Janet Gardner and George Evan Stoddard
From NeilDocs
Janet Gardner and George Evan Stoddard were married July 25, 1969, in the Manti Utah Temple, thus beginning our family and our family history, though of course in reality our history and the history of our family stretches both backward from and forward to the eternities. It was with this eternal perspective in our minds and hearts that we pledged our love and commitment to each other in that beautiful and sacred spot.
After lunch with family and friends at a restaurant at the mouth of Spanish Fork canyon, we returned to the apartment at King Henry Apartments in Provo, where Evan had been staying with his family since the beginning of summer. That evening we enjoyed visiting with more family and friends at a reception at Bishop Revell and Sister LaRue Phillips' back yard on the Provo bench. As the evening wore on Evan's Aunt Ruth whispered to Evan that it was time to take Janet away. (She looked tired. We had been up since very early to get to the temple in time.)
We spent our honeymoon in southern Utah. We attended the Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City and the temple in St. George. We spent the rest of the summer in Provo (King Henry with Evan's sister Jean, and then in Evan's old apartment), where Evan was teaching part-time at the Language Training Mission and continuing work on his master's degree in sociology at BYU. At the end of the summer we stayed for a week or two with Grandma Ethel Lowe and Aunt Adeline Jensen at 121 "T" Street in Salt Lake City, then moved to Ephraim, where we lived for the next school year.
We both taught the first semester at Snow College, Evan as the sole sociology and Spanish faculty member, Janet in the English Department. Janet was pregnant and taught only the first semester. Our first child, George Eric Stoddard, was born May 31, 1970. At the end of school we moved back to King Henry with Evan's parents for the summer. There, Evan completed his master's thesis and degree.
Serendipitously, a position opened up in BYU's Sociology Department, and Evan took a one-year position. We rented a home on the west side of Provo. During that year Evan determined to go back to school. He was interested in city planning, but decided to apply to Ph.D. programs, as well as terminal master's degrees. He received offers from Cornell and the University of Pittsburgh. From early on we had the impression that we would and should go to Pittsburgh. When the offer there turned out to be the best we made the decision to go. Evan's parents, who had been in Provo again for the summer, offered to take Eric home with them on the plane. We drove across country in our old black and white '59 Mercedes-Benz sedan, packed with the few things we could take with us.
In Pittsburgh we first stayed in Mike and Kathy Larson's apartment on South Braddock Avenue (near where we were mugged the first day we arrived!). The day after arriving in Pittsburgh Janet took the train to New York to get Eric. Meanwhile Evan went hunting for housing. One evening before going to sleep he lay reading counsel from Pres. Joseph F. Smith, which was the course of study in the priesthood quorums that year. Pres. Smith spoke of the importance of owning a home and of putting down roots in a community. Evan felt to follow this counsel. Together, we decided to look at houses. Before Janet had returned Evan made a trip to the South Side and found the house at 192 South 17th Street. When she returned from New York, Janet agreed, though with some misgivings. The neighborhood was far more urban than anything she was used to.
We could not move into the house for some weeks. In the meantime we lived for a couple of weeks with Bob and Elaine Booth in Stanton Heights, then with Bob and Herta Crawford in Squirrel Hill. When we finally moved into our new house we had very little with us. But over the subsequent years, stretching now, as of this writing, to over 35, we have made 192 South 17th Street our home.
In Pittsburgh Janet bore our five additional children, Christiana Marie Stoddard (October 13, 1973), Mary Ann Stoddard (February 9, 1976), Neil Gardner Stoddard (May 5, 1979), Mark Bevan Stoddard (April 27, 1982), and Amy Ruth Stoddard (January 10, 1984).
