Oral History Program Vern C. Parker Interviewed by Mack S. Taft circa 1960s Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Vern C. Parker Interviewed by Mack S. Taft circa 1960s Copyright © 2016 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Great Depression in Weber County, Utah, is an Oral History Project by Mack S. Taft for completion of his Master’s Thesis at Utah State University during the summer of 1969. The forty-five interviews address the Great Depression through the eyes of individuals in several different occupations including: Bankers, Laborers, Railroad Workers, Attorneys, Farmers, Educators, Businessmen, Community and Church Leaders, Housewives, Children and Physicians. All of these individuals lived in Weber County from 1929 to 1941. The interviews were based on what they remembered about the depression, how they felt about those events and how it affected their life then and now. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Parker, Vern C., an oral history by Mack S. Taft, circa 1960s, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Vern C. Parker. Mr. Parker discusses conditions during the Depression, including entertainment, the Ogden State Bank, the Weber Central Dairy, and growing sugar beets and gathering salt from the Great Salt Lake for additional cash. The interviewer is Mack Taft. MT: When were you married, Vern? VP: December 12, 1917. MT: When was your first child born? VP: February 1919. MT: Where were you living during the Depression years? VP: Right here in Hooper; right in this house. MT: What were you doing during the Depression? What was your profession? VP: Of course, I farmed all the time, that's all I did. I milked a few cows and raised a few beets, and tomatoes, and hay, and grain, and that's about the size of it - and chickens. Now, during the Depression years, my neighbor over here had a few chickens, and I had two or three hundred, and we were so poor that I'd take his eggs to town and buy his groceries. The next week, he took mine over. We tried to keep them a week. We could sometimes go four or five days, but if we didn't go sooner, we'd go every week. We couldn't keep them any longer and keep them cool enough to keep the eggs good. There was just no money. We couldn't afford to go to town. There was no money available. MT: Did you have an automobile at that time? VP: Yes. That was my downfall finally. That darn Model T Ford. I borrowed some money from the bank to pay for it, and then let it drag on for a few years, and 2 then the bank folded up, and I couldn't get a job, couldn't get a dollar to pay. There was just no work to be had. I would have worked for 50 cents a day if I could, a lot of the time, just to have a few cents around here. Now, Mr. Suiter was pretty well fixed. He was a man who said all the time that if these fellows can't pay cash for an implement, why it's just a poor management. He built his house and thought that he had enough money to build it all, but he ran a few hundred dollars short and borrowed money. Then he was in as bad a spot as the rest of us who owed two or three hundred dollars because you couldn't go to the bank anywhere and borrow money because it just wasn't available. Now, here's an outstanding thing that might be of interest. I went into the Sunday school superintendency, and Glen Belnap was in with me. He had a family, a young family, and each one of us had a Model T Ford. Of course, I can't remember all the details now. But President McKay was superintendent of the Sunday school, general superintendent of the Sunday school at that time. We'd get instructions from him, and there were a few things that we wanted to go down to Salt Lake for. One particular time we talked it over and thought it would be nice to take a ride. We didn't either one have a full set of good tires or the money to buy gas with. So we got a few eggs together and bought some gas, and took two tires off one car and put them on the other one, and loaded our wives in and went down there and saw President McKay. We were kidding each other, saying that if we had a little money, we'd take our wives and buy them an ice cream soda, or something of this kind. But we had no money to go buy that, so we pooled our few pennies together and had enough to buy a package of rolls, and we ate 3 them. We got back home without any car trouble, but that was the kind of times we had. Now, another thing I can tell you. John Nesbitt told me that he had some nice sheep, and they had lambs, and a fellow came around - they were nice, big young ewes. A fellow came around, and John said he'd take $20 a pair for them. The fellow got up to $16 for them, and that was as high as he would come. John kind of held his, and just debated about selling them. John found out that the price was going down, so he got in touch with the man and told him that he would take the $16 for them. He said, "Well, I wouldn't give you $6 for them today." Things went down just that fast. It was the same thing with cattle, went down the same way. I've heard people talk about - they went down to a lot less than half price. You know, when a person goes out and buys a thousand dollars