Grandpa Jim is the man on the left. On the right is his father, Esker Farrell Mayberry.
The following was researched and written by Lacy Mayberry:
Scissors and the Slaughterhouse; The Life of Esker Jimmie Mayberry
Named after his father, Esker Farrel Mayberry, Esker Jimmie (more commonly called throughout his life by his middle name) was born May 3, 1928, in Bisbee, Arizona—a place his father had happened upon by chance six years earlier.
Parentage
Esker Sr. was born and raised two states to the east in Texas. His family made their living as share-crop farmers, working other men’s land for a piece of the profit at harvest time. Jim compares them to gypsies. “They’d work two or three years here and move on, two or three years [there] and move on.” Not savoring the thought of being tied down to any one place, Esker’s father, Carter Mayberry, periodically packed his family and all they possessed into a covered wagon and set out into the unknown, stopping at night to build buffalo-chip fires until they found a destination.
But by 1922, Esker Sr., now a young man, had tired of his meager share of share-cropping. Some of his cousins had migrated to California and sent back hints of the money waiting to be made for work farming prunes and peaches. And so on his 21st birthday, Esker and his younger brother, Curt, left their ever-shifting home in eastern Texas in pursuit of their cousins’ promised coastal pastures. They drove their car (equipped with two or three extra tires and a hand pump) along US Highway 80, following the railroad track. “They said they’d have four or five flats every day. They’d stop and fix them and just keep coming.” But by the time they reached Bisbee, the car was beyond a mere hand-pump repair. Short on cash, Esker applied for a job in the town’s copper mine. The men in the office told their eager applicant that the company was only hiring miners and muckers (shovelers), to which Esker replied that his brother was, in fact, a minor—only just 18. “He wasn’t pulling a leg or nothing,” Jim says, recounting the story, “He wasn’t trying to be funny. But he really tickled those guys.” It tickled them so much, they hired them both.
Later that year, Esker ran into his future wife, Amy Busby, in the local drugstore and arranged a date with her. He and Curt had only one set of dress clothes between them. The following morning, Curt, the spitting image of his brother, donned the suit and took Amy out in his Esker’s place. “It sounds kind of like a fish story but they both said that’s the truth.” Despite Curt’s less than gentlemanly behavior, Esker was able to convince Amy to go out with him—the real him—once more. Amy was
pleasantly surprised at the disparity of character in what she assumed was the same man from one date to the next. Esker was kind and polite. And although unbound by the LDS standards of living Amy had been raised with, he didn’t drink or smoke. “Dad was an unusual kind of guy for the way he was brought up.”
Amy had moved to the boom town with two of her sisters to work at a boarding house, but had grown up in St. David—a Mormon colony forty miles north of Bisbee. Seeing its importance to the woman he’d fallen in love with, and because Amy “wouldn’t marry him until he joined the church,” Esker listened to the gospel message and was baptized on November 7, 1925. Accordingly, they were married the following February 4, 1926.
In order to better provide for his newly-formed family, Esker set out for barber school in Los Angeles. After a four-year “stopover” in Bisbee, Esker would finally travel the remaining miles of his original journey west. “He thought that was really great to get to go to California to barber school. He [thought]: ‘Oh, I’ll get out there with my cousins and we’ll have a big time. But he got out there and he said that [Amy] cried all night long. Wanted to come back to St. David. So as soon as he got out of school, he came back to St. David. He went there thinking he’d stay. But Mother didn’t—she was homesick all the time.”
A First-Born Son
And so their first child, Esker Jimmie Mayberry, was born in Bisbee, Arizona, two years later on May 3, 1928. It would be five years until he’d be joined by his brother, Andy. And then another five-year span until Esker and Amy’s last child, Roland, would be born. In the first years of his life, Amy “dolled up” her then only son and took him everywhere she went. His parents lavished hundreds of dollars on violin, guitar, and piano lessons for the boy, none of which he relished. Jim describes himself as having been “the most spoiled kid in the Busby family…probably the most spoiled kid in the whole valley.”
His mother describes him another way. In a short history she detailed about her son, she highlights his love for animals, his work ethic, and his faith in prayer. “Jim didn’t miss praying for anyone or anything. He would pray for any person he knew was sick,…[including] his sick animals [and] his dead animals. Jim was very sincere about his prayers.”
