Oral History Program Claude Armstrong & Ward Armstrong Interviewed by Charles Trentelman 15 October 2013 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Claude Armstrong Ward Armstrong Interviewed by Charles Trentelman 15 October 2013 Copyright © 2013 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 Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial house flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. After World War II, the railroad business declined. Some government agencies and business related to the defense industry continued to gravitate to Ogden after the war—including the Internal Revenue Regional Center, the Marquardt Corporation, Boeing Corporation, Volvo-White Truck Corporation, Morton-Thiokol, and several other small operations. However, the economy became more service oriented, with small businesses developing that appealed to changing demographics, including the growing Hispanic population. ____________________________________ 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: Armstrong, Claude & Ward, an oral history by Charles Trentelman, 15 October 2013, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Ward James Armstrong 1935-2016 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Claude and Ward Armstrong, conducted October 15, 2013. In this interview, Claude and Ward discuss their memories and experiences related to 25th Street in Ogden, Utah. CT: Okay this thing is recording so we got all the time in the world. So just to start it out I’m Charlie Trentlemen, I’m talking to Claude Armstrong and Ward Armstrong here at Union Station and this is for the oral history project at Weber State University and Union Station. We’re going to talk about 25th Street and Armstrong Sporting Goods and whatever these gentlemen want to talk about. I was talking with Ward last week about their store down on 25th Street and I even have a list of all the stores that were next door to you guys. So I thought that was kind of fun to look for. CA: We can remember them all. M & M Tavern, Lee’s Tavern, well of course we had the two buildings there. WA: And it goes up to the barber shop our grandfather owned. CA: And the show repair shop. WA: And Morry’s Men’s Store. CT: Now what was the address of the… WA: 302-306. CA: Was the address of our store. CT: Okay here we are, you had 300. That was the M & M Tavern that was on Grant, then 302 Armstrong’s Sporting Goods, 304 in this 1946 was vacant. 2 WA: Charles that was actually the apartment that was above our store. There was no 304. It’s just a number. CA: And a stairwell. WA: We had storage stuff up above the store and my grandfather, he has living quarters up there. Yeah so he was above the store, the apartment. CT: Then at 306 was a tavern, The Palm according to his. WA: 306? CT: 306 was Palm. WA: At one time. CA: 306 was Armstrong’s Sporting Goods also. CT: Oh was it? CA: Yes it was, at one time in 1946 and 1947 it was a restaurant supply place and when they moved out we used up all the space and at one time it wasn’t connected to our store. We had to have someone unlock it, then later we knocked a wall out between the two stores. It well could’ve been a tavern prior to WWII. WA: Yes this was 304, this is 1948 though. CT: Well I’m looking at this list, 1946. WA: Yes that was right after the war, it wasn’t a tavern then, no. CT: Well you were telling me when the store was started. When was Armstrong Sporting Goods first… CA: 1916 was the year. CT: And that was by your father or grandfather? 3 CA: It was grandfather. CT: Grandfather, okay and what was his name? CA: Claude E. Armstrong and he had come to Ogden in about 1906. WA: Yes right and then we worked for the railway express at that time for a year or two and then went to work for Browning Arms. He worked for them until he opened his store in 1916. So he worked for Browning for about nine years. CT: You said 1916? WA: Yes. Browning’s were up on Kiesel between 24th and 25th. CA: You should’ve brought that article. You’ll have to bring it down on the opening. It was the 50th anniversary. WA: Oh I got that, yeah. CT: 50th anniversary of what? WA: Of our store. CT: Oh okay. CA: Its got copies of the bill of sales back when my grandfather bought it from the hardware store, the amount he paid for it. So it’s kind of interesting to see. I can bring that down. Then he’s got the list going on up from there all the way up. CM: Well there was the Mint and the Mecca. What was the tavern… CT: Let’s see I’ve got Palm, T & O closed, Diamond Loan Bank at 310½, which would’ve been the basement I guess; El Nito Club, Ogden Distributing, the Parkway Hotel, Dick’s Club, The Hub, Wilson Rooms. CA: The Hub, that was still here in the 70s. That was the guy that sold men’s clothing. The Wilson Rooms and the Utah Café. 4 WA: That would be the Ukes Café. They called it Ukes, remember the Japanese