Family goes to Arizona

I was 11 years old when World War Two started on Dec. 7, 1941. I remember it was a Sunday and when we got out of church that's all they were talking about on the radio. We were glued to the radio for the next couple of hours, listening about Pearl Harbor. In the fall of 1942 Casper hurt his back and was advised by his doctors to get rest. In order to do this he decided to move to Arizona for the winter and Erwin Stoddard agreed to run the farm while he was gone. He turned the ice-cream business over to Farr's in Ogden to take care of his accounts with the agreement that he could get them back when he returned. Now that the war was on gas was rationed and you had to have stamps to buy gas. Being Casper had a business with trucks he could get all the stamps he needed, therefore this wasn't a problem for us to travel to Arizona. Casper purchased a small home in Mesa, Arizona on Roland Street. We went to school down there that winter and never had to wear a coat. One thing we did on saturday evening as a family would be go uptown to the dance hall where all the servicemen came to dance. We would shine shoes for a dime and mother and father would sit out in the car where they could see that we were okay. If we made a dollar, which we did we thought we were really rich. Sometimes the servicemen would tip us a dollar. The home we lived in down there no longer exists. The whole block was cleaned up and turned into commercial property. I have looked for it on several occasions. Other commodities were also rationed with stamps. These stamps didn't purchase the product, it only gave the dollar amount you could buy. On my 13th birthday while living down there I had my tonsils removed. I remember this because I went to answer the front door and couldn't talk. We returned home in April 1942.