Individual Details

John Mathias LeBaron was born September 13,1926, in Payson, Utah to Leo Bernard and Susan Mae Bingham LeBaron. He was the youngest of two sisters, Leona Mae and Ices, and an adopted brother, Paul Junius. When he was only a few years old, the family moved to Hurricane and bought the house we live in now. The house was originally built to be a dehydrating plant where they dried fruit and vegetables. It is a three story building and was designed so they could put fruit on big dehydrating screens in the basement and slowly lift them up. By the time they got to the top floor the fruit should have been dried. They had a huge furnace in the basement that provided the heat for the process. I donut know how many years they tried to make it work, but it wasnut successful, so they sold it to Johnus folks. It was a 24ux36u building with only one entrance. When the folks bought it they had to put in windows and doors and partition it off into rooms. The outside walls were three adobe thick and it had a huge foundation. There was no inside entrance to either the basement or the top floor, only some large steps on the outside leading up to a huge sliding door that was on a heavy track. The top floor was never partitioned off and John remembers his folks having lots of parties and dances up there that most all the folks of Hurricane attended. John lived in this house until he married, except for a couple of summers that he spent in Boulder City, Nevada, working for the government. Johnus sister, Leona, and her family of four, moved in with them when John was quite young. Leonaus husband was a professional wrestler and was really mean to John and Paul. He would hang them up on the clothesline with the suspenders of their pants. They were scared to death of him. John remembers him looking like a big Grizzly bear as he went around wearing very few clothes and had a very hairy body. Leona went with him on his wrestling tours all over the states and left the small children with her parents, for them to take care of. It was really hard on John and he felt like he was really neglected as far as his mom not having time to encourage and help him with school work, so he didnut do well in school at all. His father was gone most of the time hauling chickens to California and bringing citrus fruit back with him in order to provide for his family. For a long time John could hardly eat an orange or banana because he got so sickened on them. John was quite chubby as a child, and the kids at school teased him a lot. He remembers being ready to leave at the end of the day and as soon as the bell rang he would run out of the school and head for home as fast as he could so he wouldnut get beat up. When John was in second grade, his appendix ruptured and he spent almost a month in the hospital. Dr. Clark McIntire was his doctor and he spent many hours with John. John had so much poison in his body the stitches wouldnut hold together and he bears a scar about 2T wide and 6T long from it. Other than two hernia operations, a bout with viral pneumonia, and recent back and prostate surgery, John has had wonderful health and has hardly been sick a day. There were a lot of young children about Johnus age that lived in his neighborhood so he had a good time playing with them. Two Gibson families lived south of his house and they had large families. Holt and Gary Gibson were his best friends and he remembers spending a lot of time at their place. Their mother had a beautiful singing voice and would sit outside and play her guitar and sing to them. They spent most of the summer playing in the canal that was just above their house. They built rafts and used old wash tubs or whatever they could find to float in the canal. The canal was quite large and we used to take our kids up there to swim. I couldnut imagine John and those young boys going up there by themselves. Itus a wonder they didnut all drown. Their other entertainment was climbing and exploring the hills that were close by, and playing down along the Virgin River. John remembers when he was only about five years old, his sister Leona lived in the Los Angeles area, and his mom and dad took him and drove down to visit her. He got so car sick he begged them to stay there and never go back to Hurricane. He remembers another time spending the summer in Tucson, Arizona, where his Aunt Clara lived and how he spent the whole summer in the cowus watering trough trying to keep a little cool. In the late 1930us, Johnus dad bought a big ranch up in New Harmony. They planted a lot of corn. John remembers how he and his brother, Paul, would ride their horses up there, pick gunny sacks of corn and bring it back to Hurricane to sell. They had a lot of apple and pear trees and it was a beautiful place. The creek ran through it and wild currants grew all along it. His sister, Leona, divorced her husband and moved up to New Harmony with her family, to live. She was going with Ether Wood at the time, and Ether talked Leo into selling him the ranch and buying the Purgatory property. John was just sick about the idea and tried his best to talk his dad out of it, but Leo believed he was going to do wonders with Purgatory and felt that it was the right thing to do. What a big mistake. When John was beginning his junior year of high school, he had a run in with his gym teacher and was treated pretty rough. He and his friend, Amber Slack, never did go back to school after that. John had a 1936 Ford at the time and they went to Boulder City and worked at the Boulder Dam (now named the Hoover Dam) for the Bureau of Reclamation. There were a couple of older boys from Hurricane that worked and lived down there so they let John and Amber live with them in a junky trailer house. The following summer several other boys from Hurricane went down there to live and work and they had some good times. John tells of one Friday night they had gone to bed and at about midnight, he