GORDON RANDBY LUND
I was born on January 13, 1925 in Salt Lake City, Utah at 677 West Capitol Street in a modest home. My father was Djalmar Emanuel Lund and my mother, Aagot Marie Randby. I weighed 13 lbs. 2 oz. My mother was 41 at the time. I have 5 sisters and 1 brother. Connie is 2 years older than me, Aubrey 10 years older, LaVon 12 years older, Margot 14 years older, Temmie 16 years older and Vange 18 years older. Temmie was our Santa Claus and the provider of all the frills. If there were any sort of gifts, or money spent on anything other than the basics, Temmie provided. Father and Mother spoke better Scandahoovian (which is a mixture of English and several Scandinavian languages) than they did English. I also picked up some Scandahoovian. I don't think my mother ever could write English.
When I was 4 years old, we moved to 266 Douglas Street which we considered to be located in a rich neighborhood. We had many professional people living around us as neighbors. Our home was about 2 blocks away from the University of Utah.
When I was 5 years old, I was run over by an automobile. It happened on 13th East Street. I was going to the store for a neighbor who gave me an Indian head penny for going. I was headed across 2nd South and obviously darted across the street without looking and both wheels of the car went over my body and right leg. The story goes that I almost lost my leg and was going to die. Dad prayed and all and I came out of it with a scar on my leg, scars on my face, and my right leg is an inch shorter that the other. I am sure I was administered to. I was baptized on the 4th of November 1933 by my father, Djalmar E. Lund.
I didn't have much time for hobbies or interests because we didn't have enough money to go around. My dad lost his job at Western Savings and Loan as the head bookkeeper during the depression, and after tried selling insurance to make ends meet. When I was 7 or 8 I had a regular route selling magazines. I also sold homemade candy for a graduate student at the U. of U. and his wife. Then I had about 10 lawns that I mowed and some of them that I watered. One of them was Stephen Covey's parents.
I think I was a good student. I probably was a B+ or A- student. I don't remember a lot of homework, but we had a lot of other things we had to do to in providing another source of income for the family. We all had to have part-time jobs in order to make ends meet because of the depression. In school, I played football and some track in discus, shot, and javelin. I was a year ahead of where I was supposed to be somehow. I thoroughly enjoyed school as a child. I enjoyed grade school and junior high. I went to the Stewart grade school, which was a teaching facility of the U. of U. They had a very small student body. All the teachers were working toward getting their degree. It was sort of an experimental thing. We had very small classes, and it was considered to be a great honor to be chosen to go there. It wasn't any great honor in our case; we just lived within the boundaries, but a lot of people wished they could go there because it was so small and we received special attention. We lived 1 ½ blocks from it. I have no bad memories at all of grade school. Everything was fine; we had a lot of fun. We had a good bunch of kids, they were all rich, I was the poorest one there, but it didn't seem to matter; we all blended in very nicely. Several of us elected to go to Roosevelt Junior High, which was about two miles away. There were no school buses and we had to walk. It was ridiculous to go that far.
I started going with Pat Wilkins. Her dad was one of the richest men in Utah at the time. He was head legal counsel for U.S. Steel. They lived in a house up on Military Way. It later became one of the official buildings of the U. of U. when they moved. She was one of my last adventures in that regard.
I attended East High School. I set the trend on clothes to wear to school. I was on the football team; you wore levis and an old sweater and hobnail boots and that was it. So I wore the same pants and the same sweater I think for 2 or 3 years. My recollections of High School were great except for the money thing again. We had no car and I had to line up a ride before I could get a date.
