Notes on Our Grandfathers, Continued

I have located the photocopied autobiography I mentioned of Gustave H Backman, and feel some notes are pertinent to our need just now:

"Referring to Bishop Pollard I here say I first met Bishop Pollard when I was about 15. I was working at the Utah Central [railroad] shops. He had been a sailor, in fact a ship's carpenter; the ropes used in the railroad between the engine and the tender were spliced or braided at the ends, sailor fashion, and upon several occasions while doing that work he requested that I (Backman, the tinker's boy) be permitted to help him. This work taking several days gave me a good chance to get well acquainted with him. He could and would talk most of the time while at work. His stories were mostly of the sea and the scenes he had viewed and the people he had met. He could only remember the good, the beautiful, and the noble and dwelt on those. I was so impressed with his splendid character, his love for the good, his great charity and particularly his sympathy and interest in the young, that I loved him for these. I ascribe much of my happiness to the fact that my children are his descendants, inheriting many of his sturdy splendid qualities. I then first met my wife, she was a little girl about twelve who brought his lunch (dinner we called it). She was bashful and no thought occurred to us that our lives would be lived together."

Gustave Backman became Bishop Pollard's son-in-law about four months after his death February 1890 when he and Grace Bailey Pollard were married in the Logan Temple June 25, 1890.

"...I had purchased a lot on Jeremy Street, intending to build next to my brother William. Bishop Pollard however wanted me to build on his lot next to the old home on Sixth West Street. He suggested that I sell my lot and buy his... we built a beautiful little home. It first consisted of three rooms, bath and summer kitchen. We afterwards built on two more [rooms] in the rear and two in the attic placing a pretty winding stair in the front hall. We became very comfortable there and there our six eldest children were born."

John Lewis Johnson. Born 18 June 1863 in Oslo, Christiana amt, Norway to Johan Julius Johansson and Inger Kirstine Thoresdotter. Legacy of Sacrifice tells us that because his parents had joined the LDS church his birth was not recorded, the official record then being the Lutheran parish records. John immigrated to the United States with his mother and two of his sisters in May 1866. A member of the 15th Ward, he served in the bishopric for about 16 years, as president of the quorum of the Seventy and as Sunday School superintendent. He accepted a mission call to Norway 1892-1894, even while having been married to Alice Pollard in February 1888.
A blacksmith by trade he was employed in the yards of the Davis Howe company when a cable broke and he was struck by a derrick which crushed his upper body, from which injuries he died as he was delivered to the hospital.