lady that ran that? Claude, you remember the Japanese lady that ran Ukes café at one point? CA: Yes I remember Uke and Mary the Patron Saint. CT: The Angel of 25th Street. WA: The Angel of 25th Street, yeah. She was incredible. CT: What do you remember about her? WA: Well just that she saw the humanity in everybody. A wino to me was a wino, but to her it was a human being that needed a hand. She never turned down anybody for anything. CA: Uke was the same way. CT: He was, yes. CA: Yes they were just good people. CT: When did they get started down there? WA: Well they were on 25th Street and then they moved over onto Grant. CA: Yes but when they started it was right after WWII though. WA: Yes I think so. CT: They were probably 1947, 1948, well they’re not listed at Uke’s Café in here though. So it would’ve been after that. WA: The story was that a lot of the habituals on 25th Street, if they had a pension check or social security check or anything coming in monthly, a lot of them were basically homeless and their checks went to Mary at Uke’s Café. She would cash them and dole out the money to them so they wouldn’t starve to death. 5 CT: Then was the Mint below the Mecca or was it Mint that was the one that was adjacent to the hot dog place? CA: Let’s see it was the Mint and the Mecca. Mint was the lower one and then on the corner it was Frank and Roy’s Café. WA: It was on the west. Right, Frank and Roy’s Café was adjacent to the Mecca. CA: They had a cubby hole cut in the wall between the Mint and the Mecca. WA: Back by the kitchen. CA: By the Mecca and Frank and Roy’s Café. Frank and Roy’s was a hot dog stand basically, but they served breakfast and it was owned by Frank Rounds and Roy Balentine. They had a cubby hole cut between the Mecca and Frank and Roy’s because the Mecca didn’t have a food permit and Frank and Roy’s couldn’t sell beer, but their customers could pass through the wall. Hot dogs going one way and beers going the other way. CT: Is that where the rumor about the tunnels started? WA: Oh no that’s completely different. That’s a completely different legend. I don’t know how it works, but I feel like it’s nonexistent. I know it didn’t exist under our buildings. In fact three of our buildings didn’t have basements in them, as far as 302 and 306 25th Street. CA: Tunnels were down lower, for the most part probably on the south side of 25th street on up. Yeah and that Frank and Roy’s, like I say it was just chili dogs. There was about four or five things you could get on the menu all built around a hot dog. 6 CT: This shows it at 340 and then 340½ was the Subway Club that would’ve been in the basement underneath Frank and Roy’s, and then Kiesel Cross. Yeah Frank and Roy’s and then right next to that at 338 is the Mecca. This shows it as a cigar store, what was it, the Mecca? WA: It was beer. They had almost a perpetual card game going on there, and they and Mecca was a place where railroaders could cash their paychecks. I imagine the club down there, the Papasis’s on lower 25th Street, about the same type of thing, but the railroaders didn’t use banks. They used taverns to cash their railroad paychecks and the way it worked was whatever the change was on the check was the check cashing charge. It cost anywhere from a penny to ninety nine cents to get your check cashed. Most of them spent more than that on beer before they got out of the place. What the Mecca was, they had a big magazine rack in the front part of the store and then on the other side of that they had sold just a little bit of everything in the way of chips and stuff like that. Then they had a bar back in the back part. The card games were typically back towards the back, and the card games were active until about 1948 or 1949 and they finally had to tell them to go back behind the wall. CA: Golden Jensen, the new police chief kind of cracked down a little bit on 25th Street, but it was pretty wide open down there during the war. I remember also at the front of the Mecca, was a ticker tape that fed out the baseball plays inning by inning. You go up there and see where the Cincinnati was, we followed the Cincinnati Reds because Ogden was the franchise of the Cincinnati league team. 7 You’d go up there and see if Ken Hunt, from Plain City, was pitching and so how he was doing inning by inning. WA: Then they also had like I remember was the Mint the one where we used to take the football cards into? CA: Oh yes. WA: That was the Mint wasn’t it? CA: Yes, that was the Mint. WA: What we did there, it used to be a betting card. You picked four, five, six or however many teams you wanted against the odds and of course it was just open gambling. Then you’d go up and give them the dollar and give them the thing and you’d keep the receipt. CA: You had to pick ten games. WA: Well it depends, you could pick up the ten, but you actually started