I had part time jobs and I was the night watchman in a residential hotel (the Ambassador) in town. I worked from 11 pm till 7am. That made dating tough. In fact, it made it real tough because I had to go to work at 11 o'clock. Sometimes I had a little trouble getting enough sleep, but I had time to get some homework done and do some sleeping. I had to take the time clock around and punch it on different floors, but I'd lock up the building shortly after I got there and I'd also open it up at maybe 5 in the morning to let the milkman and paperboy and all in. It wasn't that difficult. I was 16 or 17 at the time. When I graduated from high school, I went to the U. of U. Of course World War II had broken out and everyone was going to go to war and there was no sense in making plans for anything. I was 16 ½ when I started at the U. We all signed up for a branch of the service we would like to go into when we reached the right age which I guess was 18. I finished 1 ½ years at the U. and then things got tough. The Navy said, "You're all V12 coming in now." We weren't even 18 yet. Then we all got sworn in and I joined the V12 program which was an officers training program with continued education until you got your degree and then you were an officer and shipped overseas immediately. The University of Colorado at Boulder was where they sent our particular group. It was all military. There must have been 5000 of us Navy, AF, Army, and Marines. They had a Japanese language school, a cooks and bakers school and during that time I was playing football. I got over to Boulder and thought I was going to have a pretty easy time with football because everyone was off in the service. I got over there and I remember going to sign up and they put me in the 15th squad; they had that many football players. They had All-Americans from all over. It was sort of the headquarters for all the athletes for some reason or other. There I was on the 15th squad; they threw me an old baseball shirt and said go down to the boonies, which was like 2 miles away at one of the practice fields. Believe me it took a long time to work our way back up to campus to get up to school. The first game I played in was against the U. of U. all the "sickies" were playing for the U. because they didn't have any of the service people there. It was made primarily up of 4-Fs and male cheerleaders. I remember Warren Stack was a cheerleader when I left and when I got in there he was one of the star performers on the football team.
From there I was shipped to a mental hospital; it was a rehabilitation hospital up in the Rockies to wait there to see if I was going overseas in the Hospital Corps or go on to med school. I was up there for 9 months at a Navy convalescent hospital on bedpan patrol.
The commanding officer pulled some strings with the dean of the medical school at Temple University in Philadelphia where they were starting accelerated classes because of the war. All of a sudden I was on a troop train going to Philadelphia to go to med school. It was great back there. We had officers uniforms and good pay, more money than I had ever seen. Plus clothes and all tuition and books paid. It was a fantastic deal. But 2 months later the war ended and they kicked us all out. I couldn't afford to continue so I went back to Salt Lake.
I got a job working for Salt Lake Transfer driving a truck. I started dating in earnest. I had broken up with Pat, realizing I couldn't provide for her in the fashion she was accustomed. I kept seeing this same girl whenever I dated. I thought, boy, she really must be popular. Well,it turned out there were two of them, Jean and my Joyce. I dated Joyce and on the 2nd date I decided to ask her to marry me, after telling her that I was reformed and was going to Priesthood meeting and wanted to go on a mission. Three months later we were married on August 25, 1947 in the Salt Lake Temple.
Shortly after we were married, I had to rush back to Philadelphia to get back to med school. I didn't have any money and had odd jobs before I got married. I ran the elevator in the hospital; worked in Breyers ice cream factory at night packing ice cream. The tuition and books were really high. Six months later we were coming home from our last social event of the year because Joyce was becoming heavy with child, to find that we had been robbed. I think the excitement brought on ruptured membranes, so we took her to the hospital. She was 6 ½ months pregnant. It was horribly expensive to be in the hospital and of course they couldn't do anything for her except try to hold onto the baby which meant she had to lie flat on her back and do nothing. In the meantime we had those hospital bills building up.
After a couple of weeks, we couldn't take that any more financially, so I told the hospital that I would take her home and change the sheets myself at home. We walked the 1 ½ blocks from the hospital. We were POOR. I was even selling blood. Joyce was 7 ½ months pregnant when we went back to the hospital the second time and Pat was born. She was in the incubator for 1 month (more expense of course).
Things got really tough financially, the real squeeze was on. I couldn't finish school. The chief of obstetrics who delivered Pat had a friend who worked for a small pharmaceutical firm in Philadelphia called Smith, Kline and French (SKF). I went to work for them and I decided to go into sales. I had my choice of place. We decided on Atlanta. We were there for a few months when the guy that had interviewed me for the job in medical research came down and said that he wanted to give me a big promotion. I told him that the only way my wife would go back to Philadelphia and the terrible memories we had there was if they doubled my salary. A week later I got a phone call and he said they'd do it - they'd double my salary. Joyce cried for a week about going back, but we went back in grand style and moved into Drexelbrook garden-type apartments. We were living high on the hog. I was traveling all over the country. I was setting up studies on new compounds with doctors and clinics. Terry, our second girl, was born there in Drexelbrook. Mark and Craig were also born in Drexelbrook.
