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Lillian Grace Fowles (Mrs. Victor E. Price (1909-1970)

 The Theodore Turley Family Book, p. 499-500

Lillian was born in Salt Lake City, Utah on July 14, 1909.  She was adopted by Sarah Fowles when she was two years old and spent the rest of her childhood in Fairview, Utah.  Lillian had an older sister who was at the same orphanage as she was.  She had been told to take care of her younger sister and she would not let Sarah take Lillian.  So Sarah gave her a dime and things were all right. 

One of Lillian’s favorite pleasures as a child was to go upstairs to the East room and play paper dolls.  She would have paper dolls strewn all over the room in their various houses.  Many times she would be chastised for waking Maurice, Tim’s oldest son, up from his nap by her walking around the room over where he slept.  She also loved to play dolls and would get into the trunk holding Lola’s baby clothes.  This was a real battle, but no one thought to make Lillian some doll clothes.  One day she found some baby mice and decided to take them to the Co-op store to show the clerks how cute they were.  She could not understand why the clerks began screaming and getting up on the counters, so Lillian let the mice loose in the store.  The story of that escapade reached home before she did.

Every birthday Lillian would have friends over and they would go swimming in the creek not far from the home.  What fun!  When Lillian was thirteen they moved to Salt Lake City and she continued to go to school there.  While she was in school, her mother would go to the temple and do genealogy research.  She graduated from LDS High School in 1927 and later that year began working at the telephone company as an operator, a position she held for nine years.

Lillian met Victor E. Price and they were married in the Salt Lake Temple on October 3, 1935.  They had four children: Ruth Joan, born December 6, 1936; Victor Robert, born May 20, 1946 (he died that same day); Steven, still born on March 12, 1948; and David Charles, born April 22, 1951.  He died June 12, 1951 at the age of seven weeks.  When her last son died, Lillian began taking welfare babies and in the next ten years she tended over 150 babies whose mothers were giving them up for adoption.  At times she had five babies all under two, in her home at the same time.  At one time she had an Eskimo family of three girls whose mother was in the hospital, at another she had a mongoloid girl and a little Negro boy.  Once she was asked to take a baby that was only a few hours old.  It had been born in the hall of the hospital and could not be placed in the nursery with the other babies.  She put in an application to get full custody to get two of the children but plans fell through so she stopped taking babies and began to work at the Holy Cross Hospital, a position she held for nearly five years.

All this time she kept up her hobby of oil and water color painting and also china painting and other ceramics.  She filled her home and that of her close friends and relatives with her handiwork.  She opened her own ceramic shop and gave lessons for two years.  She was called by the bishop to start the ward library at the Granite Fifth Ward and did so, taking with her always one and sometimes three, four, or five babies over to the library.  She also worked in the Mutual and Relief Society and was editor of the ward newspaper.