Oral History Program Virgil Cottle Jensen Interviewed by Mack S. Taft circa 1960s Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Virgil Cottle Jensen 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: Jensen, Virgil Cottle, 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 Virgil Cottle Jensen and his wife, Leona. Mr. and Mrs. Jensen describe their financial struggles during the Depression. They talk about cutting wood and canning produce in order to get by, and paying off debts. The interviewer is Mack Taft. MT: Would you please give us your full name? VJ: Virgil Cottle Jensen, born June 4, 1903. I’ve had some pretty tough times. I remember my parents telling about a herd of cattle coming across the lake there, and they were so confused and starved that they even climbed on top of one another and killed the major part of the herd at about the time I was born, there about 1903. MT: Leone, when were you and Virg married? LJ: November 23, 1927. Our first child was born October 28, the next year. VJ: Those were wonderful years, you know. They were hard ones. We went months sometimes without having a penny, not a penny, but we learned a big lesson. We charged a grocery bill at Isabelle’s old store over here, and we couldn’t pay it, and that was one of the hardest jobs I ever had in my life was to go and tell that woman that we couldn’t pay that grocery bill. So the wife and I sat down together, and we decided that if we just waited a few months and gathered up slack, and you know – we’ve never run a grocery bill since, as hard as times have been. We’ve never run a grocery bill since. With the Lord’s help, we got that grocery bill – the $60 paid off – and we’ve never run one since. I don’t believe that we’ve charged a grocery of any kind since that time, and we’ve been married now some 44 years. 2 I’ll tell you, you had to do anything. I remember the school up here, not too many years after we were married, put a sewer down to the open slough down north there, and there were so many men that went up there that they had to divide them up and put them in shifts. And I remember one fall, I was working up there one day, and I’d been used to really hitting it up down here on my own place, and when I got up there, I felt like I ought to do the same. And a fellow says, “Hey, Virg,” he says, “do you want anybody else to have any of this work?” And I said, “Well, I don’t know, I’m just working like I’d work for myself.” But do you know, that night he got laid off, and they kept me on until they finished doing the whole thing. I got about seven or eight shifts in just because I got in and worked. You know my father was born down here in 1872 in a sod house. LJ: What I remember the most about it was that we didn’t have money for groceries, and I hated to use my last cup of sugar for fear that I wouldn’t be able to get any more. I made soup without meat, and I made eggless cakes, and we had to burn wood all one winter – the year Charlene was born. We had that house down there with just the timbers under it, and the cold came under it. And that’s when the mop rag froze to the floor. We had to burn that wood, and we had a hard time keeping it warm enough. Charlene got pneumonia and we had to take care of that. But looking back, it was fun. VJ: We learned a lot of good lessons out of it though. We learned to pay tithing at that time, too. We learned that we had to rely on the Lord, and we paid for it. LJ: I made my own catsup and I put up all my fruit, hundreds of bottles of fruit to take us over. 3 VJ: The young people now just gallivant. She never lets up cooking. She’ll come home from a hard day up there at Della’s and just light right in cooking. But I’ll tell you, those experiences, they taught us how to get along during these times and save a little money. So many people don’t do that, they spend every cent that they can get hold of. If they got a thousand dollars, they spend a thousand a ten, and if they got ten thousand, they spend eleven. LJ: I was telling the kids, if you had gone through the Depression that we had, you’d be a little more careful. You wouldn’t buy all these expensive things. They just feel easy come, easy go, I guess. VJ: I’ll tell you one thing that we’ve done that I guess a lot of people maybe don’t approve of, but we had several health and accident policies, and they didn’t pay off for us. So we just quit patronizing them, and we took the equivalent and started putting it in the bank as savings, and we’ve been a lot better off. MT: What was your greatest difficulty during the Depression? Did you have trouble securing food, or clothing, or shoes, or what was your greatest problem? LJ: Oh, I made over a lot of clothes. VJ: We always had plenty to eat. We always had a garden. That helped a lot in the summer, and then her being ambitious and not being afraid to work, she put up her fruit and vegetables, and we had a good supply, and we never did go hungry. But the first year, being unprepared ... but the second year, I had to truck coal in. That was a bad year. I’ll tell you, I’d go up there to Clinton in the blizzards and cut wood to keep her and the baby warm. You know, I’d go up there in a little old Model T truck, and we’d work all day, cut it up in about 15 minutes with a saw 4 that we had on an old Chevy. And we’d cut it up in that old back room, and get it out, and shove it in the stove. But you couldn’t get enough heat off of it to warm that floor up. We borrowed $200 for our furniture and $225 to get a house. We moved one down from the old Sugar Mill, and we were years and years paying for it. Just 426 dollars. I was 24 years old, and I took over the garage here in the early 1930s, and I’d been there several years before I ever got her dad paid off. He signed with me, and the bank was going to foreclose, and so he just paid it off and said you can just pay me. So we paid him back when I opened up the garage here in the early 1930s.