getting paid off if you picked low. If you picked four in a row you got a pretty good pay deal. So it was all wagers. Then you’d go back in there and they’d say, “Oh yeah you got sixteen dollars,” or however much and they’d pay you right across the thing. The one they’d do that with us when we were ten, twelve years old. CA: There were four of us kids in the family and our dad, on Saturday nights, used to take all four of the kids over to Brown’s Ice Cream Factory and Store which was by Hostess Bakery, the Wonder Bread Bakery. Brown’s Ice Cream was there for years and each of us kids would get a single scoop ice cream cone and our dad would get a glass of buttermilk and the total bill was twenty five cents. Five cents for each cone and five cents for the buttermilk, but that was a family outing. 8 There was a little café called Gurty’s that we used to go to. If we went out the back door of our store, which we did to go around to Brown’s, there’s a little tiny stool café, it didn’t even have a booth in it. In the front window they had a pinball machine and this was back before bumpers and everything. You just pulled a handle back and let the ball fly and it’d go in a hole. We were walking by there going over to Brown’s one time and dad had given each of us our own nickel so we bought our own cone. We were walking by and I asked my dad, “What’s that?” He said, “Well that’s a pinball machine. You put money in and you may not win anything or you may win some money.” I guess he thought he was going to teach me a lesson so he said, “Do you want to try it?” I said, “Yeah.” I was like eight years old, and it was my nickel I wouldn’t get an ice cream cone if I lost. They put a milk carton down for me to stand on and I stood up there and I won sixty cents. My dad thought he created a monster and he had. I’ve loved gambling ever since, but those were memorable days. WA: Charles was also asking about how we both personally knew Marshall White. We called him Doc White and I don’t know whether that was because he was a medic in the military or a nickname or what? CA: He was from Tennessee and I think he came here during WWII, but what a tremendous person he was. WA: Wonderful guy. CT: Yeah all I’ve ever heard about him was the incident where he was killed. 9 CA: Yes he was just a legend on 25th Street. You know it was segregated from the Bus Depot on 25th and Grant west. The south side was the blacks and north side was white with the exception of Willie Moore’s Barber Shop. CT: Yeah Willie Moore’s Barber Shop was in the Marion. CA: Oh the Marion Hotel was just a quiet place in and of itself. They had what they called their basement, the snake pit. You’d go down there and for a quarter you could get a cot to sleep the whole night. CT: Now why was that? I know it was a tavern or bar down there at one point or a dance hall. WA: It’s right on the corner of 25th and Lincoln. In fact our great uncle, our grandfather’s brother built the Healy Hotel which was right on the corner of 25th and Wall. CT: It was a nice looking hotel. CA: It was. WA: The nicest hotel here in Ogden before the Hotel Bigelow was built right? CT: Yes. CA: Then the Broom Hotel was of course on 25th and Washington. WA: But Marshall White, a couple stories on him. They used to have a lot of fights going on out in the park right across the street from the store. Most of the fights occurred because the Indians weren’t allowed to buy liquor. So the traditional way for them to buy liquor was for them to give money to these Mexicans or someone and they’d go into the liquor store and buy it. Well inevitably they got short changed or they didn’t come back, took the money and fled. So you ended 10 up with all these fights going on in the park and they’d be bouncing around out there and pretty soon somebody would get Doc White, Marshall White. He would come over and he’d grab two at a time and he’d walk them into the jail and he’d book them. He’d come back and get two more and I noticed he’d walk with them and he never had any trouble. He’d just walk them in so one time I was asking him, I said, “How do you get them to come along that easy without fighting?” He said, “Well…” They had a device in those days Charles that the law enforcement used, which was a big long chain that you wrapped around a person’s wrist and you twisted it. The idea behind it was any person that increased the force to resist it, it cut into the arm. They were very uncomfortable. CA: It was called the Come Along. WA: They had the name Come Along and so that’s what they used. We had one in our store just to show to people, but Marshall would take one and he’d say, “Oh, let me show you that.” He used to take your thumb and he had great big old hands, and he’d lock that thumb back on that side. So it’d take two of them and he’d walk them in and he’d say, “That’s one Mississippi Come Along or Tennessee