Just as Jim’s nearby parents would shape and nurture his own children someday, his mother’s parents, Abraham and Clara Busby, greatly influenced him throughout his boyhood. In summers, he worked on Grandpa Busby’s farm in St. David and at as early as five years old, stayed overnight at his grandparents’ ranch in the Whetstone Mountains, where “Jim would help Grandpa ride horses, tend to the cattle, and fix windmills.”
A Shock
At fifteen, Jim was electrocuted. He and his cousin, Floyd Clifford, had taken a break from irrigating their Grandpa Busby’s corn fields. They climbed up into the shade of one of the mulberry trees along the highway to rest among its branches and feast on its fruit. “The electric line that furnished [power] for the valley went through the branches of this tree.” Floyd, his mouth full of mulberries, asked his older cousin what would happen if he touched the wire. Nothing, Jim assured him. Months earlier, up on his rooftop in Bisbee, Jim had touched a similar nearby wire. Nothing had happened. “I was lucky then [that] I didn’t get it that time.” Attributing the lack of shock to the thick sheathing covering the wire, he assured his cousin that the same was true of the wire before them now.
Floyd tested it out and hollered. Jim was certain he was teasing, but Floyd insisted he’d been shocked and that Jim come and try it for himself, if he didn’t believe him. Jim climbed down to where his cousin was, took hold of a limb with one hand and reached out for the wire with the other. “I was just barely going to touch it…because he said it had shocked.” But his hand grabbed the wire instead and shook him with what an electrician would later report as 23,000 volts.
The surge subsided momentarily and Jim, his hand still clenched around the wire in a stupor, reconciled himself to being the first of Grandpa Busby’s grandkids to die. The electricity came back on. “It got you shaking…you really felt like everything was coming up you like that and… it pushed me in a ball.” For a second time, the electricity eased up. “Why or how, I don’t know.” But Jim decided, in a moment of clarity, that “it was either now or never.” He pushed off the wire and fell back into the tree. “I was lucky I didn’t fall off on[to] the ground.” Assessing his wounds, he found that the hand gripping the wire was perfectly fine, while the one grasping the branch oozed like a seared steak—the scar of which he still bears today.
“I told Floyd, I don’t know what I ever did to deserve that. He said: ‘Well, what do you mean? To get shocked like that?’ No, to get loose! I don’t know what I did to ever get a blessing like that.”
Sweethearts
With his mother’s strong attachment to St. David, the Mayberry family traveled from Bisbee to her hometown every other week. They stayed with Amy’s sister, Rose, who already had a husband and three children in a two-bedroom house. “Dad said, ‘Dang, we got to have a place to sleep."' So he bought a piece of his father-in-law’s property and built his own two-bedroom house to accommodate his family’s frequent visits.
In the summer of 1944, Jim, now sixteen, sat on the wide cement ledge of the water tank his father had built near their St. David home. School in that town was set to begin the following day, and Jim, a self-proclaimed non-academic, reveled in the fact that Bisbee schools wouldn’t hold classes for two more weeks. That afternoon, a few teenage girls from town were using the Mayberry water tank as a swimming hole. Jim watched them admiringly from his well-positioned seat. “I thought that those were the most beautiful girls that I ever saw.” One of them, Gwendolyn Young, would later become his wife. “They said, ‘Why don’t you start going to school in St. David? We need a good football player down [here].’ He was easily convinced. The next morning he was all but pounding down the school door. “I got out there before any teachers or principals. I was on the door trying to get in. And that’s not exaggerating, either.”
His parents had partnered with his Aunt Rose to raise 500 turkeys. With World War II on, meat was in shortage and the turkeys would bring a high price. Jim offered to stay back in St. David when his family moved home to Bisbee that fall. Helping with the turkeys became “another reason I got to talk my mother into letting me start going to school [in St. David].”
Jim transitioned easily to his new high school and joined the football, basketball, and baseball teams. “I got on all-conference teams for football and basketball. We did real well, for what we had to work with.” His coach, Ronald G. Bateman, was glad to have an extra body of talent. Although Jim was living alone in his parents’ St. David house, Coach and “Ma Bateman” hosted him at their home every evening for supper.
Sports wouldn’t be his only extra-curricular activity. To raise money for their Senior trip, the 12th graders put on a play. Short one part, they asked Jim—a Junior—to join them in the production. Gwendolyn Young was among the cast. “I was supposed to be an Air Force guy and we were kind of sweet on each other—in the play. And so it worked out after the play, too.”
