Dorothy Huston

Dorothy Jeanne McLaughlin was born 12 October 1927 to Olive Haney and William McLaughlin in Manson County Iowa. She was the 12th, and final child. She had 10 older sisters and one older brother. She was the last surviving of them all.

The great depression happened just a few years after her birth and continued until WW2 began.

She was in high school when the US entered WW2. The Army corps put out a plea for young women to train as Registered Nurses. All of her sisters had become schoolteachers, but she didn’t and decided she wanted to be a Nurse. It took some talking to get her father to allow her to join the training for the nursing program, but she prevailed. She graduated in 1945 as the war was in its final days. She married and that marriage ended in divorce, but not before she gave birth to her son, my brother David.

She met our father, Irvin Huston about the time that David was 2. He had 3 daughters; They married and for a while lived on the McLaughlin farm in Manson Iowa. There she had a daughter (Glenna). A few years later our father decided it was time to move to Alaska no less. The move to Alaska involved an army surplus truck, pulling a trailer house with 5 kids and one dog over Alaska/Canadian (Alcan) highway, which was a 1950-mile road of gravel in 1953. Shortly after moving to Alaska James Huston was born in 1955 and Mavis was born in 1957. They bought 80 acres of heavily treed land and worked to first clear the footprint of a simple house.

They built their home from discards from the White Alice site across the road, pulling nails from shipping cartons for wood needed and completing the home with stucco. The home had no indoor plumbing, no phone or tv. The heat was from a barrel stove off the kitchen. One of my earliest memories sitting by the barrel stove, with a kerosene lantern for light, with her reading to us; Keats, Shelly, Tennyson, Lord Byron and Rudyard Kipling. We developed a love of literature from these books she shared.

Later plumbing was installed, a well dug and connected, but before that she melted snow to fill our galvanized tub to keep us clean. Laundry was a day long battle for 7 people, with an old-fashioned wringer washer, and a clothesline. In Alaska there were 3 months of summer, and 9 months of winter. Our clothes were often frozen solid as we took them off the line.

Every year in Alaska she planted a quarter acre garden and canned vegetables for our food each year. She would take us salmon fishing during the salmon runs and we would all catch our limits (about 15 each at that time) least once a day. She processed all the catch into jars for winter. The credo she lived with was to use it up, wear it out make do, or do without. She would spend hours at her sewing machine making clothes to keep us kids decent. It set a good example for us and taught us what she knew. She made clothes from flour sacks, and quilts from scraps. In Alaska she was called upon at times to attend births. She was a community mid-wife of sorts. She assisted in the delivery of some of our closest friends.

On the farm, after the fields were plowed off trees there were acres of roots that had to be removed. This was done with a trailer behind a tractor and the manual labor of picking roots. We would spend most of the summer picking roots and weeding the garden.

She had become a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1963. Almost immediately she was thrown into the deep end of the pool and became a member of the Relief Society presidency This continued until the great Alaskan Good Friday earthquake in 1964, She had worked so hard to fill the shelves in our root cellar and the earthquake dumped it all into the center of the room in a 3 foot high pile of broken jars and canned food. After a Temple trip to Hawaii our father decided it was time to move again. This time to Hawaii. Mom found a job as a nurse of Kahuku Hospital in Kahuku, Oahu Hawaii. There she continued her nursing occupation and sometimes she rode shotgun in the ambulance to respond to accidents. She entertained us with stories of adventures in the hospital and with the ambulance crew. One fall when the sugar plantation was burning the sugar cane, her hospital was invaded by cane spiders the size of your hand, and covered in brown fur, they were scary looking, but harmless. They piled up under the outdoor bug zapper and continued to the end of the cane fires. By 1967 our father was tired of Hawaii and decided we needed to move again. Mother wanted to get more education and decided on the University of Washington. There she completed her bachelor’s degree and graduated in 1971. In 1972 we moved to Trinidad Colorado where Mom worked in the health department and did home visits for handicapped children. In 1974 we moved to Ogden Utah. After a few years there she specialized in helping handicapped children. She learned how to help their development and taught blind babies how to crawl.

Another move took them to Roosevelt where she worked for the UTE Indian Health Service teaching nutrition classes and helping households that were in need. She was later recruited to teach the LPN program in Roosevelt, and many Licensed practical nurses can credit her with their careers. In her 70s and after my father’s death she served a full-time proselyting mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for 18 months. She filled in for a health officer when needed on the mission.

My mother was a modern pioneer. She worked hard; she served wherever she was called. She was a poet, and some of her poetry was published. In grade school she was the class poet, and this continued into her nurses training and on her mission. My mother has blessed with 8 children, 31 grandchildren, 67 great grandchildren and 2 great, great grandchildren.

Memorial services will be held 2:00 pm Thursday, December 4, 2025 at Lindquist’s Bountiful Mortuary, 727 N. 400 E. where friends and family may visit from 12:30 – 1:30 pm prior to services.   Services will be live-streamed and may be viewed by scrolling to the bottom of Dorothy's obituary page.

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