got up and said he was going to Hurricane to get a SKeith Tobler haircutT. So they all loaded in his car and headed for Hurricane. John was working in Boulder at this time and his dad went down there and talked him into coming back to Hurricane and helping him with Purg. Leo had borrowed a large amount of money to put in a cement ditch to carry the water from Harrisburg Canyon down to the farm and he needed Johnus help. John worked for his dad for quite some time, but it seemed a helpless cause. The ground was mostly gypsum and if a little water leaked out or ran over the ditch, the ground would just melt and the ditch would cave in. That along with the cattle that would get in and break it up, made him wonder if he would ever get it done. To top everything else, there was a drought and where a nice stream had run when he bought it, there was barely enough to push the water down to the farm, not nearly enough to do any planting. Johnus dad never gave up and dreamed of the day the whole valley would be under cultivation and green. Johnus father was killed in 1955, while bringing a tractor home from Purg. A young boy ran into the back of the tractor with his car and it threw Leo off. It happened on Sunday evening and he passed away the next morning. This was about the hardest thing John ever faced. At the time, Leo owed quite a lot of money for the cement ditch and since we had a large family with little income, we were forced to sell the water rights to the city of St. George, to pay off the debt. At the time, we had a water certificate and thought we owned it all, but found out later that the water belonged to the Purgatory Irrigation Co. of which the Adams family also owned a small part. We went to the city and offered to pay them back, with interest, the money they had given us, but it didnut work out. Legally we still owned the water. When they built Quail Lake, the Water Conservatory District Condemned our water rights and took it away from us for a small fraction of what it was worth. In April, 1943, John and Carlos Black came to St. George. My friend, Wanda Cooper, and I were walking along the sidewalk after school. She knew John and Carlos so they stopped and talked with us. They gave me a ride home to Santa Clara and then took Wanda to Washington, where she lived. John came over to see me quite regularly after that and on my seventeenth birthday I had a party and invited him and his friends. The others had all left and John and I were talking in the living room, which adjoined my parentus bedroom and about 10:30 my father yelled and asked if didnut we know what time it was and heud sure like to get a little sleep. It nearly scared John to death and he left like a streak of lightning. He didnut come in the house again for quite awhile after that. One evening John and Amber Slack came down and took Wanda Cooper and myself to a movie. Some of his friends were leaving St. George at about 1:00 AM for the Armed Services, so we decided to stay up and see them off. After they left on the bus, we drove Wanda home and then started for Santa Clara. Amber immediately fell asleep and it wasnut long after that I was asleep, too. When we got to the Santa Clara Wash, where the Sand Hollow Water Park and swimming pool is now, John fell asleep and rolled his car into the wash. After we woke up Amber, we all crawled out the car door window on the top side of the tipped car. We walked home and I woke dad to see if we could take the team of horses for awhile. He finally got it out of me that we had wrecked the car. He took the team and pulled the car out of the wash. John was able to drive it home but it was so smashed up it couldnut be fixed. He really felt bad because he loved that car and had had some really good times in it. The following June, Wanda and I went to Henderson, Nevada, to work and John got a job in Las Vegas. He didners Feed Store in St. George, for $6.00 a day. We lived in Snowus Apartment which was above their store on Main Street, for about three months. Then we moved to Hurricane. John was called to the draft and had to go to Salt Lake for a physical, but he didnut pass because of his hernia, so he came backed and worked with his dad again. In 1945, we moved to Boulder City and John went to work on the dam. They were repairing the big tunnels that carry the overflow water. He worked there until the job was finished and then went to work on the Davis Dam. He only worked there a few months, then he and Fenton Imlay went to California to work on a dam there. When things didnut work out, he returned to Utah and in February, 1947, he got a job with Utah Construction at the iron mines south west of Cedar City. In November, 1948, we moved back to Hurricane and lived in the basement of his parentus house. He drove back and forth to the iron mines for about seven years until Theron Leany offered him a job painting. Work got scarce, but John was able to get a job with Morris- Knudson building the road up on the Black Ridge going to Cedar City. After the job with Morris-Knudson ended, John and Leslie Hanson went to work on Mt. Charleston, west of Las Vegas. They would take a Sgrub boxT with them, with the weekus food and slept in the car. John did anything he could to save a dollar for his family. He tells of walking past the kitchen window when the family was all around the table eating, and wondering how he was ever going to keep food on the table for them. I donut think he ever spent a dollar on himself for anything except the necessities. After Mt. Charleston, John went to work for Stratton Brothers Construction. They were putting in a water line for Overton, Nevada. While there, he got viral pneumonia and nearly died. He was off work for a month. At this time, I was working as treasurer for the City of Hurricane. Ben Lee, who was Superintendent of the Utah Highway Department came in to pay his utility bill and I asked him if didnut he need a good man to work for him. He