The Great Norvak

A biography of Norvel Christenson as written to the best of her memory by his daughter Cindy. More stories to come from other of his children.

 

It was 69 years ago that the great Norvak, son of Minnie Neona (nie Christensen) and William Burr Christenson, was born. Actually, his name was Norvel, but his alter-ego, Norvak, would be entertained by 10s, if not 100s, of people the world over.

 

He was born at home in Heyburn, Idaho, in a home that bordered J.R. Simplot's potato processing plant and the Heyburn/Burley Highway. He was the baby of the family for a solid six years until a little sister, Norma, was born later. He was the eighth child.

 

Norvel's father was a mechanic and school bus driver. Neona was a homemaker who had her hands full, especially with Norvel.

 

Neona and Bill had one hard-and-fast rule: no breaking of the Sabbath. But Norvel and his brother Marvin and their friend, Wally Bradshaw, loved to fish. So they would wait until midnight following Sunday nights to go fishing.

 

Norvel grew up in the wilds of southern Idaho. He can remember when you could catch Salmon on the Snake River. His mother would constantly warn the children of the dangerous undercurrents of the Snake River. Like all good mothers of that generation, fear was the best instigator to get children to behave.

 

From the time he was a young boy, Norvel loved to sing. He had dreams of being a singer like Elvis Presley. He would sing to his 5th grade class at Heyburn Elementary School. 



 

Norvel at age 10 or 11.

 

Norvel is in the bottom center. From left to right, clockwise spiral: Larry, Loretta, Gladys, Darwin, Neona, Norvel, Willian, LaVaugn, and Marvin 

Norvel also loved cars. His first car was given to him at the age of 15. His siblings thought him spoiled. He loved his first car.

 

Norvel graduated from Minico High School in 1962 and served a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Eastern States Mission (Washington D.C. area) from 1963-1965. He would play football on the Washington Memorial lawn on P-Day.

 

When he returned home to Idaho, someone in his ward (I'm not clear on the story) advised him to go to college at BYU. He decided to go, and that's when he met Karen McEuen from Montebello, California.

 

Karen was Norvel's California Girl. They married on September 9, 1966, in the Los Angeles Temple. Norvel and Karen had their first child, Doug, while at BYU. They finished BYU with goals to be teachers.

 





Karen, Norvel, and little Doug outside the Abraham Smoot Building on BYU Campus

Their first teaching assignments were in Lewisville, Idaho, at a junior high. I'm not sure what Norvel taught. It was either P.E., science, or something. I know he also taught driver's education courses.

Karen taught science or English or something.

Their family grew. Amy and Brian were born in Lewisville. Soon Norvel was thinking he needed a better job to support his family.

The family moved back to Heyburn, where Norvel found a job selling fertilizer and working with his brother in a small sign business.

He was later offered a job by Don Ovitt of Don Ovitt Chevrolet to be a car dealer. Norvel loved being a car salesman. He was good at it, and he loved finding people a car.

He even won an all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii for selling the most cars in 1981 (or was it '82). The children were dispersed out to friends and family for the week, so Karen and Norvel could take their one-and-only no-kids trip.

Don Ovitt's sold the Chevrolet dealership, so Norvel decided to go into business on his own with a partner. They opened Tri-Auto Sales, that later moved to a big building on Overland Avenue in Burley. They renamed their dealership Overland Auto.

During this time, Norvel and Karen continued to have children. In total, they had 10 children: Doug, Amy, Brian, Kathy, Cindy, B.J., Mary, Hetty, Wayne, and Edward.

To help augment the family's finances, Norvel started a janitorial business. At first he hired local youth from church. His employees became family friends. Bill Route and Joel Anderson, two of his employees, would also babysit for the bulging-at-the-seams family.

As the children grew older, Norvel would bring them into the family business. He wanted a way to teach his children about work, much like working on his small family farm did for his upbringing.

Norvel was fond of using one-line sentences to raise his children.

• "Work builds character."
• "Like river rocks, be smoothed by adversity."
• "Always have something to look forward to."
• "I'll give you something to cry about."
• "There's always someone who has it worse than you."
• "The works not done until we're all done."

Norvel also enjoyed spending time with his children by taking them fishing every Memorial Day, or going swimming at the hot springs in Oakley, Idaho. On trips to anywhere, he'd stop at a gas station and let all the children choose one treat.