Gwendolyn was “a smart son-of-a-gun.” Her scholarship helped to earn St. David’s school its first honor of The President’s Cup from the University of Arizona, where she attended college after her graduation in 1945. Jim still had another year of high school remaining. Despite the distance, the two remained sweet on each other. After his graduation in 1946, Jim planned to play football for Gila (now Eastern Arizona) College in Thatcher, Arizona and convinced Gwen to transfer there, too. “It wasn’t a very wise decision, really. Gila College is just a little old dinky two-year school and she was top of the whole state [at] U of A.” After their first and only semester there, Esker Jimmie Mayberry and Gwendolyn Young married on November 26, 1946. Jack Mcrae, Bisbee’s bishop and also a relative, presided over the ceremony held in the Mayberry home on Tombstone Canyon Road. Four months later, on March 18, 1947, the couple was sealed in the Mesa, Arizona Temple.
To Tucson
Jim and his bride moved into the same house he’d occupied as a bachelor during high school. He began working at the Apache Powder Company making material for dynamite. After four months, he tired of the job and he and Gwendolyn moved to Tucson, where Jim aspired to train horses for a living. “That didn’t work out too good. It didn’t work out at all, really.” Without the money to advertise his skill with horses, Jim was forced to set aside his aim and take a part-time job working at the Goodman Service Station, changing oil and tires. A short time later, his uncle hired him on at the Vern Busby Meat Company—a slaughterhouse in south Tucson that butchered up to ten cattle a day. Jim purchased, fed, and slaughtered livestock. “Back in them days, we just hit them in the head with a big sledge hammer.” But after the Humane Society condemned the practice, “we shot them with a .22.” The workers then cut the carcasses’ throats and hung them up to bleed before they were gutted, skinned, and moved to the chill box.
Despite working two jobs, Jim still found time to foster his love of horses in the sport of rodeo. “That was my big thing: rodeoing.” On July 26th 1947, Jim left his wife—now nine months pregnant—in Tucson and traveled with his cousin, George Busby, to St. David for the Mormon town’s weekend celebration of Pioneer Day. The two had hauled a trailer full of roping gear and horses to unload in preparation for the rodeo the following day. But almost as soon as he arrived, he received word that Gwendolyn was in labor. His Aunt Luella offered to lend him her husband’s car. “Boy, I went back to Tucson in a hurry.”
Upon arrival at the hospital, Jim learned that his wife had given birth to a baby girl. “I wasn’t going to have any girls. And I wasn’t going to have but three kids, [either].” He grudgingly made his way to the windows of the nursery. “I’m ashamed to say it, but facts is facts…I didn’t want the girl. Send her back! ...Trade her for a cat or something.” Through the glass, Jim watched his newborn daughter yawn. “Just as soon as I saw that, it turned a light on! I wouldn’t have traded her for a whole trainload of boys! ...She yawned and, dang, I fell in love with that girl.”
Jim and Gwendolyn would go on to have four more girls and four boys—totaling nine children: Linda, Ralph, Susan, Young, Janice, Wendy, Carter, Michelle, and Andy. “It was hard on Gwen, having all those babies to take care of…[but in] later years…we’d say: which one would you do without? …We kind of decided [that] Heavenly Father wanted us to have them, so we enjoyed them.”
Barber, Barber Shave a Pig
Nearly a year after Linda’s birth, Jim followed his father’s footsteps and set out for barber school. “Over at the powder plant working, I felt I got paid more than the
work I was doing and there at the slaughterhouse, I felt like I was doing more work than I was getting paid for. I wanted to work for myself.”
To cover the tuition cost of $1000, Jim sold the house he’d spent the last year building in Tucson and moved to Denver. Because both he and Gwen would need to work throughout the six-month program to sustain themselves, Linda was sent to live with Gwen’s mother, Helen, who had recently re-married and was living in New Mexico. “That was the closest thing we had to a honeymoon. Just the two of us.”
Rather than pay rent, the couple bought a small trailer furnished with only a bed and a sink. “We’d put it in a park and we’d do the laundry and stuff outside [and] go to the bathroom outside.” Gwen took a job at Colorado Bit and Spur, selling ropes and saddles. Jim found a job washing dishes at a hamburger joint, where he worked after class from 5-8pm and could take advantage of the free meal offered to employees.