worth of animals and feeds them for a few months, and then has to settle for $500, he's not going to stay in business for very long. That's the kind of time it was. But for me to cite you any one particular thing, other than just what I'm telling you... I know that we were getting a nice price for beets, and the next year we didn't get half as much. Now, I can't give you the amounts. Then to make it doubly bad, right at that time, that was before the Echo Dam was built, and we ran out of water. We had a dry year, and white lice came through here and cleaned us right out. We had no crop, had our taxes to pay, the taxes went delinquent, the Suitors went delinquent. We just couldn't pay our taxes with no money available. You couldn't borrow it, you couldn't sell an animal for anything. 4 You'd have a good cow that was worth between $50 and $60 and $75, and sell it for $10 or $15 or $20. The government bought a lot of nice animals for $20. You just did whatever you could. I had been in the habit of paying tithing all the time, and I talked to Bishop Hooper and told him, "I guess I'll have to give you a couple of cows." Well, of course you can't say whether that's a full tithing. All you can do is take that in as two cows, you see. He allowed me that two cows were probably worth around $75, and he turned them back to Albert Anderson. He kept them for, oh, about a year, and then got more than that for them. But there was a time, right there, when there was just no money. You just couldn't raise any money. Now, Rita, maybe could cite you a little stuff maybe. Now, you know Mr. Suitor, what kind of a man he's always been on cash. Finest neighbor you'll ever see, and he figured that he'd never get down. Well, that's the reason I cited him in the story. Some of the neighbors around here went to buying implements and have three or four go together. At that time, why they expected you to pay about one-third down, and then he was one that was paying the one-third down because he could get the third and have to make the rest in the fall. The crops failed, and they couldn't make it in the fall. It was a terrible condition. Mr. Suitor had to send a kid over here one day to see if he could borrow two bits [25 cents]. He had something he wanted a little money for, and we had the two bits. We let them take it. Then the two bits came back. Then maybe would come the time when we'd need the 25 cents or 50 cents, and we'd go over there, and if they had it, they'd let us take it. We just exchanged chicken feed like that because we had 5 nothing more. That was common with a lot of people. Some people maybe didn't have as good of neighbors as we did. But we traded 50 cents and a dollar and 25 cents a time or two. Maybe it got down to a dime. I wouldn't know about that. We chopped wood and bought coal, and there was no good wood around here to burn - these old soft wood trees, black willows and poplars and that. There was thousands of tons of salt hauled out of the [Great Salt] Lake right at that time. They figured that it was a godsend. You know, in the early days, my mother and them gathered salt; and 100 years ago, all of them were gathering salt there a little bit. But the wind would come and blow the salt up into some of the low places, and go back, and it would evaporate. They'd go down with sticks in their hands and gather salt at that time. There was an area down there where the salt got about two inches thick, maybe three inches thick. But there was a little puddle of water over the top of it, and it was hard on horses, but they went down. (I went down once or twice. The year Lynn Garner didn't have anything, he came down and took my team and wagon because he didn't... He got so much salt, he couldn't get it out of there.) They'd go down there and work all day and come out with maybe a ton of salt, or a couple of tons of salt depending on how good of outfits they had to bring it out with. There was a salt company at that time that owned all of the lakefront except for a little bit that we had. My brothers and I owned a little lakefront, and they'd brought suit against all these fellows. They didn't fine them, but they had them to a meeting and they said that if they were caught back on their ground again, they would fine them. So they had to build a special road and a bridge so 6 they could go right down through the pasture and onto the lake and onto our lakefront. They still kept hauling salt. Then some of them went at it in a big way out there below Norman Reed's place, down in that area. They hauled out salt and loaded some core, and then loaded salt and core. The truckers came in on these guys and would truck it. They'd put it in sacks and truck it in there and sell it for, oh, 50 cents a hundred pounds, or $1 a hundred. They got different prices different places. I never did get in on that, and I couldn't tell you the year that was in, but it was during the Depression times. That was hard work down there, and hot and hard on the horses. They'd get back out with the horses, and they'd have to go to a ditch of water or canal to take buckets of water and rub it over their legs and stomachs, or they would get