One the favorite stopping places was a Flying J gas station in Snowville, Utah, where the family would stop on their way to visit relatives in Utah County. One son, Wayne, assumed that every where they went there'd be Snowville, which started a family saying: All roads lead to Snowville.

Norvel loved BYU football, and when Karen's brother Fred generously offered the large family some tickets to a game, Norvel would excitedly load up the family and head to Provo.

One of the fondest memories all the children have of Norvel was his bedtime routine of singing, "Good Night Ladies." Norvel would tuck in the children and then sing the song, and then at the end, he would act like he was leaving the room and then run into the door, which would cause him to run into a wall, which would cause him to fall onto the bed. It was great slapstick that would have the kids rolling with laughter.

The lyrics to the song go like this:

"Goodnight ladies; farewell gentlemen,
So long everyone....I'm going to leave you now.
Whup, whup. whup, merrily we roll along, roll along, roll along,
Merrily we roll along, that's a good time, too.
Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight...Woah!"

It wasn't until the children were older and performing the act for their own children that they realized how physical and tiring that one-act show was.

Norvel also served faithfully in various callings in church. He believed in never working on Sunday, just as his parents taught him in his youth, so he kept his business closed on Sundays. He's not sure he ever received any financial blessings from that decision. His dealership wasn't the most successful. Mom would say that if he'd sold cars to people who could have afforded them he would have done much better.

Norvel never gave up on his singing. He and Mom were always a part of the ward choir. For one ward activity, Norvel donned his alter-ego, Norvak, and he and Mom entertained audiences with "The Great Norvak" routine.

His assistant, Mom, would hand Norvak an envelope that would have a punchline written very small in the corner. He'd say the punchline to the audience, and then open the envelope and read the joke. It was a routine borrowed from Johnny Carson. Dad never had great sight. Ever since he was a boy he suffered from being legally blind in one eye, so he couldn't always read the punchline in the small lettering. So when he couldn't read it, Mom would try to whisper it to him without the audience noticing. Audiences loved it.

The fear of having to work for Dad the rest of their lives put a fire in all the children to leave home and get college educations. All 10 of his children have college degrees.

Norvel retired from the car business, and he and Karen served a mission for the LDS church in Texas. Texas and Norvel went together like barbecue and beans. He even managed to find the home of his idol, Chuck Norris.

So much more can be written, and will be written, on this blog about our paterfamilias (only, we're of Danish descent and Mormon, so I guess we would call him our patriarch). Words can't express how much we love him. He wouldn't want that anyhow. He'd rather us show our love by doing the dishes, mowing the lawn, washing the windows, or some other act of service.

My Dad and one time I wrecked a car

There was a time when we, the Christensons, lived at my dad's place of business. I'm not exactly sure of all the details on why we had to live there, so that may be a story for someone else to write. We moved there when I was 8 years old. My dad sold used cars, and he had just built a very large new office/sales building on the lot, and we moved our residence into the empty offices. The details about the car lot are not important to this story. All that is important is that it was a car lot. So growing up from eight years old on, I was surrounded by cars.

My childhood chores revolved around taking care of cars. Sometimes I would have to go put keys in all the cars in the morning in case people wanted to come test drive them, or sometimes I would have to go get the keys in the evening. Sometimes I would have to put little plastic flags on the car antennas. Sometimes I would have to dust off the dash boards in the cars or clean the windows, and as I got older my responsibilities increased.

One thing I learned very fast was that I should NEVER scratch, dent, or scuff the cars. My sister, Hetty, and I got into very serious trouble when we smashed the windshield of what we thought to be an old useless clunker that was in the back of the lot. Apparently the car had been saved for its windshield or something. We also got in huge trouble for writing words in the dust on old cars because apparently that scratches the paint. Anyway, it was made very clear to us that the cars were very important, and if we caused any harm to befall the cars, then it would be returned to us ten fold.

Well once I had reached the very sound age of 12, my dad decided that I was old enough and responsible enough to begin driving the cars into the garage to wash them. It really shouldn't have been to hard. Driving really isn't all that complicated, so I surely would be able to do a simple thing like pull one into a garage, and back it out again later. But I was twelve, and the garage was full of immigrants my dad would hire, and they always spoke in Spanish, and were really intimidating to me. Every time I pulled into the garage with a car, I felt like the mechanics would stop what they were doing to watch me. I felt like they were waiting for me to make a complete fool of myself so they could have a good laugh, and joke about me in Spanish. It was always a nerve racking experience in my 12 year old mind.