Jim graduated the program and hurried back to Phoenix to make the application deadline for the state’s barber licensing exam. “You couldn’t mail [the application] in... But on the way down, we broke down… I was in the next morning but they wouldn’t take my application.” He would have to wait three months for the next test date. In the interim, he began cutting hair on the Davis Monthan Airforce Base, which exempted his need for a license. The owner of the Base barber concession also owned the University Barber Shop, a six-share barber shop near the UofA campus. “He saw I did a good job and so when I took the examination and passed, he hired me to work down there at that shop in town.” After two years of employment there, Jim took a barbering sabbatical and returned to work at the slaughterhouse. “I liked that [work]. Dealing with the cows, you know. And Uncle Vern paid me, oooh dang, paid me really, really, really good money. More than before…He saw what I’d done before and he liked me and he needed some help.”
Resettling into St. David
Jim helped his uncle at the slaughterhouse for another three years before moving his family back to St. David and taking up his trade again. To supplement their income, the family began growing vegetables—mainly squash—to sell to grocery markets in Tucson. “We’d take [up to] 100 boxes a day and get about three dollars a box.” Every child old enough to help labored in the venture. “I’d get those guys up at five in the morning and crack the whip...and if they got done by noon, they were lucky.” The unpaid children felt that they were worked unfairly and said as much to their father. “Honestly, [Gwen and I] would have a hard time, you know, buying clothes and all those shoes [for our kids]. We didn’t have a very good car. Just living hand to mouth… But it made me feel bad to think that I was a slave driver.” Jim decided to give his children profit-sharing privileges. From then on, all the money earned on the farm was divvied up among the children according to the number of rows they hoed. “Man, that went over big.” Jim and Gwen required them to pay a proper percentage
into the tithing, fast offering, and ward budget funds. Because the work was so plentiful, the Mayberry children hired their friends from town to help—becoming overseers and paying them from their own pockets at harvest time.
Earning their own money taught the kids its value. Janice, anxious to keep up with her fashionable friends at school, quickly earmarked five or six hundred dollars-worth of merchandise in the Sears and Roebuck Catalog. When her father’s figuring showed that her load of three rows would need to be increased to thirty to afford the total, Janice cut back her wish list.
“It really worked out good for me as a parent.”
Cleaving to the Cleaver
During Jim’s twelve-year absence, the Vern Busby Meat Company had fallen into financial trouble. Vern offered his nephews Jim Mayberry and Ray Nelson each a third share of ownership with him if they would help bring the business out of debt. And so in 1966, for the third and last time, Jim went back to work at the slaughterhouse—commuting from St. David to Tucson to do so for the next sixteen years. “That slaughterhouse was a big thing to me.”
When he sold his share and retired from that place in 1980, Jim partnered with his eldest daughter, Linda, and her husband, Robin Richey, in running Grandma Goodman’s, a St. David “mom and pop grocery store”. Jim naturally found his niche in the meat department. Gwen worked at the cash register. “But she was having trouble making change.” Jim and the Richeys chalked the errors up to her creative mind’s weakness with mathematics. Unbeknownst to them at the time, Gwen was in the early stages of Alzheimer ’s.
Called to Serve
As their youngest child, Andy, came of age, Gwen began to press her husband to serve a couple’s mission with her. Jim resisted the idea. “I’d been a stake missionary and all that kind of stuff, but didn’t really relish it… But Gwen, oh, she wanted to go on a mission…I didn’t want to go.”Eventually, Jim relented and experience changed his tune. “We went and I had all the fun. That mission was more fun than anything I ever did.” He compares his change of heart toward serving a mission to the experience of seeing Linda for the first time. “It was a blessing for me.”
Elder and Sister Mayberry received their call to serve in the far-away Fiji Islands in 1986. And although 6,000 miles from home, Jim found an opportunity to work with cattle once again. A Fijian ward clerk had an interest in starting his own
slaughterhouse. Jim took him under his wing. “I kind of set [the] guy up in the business…and he ended up in jail. He got to stealing [the cattle] rather than buying them.”
In Fiji the church was growing out of infancy. Along with basic skills like cooking, sewing, and animal care, the Mayberrys helped new converts recognize which of their cultural norms were at odds with LDS standards—encouraging men and women to dress modestly and bathe in private. Gwen, who was skilled in making her own clothes, cheese, and bread from scratch, shared her knowledge with the Fijian women. “She taught them a lot of stuff. But just minimum for what she was capable of teaching them.” By 1986, Alzheimer’s disease had begun to take hold of Gwen’s apt mind. “It wasn’t until I got on my mission that I realized that there was something wrong.”