Come Along.” He laughed, he had a great sense of humor. I remember another story about him. They used to hire buses to go shoot rabbits because the rabbits were so bad they’d actually provide buses and the ranchers would pay for them. We’d go out with a bus load of guys. CT: Where? WA: Up toward Coalville first and then towards Promontory. We’d shoot the rabbits which would help the ranchers. Well it was open to just any customer want to 11 show up at five or six o’clock on a Sunday morning to go shoot rabbits. It was no charge and Marshall White went along with them and he got along with everybody. He was so funny because he was always talking to the rabbits. You’d hear Marshall and they’d laugh. We’d get back on the bus and somebody would say, “What are you doing out there talking to those rabbits?” He’d say, “Well they’re so close they really aren’t any challenge so I yell bunny run bunny, bunny run! When that bunny get running far enough out I’d shoot him.” He was a good shot too wasn’t he? CA: Yes he was a good shot. WA: He was just a guy that would stop by and drop into the store to say hello and a real interesting guy. You might tell him about the comments on the racial thing, I never heard this before. CA: Yes he was the first local president I believe of the NAACP and I was out sweeping out our frontage. So this would’ve been in the late 1950s, early 1960s and Marshall White came up. Course he stops to visit and he got to telling me about NAACP, I didn’t even know what it was. I said, “Well we don’t need anything like that. There’s no racial prejudice in Ogden.” He looked at me like he was dumbfounded. His jaw dropped, he says, “This is one of the most racially prejudice towns I’ve ever known of.” He started listing and just going down where the blacks could go in the theater, upstairs in the balcony. Restaurants that they didn’t dare go into. CT: Did Ross and Jack’s serve blacks, I’m just curious? 12 CA: I don’t think so. That was Jack Dempsey’s café. I mean Jack Dempsey worked there as a busboy when he was young. WA: You should tell him what he said about Gray Cliff. CA: Oh he asked me, “When you go out to a nice Sunday dinner, you go to Gray Cliff.” Now how he knew that I don’t know. That was in Ogden Canyon, it was owned by the Greenwell’s. I said, “Yeah, that’s where we go.” He said, “You ever see any blacks in there?” I said, “Well, no I guess I haven’t really.” He said, “Well why do you think that is?” I thought, “Well it’s expensive.” They wouldn’t let them in at all. Ed Greenwell would just not let them in his place. I don’t know if they ever really tried. My first job, when I went to work for sporting goods, I was ten years old. I’d get to the store at four o’clock and I worked until they closed at six, two hours after school. I’d get fifty cents, but my first job was to take a hand truck and go down to railway express. We sent out a lot of athletic equipment, just small items to schools and it went by railway express. That was the UPS of its day. I was told by my dad, “Now you go down and you don’t cross 25th Street. You stay on the north side of 25th Street.” It worked fine until one day I was going down there and a guy who was right near the Porter’s and Waiter’s Club he came out, he had been stabbed with a butcher knife in the front and out the back. He grabbed a parking meter and just slid down it and painted that parking meter red. He bled out right on the sidewalk. I got sick looking at it. Went back and told my dad, I said, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” I didn’t have too. He didn’t send me down there anymore. 13 WA: Yes we saw several stabbing aftermaths and I was wondering on the shootout when Carver killed a guy. You remember that? CA: Yes. WA: Now what tavern was that in? It was a tavern up towards the Mecca but I can’t remember… CA: Yes I can’t remember the name of it. CT: Okay what shootout was this? Take if from the top. CA: He came up, Roberts Carver was a really good shot, he won the state pistol championship for lawmen every year for years. He went into this tavern one day and he saw this guy sitting up in the bar. He was from Evanston, Wyoming as I recall, and they had a warrant on him for arrest. He went up and he tapped him on the shoulder like this, he turned him around and they guy turned around and pulled a pistol out. Wade jumped back and tipped over a jukebox. So they’re shooting it out across a jukebox. Well when you’re engaged in pistol warfare with a state champion you lose, but it was Roberts Carver. WA: Yes not Boyd. CA: He killed the guy, and then also a bystander or a pedestrian out on the street was hit in the hip by a stray bullet. WA: They showed you where the bullet hit the jukebox, it went two-thirds of the way through the jukebox and got jammed up where they had the records stored. He was behind the jukebox shooting at