The following is extracted from a letter written by Howard Shafer to Stephen Sweeten:
Here are two jokes Beth told me when I was much, much younger.
1. Girl goes into store to buy a sweater. This was the 1950s. Lana Turner, Kim Novak, Marilyn Monroe and other big breasted women were the stars. Girls wore pointy bras (although it was supposedly not nice to notice girl’s chests). This girl tries on a sweater, poses with it for the clerk, and asks, “Is it too tight enough?”
2. You, Beth says to me, are the kind of guy who takes a girl on a date, takes her to a restaurant, and then asks, “I’m just going to have a hamburger. What are you just going to have?”
Beth visited us several years in a row in California. She came to visit museums. We went to the de Young Museum in San Francisco and to the Quilt Museum in San Jose. We visited the redwoods. I enjoyed those visits.
Beth spent at least two springs (February to April) in Ordbend, California while my dad paid for his bees with sweat labor. She went to the same two room schoolhouse that I went to. Then in the summer, she spent July into October in Rainier, Alberta in a tent. In the fall she started school there, also in a two-room schoolhouse. Our drinking water came in a bucket from the CPR station, and our baths were taken in a close by irrigation ditch. We all helped Dad fill two-pound cardboard cans with honey to be shipped to a department store in Vancouver, British Columbia. Marian says the outhouse had no door. I don’t remember that.
Lloyd was very much in love with Beth. He graduated from BYU and returned to Malad and Holbrook, but she was still in school at BYU. (She worked her way through school. As far as I know she got no financial help from her parents.) Lloyd would drive from Malad to Provo, take her to a dance, and then drive back to Malad the same night. That is real love! I really liked Lloyd.
Lloyd’s accident occurred while he was pruning a pear tree in your front yard in Malad. Your parents had just bought this large, two-story house that had previously been a mortuary. It still had stacks of coffins in it when they bought it. It also had ramps to the doors for moving coffins in and out, which proved very useful when Lloyd was in a wheelchair.
Beth was my most beautiful sister. She was probably also the most artistic of us all as well.