JR Garfield

Profile Updated: August 12, 2022

Residing In	Syracuse, UT USA

Spouse/Partner	Becky Bartholomew

Occupation	Engineer (Still working)

Children	Bryan John, born 1964, Brad Harmon born 1966, Amy June born 1970, Jeffry Owen born 1974

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My engineering career has taken Judy and I many places. We started in Utah, then Texas, Florida for 5-years, back to Utah for thirty years, on a mission to Xi'an China, to Alabama, back to Utah for five years, then to Washington DC for 5-years, on to New Hampshire, back to Utah, to Nevada for 6-months, and back to Utah for good. My greatest accomplishments are a successful marriage of 59 years and our four children of which we were always so proud and our twenty-one grandchildren: each one better than the others. At work one of my most significant accomplishments was that I was part of the three-engineering team at Thiokol who initially design the Space Shuttle solid rocket boosters that won the contract for Thiokol. I was told by one of Thiokol's top managers in front of my son that I had no idea of how much money I had made Thiokol over the years.

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School Story

Bear River High
Utah State University
University of Houston
Back to USU to Graduate
Some Post Graduate work in Engineering

What follows are some memories from my youth:

Green Bike:
Shortly after my mother and dad were married my mother was fired from her job as a school teacher because the school policy was that they could not have on staff two people of the same family. In the post-depression years jobs were still very scares. Since mom and dad were now a family, they fired mom.
They lived in a basement apartment by the back corner of the 2nd ward church parking lot. They enter a contest of some kind, I don’t remember the details, but they won a new car. It was nice to have a car especially since dad had to go out to the farm and milk one or two cows morning and night. They decided they need a house more than a car so they sold the car to make a down payment on a house two blocks south of the church on South Tremont Street between a vacant lot and the Dick Rock home.
Dad had a green bike that before and after school he would ride to the farm to do his chores. Along with this busy schedule he was in the bishopric. I remember it was handy to have him at McKinley school where I was. I could always hit him up for a nickel for a candy bar, and was seldom disappointed.
It was 1949 before Dad and Mom could afford a car; they bought new Ford. That meant that I inherited the green bike. I loved that green machine. It took me any where I wanted to go. I remember the rock boys next door were always tearing their bikes apart to fix them. I never had to work on mine; it always worked and never broke down. Even the tires seemed to stay inflated and never go flat; though it may be just an optimistic memory. As I grew up, during my free time and when the snow was not too deep, my green bike and I were seldom separated; it went regularly from the high school swimming pool to the cemetery and all other part of town I had a mind to go.

Making a list of elements:
I remember when was in grade school I was always most interested in science. I always felt that was where my future lay. My Uncle Mel who was a professor at the University of Utah encouraged me. He always found time to talk to me about my many questions. I was puzzled about how dinosaurs and cavemen fit in with the scriptural accounts of the creation. I wondered how the sun earth and planets were formed and how they would die or be changed. He spent a lot of time with me teaching me about the science and religious aspects of these questions. One of his statements as to he knew where we, as a civilization, were headed because he understood the backs of the books, referring to the scriptures, i.e., Revelation, the Doctrine and the Covenants (especially section 88 and beyond), and the Pearl of Great Price. This resonated with me and made me realize the answers to most of these import questions were to be found generally in these later parts of the scriptures.
K.H. Fridal a neighbor and one of my dad’s best friends also spent time discussing these things with me. He had a very scientific mind. I read the Birth and Death of the Sun by George Gamow. Dr. Gamow prosed the original theory as to how the Sun Works. Although his theory disagrees with the scriptural description of how the sun works, Gamow’s theory is still largely accepted by science today. I remember discussing this with K.H. and enjoying his insights. K.H. was in some ways like a second father to me. He included me in many oof tier family activities like hunting, water skiing, camping, rock hounding, snow skiing, and tripping in general. There were many of the activities that dad could not comfortably engage in because of his crippled foot. One of my sad thoughts of K.H. was that he came down with Alzheimer’s disease and later few people in the ward knew what a brilliant man he was before the terrible disease struck him.
Some where in my early learning I got introduced the elements. I knew the first with an atomic number of 1 was hydrogen and Uranium was number 92, but what were the 91 elements in between. I did not know and did not know how to find them. I made a table with 91 numbers in a note book and decided the dictionary was a good place to start my quest. So, I started to read the dictionary. Once in a while I would find a word that the dictionary said was an element and would give its atomic number and so I would enter it in my note book. This went on for a long time and I was getting a pretty good list. Until I was looking in a really big dictionary and came a crossed in the "E" section the word element and there was the was the whole list of all the elements.

Rock Collecting:
I don’t know exactly Where I developed my interest in rocks, but I must have been nine or ten when I started to collect rocks. I would walk the rail road tracks looking for interesting rocks. Maybe that is how it started in my walk I just accidently came a crossed some interesting rocks and started wondering just what they were and what minerals were in them.
I got to go to the mountains and found some interesting samples. When Uncle Mel found out I was interested in rock he gave me some wonderful crystals and some that were quite valuable. K.H. Fridal also help me in my connecting. I had samples of igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks, and lover to study about them and how they were formed. I researched which Universities had schools of mines and would write to them and begged for sample of interesting rocks. I got quite few specimens back in the mail. Every day I looked forward to the mail.
I could never figure out how to display them. First, I kept them in a waste basket but that didn’t work well. Then I glued them to cardboard with a description, but they were heavy and didn’t stick very well and the card board would buckle. I don’t know quite when I lost interest and lost my collection. I would love to have it today.

