One hundred years Young
Leda Whitmore Young turned 100 on January 5. Monticello was her home from 1953 until 2001, when her husband Darroll passed away and she went to live with her oldest son and his wife in California.
She is the 9th of 11 children. Both of her parents died while she was young, leaving her an orphan.
Leda entered the nursing program at LDS Hospital that fall and graduated as a registered nurse. She was made a supervisor over the rural county nurses in Carbon, Emery, Grand, San Juan, Duchesne and Uintah counties.
On a trip to San Juan County, she stayed with the county nurse, Dorothy Bayles, who took her to a basketball game and introduced her to a red-head named Darroll Young. Thus began a 5 year courtship, mostly by letter. They were married in the Salt Lake Temple on November 22, 1938.
They worked in Salt Lake City, Browning, MT, White Earth, MN, Keams Canyon, AZ, and Mescalero, NM. After ten years, Darroll changed careers and he and Leda took the family to Monticello, where he joined his brother Clyn, who was building “shuttle buggies” for use in the uranium mines that were sprouting all over the Four Corners area.
Thus, Young’s Machine Company was born.
In 1953, Leda returned to nursing at the San Juan Hospital in Monticello. She became the supervisor and served for 3.5 years and was in charge of the nurses in 1961, when the hospital moved into its new building, on the site of the present hospital in Monticello.
She became Dr. Goon’s office nurse and surgical nurse, where she remained until retiring in 1975.
Leda and Darroll served twice as ordinance workers at the Manti Temple, years before the Monticello Temple was built three blocks from their home. They also spent 14 years in the Name Extraction program of the LDS Church.
After Darroll died in 2001, Leda went to Gilroy, CA to live with her son, Wayne and Louise Young. She moved to a residential care facility in 2008.
The homes of children, grandchildren and friends show off the afghans, quilts, needlepoint pictures and other handwork that Leda has done over the years. She has 13 grandchildren and 26 great-grandchildren.
She still reads the San Juan Record and keeps in contact with many close friends from Monticello.
Years of service as a nurse, raising her children on Indian reservations, and serving her church and her family are grand tributes to the resilience and determination of an orphaned teen-ager from Midvale, who dug her roots deep into the good earth of San Juan County.