happened to me.  I'd gone to Arizona to be with my oldest sister and her family. Mother was there.  The week after I arrived, my sister's husband took us on a picnic.  This included my sister, my mother, myself and two little nieces - Paula, a little Indian girl who my sister and her husband were adopting at the time, and another, Vicki, who had been adopted previously by her and a former husband.

My brother-in-law had been drinking a lot and during the picnic he became very angry with my sister and shot her.  Needless to say, what followed was chaos.  My mother ran to get help and I sent my nieces to follow Grandma.  My sister lived about 10 minutes.  She had been shot in the chin so she couldn't speak.  She was lying in about 6" of water that was red with her blood; her husband was kneeling beside her.  She looked at me and smiled, looked toward heaven as though to say, "I'm coming"; then she looked at her husband with total forgiveness as though saying, "If I have to die for you to get your life straightened out, I am willing to do it."

She died at 2:15 on the afternoon of May 27, 1972.  I was 18 years old and nothing before or since have touched. me like the look I saw in my sister's eyes. It not only affected me physically but changed me spiritually because it was the most forgiving, loving expression that I will ever witness. I have never seen such a look in anyone's eyes that I saw that day.

Everyone goes through traumatic situations and turns one way or another.  It can either give you direction or destroy you.  My sister's death impacted my life more than anything I've ever experienced. I have a much better sense of what life and death are than a lot of people, because I literally watched her soul leave her body.  I visually saw the breath leave her; spiritually I saw her soul go to heaven.  I have the wonderful assurance of where she is.  I definitely believe there is a purpose in all things, and a result of her dying was to make me a stronger, more forgiving, more sensitive and a more discerning person.

"When Mother came home, she brought some of my sister's belongings, and I said exactly what I felt, "I want to kill him!"  Mother's response was, "We will not condemn this man.  We do not have to forgive him but we will not condemn him because by doing so we will only put our­ selves in his shoes."

That entire summer we were involved in court hearings and the trial for my brother-in-law. The charges were involuntary manslaughter.   The defense was that he had been drinking so didn't have his senses.  His sentence was five to six years but he was out in 19 months.  I have seen him several times. Once we had to go see him in the prison to have some papers signed.  I never want to go into a prison again!

The other time was when I was in college.  We were on a concert tour.  I was on stage, looked out and saw him in the audience.  My thoughts were, "I won't condemn him but I can't forgive him." I never saw him again.  It is interesting, though, that I probably never sang better than I did that night.  My music has always been a way for me to get my feelings outside myself Warren says that he can tell when I am angry.  I go to the piano and pound.

My mother adopted Paula and she became my youngest sister.  The husband to whom my sister was married when they adopted Vick wanted and gained custody of her. Mom wanted to be closer to where I was, so, at the end of the summer she and Paula moved to Independence, Missouri, and I went back to continue my college education at Graceland.

I did my student teaching in Kansas City and Osceola, with Ross Frahm as supervisor here in Osceola.  I graduated with a degree in music education for grades K through 12.  I took a job in Osceola, where I taught for six years in the elementary school music department.

It was while I was teaching in Osceola that I met Warren.  Among my students were his children Mike and Stephanie.   Warren was divorced.  One night he called and asked me out.  He introduced himself as Stephanie’s dad.  At the time I was seeing another guy and turned him down.  He called again on a day that I'd been home sick with a cold and I turned him down again. That was on a Friday and on Monday night he came to the door and said, "If we're going to get together, I guess I have to make the first move."  We dated four years and were married in the Osceola United Methodist Church by Rev. Dick Eis in May, 1982.  Warren had come from the United Brethren tradition, and I from the Reorganized Church of Latter Day Saints, so we have compromised on Methodism During my teaching career, one of the most influential people was Frances Carson, the elementary principal. Frances had a gift for turning new teachers into much better teachers.  In the time I worked under her, she taught me how to go beyond teaching facts and figures and to bringing a personal part of me into my teaching. She was one of the greatest teachers of teachers I have ever known.