In November, 1956 we built a house out in Levittown which was our first house. It was a new community with young couples, lots of kids and everyone had a good time. Everything was going well for us at SKF. We were making lots of money, were doing just about everything we wanted to. We took trips to Salt Lake quite frequently and I think we had a happy home. Then we decided that daddy was going to build his dream house. I drew a picture and the builder said, "that's real interesting. I'd like to build that." We found 2 ½ acres of woods on the side of the mountain overlooking Valley Forge park. This was in 1960. The house was all glass in the back with stone columns and sliding glass out of every room and a tree growing through the roof. I loved it and everyone else thought it was atrocious. We built a swimming pool and a basketball court. The kids had just about everything they needed. Mark started playing the drums when he was about seven, and Craig started playing the guitar and they started playing in a band together. Terry was taking piano lessons and Pat was getting into modern dance. Everyone was generally having a good time.
Mark, Craig and I were getting involved in sports. I became the president of the baseball Little League in our area. There were 850 boys on 56 teams. At the same time I was coaching the Pop Warner Football team. Needless to say our boys were both superstars. We won everything and they were always All-Star team performers.
We helped build another church in the Valley Forge ward. I was put in charge of the mutual.
Things went very well for me at SKF. After eighteen years, I retired from the company and started a new company called Pro-Services Inc. which was very successful. Then Jack Turnquist from Dallas talked us into merging with his company called Modern America. The American Medical Association Journal had touted us as the outstanding managers of professional money. We had lots of publicity. DuPont was also wooing us at the time to join with them and manage their mutual funds. I was outvoted and we moved to Dallas in 1969, I being the manager of our firm. We had forty salesmen and they had ninety salesmen. I had the job of trying to merge the two sales forces. When we sold he whole thing to C&A, we decided that we had to do something else. He and I decided that we would have some fun building motels. We got property in Greenville and Sherman, Texas, and Ardmore, Oklahoma. We had 6 different locations. Then the Arabs struck. No gas. That got real scary. We hung around in that project for another 6 months before we decided there was no way. We also built some homes.
In the interim, Pat graduated from BYU and went to work in Washington, D.C. as a waitress in a restaurant. Terry graduated from high school, Craig was in his last year of junior high and Mark was a junior in high school. We bought a new house in Northwood Hills, the last outskirts of civilization. Now it is downtown.
I was very quietly going into the insurance business. In the first month I was in the property and casualty business; I think I made $12. In the first year I almost made enough to pay the rent. This was in 1975. Things went along very well there for the next four years. I got to where I liked and built up a nice little business. We moved into the building where we are now in April 1981. I now have more business than I can handle, and everything's going great. Tom Price sold his part of the agency and I opened up the Gordon Lund Insurance Agency on January 1, 1984; I bought the building from Tom Price. The business doubled in the next 2 years. Pat, the first to get married (to Dave Anderson) has had 4 children. They are living in Woodlands Hills, California. Terry went on a mission to France, then finally found Doug Mahlum. They live in Allen, Texas and have 2 daughters. Craig graduated from the University of Oklahoma, and then went on a mission to Uruguay. He returned and married Jill Love. They have two children and twins on the way (they were born November 21, 1985). Mark graduated from SMU, got a Masters at the University of Texas and married Phyllis Larson. They have one son.
The current big problem is controlling my weight and staying in some sort of physical shape. Joyce and I work out every night at the Fretz Park Community recreation center. I have been president of the Fretz Park council for years. Joyce also serves on the council. The month of December is our favorite time of year. We are booked solid playing Santa Claus. I have a fantastic Santa suit and mother dresses as Santa's helper, handing out candy canes. We really enjoy going to schools, churches, parties, etc. Christmas Eve we start in the early afternoon and finish about midnight; visiting homes where we know there are kids. It's become a real tradition and the most gratifying experience I've had.
I finally decided to stop and smell the flowers, went to Europe for my first trip in September 1984, visited Norway and Denmark. We had a fabulous time. In June of 19 we went on a Caribbean cruise.