raw, you know. A lot of these things were common around here. To see people without money wasn't any disgrace, I'll tell you. If someone came around and said, "I haven't got any money," they were telling the truth. They didn't have any, and they couldn't get any. My experience with that, of course, was that when the [Ogden State] Bank folded up, and I still owed them two or three hundred dollars, and I gave them my water stock; it looked like I was going to have to give them all my cattle. But I was able to get out of that with the help of Weber Central Dairy. They came to my rescue. It's a wonder I didn't lose my home and everything I had for that few hundred dollars. You know, you'd go to the bank, and they'd say, "We can't loan you any money. It doesn't matter how much collateral you have, we just can't loan it to you. We haven't got it. The director has said no money is to be loaned." 7 That was the story we'd hear all the time. The only people that would loan anything were these sharks that wanted about 20-30 percent interest on the money. Everybody was saying, "Keep away from them. You'd better lose the place than get tangled up with them and lose it anyway," you know. MT: You mentioned getting help from Weber Central Dairy. Did you have dairy cows at that time? VP: Yes, I was milking a few cows. I never did have a lot. The girls helped me milk as quick as they got large enough. The older girls were all good hands at milking. Weber Central Dairy - now it was before the Depression when it made its start - and we were having trouble selling milk and cream down here in Hooper. There was another little area, I think that was in Slaterville, that they put a little skimming plant in. I think the house where Roy Fowers lives now, they put in a little skimming plant out there. We (several dairymen) went together and got a little plant over there on Ogden Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets, and they operated there. When we bought that, we had everybody using their checks. They'd take one or two checks to make that payment (at the bank) and get the thing going. If it hadn't been for James R. Beus being in there when it looked like the bank was going to take everything I had... I went to talk to him, and he talked to the directors. They said that if I could get by on every other check, then they would take the checks and pay off my bank bill. I'd take one check, and they'd take the other one. I told you the story about John Nesbitt and the sheep, but Lou Spalding went over and drove out a herd of calves. They didn't truck them in those days, 8 they drove them. I think it was with a bunch I went to town with one day, and saw them - Lou and somebody else driving them. They didn't have a big lot. I imagine they had 20 head maybe, 30 head of small calves. He kept them until they were pretty well grown, and he said he was going to sell them. The price was way down. So he said, "Well, I think I'll keep them another year."And the next year they were still cheaper. He sold them for less than he could have done the year before. We sold some cows to government officials for $20. Mrs. Parker: We raised beets out here in this little piece of ground north of our home, and we got about 20 ton to the acre. When the Depression came, one year we dug them, and we got six ton off the whole thing. The Depression and the blight and everything else along with it. VP: There was drought, and that bothered. And the sugar factory was also trying to raise a high sugar content beet, and between the whole thing, they all died. It was no good. We got the beets in - we usually had to hire help to get the beets in - and they'd let the factory pay for it, see. Then we owed the factory, and it took us another year or two to get the factory paid off for the seed. Those beets got up about the size of that thing, maybe a little larger, and stayed alive; but you could go out and wiggle that beet around in the hole. The root was still down far enough to make a little green leaf here and there on the top. There were a lot of dead leaves, but there would be one or two little green ones. We dug an acre or two out here. We wanted to try to get the factory paid off if we could, and it wasn't worth trying to plow them out. So we went through here with - one or two of us would go down through here with the shovels and loosen the beet and top it and 9 throw it in the wagon. It took us a couple of days to get a ton, maybe, of sugar beets. That was the story. It was no wonder that people went to the wall and did a lot of desperate things - a lot of them. Mrs. Parker: Your folks, you know how they - the bank was closed, and every bit of money that they had to live on was in there. My folks were the same way. VP: If a person was out of debt, had no debt at all, and, of course, in those days you could grow grain and take it and trade it for flour and a few things, and everything we had was a blight crop. We didn't get any kind of yield on anything. We didn't get anything whether it was crops or grain and hay. It was a bad year. Mrs. Parker: One time with the PWA, the government people went out and worked for $1. They worked for $1 a day.