the guy, he was using it as a shield. Course by the time we got up there the guy had been taken off dead. CT: Which tavern was this in? 14 CA: It wasn’t the Mint or the Mecca I know that, it was neither of those two. CT: What year? WA: 1950, 1949? CA: No it was, god I can’t remember. I think it was after I came back from the service and that was 1959. WA: No it wasn’t that late. It was while we were still in high school. CT: So early 1950s? WA: Yes I think you’d be safer in the 1950s, but he was one of the cops they had that worked the streets and we got to know the cops well too. We were always having friendly little problems with drunks coming in the store and we had to bounce them out, forget exercise. The first team of cops, this goes back to WWII. M.P.’s and Ogden City Police working together would come through the door and they’d say, “Okay trains are leaving. Come on guys anybody that wants to get out of here better not be late.” So guys would be in the store buying, and there wasn’t much to buy. It was hard to buy merchandise, anything you could sell these guys. So there’d by an exodus then pretty soon you’d see these same cops they’d be walking drunks back. They’d walk them two blocks back to see they got them on the train and they had a cop team remember, Ralph Morley, and what was his partner? CA: I remember Ralph well. He was a wrestler, a professional wrestler. WA: Yes he was a big guy and then he had a little guy as a partner, and they worked together as a team on 25th Street. They were tough, I mean he was a professional wrestler in his day, a big man. Then the other guy was a tough little 15 guy. They could handle anything on the street. They were the modern day early law men I guess they had in those days. Course then later it was Marshall White who was doing somewhat the same thing and then when they got real bad actors they’d bring in a guy like Bob Carver. I think Bob Carver might still be alive. CT: Oh really? WA: Well he came through the museum here, I’m going to say maybe eight years ago and he brought a guy, a marine buddy of his in and they were veterans of WWII which I didn’t know. Since that time I’ve never seen, he was in good health, but I’ve never seen if he’s passed away. So he might be in a rest home somewhere around here. CT: So he lives around here? He was in the Ogden Police Department? WA: Oh yes, he was captain of the pistol team and was not only an expert pistol shot but he was a tough guy too. CT: I wonder if the police could help me find him. I think they probably can. WA: I’m sure they would. CA: On the other side of the law one of the characters Ward and I remember is Rose Davies. She was the madam for Rose Rooms down on 25th. WA: Did you read the article? CA: Yes I did. CT: Sunday’s paper? WA: A very good article too by the way. CA: Oh yes, she was a very flamboyant gal. Beautiful woman… WA: Really well built. 16 CA: Her husband was Lucky Davies. She drove a lilac Cadillac Convertible, everybody knew when she was around because it was the only lilac convertible Cadillac I ever saw. WA: We’d do film processing for her. CT: Oh really? WA: I always knew the name Davies and then I can remember her coming in. She loves that picture’s that taken that he’s got in there with two pictures of Rose, see that’s actually a mugshot. CT: Yeah that’s a booking mug it looks like yeah. CA: They booked her and I can’t remember what it was they booked her on for sure. I don’t think it was prostitution as I remember, but anyway they booked her in. So she’d come in, she’d bring in and pick up her pictures. I remember because she was so damn busty and that was made for her. As twelve year old kids we were… CT: You were interested in that, yeah. WA: She carried herself very well. I can’t ever remember meeting her husband, they called him Lucky. CA: Yes, Lucky Davies. They used to come in, she carried a .25 automatic pistol with her all the time and we had a full time gunsmith. Every once in a while they’d be in there for gun repair on her purse pistol. I remember her walking through our store, everybody was looking. They knew who she was and what she was. CT: Did she ever come in with her pet ocelot? Is that what she had? Some sort of cat? 17 WA: No, no. CA: Oh I didn’t know about that. CT: I’ve seen a picture of her with one. WA: I’ll tell you another story too that’s kinda about the Rose Rooms. The guy’s still alive and he’s somewhat of a friend of ours his name is Jay Anderson, quite a character. Anyway his dad was Clark Anderson, the ranger for the 4th District. He was also the main source for Christmas trees for quite a bit of Ogden, and he had a big house on the corner of 29th and Eccles. Anyway Jay was like I don’t even know probably sixteen if he was even that. He drove before that, but anyway he takes a Christmas tree down to this address down on 25th to deliver, well it was the