While in Fiji, Gwen, who had recognized that she did “not feel well in mind or body” as early as 1979, diagnosed herself with the disease. An avid reader all her life, Gwen had studied many medical texts. “She knew more than half the doctors, really. About what sickness is and how to treat wounds and that kind of stuff. So we didn’t do anything [about the disease] until we came back from the mission.”
Jim and Gwen had initially intended to leave for their mission at the same time that their son, Andy, left for his. But because of an unexpected prostate operation that Jim underwent, their plans were delayed six months—aligning the conclusion of their 18-month stint of service with the end of Andy’s two-year call.
A church employee, whom the couple had met in Fiji, helped to arrange a ticket for Andy to join his parents in Fiji. “Church policy is that they send the missionaries to where the parents live. So…Andy left Norway and came here to St. David and got released and had a plane ticket to go to Fiji.”Michelle, their daughter just older than Andy, decided to join them there as well. The four of them toured Fiji and then took a short plane ride to Australia to see the World’s Fair—a once in a lifetime opportunity—before returning home to southern Arizona.
Progression
Gwen’s mental health progressively deteriorated. Rather than put her into a facility, Jim and his children rotated responsibility for her care at home. On one occasion Jim went out of town, leaving his wife to the care of a Sierra Vista rest home. He returned to a surprising scene: Gwen walking down the hallway swinging hands with a male patient. “Like a couple of little kids, you know. That tickled me. But it made me jealous.” As her demand for full-time care grew, the Mayberrys hired Consuelo Alonzo Estrada as a live-in home-care nurse for Gwen. “Connie,” a Guatemalan woman living in Mexico, was eager to escape a soured marriage and along with a small stipend, agreed to the exchange of room and board for her services. She and three of
her four children moved into the Mayberry home in 1997 to care for Gwen “during her last, long struggle in mortality.” Two years later, at the age of 72, Gwen passed away from reasons incident to Alzheimer’s—having shared with Jim 52 years of marriage.
In pondering their life together, Jim declared his appreciation for having “had such a…dependable… wonderful wife...[who] made home a place where he wanted to be.”
A Second Match
During Connie’s time in the home, Jim had grown to love her. “Gwen…wasn’t dead but she wasn’t alive. For a year or two, really, I’d been single.” Jim proposed to marry Connie six weeks after his wife’s funeral. But Connie insisted on waiting to consult the matter with her oldest son, whose service as an LDS missionary was almost at an end. With Gwen gone, both propriety and Jim’s children demanded that he move out. “[It] was just easier for me to move than her… There were four of them and just one of me and I wanted her to live there as my wife.” Accordingly, Jim relocated to an apartment near his parents’ former house, a few hundred yards away. But he spent mealtimes back at his house courting Connie and impatiently awaiting the return of her son.
Meanwhile, Jim’s children expressed strong reservations toward the hurried match. “It was a trying thing.” But Jim defended his choice, saying that “she’s a nice woman and I like her and like her family and I can help her and she can help me.”
Jim and Connie married on July 17, 1999—Connie’s 45th birthday. Because of the temporary closure of the nearby Mesa temple for cleaning, the couple was sealed in the Las Vegas temple. They then commenced on a temple-tour honeymoon throughout Utah and into Southern Idaho.
This two-week trip would take them to Bountiful, where Gwen’s mother, Helen, was then living. “That was what I was really worried about. About what Gwen’s family was going to think about it. We were married so quick after she died, you know.” Nevertheless, Jim and his new wife, armed with a bouquet of flowers, stopped in to see his mother-in-law. “I really was afraid to go see her. But…oh! It was the nicest reception you ever saw. She just took Connie in. I don’t know if she was putting on or what. But, oh, she was nice…Nicer than I’d ever seen her! It made it a lot easier, you know.”
Changed and Unchanged
After his marriage to Connie, parts of Jim’s life changed vividly. He purchased a red Mustang, painted his house pink, and stepped in as step-father to Connie’s young children.
But much of the routine of his life remains in force. Along with barbering in Benson two days a week with his brother, Roland, Jim keeps up with his daily chores. “I go out and feed the pigs, and feed some goats, and feed the horse, feed the dog…and then I irrigate. I’ve got pasture land, pecan trees. And all the time I’m fixing fences.”
Reflecting on his eight decades of life, Jim jokes about the legacy he leaves his posterity. “I can think of some things I hope they didn’t learn from me.” More seriously, he adds: “Do what you say you’re going to do. Live up to what you believe…Like I told my kids: you can have anything you want, but you’ve got to earn it.”
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