Charles Mickelson Clark

 My maternal grandfather Charles Clark, was born 26 October 1903 in the small town of Hilliard, Wyoming. Hilliard is just Southeast of Evanston, Wyoming (I don't think it is there any more). He was born the oldest child of Charles Mickelson and Mary Bate. His mother died shortly after giving birth to her third child. Charles father was a rodeo rider and left his three small children with family and went on the road. It was later learned that Charles Mickelson had died in Kansas. Charles and his younger brother were eventually adopted and sealed in the temple to the family that had taken them in, George and Mary Clark. As a young boy the family lived in Orem, Utah where they farmed for several years.
On August 1923 grandpa married Mary Lucille Bulow in Provo, Utah. They made their home in Provo, Utah living with his father in the family home. Charles and Lucille cared for his father until his death and then remained in the home all of their married life. The home was a simple square frame built home divided into four rooms of equal size. Charles made many improvements to the home over the years including an indoor bathroom and added a bedroom on the back of the home. my mother remembers sleeping in the back room with a plastic sheet over her because the roof had not yet been shingled.
Charles and Lucille were the parents of six children. Two of their children died as infants. Marie the day after she was born and Robert died of pneumonia at six months old. Four of their six children lived to adulthood, my mother Carol was their fourth child.
Charles worked most of life for US Steel, first working as a chemist in the Ironton plant in Provo and later and the Geneva works in Orem.
It was from my grandpa that I learned the value of work. As a boy I enjoyed visiting and helping him with various work projects. He never gave me job to do and then left me to work, we always worked side by side. From him I learned the joy of gardening and working in the yard. I once helped him remove all the old shingles off his very steep roof and then we laid tar paper and new wooden shingles. I was about sixteen at the time and I remember him teasing me when a group of girls walked passed the house and made cat calls at me.
Charles lived the last few years of his life with my parents in Spring City, Utah and then In a rest home in Heber, Utah where he died on 1 August 1991. Charles and Lucille are buried in the Provo city cemetery just a few blocks from where they lived their entire married lives.