Rose Rooms. Jay goes down and he takes this tree up to the Rose Rooms and here’s all these scantily clad gals and he was so impressed I think he delivered them another tree every day, he’d go grab some scroungy tree and take it down there. “We didn’t order this.” “Well it’s okay.” He thought it was pretty neat. CA: They had to have a tree in every room didn’t they? WA: Rose Rooms wasn’t really much of a facility. The upstairs had about half a dozen rooms over El Baracho. CT: It was just the El Baracho it wasn’t in the some hotel. WA: I don’t know maybe it’s bigger up there. I never got up that far. CT: Now they weren’t using the cribs on Electric Alley for anything were they? Or was it even still there then? CA: No that wasn’t there then, it was gone. I think that’s pre WWII. 18 WA: What? Electric Alley? CA: The cribs. When they used to actually have them ride out. The Electric Alley was still there. It was kind of a challenge to go down it at night. The prostitution was accepted and the girls had to be tested or they were gone. So it was controlled and it was the old philosophy of those days that dated clear back ‘til the war days that if you’re going to have it you want to control it, keep it in a given locale. In WWII that was almost a necessity because those boys had money and they were horny and they’d have so many hours between train layovers and they were going to spend money no matter where. CT: Yeah that’s the thing a lot of people nowadays don’t realize is it was more of a practical matter back then. WA: Then the fights that used to break out, oh we used to see all kinds of fights. I can remember even in the M & M Tavern, which was right next door to us, a guy got his throat slit. You oughta come get a look at this. Here’s this guy and he’s laying back against the bar and he’s got a bar cloth pushed up. He didn’t have his throat slit but the guy put a knife in pretty deep and he’s sitting there holding onto this thing. I can still remember because he’s holding on to this thing and having trouble breathing. A little kid looking down there, well what was so funny was, right next to him there were a couple of guys just sitting there drinking their beer. CT: That was pretty normal for that day huh? WA: He bled out. CA: That was before the ambulance got there, and the ambulance got there and they took the guy away. 19 CT: Heck what a thing for a little kid to see. WA: Oh yes it was an education. It really was. CT: You mentioned Marshall White and him having to educate you on racism here. When did you become really aware of the divide? WA: Well I’ll tell you one story because I was like Claude, I didn’t think anything of it. We had good black customers and so on. We went to school with a couple of black kids and we were friends with a couple of them. I was in that Frank and Roy’s that we talked about and they used to have this little sign, it was a little oblong sign, “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.” I always thought it was because they didn’t want to serve the drunks. If they’re too drunk they’ll go to another tavern and send him on his way. Anyway a guy came in and he sat down right in the first booth, the first stool right by this sign. I would’ve had to look two or three times to see that he was even black because he was very, very light, a malado type black. She, Dotty, walked and without saying anything to the guy and she kinda just reached around to the sign and pointed to it and he didn’t argue, he walked out. At that time I asked, “Well don’t you serve?” She said, “Well, the boss leaves it up to me.” So it wasn’t the store policy, but she said, “I won’t serve those blacks.” So that’s when it really sunk home to me about how it was. CA: I’ll tell you how oblivious we were to this problem. There was a theater called the Liceum and it was on the south side of 25th Street in between Grant and Lincoln. I went in one day and told my dad, “Well I’d like to go to the movie.” Well he’s thinking I’m going to the Paramount or the Orpheum Theaters and he gives me a 20 quarter to go down to the movie and I go down to the Liceum because it’s so close. It was just a half block away from our store. I went in there and to this day I can remember walking in and watching this movie and it was called Stormy Weather. I think it was Lena Horn, but it was all blacks. Everybody in the movie was black and I thought that’s kind of strange, and then I looked around and everybody in there but me is black. That was a black theatre. CT: Oh really? CA: Yeah, the Liceum. CT: I have never heard that before. CA: Yeah they could go to the Orpheum or the Egyptian but in the balcony. CT: In the balcony or had to sit in the back. WA: Yes I can’t remember what the policy would be on the Egyptian. The Orpheum you had to go up above but did the Egyptian allow blacks? CA: Yes the Egyptian had a balcony too. WA: They had a crying room too. CA: They had the star ceiling. There was another character on the street, he was a black bootlegger named Spotlight King. He was kind of notorious. He’d wear these great big long overcoats and guys that go to go to the liquor store would find out it was Columbus Day or Arbor Day or some dang sneaky holiday and they couldn’t buy a jug, or after hours, or on a Sunday. They always knew that if they got a hold of Spotlight King they could get anything they want because he’d open that coat and he had these insert pockets on both sides that would hold a half pint of whiskey. He was a walking liquor store. 