Tom Sawyer:
Mom spent a lot of time reading to us. She was a school teacher all the way through. She read us all five volumes of the Book of Mormon by Neilly, I have always known more about the Book of Mormon than any of my pears because of her. We also read the real Book of Mormon a couple of times together, but we skipped most of the Isaiah parts. She read a big book on Sacagawea to us, and may others. The books by Mark Twain were the one we got into the most.
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were our favorites and became our role models. Soon we had a Tom Sawyer club and we would act out the stories. We would play down on the Malad River and named the various places after places in the books. I remember we had a Jackson Island and several other places. We were quite close to the cemetery which was handy. I was Tom, Phillip Markham must have been Huckleberry, and Brent was Sid Sawyer. We even built a raft. The Malad River would flood every Spring, I think it still does, and the raft was great fun, although when our parents found out about it, they put an end to our river running adventures.
One day we decided our undertaking were not dangerous enough, because they all took place in the day light. To be realistic and have some real escapades, it had to be dark. So, we plotted to sneak out the window of our bed room at night. When the big night came Mom must have known something was up because we couldn’t wait to go to bed. We blew it. When it got dark, we quietly opened the window and went out. It was quite a drop. Phillip was outside waiting for us. Our first destination was the cemetery because we new that was where the grave robbers hung out. We even had a bag of garlic to protect us. Guess what, there was nothing going on at the cemetery. No grave robbers even. We went down to the river, nothing going on there either, but it was kind of creepy. I remember walking the rail road tracks behind our house, but it was boring.
We finally decided we had had enough; it was not as much fun as we thought it would be, so we headed for home. Then it got exciting. Mom was waiting or us with a switch. I can’t imagine she as really as mad as she acted, but she fooled us. She seemed pretty darn mad. After that she threatened to quite reading to us these adventure stories; it put to many ideas into our heads. I don’t think she stuck to it though.

Baseball & a Broken Window:
My Dad and Mother loved baseball and I grew up listening to the pro games on the radio.
In 1954 Dad bought a new Pontiac and we went back to Pontiac Michigan to pick it up. You use to have the option of paying for your car’s shipping or the dealership would give you the shipping money and you could go back and pick it up and drive it home yourself. Dad and Mom took the second option and the whole family went back on the train to Michigan to pick it up. We had a very nice trip. We got a very interesting ride in a little train around the factory and see the new Pontiacs being made. We went up into Canada to see how the Canadians lived. On the road we got to eat a lot of bologna and bread opened faced sandwiches. I still love those bologna and white bread sandwiches today minus any condiments. Well, what has this go to do with baseball?
On the trip we stopped in Cleveland, Ohio and got to see the Yankees play the Indians. Mickey Mantle hit two home runs. It was an experience I never forgot.
As a kid we played a lot of baseball in the vacant lot next to our house. The game would often last most of the day. We did not have a backstop, so we just used the cars going by. This sometimes resulted in irate motorists. I hit a few home runs, not because I was a good hitter but because we usually did not have enough fielders, and the lot was not very big so the bases by necessity were close together. We had a lot of fun playing, and it was a major activity during the summers.
One day I was bouncing the ball off our house and catching it. On one throw I missed the house and hit the big plate glass window. You can imagine the loud noise and the big hole made in the window. I was scared so I took off and want to the park. Later when I was call on the carpet and asked about the window, I lied and claimed to know nothing about it, but my falsehood did not work. Our neighbor a crossed the street saw me, and so confronted with the over whelming evidence, I had to fess up. As I remember it just resulted in a lecture on honesty which I took to heart.
When we moved to the farm when I was about 12 years-old we would play in the pasture. Dried cow pies made excellent bases, but with only my cousins, brothers, and me it was always a very short-handed game. But we still had fun.

Ropes:
One day, I must have been about 10, after school I was up at Phillip Markham’s house. I liked to go up there because Lynn, Phillip’s dad, took us on some trips I loved. He had an interest in some mines out west. I would have the time my life on these expeditions. I got a lot of chances to collect rocks. We learned to use carbide lamps. We would put them on our heads and go exploring back in the long, dark mine tunnels. I remember climbing on the rock cliffs. These trips were great adventures. Back to ropes.
In Phillip’s garage there was a humungous pile of heavy ropes, maybe an inch in diameter. I guess they were for the strapping of hay bales on trucks. Phillip’s dad said he didn’t need them any more and asked us to load them on a trailer then help him haul them to the dump. We pitched in and loaded the pile of ropes and rode on the trailer heading for the dump.
On our way we had to go right passed my house. As we went by, I got a brilliant idea. I asked Mr. Markham to stop and let us unload the ropes in our drive way. You can only imagine what my dad said when he came home to find to find this gigantic, unsightly rope pile blocking his drive way.
We were blessed as children with a back yard which had the five best climbing elm trees in the known world. Much of the time we lived up in these trees. We had even built a nice tree house in one of them. In actuality it was just a six by six-foot platform with a hand rail around it for safety. It was about 15 or 20 feet off the ground.
Before my dad made us haul the ropes the rest of the way to the dump, we hauled them to the back yard and started hanging them from the trees. We were quite ingenious about this and made bridges between the trees, ropes ladders, knotted swinging ropes, and trapeze swings. We could go from tree to tree by swinging or using the bridges without touching the ground. We were in a world only Tarzan, Bomba, Sheena, or a circus aerialist could appreciate. We were in jungle heaven having the time of our lives. We would practice and then put on circus shows for anyone who we could entice to come and watch. Apparently, we were not good enough, because none of us were ever drafted into the circus, but it was still great fun.

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