One of our neighbors was Max and Vivian Larson. Their ranch was two ranches to the south of our ranch. They were in our ward. Around their ranch house, they had about fifteen spruce trees. The trees were planted along the fence line to form the yard for the house.
In the spring when I was 13 or 14, Max stopped Cade and me at church one Sunday and asked if he could hire us to trim his trees. We agreed to do the job. I think he said he would pay us $50 plus lunch.
Later that week, Cade and I drove our loader tractor to the Larsons to trim the trees. Max had a hedge trimmer and a couple of tree trimmers he gave us to use. Max (and his sons) had carefully pruned and trimmed the spruce trees for several years. He instructed us how to trim and prune the new growth on each tree.
Cade and I worked hard all day to trim the trees. We used our loader tractor, the Larson’s loader tractor, and a folding step ladder to reach the branches all the way to the top of the trees. We gathered the branches we trimmed off and piled them in the yard to dry for a later burning.
It took a couple of days to get all the trees trimmed. It was the first time that Cade and I had worked for someone else. We worked hard and took pride in a job well done.
Max invited us back to trim the trees for one or two additional years. Then, Mark (Max’s son) took over the ranch and the tree trimming.
A few Sundays after we trimmed the trees the second year, Leo Pendleton stopped Cade and me at church and said the Larsons had referred us to him for tree trimming. Leo asked if he could hire us to trim his trees.
Cade and I agreed. Leo told us he only had about 8 trees. Cade and I thought we could trim them in one day. We agreed to be paid about half of what Max had paid us. We called Max and asked if we could borrow his tree trimming tools. Max agreed to loan his tools to us. We drove the tractor to the Pendletons to trim the trees.
When we arrived, we discovered that the Pendletons had never trimmed their trees in the past. Leo gave us instructions to make the trees look like the Larson’s trees. On one side of the yard, the trees were getting tall enough to interfere with the power lines. So, Leo asked us to cut the tops off all the trees to make them the same height and to get them away from the power lines. Then, we were supposed to angle the sides of the trees to give them a triangular shape.
Well, well, well! The tree trimming task was much more than Cade and I had expected. We did not say anything about our ability to do (or not do) what Leo asked us to do. We just listened, nodded, and said we would do it.
We got the instructions and then went to work.
We cut between four and ten feet off the top of each tree. We eyeballed each tree and begin trimming branches. We molded each tree into a nice shape that tapered to the top of the trees where we cut the tops off. It was a lot more work than we expected. It was much harder than the work for Max because the trees had no shape. We should have charged more!
I think we got to Pendletons around 8:30 or 9:00 a.m. We worked all day and only finished around dusk. We had to drive the tractor home in the dark with no lights.
And that was how Cade and I learned about tree trimming. It is also the beginning and end of our tree trimming business.
Epilogue …
In March 2024, (Easter weekend), Tanner asked me what I knew about trimming trees because he is thinking about trimming some of the trees in his yard. I gave him a few tidbits of fatherly advice.
When he reads this, he will have the rest of the story!
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