One day I nervously pulled a car into the garage as per usual, and I felt like I had done a pretty good job driving the car in. I felt like I had been doing pretty good that day. I was pulling cars in and out of the garage like a pro. After I finished washing this particular car, I got inside and noticed through my rearview mirror that someone had the shop vacuum out near the garage door. I made a mental note to avoid the vacuum because that would be super embarrassing if I ran over the vacuum. I put the car in reverse, and turned the wheel to avoid the vacuum. I kept my eye on the vacuum because I sure wasn't going to hit it. I should've kept my eye on the other side of the garage entrance because before I knew it, I had swiped the side of the car into the garage entrance.

All of the mechanics stopped what they were doing, and looked over at a 12 year old boy hopping out of a car and panicing in sheer terror. When I saw the car jammed into the wall with a huge dent on the panel, I felt like my insides had melted. I knew my dad would be more than furious. I knew that this meant I would never have friends because I would be eternally grounded to my room, and I would be washing off cars for the rest of my life to pay for the damage I'd done. I couldn't even imagine how much money it would cost to repair the damage. There was no way to hide what I had done. I had to face my father.

I slowly walked into his office, and I began sobbing immediately. I can't remember what I said, but I remember that my dad didn't explode into an angry ball of rage. I can't remember what my dad said, but I remember that even though he was disappointed he forgave me. I think up until this point in my life, my dad had always responded to mistakes that I made with the quick and stern rebuke that we often give to children. I think this marked the point in which my dad started using the mistakes I made to teach me important lessons rather than just punish me and scold me for being a dingbat. To be sure, there were still plenty of dingbat moments after, but at this moment, my dad showed compassion and mercy when I needed it most. I don't know if he ever understood the trepidation, anxiety, and fear I had about being around his mechanics, but I think he understood how terrible I felt for damaging a car, and I think he saw that I had punished myself enough over it.

I can't imagine, looking back now, how stressful it must have been for my mom and dad while we were living at the car lot. I am amazed at how much patience, and forgiveness my dad had for me. To be sure, there were plenty of times my dad lost his patience, but at this moment he kept his cool, and it really meant a lot to me.

Our Family Blog...Now Write!

Today I received a phone call from a missionary companion of Uncle Fred's. He found my name through my blog, looked up my name in the phonebook, and found me, so I then helped him get a hold of Uncle Fred.

All because of my little blog.

The world is getting smaller and our family is getting bigger.

If we don't write this stuff down, people, we'll forget, and the stories will be lost.

Tragic!

Don't we want out grandkids to know that we loved each other, but also hated each other at times, like all good siblings in a family?

Don't we want our posterity to know about such infamous stories as:

• Dad and Mom doing the African Dance Ritual at a Lewisville Junior High pep rally and Mom losing her serong in the process.
• Doug being the leader of the Minico High School Marching Band when they threw down their instruments and played their kazoos?
• Amy wrecking her car while making-out with "Elder Smedley?"
• Brian breaking his bones falling into Cauldron Linn?
• Kathy wrecking the family car seconds before our annual fishing trip to Silver Creek, and Dad somehow blaming it on B.J.?
• Cindy ruining not one, not two, but three cars over the years from driving backwards while under the age.
• B.J. using the trampoline and the teeter-totter to launch himself over the tree and breaking his arm in a ZZ Top formation?
• Mary spending her senior year in Germany?
• Hetty taking care of the three-legged cat?
• Wayne giving the Convocation address at the Burley High School non-denominational high school graduation celebration?
• Edward living alone with Mom and Dad and the animals?

As discussed at the bi-annual family reunion, I have been commissioned to start our official family blog. I can't wait to hear your stories from your points of view.

And include pictures, like the following:

Competitors in the Spudman, July 2012

 

The grandkids, all 23 of them.

 

Kathy, Sadie, and Dad

The middle children: 5, 6, 7, 8, and Chrystel

Finding your first best friend in your cousin: Lehua and Kembrie.

Mom and Dad with all the kids.

Mom and Dad with the boys.

Brian in his Wildcats Spudman outfit.

Mom, Amanda, and Cindy prepare for the swim.

Doug goes shirtless before the swim.

Mom, Amanda, and Amy waiting nervously for their wave to start.

More to come...eventually.