I was born in Lodi, California, December 4, 1937, into a Seventh-day Adventist, Christian family, the second daughter of Milton and Myrthful Mundall. I was three years old the day we arrived in Phoenix, Arizona, to live on Grandpa and Grandma Mundall’s farm. I remember being so excited that day. I loved the freedom of country living and would often cross over the pasture between our house and Grandma’s to visit her. Grandpa had a dairy farm, and it was always fascinating to watch the cows being milked and the milk being poured over a cooler where it ran down the washboard-like surface into big milk cans. Often the milk would freeze near the edges as it was being cooled, and I would pick off the raw frozen milk and eat it. It was so refreshing on a hot summer day.
Dad and Mother were good Seventh-day Adventists. Every morning before going to school we would have a Scripture reading and prayer. Often the reading would be from the Adventist morning devotional book. In the evening we always had family worship-a time of reading the Sabbath school lesson and having prayer where each one of us would pray: first Daddy, then Mother, than each of us girls in age order.
Carolyn at 10 months
I loved going to Sabbath School and church. My kindergarten teacher knew how to make the Bible stories come alive. Six children sat on benches around a sand table and watched as our teacher illustrated the story in the sand using paper figures and live shrubbery. I was thrilled and inspired as she told us the Bible stories. I still remember one of the songs we sang about how Jesus loved the children when He was on earth. The last phrase of the song said, “And that I might have seen the kind look when He said, ‘Let the little ones come unto Me.'” Together with my parents this teacher sparked a love for Jesus in me that would never go away.
I must have been about five or six years old when one day Mother asked my older sister Jeanine and me to walk to Mrs. Hawkins’ house to borrow some eggs. Mrs. Hawkins was an older lady and was always very kind to us when we met her at church. We loved her in return. I am not sure why Mother wanted to borrow eggs from her; we had all the eggs we could use from Grandpa’s farm. I think she just wanted us out of the house for a while. It was about a mile to the Hawkins’ house and would take us a good hour for the round trip as we didn’t walk fast. When we were getting very close to the Hawkins’ we saw a rather strange looking dog in the path right where we were walking. It had thick saliva running out of its mouth and looked very sick. We walked by this dog without incident, but wondered why anyone would let their dog get in such a terrible condition. I remember Jeanine telling me to be careful as we got close to the dog. How ever, it didn’t even appear to see us.
Edie, Jeanine, a friend, and Carolyn about the age when we walked to Mrs. Hawkins’ home.
Mrs. Hawkins greeted us, and we chatted a few minutes while she was getting the eggs. She phoned Mother to say we had arrived and would be starting home very soon. She handed Jeanine a brown paper bag with six brown eggs in it. We thanked her and started home. On the way home we just enjoyed the walk, not rushing or worrying about time or any thing else. As we were getting close to home we saw Mother at the end of our driveway looking for us. She was happy to see us, but we wondered why she appeared worried and why she was out at the street looking for us. She told us that the county dog pound official was out looking for a dog that had rabies, and the officer had just knocked at our door asking Mother if she had seen the dog. We then told her about the dog we had seen. We went into the house and the three of us knelt on the kitchen floor thanking Jesus for His protection over us.
I was nearly eight when I started school, and I completed the first and second grade in one year. So when I was nine, I was in the third grade. That was a very special year for me. One of the Bible verses I memorized that year was 1 John 1:9. “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” The belief in the promise of that verse has remained with me all of my life, and it became very special to me while in high school.
One day as I was out in the pasture between our house and Grandpa ‘s, I felt so close to Jesus. I wanted to be His special child. I wanted to go home to heaven with Him. I wanted to live with Him forever. I invited Jesus into my heart and felt He was right there with me. I sensed a special presence and joy. Now, I also believed that in order to be able to go to heaven with Jesus, I must work very hard at being just as good as I could be.
I soon attended a baptismal class at church where I was the only child in the class with adults-and the only one at the end of the session as everyone else had dropped out. On a Sabbath morning I was baptized. I now thought because I had taken this step I would be perfect.
Our church had about twelve steps up to the sanctuary, and on each side there was a wall with a banister about a foot wide. Children loved to use this cement banister as a slide, even though we had been told not to. After church I went down this “slide”, and my sister Jeanine was at the bottom. I felt she was waiting for me. She scolded me and we got into a little sibling squabble. I was devastated. Did not baptism make me perfect? Why did I still want to fight with my sister? I was so disappointed. Could I not be perfect if I really tried? I guessed I would have to try harder. That night I told her I was sorry. I learned to pray a prayer that I prayed almost daily after that, asking Jesus to forgive my sins and to help me be more like Him. Would I not surely someday be able to say I was perfect like Him if l really tried hard and prayed a lot?
