Posted by:
donbagley
(
)
Date: November 23, 2014 02:53PM
My grandfather, John Henry Bagley, is buried in Baker City. Even though it's near La Grande, we didn't go look at his grave. I think my father knew that our family history is really embarrassing and not much more than a story of stupid men having too many children (and sometimes too many wives) to take care of.
Every generation for the last three or four going back, large Bagley families have dissolved in rancor. The Mormon ones hate the ones who become secular. My father had most of his siblings do that, and we were kept away from those sinners when I was a kid. He's a very evil Mormon man, my dad, and he lied to me about his own family. He said they wished they'd never left the gospel and wanted back in, but it was too late somehow. When I finally met his sister in Fontana, CA, she told me he was selfish and arrogant to his siblings.
My father married my mother, a non-Mormon, because her parents had money. She was perhaps the craziest young agoraphobic woman in La Grande. Dad was a local dumbass who the other kids called "Bowge." I don't know where his nickname came from. His father had died early and Bowge was a weird Mormon jerk who claimed his old man turned into a God. Mom was afraid of boys, because they wanted her to socialize. So she hooked up with the outcast oddball, Bowge, at the tender age of nineteen and they were married in the Idaho Temple.
Mom's mother was a mysteriously dark-skinned woman who may have been part black, but that wasn't talked about in the family. My parents went to work on my wealthy grandparents, telling them how rotten I and my siblings were. Their strategy was successful, and none of their offspring were named in the will. Grandpa's side (not Mormon and not lunatic) named the children and grandchildren in the will. Those were from a different marriage, I think. So my mother and father took every last cent of their family's side of grandma and grandpa's fortune, which was one of the best in La Grande.
La Grande is an odd touchstone for me. I was born there, humiliated and abused by my father there, and cut out of the only will that I might have been part of. I was denied a chance to know my agnostic grandparents, as my parents carefully poisoned the relationship. The people of La Grande who were not LDS used to call the local Mormons "cricket stompers." I remember thinking that the Mormons were the worst people in town. The bishop proved my point by demanding that I talk about my genitalia in an interview the first time I met him. I imagine the town now, huddled under the slopes of Mount Emily and Table Mountain, awaiting the dark and frigid nights of winter. It will always be a winter place for me.
Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 11/23/2014 11:19PM by donbagley.