My father was a cowboy and a scientist - remembering dad, twc

I originally wrote an earlier version of this in January, 2006, which was a Gather home page feature in March, 2006. I have since rewritten and added to this. I now offer it as part of the Two Word Challenge, Remembering Dad.

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My father was born in 1927, in Cedar City, Utah, when it was a town of less than 2,000; now, its population is more than 21,000.  During the Great Depression, sheep grazed on front lawns to keep the grass short, as manual lawn mowers were in short supply. The sheep were then used for meat and the cows were for milking.

My father's mother was one of the 44 children of Thomas Chamberlain, my grea-grandfather who was married to six women, simultaneously. Yes, my great-grandfather was Mormon. This was during the days when Utah was still a territory and many LDS at that time had several wives. My other great-grandfathers each had two wives, simultaneously. 

In one genealogical book my relatives published, Thomas Chamberlain stands, as the patriarch of his family, next to his six wives and all 44 children, who ranged in age from infancy to age 30. Thomas was very successful in his day - and upon his death, he left each wife a house and each child $600.

Thomas Chamberlain's ranch was part of the United Order of Orderville, a polygamist ranching community in the late 1800s, which was a type of early Socialism in that each member gave what they could and used what they needed.

Today, all that remains of my great-grandfather's ranch are several small frame houses, a barn and a plaque posted on the highway from the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers. A local family rents the property now owned by a dentist from California. It was an eerie feeling walking theough the property in 1989, visiting for the first time the ranch that had been so well known in the Cedar City area in the late 19th century. The then- 7,000 Chamberlain descendants could not scrape up the dough to buy it when it was offered back in 1988. The property was on the market at that time for some $80,000 - about an acre's worth of land and buildings.

My daughter's put off by this polygamy; it's too close for comfort, she says.

Polygamy was commmon at that time in Utah history.  Virtually of the Pioneers who came West with Britham Young at that time practiced polygamy, which was against US law then, as now. Utah was a territory and not a state, and the territory of Utah was run by Governor Young, essentially a religious oligarchy. In 1890, in order for Utah to apply for statehood, the federal government forced Gov. Young's hand, and he, in turn, was forced to turn on his beloved Saints and declare that they must cease to practice polygamy.

At that time, my great-grandfather built separate houses for the wives (they were all married by religious ceremony) and after a short, six-month mandatory stay in the county jail, he was allowed to resume living with his large family. My grandmother called the women who were not her mothers "Aunts."  A short jail sentence was mandatory for many polygamists of that day. They were proud to serve, and it was considered a badge of honor, rather than shame, to have been called to jail. My great-grandfather spent many an hour playing checkers with the guards.  The LDS considered their lifestyle sacred and looked down upon the Federal government for forcing them to change their ways. That debate still rages today.

Only a small percentage of LDS practiced Polygamy to the extent that my great-grandfather did. You hear of the polygamous communities in Arizona a fair bit these days, but they are not Mormon, or LDS; they are of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints sect, which has nothing to do with mainstream Mormonism.

In my great-grandparents day, Mormons were common folk from Britain who left because of famine, low education and lack of work; they walked from Iowa to the Great Salt Lake and lived on little else other than Sego Lillies and dried meat, carried in small handcarts they rolled across the plains and over the rockies to the land they hoped would give them the gold rush, work on the railroad and a homestead out West.

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It was into this unique world that my father was born and raised.

Mornings he milked, afternoons he swept corn flour from his father's Esplin Feed and Seed store. Life was hard, life was fast. By age 11, he had sustained a scar above his left eyebrow where he tried to ride a cow - she, being bovine, did not take to this intrusion at all, and so, she bucked him off like a bull. By age 11, he had  smoked cigarettes, driven a truck and and he learned the language of a longshoreman.

But he had a higher calling than the irrigated pastures of Cedar City. He wanted to become a scientist; he wanted to become a chemist, and he told my grandfather he wanted to go to university. He knew in his bones, that he wanted to become a scientist, even as he played with backyard explosives. He was meant for something other and greater than the red clay earth of Cedar, his homeland.

College is for rich folks, was my grandfather's answer. A few years later, directly after high school, my father was drafted into the Navy during World War II, where he trained in San Francisco. He was nearly shipped out to sea when World War II ended; my father married his high school sweetheart, my mother, when she was just 20 and he wast just 19, in his Navy Dress Blues in San Francisco. My father was so lucky to have been born in 1927 and not 1926  - had he been born just a year earlier, he would have seen battle on the seas in WWII.  My father would have turned 80 this past April 2.

 My father's polygamous, pioneer ancestry claimed the red clay of Southern Utah as their own, as part of a promised land, their Zion, where they would find freedom from persecution. The arid, unarable land would take generations of hard work to create the dream they nearly died for. The long work, harsh winters and red clay made for a difficult life.