I was in the third grade when I was baptized, the year that I met Dale Ratzlaff. His dad and my dad had gotten together that Saturday night to discuss plans for an expedition to find Noah’s ark. Of course the adventure never materialized, but that surprise visit was a delightful treat for me. A Saturday night tradition at our house was to have popcorn and apples, and that winter evening was no exception. Popcorn and apples appeared to please Dale’s likes better than playing “church” with blocks and giggling girls!
Mother taught me how to sew my own clothes, and at nine years of age I made my first dress. Mother saved it and gave it to me before she died, and I am amazed at the detail involved. There is a set-in waistband, buttons all the way down the front with hand-made buttonholes (I remember Mother help ing with these), set-in lace at the neck and sleeves, and set-in side pockets. From that age on I would be sewing many of my own clothes.
My uncle Lester Mundall was Grandpa’s farm manager, and when I was in the sixth or seventh grade I asked him to teach me how to drive the tractor. He did and I was so delighted when he said I could clean the cow corral and pile up the manure!
I drove the tractor with the box scraper on the back around the corral scraping up the manure. When the box was full, I would drive up over a hill of manure already there and lift the lever to dump the load. The cows were still in the corral, and I remember them looking at me as if I were some strange creature. I was having so much fun the repulsive, putrid, disgusting smell of fresh manure was offset by the joy I was having in this new experience!
The summer I was ten years old, Jeanine and I worked for Dad in his Texaco service station that was connected to his auto repair and body shop. She would work one day, and then I would work the next day. Our jobs were to pump gas, wash the car windows, and keep the station, office and restroom clean. Jeanine already had a bike, and she would ride to the bank to make the deposits. When I had earned enough money I bought a bike, and then the task of taking the deposit of several hundred dollars to the bank about a mile away was added to my list of duties. I also earned enough to go to summer camp in Prescott.
On the days I was not helping at Dad’s station, I would ride my bike to the public swimming pool. I would swim until lunchtime, get my hand stamped so I could return, and then I rode home for lunch. After lunch I would ride back for more swimming in the afternoon. Often our entire family would go back to the pool for the evening.
I loved that heavy, maroon-colored bike, and it would take me many miles. One spring day our cousins, who lived about four houses from us, some friends, and we sisters decided to ride our bikes the six miles to school. We loved this experience so much we repeated it for several days. We rode along the Phoenix canal bank and the back roads to the Adventist school, Arizona Academy Elementary. Spring in Phoenix was always so beautiful, and I enjoyed the fragrances of the blooming flowers that perfumed the air as we pumped our way to school. Later, in the eighth grade on a cold, windy day, I rode 50 miles on that bike with a group of friends. My younger sister Edie, who was in the fifth grade, and I were the only ones to finish the trip.
One summer I worked all season building an adobe mud house with walls that were about two inches high. Then I molded adobe furniture to fill two bedrooms, a bath, kitchen, and living room. Each room was completely furnished. I spent many hours on this project that kept me engaged during the hours I was not swimming, helping at Dad’s station, or helping mother with all the chores of our growing family.
As I sat in class on the first day of school, I could see a huge thunderstorm begin to gather. It soon started pouring and flooded the school playground. I knew when the rain started that it would be the end of my adobe house. When I came home I stood a few minutes looking in sadness at the pile of mud feeling disappointed, but not devastated. I learned two things that day. The first was that if I were going to build something I wanted to last, I knew it must have a firm foundation. I thought that if I ever did this again I would put it on a board so I could move it to a safe place in time of a storm. The second thing was to not let disappointments or circumstances take joy from my life.
When I was in the sixth and seventh grades, on Sabbath afternoons Dad would take some of my girlfriends and me to pass out literature to non Seventh-day Adventist homes. I remember one family that we loved to visit. Dad would wait in the car as my girl friend Shirleen Wagner, another girl, and I would visit this home. The husband was deaf and every time we visited we prayed with the wife for God to restore her husband’s hearing. The wife appeared grateful, but to my knowledge, God never answered this prayer. The lady, however, acted like she appreciated the literature we gave her.
Once a month Dad and I, and sometimes our entire family, would go to Fort McDowell Indian Reservation where there was a small SDA church. A handful of Indians attended services when someone would come to speak to them. I cherished going there with Dad on Sabbath morning. He had recently taken me out to the newly paved, but still unopened, Black Canyon Highway, now I-17, and taught me to drive. I was only thirteen years old and learned to drive a car with a stick-shift transmission. Dad would let me drive on the dirt road through the desert to Fort McDowell. When we arrived at the church I would play the two-peddle pump organ for the singing, and Dad would give the sermon. When our entire family went Mother took prepared food for everyone, and we would eat in the home of Nellie Quail, a sweet SDA Indian lady whom everyone loved and who lived across the street from the little church. Her home was very primitive with a dirt floor and no running water or electricity.
