Lloyd H Ellsworth
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Dad was one in not a million—he was a one in ten million. Dad was a premature baby, and he only weighed two pounds and something. They didn’t have incubators in those days, so they put him in a box—a little shoebox—and put bricks around him, so the story goes, to keep him warm.
Dad lost his left arm and his left leg in an electrical accident when he was seventeen years old. He and some of his cousins went to the old power house which was located where the Mesa Country Club now is. All of the boys went over all the wires on the place, but when Dad went over the last wire, it grabbed him. His left arm and left leg were so badly burned that they both had to be amputated. It was so bad that the people in Mesa got up a petition and gave it to the doctor and said, “Let him die.” His mother and dad went to him and said, “Lloyd, you’re that bad. They say they want you to die.” He said, “I won’t die.” After the accident he finished a two-year teacher certification course at ASU, which was then Tempe Normal School. He taught for one year but couldn’t handle being inside, so he went into the farming business with his Dad and two brothers, Ed and Ron. They raised primarily grain, cotton, and alfalfa. Dad learned how to drive a tractor, he learned how to rope, he learned how to ride a horse again—all the things he’d done before. But he used to say, “There is one thing you can’t do with one arm, and that is irrigate.” They didn’t have all the false legs and arms like they have nowadays, so he just had to have help when he went irrigating or shoveling. (You can’t shovel with only one leg and one arm either.) Dad was really strong willed—physically and in all ways—Dad was a very, very strong man. I have seen a horse fall with Dad on its back, and Dad just rolled head-over-heels, got up, and got right back on the horse. The only thing that he wasn’t strong in was the Church. There’s no man on Earth I’d rather have had been my dad but Lloyd Ellsworth. His language wasn’t good and he had a couple of bad habits, but he treated me as a man all the way through my life. He never looked down on me. He’d tell me something to do, and if I thought I could do something better, he’d listen to me and then he’d tell me, “Okay, go ahead” or, “No, I’ve tried it. Let’s do it this way.” He always treated me real, real good. By his son, Lloyd Reed Ellsworth.
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