asked why I wanted John to work in the area and I told him I was tired of milking the cow and needed John home to do the milking. He did hire John, but every time he saw me he had to kid me about only wanting John home so he could milk the cow. In the fall of 1949, we bought part of Rose Isomus lot and had Keith Hall and Leon Glazier build a house on it for us. We had saved up enough money to pay for the lot and borrowed $5000.00 from my parents to build the house. It was two bedrooms and one bath, plus kitchen, living room and utility room. We later added two more bedrooms, a bath, and big screened porch. We moved into the house in July, 1950, with no air conditioner and only a wood stove to cook on. We thought we were in Heaven. We bought a new 1953 Ford, and Gai was born in 1953, so we had a new car, a new house and a new baby. We lived in our house until 1976, when we sold it. We had purchased Johnus folkus house, after both his parents had died and had been renting it out.. It was really getting rundown with the renters. We decided to sell our house and return to live in Johnus childhood home. John fixed the basement up nice and we lived there while we finished remodeling; adding another bedroom, two baths, a dining area, and extending the kitchen. We made a lovely home and have enjoyed living in it. We bought an old Spartan trailer one summer when the kids were all home and weud pull it up to Mirror Lake on Cedar Mountain every summer for five or six years. The kids all remember the good times we had spending weekends up there in the summer. The Forest Service closed down that area so we couldnut take the trailer there anymore. We bought a tent and spent several weekends up there in the summer for a few more years. John used the trailer to live in a lot of years while he was working for the highway department away from home. We pulled it out to Apple Valley about five years ago and still go out and stay in it overnight some times during the summer. John worked for UDOT for twenty-seven years. All during his employment with UDOT, John studied constantly and even attended college classes, always striving to further his knowledge and improve his education in order to pass the tests required to earn promotions. He went from holding the stake while they surveyed to being the foreman over the whole crew. He was always honest and put in 110% on everything he did. He wasnut too popular with some of the contractors because he made them follow the specifications the contract called for instead of cutting corners. One time when he was inspecting a project, we were trying once again to put the water in the ditch down at Purg and we needed a backhoe really bad. The contractor on the job was trying to cut corners and not compact the dirt like he was supposed to and John wouldnut pass the job. The boss for the company came to John and told him if he would get lost and stay away from the job just one afternoon, that he could go down to Purg and there would be a backhoe for him down on the ditch. John wouldnut do it, so the contractor tried to get him fired by telling lies, but it didnut work. He told John later that he really admired him and that he was about the only one he couldnut buy off. John was the main inspector of the road that goes down through the gorge on the way to Mesquite and a lot of other big projects. The highway department bought him a new truck for his work and pretty much put him on his own doing projects. He worked from the gorge all the way up I-15 past Nephi, on 89 up to the Colorado border and all the way through Moab, the Uintas and over to Devilus Canyon by Glen Canyon. He retired in 1987, having worked with seven different superintendents who all treated him with the utmost respect. At his retirement party, they praised him for his dedication to his job and said no one kept a journal of the work like he did. Since retirement, John has been busy building up the lot around our home, making a lot of rock walls which he built by himself. He did buy himself a backhoe and an old dump truck and has hauled tons of dirt to fill up the volcanic wash that ran down the middle of the lot. He has made a beautiful field which we planted into an orchard and pasture to run his milk cow and beef cattle in. There wasnut anything John couldnut do or fix, from electrical, plumbing, carpentry, or mechanical. We never took a car to the garage to be repaired as John did it all. He also taught the boys how to fix cars and to be independent and there isnut much that any of them canut do. His physical health is excellent and for good reason. He never mistreated his body and ate the good foods as outlined in the Word of Wisdom. He is honest as the day is long and has set a good example for his children. He loves our home and has had no desire to go on any long trips or visit any other country. We bought a fifth wheel about fifteen years ago and went on a few trips with friends. He believes everything he has is the best and treats it that way, even though it may be about worn out. Even though Johnus mental health is deteriorating, he still tries so hard to help me and feels bad that he canut do more. John has been a good provider and his family never went hungry nor lacked for anything they needed. He has had an interesting life and faced many challenges.

Seal to Parents: @I10067@ FIELD NAME Page VALUE Spilsbury Mortuary, Hurricane _INFO P FIELD NAME Page VALUE John M. LeBaron Obituary - Feb 16, 2006 _INFO P

Birth	13 Sep 1926	Payson, Utah, Utah, United States
Naming	2 Jan 1927
Marriage	30 Jun 1944	Pioche, Lincoln, Nevada, United States - Living
Death	13 Feb 2006	Hurricane, Washington, Utah, United States
Burial	17 Feb 2006	Hurricane, Washington, Utah, United States
Ancestral File Number		D4DC-W3

Spouse	Living
Child	Living
Child	Living
Child	Living
Child	Living
Child	Living
Child	Living
Child	Living

Father	Leo Bernard LEBARON (1888 - 1955)
Mother	Susan Mae BINGHAM (1890 - 1967)