Norman John Harker was born on June 15, 1948, at the Idaho Falls Hospital. The family lived in Lewisville, a small agricultural community about ten miles north of Idaho Falls, but the hospital was the place to be born.
The house Norman grew up in first was a one-level white house — two rooms on the main floor and no indoor toilet. The outhouse sat about fifty feet from the back door, and on cold nights Norman would carry out some newspaper, light it, and throw it down the hole: two purposes at once, a little heat and a lot less smell. The house had an indoor shower and hot water, and a coal-oil heater in the living room. Norman and Van slept on a hide-a-bed in that same living room; their parents had the one bedroom.
When Norman was in third grade, his father Ivan did something remarkable: he had the whole house picked up and moved across the canal to a new foundation he had already laid. Norman came home from school one afternoon and the house was simply gone from its lot. Ivan’s new foundation was large enough for the original house plus an added bedroom and kitchen, and it had a full basement. The basement became Ivan’s domain — he built a darkroom for photography, installed a wall of tropical fish tanks, and put in two bedrooms so both boys finally had their own rooms. There was also a food-storage room that doubled as a bomb shelter, which seemed sensible in the Cold War years.
Before that move, when Norman was in first grade, Ivan bought an 80-acre farm in Little Valley, between Vale and Harper in eastern Oregon, and the family spent two years there. The farm had cows, alfalfa, and some corn. Ivan worked it with a single tractor and a mowing machine. The nearest school was in Harper, ten miles away — Norman and Van rode the bus. Norman remembers a pond out back where the boys went swimming and came out with leeches on their legs. When the farm stopped paying, Ivan sold up and moved the family back to the Lewisville house they had kept.
Gayl worked nights at the Idaho Falls LDS Hospital — 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., five nights a week. She was almost always asleep when Norman got home from school. Ivan, after the Little Valley years, went to work at the Atomic Energy Site (now the Idaho National Laboratory) out in the desert west of Idaho Falls. The family drove into Idaho Falls or over to Rigby for groceries; there was a Tolman Mercantile in Lewisville that sold some of everything, but the serious shopping happened in town.
Norman describes himself as not particularly motivated in school — “mediocre” grades, no serious trouble. His closest friend was David Carter. Van, three years older, liked high school enough to stay an extra semester.
The Lewisville chapter ended in 1960 when Norman was twelve. Ivan and Gayl divorced, and Gayl moved the boys to Idaho Falls.