The summer between my sixth and seventh grades, my parents bought a little house trailer, and we traveled from Phoenix to New York and back again. Some of the places we visited were Yellowstone, the big zoo in Oklahoma City, Niagara Falls, the Michigan SDA campmeeting, Canada, back down through Texas, Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, and down into Mexico. Dad’s brother Lester and his family also had a trailer, and we traveled together. I will always remember this “trailer house trip” as a highlight of my childhood.
In Michigan Uncle Lester bought two new pickups he was going to drive home and sell. Aunt Lorene drove one and my cousin Stanley drove the other one. Uncle Lester drove the car with the trailer, and I rode with him. When we went through Texas he was remarking how awful the watermelon patches looked. We stopped for gas at a station, and he asked the lady if she knew what was wrong with the watermelons. Her heavy, Texas drawl reply was, “Either they have too much of somethin’ they don’t need or not enough of somethin’ they do need.” Uncle Lester was a successful, commercial water melon grower and he and I laughed about this all the way home and nearly every time after that when I would visit him. He would repeat these words, mimicking the Texas drawl of the service station woman. These words became the “solution” to any gardening problem we had.
Three more sisters were born into our family. Now there were five of us in this order: Jeanine, Carolyn, Edie, Millie, and Marie who was born two weeks after arriving home from our “trailer house trip”. After my seventh grade, our family moved north from Phoenix to Cornville, Arizona. Dad and Mother had purchased an eighty-acre ranch bordered on three sides by the beautiful Oak Creek. There was a nearly new, three bedroom house with a full basement. We were all so excited. There was so much room. Jeanine and I would not have to sleep on the back, screened-in porch in the cold any longer!
That year I was in the eight grade in a one-room school house with eleven students. Janice Thacker and I were the only ones in the eighth grade. There was no time now for after-school or summer play. Each day after school and on Sundays I helped Dad clear the land for planting an orchard, garden, and watermelons. I liked working outside driving the pickup, loading the many rocks he plowed out, and dumping them in an ever-growing rock pile. The land at one time had Indians living on it, and we found many little pieces of pottery, some arrow heads and several grinding stones.
On Sabbath afternoons Dad and I would go to Camp Verde, a small town about 20 miles from home, to conduct a branch Sabbath School. I enjoyed teaching Bible stories to the five or six children who attended while Dad taught the eight to ten adults. One week the Sabbath School lesson was on Jesus turning water into wine. Mother had four tiny pitchers that were about three inches tall. I put red food coloring into the pitchers at home. I had a larger pitcher I filled with water and let the children fill the small ones. When we poured the water out of the small pitchers at the appropriate time in the story, of course it was red. The children were amazed! This was my first experience teaching children’s Sabbath School, but it certainly would not be my last.
One of the highlights of that year was an experience that happened on New Year’s Eve. Mom and Dad had invited the entire church of about ten families to our home for a party. However, it had been raining for several days and Oak Creek was flooding. Even though we were several hundred yards from the creek, and up on a higher level, the water was almost up to the house. The neighbors reported to us that the bridge to town was being closed. The electricity was off so we had no lights, and we had no phone to give word to the church people not to come. We were so sure no one would come that we had not cleaned the house, and Mother had not prepared any refreshments. We had just spent the day trying to keep warm around the kitchen wood stove and watching the creek as it was rising. How ever, those town people were not as concerned as we were, and at the appointed time everyone arrived at our dark house.
That evening turned out to be so much fun. All the kids went to the basement where there was a family room, and with flashlights and candlelight played games. Mother always could find something to serve when unexpected company arrived, and this evening was no exception. She began mixing up gingerbread that she baked in the wood stove oven, and then served it with fresh whipped cream from the milk of our cow. That gingerbread tasted so good, and everyone had such a good time.
The farming was not as successful as Dad had expected, and at the end of the summer we moved from Cornville to Oakdale, California, where Dad became farm and dairy manager for one of his brothers, Dr. Raymond Mundall.
My Cup Overflows. Copyright © 2009 by Carolyn Ratzlaff. All Scripture quotations—except where otherwise noted—are from The New American Standard Bible, © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1975, 1979, 1994 by the Lockman Foundation, used by permission. All rights reserved. Life Assurance Ministries, Inc.
Carolyn has always been a positive person enjoying life and outdoor activities such as hiking and gardening, and she and her husband currently raise a good portion of their own food in small grow boxes. She also reads many health journals and is often surprised at the contrast between what was taught through the writings of Ellen White on forbidden items of diet and health, and the beneficial evidence of these same items which is supported by a plethora of scientific studies.
She and her husband Dale Ratzlaff have two married sons and four grandchildren.
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