In the 1920s, Utah was a place where the LDS Deseret language was still taught in schools, where a few scattered families hid behind illegal polygamy, lies and armed communities. Mostly, Utah was a place of  clean-cut Mormons who valued education and hard work above all else secular.

My father did not believe in LDS ways, and so, he had few friends in school; none, really, in high school. It was not until he left high school on the principal's advice that his best bet was to quit school and go to university that he hit his stride. No longer was he a black sheep in a small, Mormon community in which one was either part of the solution or part of the problem; At the University, he'd found a place where he could grow into his own.

He went to the University of Utah for his BS, then transferred to the University of Texas at Galveston for his MS., but left there due to a disagreement with his professor. His professor believed my father should give up "trying to do it his own way" and to do things "the accepted way." In my father's own words, he was very glad to leave the medical school in Galveston and to return to the University of Utah. I had my first birthday in Galveston, before my father's return to Salt Lake.

It was at the University of Utah where he met Louis  B. Goodman, M.D., editor of the pharmacology textbook that would be bible to medical students and pharmacology students alike: "Goodman and Gilman's Pharmacogical Basis of Therapeutics." Goodman was a very famous man in his field; he had been sent from Yale University to ramp up the medical school at the University of Utah; Utah, being a state filled with hard-working LDS, was seen as the best place East of California to have a top-notch medical school. 

In not too many years, my father would become known as the best pharmacologist under 30 and would travel to Seattle to pick up an award; he would publish as few others in his field did. He was on fire, he was in the right place at the right time.

There were many evenings he stayed at the lab. It was his work, his passion, his life.
 

Soon, a Polish doctor-woman with a young son came to work with him. Within a year, he betrayed my mother and married the Polish doctor. He was still the farm boy, a cowboy whose left eyebrow bore a scar when he tried to mount a cow, ride her like a horse and she gored him; he was still the cowboy boy who liked to play harmonica and guitar and hike in the Rockies, yet he was becoming a scientist of world-wide renown in his field.

My stepmother loved these cowboy facets about my father; such an unlikely couple they were: she, a former card-carrying Communist, a family doctor in Warsaw who'd lived through the Holocaust, who'd found herself at the ends of the earth, in Utah, on a post-doctoral fellowship, next to my father, her teacher.

Both found the other immeasurably exotic and foreign, worlds away as they were from their own small backgrounds. Even though she loved the cowboy in him, she begged him to give up his beloved and well-worn cowboy boots and to wear dress shoes and a natty blazer to work. This he eventually did wear. 

It was during his undergraduate university years that he first flew on an airplane, first heard classical music and became friends with a motley group of beat generation leftists, some of whom had to leave for Canada during the McCarthy era.

When he became an entity in the scientific community, he traveled a lot-to visit departments who wanted him as their department head, to visit departments who wanted him on their teaching staff, to attend annual scientific meetings.

On one such business trip in 1964, my father, stepmother, stepbrother and I piled in the back of the '59 Chevy wagon and drove from Utah to New York City, where my father, in his cowboy boots and jeans pulled up to the New York Hilton, only to be told by an unctious doorman: you can't park here sir, this is only for hotel visitors. And my father, bless his heart, replied, hey, #&(# mac, I am a hotel visitor, you #&*$.

Oh, he was a good father and a great scientist.

My stepmother's attempt to get him to dress more conservatively and less like a cowboy became more successful when we moved back East, to Montreal.

Little did we know then that we were moving to the second most culturally isolated geopolitical region in North America: Quebec; the irony still astounds me, even now, as my mouth curls around its edges in a smirk.

Not that life was perfect. There were times, early in the new marriage when he was lying flat on the floor, unresponsive, as my stepmother begged  him to awake. Yet he went to the University the next morning, chipper as a bird and never missed a day of work.The love, evident between them on other days made up for the nightmarish quality of dysfunction, so common in many families.

He was known as a scientist who could write and write well. He was my first tutor and my best.

Unfortunately, these times were not to last.  We moved to Montreal a few years later, where my father was a full professor in the department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics at McGill and my stepmother was an assistant professor. I had a stepbrother and two younger sisters.

On December 7, 1971, thirty years after Pearl Harbor, my father suffered a fatal heart attack while on vacation with my stepmother in Mexico. That day was the beginning of a turning point for all of us, as we learned to cope without my father. It is in Remembering Dad, remembering my father at his best, through sorrows and pain, joy, laughter and tears, that I have my greatest joy in life.  And always with great love, do I remember my father.

There are now 71 mentions of my father, "Don W. Esplin" listed in Google; that is pretty good, considering he died 36 years ago. 842 libraries nationwide have the textbook he wrote: "Goodman & Gilman's The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics" - the textbook still used today by medical students and graduate students in pharmacology.