Burning Barn - 1974

This is a story that my dad told me recently on the phone that I hadn't heard before, so I wanted to share it in case anyone else would be interested in the story. This was about 1974, which means that dad and mom were still married, Randy would have been about 3 and Diana would have been 1.

The family was living in a little house in Meridian on Ten Mile road. This was the first house that mom lived in, in Idaho and the house that they brought baby Diana home to. The house had a little land with it and in the back was a small livestock barn. Mom and dad had bought some calves and one of Aunt Barbara Ann's kids had caught a pig at the fair, but didn't have any place to raise it, so that was in the barn too. They had bred the pig and she was pregnant.

One day, dad was burning some weeds in the back and after he had finished, he went to work (his second job). He had a night job of cleaning the floors at a grocery store. What he didn't know is that there were some boards nearby that were still smoldering from the fire and unfortunately they caught on fire and were near enough to the barn to catch it on fire as well.

In the middle of the night, someone noticed and started beating on the front door of the house telling mom that the barn was on fire. Mom called dad at work and he put away the floor buffer and came home, but by the time he got there it was too late. The pig had started giving birth that night in barn, but just before she had the last piglet, she broke out and had the last one outside the fire. All of the calves and all but one of the baby pigs died in the fire. The mother pig was so traumatized that she wouldn't feed the one baby that survived and mom tried to bottle feed it, but to no avail, the final baby pig died.

Unfortunately since dad left work before his shift was done, he was fired from that job. Also when the landlord found out about the barn burning, he evicted the family. They ended up having the mother pig butchered because they had no place to keep her. After that they moved into the first 14' wide trailer they lived in, which was actually a much nicer house than the old one.

Here is a picture (taken in 2012) of the house. When they lived there, there was open fields surrounding the house with only one house to the north and now it is almost exclusively housing developments. There were out building that they used for storage and a chicken coop that are still there, but the garage and barn are gone now.