LEAMINGTON, Millard County — One snowy morning shortly after he quit teaching and coaching at Delta High School, Ladd Holman drove his truck south of Leamington to feed some of his cattle. He kicked the hay off the flatbed and thought about the change in his life.
He had worked 20 years at the school, but now he was staying home in Leamington, focusing on farming and ranching. He thought about what school would be like at that time of day, about 10 a.m. It would be noisy. Students would be rushing through the halls.
"I shut the truck off and the cows were eating hay in the snow there, and I could hear their jaws munching," he remembered. "It's that quiet."
This, Holman thought, was what the Celestial Kingdom must be like.
Welcome to Leamington (pronounced Lemington), where life is peaceful and small-town traditions thrive.
Situated halfway between Nephi and Delta on U-132, Leamington for many drivers is a blur of greenery and a now-closed general store, a defunct Phillips 66 gas station, a large cream-colored town hall and a series of houses — one or two abandoned, fading and leaning, but more neat homes behind stately elms. Then travelers pass the post office, which looks about the size of a workplace cubicle, and they're out of town.
There's a lot more to Leamington than that, say residents. There's tradition, a glue that binds friends and families together.
Take Leamorado Day, said Leslie Rasch, wife of the mayor, Jim Rasch. When World War II ended, "They threw a big party, a big celebration for the soldiers coming home."
Folks liked the celebration so much they continued doing it every year on Labor Day. On Monday, Leamington will hold its 60th Leamorado — a town dinner, rodeo, games and talent show.
Military personnel will be honored, including the four service people from Leamington now in Iraq. Also celebrated will be a special guest who isn't with the military but has lived here a long time.
The rodeo grounds are behind the town hall, which is nearly 100 years old.
"There's a bunch of shade trees, and we have the dinner right behind the town hall," Leslie Rasch said. "It's a lot of work for the town. It's probably our biggest fund-raiser, to help run our little town."
Leamorado is such an important tradition that everyone gets an assignment to do something for it or to bring something for the day's events.
She also remarked on the quiet. A train comes through at night delivering coal to the nearby Intermountain Power Plant, but other than that, Leamington nights usually are calm.
"At night you can hear the coyotes," she said. "The stars are beautiful," brighter than in cities because of the lack of light pollution.
Teachers who commute to Delta, professional people and farmers are among the approximately 212 people who live there.
Residents travel to Cedar City for the annual Shakespeare Festival and Park City for the arts festival there.
"Just 'cause we live out in nowhere, we're not hicks," Leslie Rasch said.
Even something as simple as children boarding a school bus can be a lesson in small-town honesty.
"I think there's a little less crime potential," she said. "I'm not saying it's perfect here, because it's not."
One thing that shocked her when the Rasch family moved here 15 years ago from Lake Charles, La. (present population close to 200,000), was a lack of concern about theft.
Every school day, Leamington's children board the bus to Delta, 21 miles away.
"The kids would catch the bus," she said, "and they would leave all their bikes at the corner."
When they return from school, they just get off the bus, hop on their bikes and pedal home.
According to Eva Neilsen, who runs the post office, the town's biggest problem may be people racing along U-132 and failing to obey the lower speed limits in town.
The post office is open six days a week, 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. Customers aren't in the building every minute, she said, "but every once in a while we have a line."
It's a place where kids go trick-or-treating at every house "and you don't have to check your candy for poison," she said. "You don't have to throw out that homemade doughnut, because everybody knows who made it."
In fact, Leamington holds a Halloween dinner every year so the kids will get something nutritious in their stomachs before they set out on their rounds, she said.
During the summer, the children play a lot of outdoor games, catch and raise tadpoles, help with the family farm and swim in the river, Neilsen said.
"One thing that I find interesting is our kids are really active in the school, even though we live so far away," she said.
That brings up a disadvantage to living here. Residents must drive to Delta for some shopping, or the 70 miles to Provo for bigger projects. But they can visit a convenience store and gas their vehicles at Lynndyl, only five miles away.
Leamington's boom time came when the huge Intermountain Power Plant was built at Lynndyl, from the early to the mid-1980s. Jim Rasch originally worked at the plant when he arrived in 1983, then switched to the Ash Grove cement plant east of Leamington.
"Mainly, everybody farms in this little area, but everybody has a second job," he said.
They may work at the Delta school, the cement plant, IPP or the Brush Wellman beryllium processing plant near Delta.
A couple of decades ago, Leamington had a greater proportion of young families because of the influx of workers to IPP. Today, said Holman, "Most of the kids are raised . . .
"They've grown up and graduated from high school and gone out in life." Few of them can stay because there aren't many job openings. Their parents still work at the IPP or the cement plant, so those jobs aren't available.
But some of the younger people are able to find jobs nearby.
Cody, 26-year-old son of Jim and Leslie Rasch, works at the power plant. He also collects and fixes up antique cars, including two Chevys, a Ford and an Oldsmobile, all from the 1950s. One of the vehicles is parked picturesquely in front of the Phillips 66 station.
Still, Leamington is a great place for a young family.
"Everybody kind of looks out for everybody else," Jim Rasch said. "This is one town where all the parents and the mothers watch out for the other kids."
A large part of the social life revolves around The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The ward serves Leamington, Lynndyl and the nearby community of Fool Creek.
While Leamington isn't growing, it isn't dying, he said. Population "stays about the same."
In the four years he's been mayor, "we've issued two building permits. It doesn't expand a whole lot."
Every Christmas Eve, two Santas and their helpers divide the town. Wearing their costumes, they visit everybody in Leamington and Fool Creek, listening to the children's requests and handing out bags of candy and peanuts.
With time spent posing for pictures at many of the homes, the ritual takes about four hours.
"It's a good tradition," Jim Rasch said. "It's kind of one of those small-town things they used to do years ago."
E-mail: bau@desnews.com