Punching In Early, Punching Out Late

By Lyman Hafen

My uncle Eldon Hafen passed away recently at the age of ninety-six. I’ve known him all my life. In fact, one of my earliest memories is of him riding a horse around a corral in the backyard of his St. George home. My dad, Kelton Hafen, taught me to ride, but it was Uncle Eldon who taught me to work. They, along with another life-long mentor named Marv Jones, taught me what makes a story. And they are all at the center of some of the most important stories in my life.

Before I was born, Uncle Eldon started a business called OK Rubber Welders on the west end of what is now St. George Boulevard. Dad became a junior partner when I was just a baby.

They developed St. George’s go-to tire store. It’s where you went if you had a flat or needed a new set of tires or a front end alignment. You could get your worn-out tires recapped there as well. But what made the business legendary was how it became a social center for cowmen, farmers, building contractors, truck drivers, and just about everyone in town who worked at sweatinducing jobs for a living and needed good tires with air in them to do it. There were a couple of bars in St. George, but the place to gather for most of the town’s most productive men was around the pop machine at OK Rubber Welders, where you could swig an ice-cold Pepsi Cola and hear a good story.

Most of those stories were shared by my dad, Uncle Eldon, or Marv Jones. I sat awestruck at their feet as they delivered them flawlessly. The men in the circle listened intently and broke into laughter in spontaneous unison with every perfectly delivered line.

I went to work patching inner tubes at the tire shop when I was ten or eleven years old. By the time I was fourteen, I was a fullfledged tire repairman. I could balance a tire and true it, and I could squat and slap it back on the car or truck without ever touching my knees to the sizzling hot blacktop out back of the shop. I punched the clock for every hour I could accumulate between school and rodeo practice sessions out at the Posse Grounds arena.

When I was eight, Dad, Uncle Eldon, and their brother Herschel got their hands on enough funding to buy the ranch in Clover Valley, Nevada, where their mother was born. Dad began to work his way away from the tire shop to run the ranch, and Uncle Eldon remained on-site to manage the business. Because of the need for a steady wage to finance my rodeo dreams, I put in much more time at the tire shop during my high school years than I did at the ranch. As a result, I spent a lot more time with Uncle Eldon than I did with my dad.

The work ethic Uncle Eldon taught me can be traced directly back to Clover Valley. It was always “first things first” in Grandma’s family. Just like his grandfather Lamond Woods, Uncle Eldon generally put in a half day’s work before he got around to thinking about breakfast. Those Clover Valley ancestors survived from day to day because they worked from daylight to dark, and if they didn’t, they’d have nothing to eat, no roof over their heads, no financial cushion to purchase the things they really needed or from time to time, a few things they merely wanted.

Left to right: Lyman Hafen, Kelton Hafen, Marv Jones, and Eldon Hafen

Up until just a few years ago, Uncle Eldon was still putting in full days in Clover Valley: building fences, digging trenches on his backhoe, cleaning ditches with his shovel, turning water through the intricate network of canals and pipelines he’d engineered and built through the years to get extra water to the valley’s meadows.

As a boy, I was intimidated by Uncle Eldon’s ability to work circles around most people. At the tire shop, I wanted to emulate him. I had the feeling he expected me to work as hard as he did, but I couldn’t. I’d get tired. I’d get distracted. I prayed for the clock to move faster. I knew he was on to me. The last thing on earth I wanted to do was disappoint him, but it was almost impossible for me to live up to his standard.

As I grew older and my responsibilities increased, I began to find joy in being busy and pushing myself a little harder. Uncle Eldon seemed to sense this, and he began to treat me more like a man than a boy. That was a self-fulfilling prophecy. I could still go off the rails from time to time—and he never cut me any slack when I did—but I was mostly coming to a reckoning with the whole idea of work and how it could empower you if you embraced it. By the time I was a senior in high school, I was doing all the work and doing it on the same level as the men I worked with. I had become responsible to the point that on the morning after my high school graduation, a morning when I didn’t get home until 4:00 a.m., I was punching in at the tire shop at 7:55 a.m., not because I was forced to but because it’s what I figured my Uncle Eldon would have done when he was in high school and what my grandfathers on Clover Mountain would have done under similar circumstances.

I can look back now and understand how lucky I was to have Eldon Hafen as a mentor. I could never keep up with him, but I could never abide the thought of letting him down.

I learned a multitude of important things from my dad, but I’ve always felt blessed to have had an uncle placed in my path at just the right time to make such a difference in my life. I learned that working hard makes the rest of life that much more fun, and this was never illustrated more powerfully than those sessions around the pop machine when some of the best, finest, and hardest-working men in town cracked open a Pepsi, sat on the stacked tires, and listened to the stories that only my Uncle Eldon and my dad could tell.

About the Author

Lyman is the author of a dozen books intent on connecting landscape and story in the American Southwest. He is executive director of the Zion National Park Forever Project, and is past president of the national Public Lands Alliance. He’s been writing and publishing for more than 35 years, with several hundred magazine articles in publications ranging from Western Horseman to Northern Lights, and was the founding editor of St. George Magazine in 1983. He’s been recognized on several occasions with literary awards from the Utah Arts Council, and won the Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. He lives in Santa Clara, Utah, with his wife Debbie, and together they have 6 children and 18 grandchildren.