I remember one incident when I was teaching 6th grade music. To give them all the best of it, I would say they were not necessarily the best-behaved class. There had been a school program the night before and some of the props were still there. When a point came that I had "had it", I climbed onto a chair that was sitting beside the piano, then onto the top of the piano, stood there and said, "This class is going to come to order now! "  At that moment the door to the classroom opened and in walked Mrs. Carson.  I didn't know what to do, so I picked up a feather boa left from the night before and said, "Let's sing." It happened that her project on that day was evaluation.  I was surprised to find that mine had been favorable. Her assessment of my approach was, "Very motivational."

Frances retired the same year I quit teaching here, and she recommended that I take a part-time job teaching in the Decatur City Elementary School.  I did that for a year, teaching both instrumental and vocal music. I took over the next year teaching for Barb Jackson at Murray.  She and her husband moved to northern Iowa and I taught part-time in her place for 1 1/2 years
until she returned.

If you'd told me at Graceland that I'd be a farmer's wife, I'd have said, "Yeah, right."  But it has been and is a wonderful life with a wonderful husband. Warren's venture in wheat harvesting is a story in itself   People have no idea what they are getting in that loaf of bread. Wheat is a delicate crop that can be wiped out in five minutes in a hail storm, so our job becomes very important.  We have to get the crop harvested before anything happens.  This is what we do four months of every year. It is also our joy. I love to look across a field and see the wheat wave. I know something of the feeling of Katherine Lee Bates as she wrote in "America the Beautiful" about the "amber waves of grain.

Warren had been going on harvest since 1972, when he and a partner went out with two combines. He quit to farm for three years, then went back in 1979, with a partner, Don Waltz. They each had two combines and in 1980 they went in separate crews.  When we decided to go back on the wheat harvest, I had to give up my teaching career to accompany him. We go every summer from Oklahoma to North Dakota with a crew, which are usually three college kids that can spend the summer with us. Since 1994 Mike, Warren's son has bought into the business and he goes with us, so we hire two men to make up a crew of five.

This changes my life considerably. We have a whole different life style than we have here. We leave home, pets, family, church and head out on the road with the crew, two trailer houses, combines and trucks; to work for farmers from south to north as the wheat ripens. It's hard work but yet it's become a major part of our life.

I'm usually up at 6:30, fix breakfast, and feed the crew at the camper. I wash the dishes and go to the store for the day's food.  I fix lunch, leave the camper at 11:30, spend two hours with lunch at the field, go back to the camper to clean up and get ready for supper.  I leave at 5:30 to go back to the field, then back to the camper, clean up, fix something for when the men come in at night, usually about midnight. Before the crew turns in we share something to eat and generally have some sort of nightly devotion.   In between, I take care of laundry.  I do that for the entire crew except on rainy days, when the guys do their own.

We go back to the same places, the same people, year after year and would miss the people tremendously if we didn't go back. We attend churches all along the road.  I sing in many of them.

The other months of the year we farm about 2,000 acres near Osceola. My job is to drive the trucks, unload the grain and chauffer Warren from field to field, fix meals, and keep the crew happy. Warren and I are the crew.

We have no children of our own but I have three step-children, Stephanie, Mike, and Jeff. Stephanie and Mike are both married. Mike's wife is Karen, daughter of Orville and Joyce Turner.  Jeff is in the Air Force in Enid, Oklahoma.

Angels are a natural part of my life. I believe my sister's soul is the soul of an angel because I feel her presence with us. Every time Warren goes out to work, I pray that God will send an angel to watch over him.  He does.

There is a tradition within the RL.D.S. church which makes it possible to obtain a patriarchal blessing. I had this privilege in June, 1978, and have a typewritten blessing through Patriarch G. Merlin O'Haver. It assures me of God's continuing love, that I have a purpose for which I have been given particular qualities and talents. It involves working within the church and elsewhere, particularly with young people, following the teachings of Jesus. These opportunities have opened up to me and, the blessing tells me, as I am faithful to what has been given, more will be revealed. I have read it many times and always find in it comfort and encouragement.

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