Here is a little Family History Valentine's gift for each of you from mom and dad.
Courtship and Marriage of Charlene Brague and Ralph (Mick) Jackson
Upon returning from my adventure in San Francisco, I made
the decision to go to school at BYU. I arrived in Provo, Utah for the
Winter semester. I rode up with a friend in his car and the day we
arrived it was snowing. A first for me. I lived in Heritage Halls
with three other girls. One of the girls had a brother whom I started to
date. After a while we became engaged and set a marriage date. I
made my wedding dress and the invitations were at the printer when I started to
have some uneasy feelings. When I talked to my parents about these
feelings, they told me it was probably just pre-wedding jitters. But the
feelings persisted and so I went to my friend and neighbor, Myrthus Evans, who
was a stake patriarch and talked to him about my feelings. He told me
that he couldn’t tell me what to do, but that he could give me a blessing of
guidance and comfort, which he did. In the blessing he told me that if
this was not right, that I would know. He also said that if this was not
right, that I would know who the man I was to marry as soon as I met him.
The engagement was broken off and I was back into the dating game, which
is hard once you have been out of it for a while.
In the Fall of 1957 I was on the stake young women’s board
and we had a stake meeting. The wards had not been getting their reports
in on time and I guess the Stake President wanted to make a point so he chose a
ward and had the YM president stand up and he started to dress him down for not
having his report in on time. After a few minutes, the ward YW president
stood up and told the president that this man had only been in as YM president
for a few days. This YM president was Mick Jackson. He told the
president that he would get the info to him asap.
At the time my dad was Stake YM secretary so after the
meeting he came up to dad to ask for his address so he could get the report to
him. As I was standing there waiting to go home with dad, Mick turned to
me and said “Since I have your address, can I pick you up for the road shows
this weekend”. Sneaky, huh? Of course I said yes and we had our
first date. When I got home that night, I told my mother that this was
the man I was going to marry, I just had to convince him of the idea. Of
course he always said that I wanted him for his Thunderbird, but not so.
He was an answer to a priesthood blessing.
So we dated for about 7 months and were married on May 31,
1958 in the Los Angeles Temple. We have had 7 wonderful children and
celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary while on a temple mission in the
Philippines.
Mick's Memories
The first date with Charlene was the stake roadshow which
was in Riverside, Calif. It was in the
Riverside City convention center. My
seat was up in the balcony..a ways away from the stage. Charlene had a part in the roadshow and I
remember looking down at Charlene and thinking wow what a beautiful young lady
and I wanted to find out more about her and her family. Dating came easy because she really like my
thunderbird. The next date was when we
went to the area roadshows in Orange County.
We jumped in the t-bird and I thought I was in heaven…we had lots of happy times together.
When I decided to ask Charlene to marry me I went to her
dad and told him that I wanted to marry his daughter and asked what he thought about
that. Charlene’s dad asked if my
intentions were honorable and I explained that they were about as honorable as
anyone could be. If he’d only known how
I was going to drag her around the western united states, including Alaska and
Hawaii he might have been sorry to have given the ok. However both mom and dad Brague sure loved to
come for visits wherever we lived, especially Alaska.
After the wedding reception while fleeing across the
desert towards our honeymoon destination at the Johnson ranch, a few miles out
of Barstow we were pulled over by a highway patrolman who said we (I) were
speeding. We were tired from the long
day but that didn’t prevent the patrolman from giving us a citation. The patrolman was drunk but I never mentioned
that to him but thought about reporting him to the CHP authorities. We spent the first evening in Barstow after
being scolded by the drunken CHP. We
were so tired we didn’t care much.
Early the next morning we were off to the ranch in the gun
metal gray t-bird. We kept our eyes open
for other patrol cars but didn’t have any more problems. After arriving at the ranch we looked around
at all the cabins and chose the best one for us to live in for the week. We had the whole ranch to ourselves, Gayle
and Brad made sure of that. T refrigerator
was chuck full of food, fresh linens on the beds, horses in the barn raring to
go. It was a great week of relaxation,
and getting to know one another.
Just one little incident...while feeding the horses to keep them happy I
grabbed an armload of hay and chucked it in the manger and all of the sudden I
looked down at my finger and noticed my ring was gone. I didn’t know how to report that to my lovely
wife who had worked a whole month to buy it…so I didn’t! Later on she asked about the ring and I then
spilled my aching feelings about the loss.
To this day I could not replace that beautiful ring!
After a beautiful week in the mountains of Utah we jumped
back into the car and headed back across the desert. A trip we have made a thousand times
since. We started our married life in
Riverside in a little apartment. The
apartment consisted of a kitchen, bedroom and bathroom. When we arrived at our apartment, to our surprise we were unable to enter
through the door because Charlene’s friends had filled the entire apartment
with scrunched up newspapers, thanks to the Riverside Press.
Charlene and I both worked as we began our married life
together. Charlene worked at Citrus Belt
Savings and Loan and I worked for a friend by the name of Dave Mitchell. He owned the Pamona Valley Electronics
business. I started as an indoor representative
learning the electronics business. After
a few months I was given an assignment of outside sales.
We started our new life together earning a good income
and that kept gas in the t-bird and food on the table. After a few months at our current jobs we
decided that we needed to plan for the future with better education and a “sacred
savings” account.
