Their Story
Ruby Mendenhall Wilkinson grew up in Franklin, Idaho, one of the six children of John and Rhoda Wilkinson who lived to adulthood. Across the valley in Richmond, Utah, Melvin Harold Albiston — always called Holly — was born the same year, 1905, one of the sons of Joseph Heber and Mary Alice Bright Albiston.
They were near neighbors in the small Latter-day Saint farming towns of Cache Valley, a wagon ride apart on either side of the Utah–Idaho line. The Franklin newspaper columns of the mid-1920s catch them courting: Ruby Wilkinson of Franklin turning up at a party “given at Harold Albiston's at Richmond,” and making Sunday visits to Richmond with her friends.
On Saturday, November 6, 1926, “two young ladies of Franklin were married last Saturday at Logan” — among them Ruby Wilkinson to Harold Albiston of Richmond. They settled in Richmond and raised three daughters: Jalaine, Helen, and Shirley.
By day Holly worked at the Sego Milk plant in Richmond for some thirty-three years; by night he was the projectionist at the town's movie theater, a post he held for thirty-seven. In the busy years they ran a picture most nights of the week — his son later ran the booth with him, and his daughter Jalaine, Jan's mother, worked there too, about every other night. By the time Jan was in high school it had wound back to Friday and Saturday shows; not long after, the theater closed, and Richmond has been without one since.
At his retirement they gave him a barometric clock he kept on a small wooden shelf. Once, when an earthquake shook the house, the first thing he did was rush to steady that clock — and his granddaughter Jan, who saw plainly how much it meant to him, later asked for it as the one thing she wanted from their estate. She keeps it still. He was Holly to everyone, and he meant it — he would not be called Grandpa; Ruby answered to either Ruby or Grandma.
Ruby died in 1982 and Holly in 1988, and both rest in Cache Valley among a large family of descendants.