21 WA: Yes he was quite a character. CT: Now was he that guy that, no he wasn’t the guy that had all the pictures of movie stars. He was a porter on the train, that’s a different guy. WA: No I don’t think Spotlight ever worked for the railroad, did he? CA: I don’t think he did. WA: Grant Gibson, he used to work down here as a conductor. He was a wonderful guy, Claude worked with him down there for a while. Anyway Grant was responsible for putting the crews together for the railroad and he used to go up to Annabelle’s. He’d go in there and say, “I need a couple of guys.” “Oh yeah take him he’s all messed up.” She was more in charge of staffing those crew, particular the cooks that ran the kitchens in the trains. CA: The porter’s, the sleeping quarter porters. WA: Right and the porters and waiters, that was their other function in the dining cars, but that was her. She knew everybody. Which one was sober and which one wasn’t and which one was dependable and which one wasn’t. Grant said, “I just really relied on her. She was great. She never gave me a bad tip.” CT: Yeah the Porters and Waiters Club was kind of a place where they could stay and sleep as well as being a bar downstairs. It was kind of a hotel kind of thing. CA: Well it was. Entertainers that would come to play usually in Salt Lake, also Lagoon, prominent, black entertainers like Louie Armstrong. They couldn’t stay in Salt Lake in a hotel so they’d come up and stay in the Porters and Waiters Club in Ogden. 22 CT: Someone was asking me what attracted all these guys to Ogden and it was because they couldn’t stay anywhere else. WA: Well as an example and this was actually from the Utah Historical Quarterly. Who was the famous lady singer that they brought in to sing with the Utah Tabernacle Choir? Anderson? It was a black gal, really good singer. CA: Her name was Marion Anderson. WA: Anyway she came in to sing because she was such a terrific voice with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but she couldn’t stay in the Hotel Utah because blacks weren’t allowed, but she could stay in the Ben Lomond Hotel. So she drove up to Ogden to stay and then went down there. So we were prejudice, but Ogden was considered not nearly as prejudice as Salt Lake. CT: Yeah I grew up in Salt Lake in the 1950s and I remember seeing those signs. You know we reserve the right to… WA: Yeah so you know what I’m talking about. CT: Yeah you know there weren’t that many black people in Salt Lake. WA: No, no. Where did you go to the high school there? CT: I went to Judge High School. WA: Oh to Judge? CA: Judge Memorial? CT: Judge Memorial, yeah. CA: Yes a lot of my fraternity brothers were from Judge Memorial. Macnamaras and Omaras. WA: Yes most Catholic kids all went there. 23 CA: Brennans, all Irishmen. WA: All of our relatives went down there too. CA: Yes we had Catholic relatives. WA: Our mom was an Irish Catholic. She gave up the Catholic Church to marry my father and he was a Presbyterian. My grandfather Claude who started the store was an extremely close friend of John Edward Carver who was a Presbyterian minister here from about 1900 until he died in 1951. Anyway all these Irish aunts, the ones we had that lived in Salt Lake, a lot of their kids, like Eddie Shay, went to Judge Memorial. He went with John Morton. Good school, it is yes. CT: Still is, yeah. WA: When did you graduate from there? CT: I didn’t graduate. I would’ve graduated in 1967. We moved to Florida in 1965. I went to public school over on the west side, over on 13th West and 10th South. I still remember the first time I met a black person was in kindergarten. There was a kid there that was black, neither one of us could understand why he was white here and dark here. I thought well maybe it will wash off, have you tried washing it? It’s interesting, when you come to the realization that the way you’re living is discriminatory because it’s just the way you are. Then suddenly you realize, maybe this is wrong, but until you realize that…In your case it took Marshall White to point it out to you perhaps? WA: Yes of course we were really good friends with Bob Gillepsie. We played softball with him. CA: Jim Gillespie. 24 WA: Or Jim Gillespie, Bobby Gillespie is his boy. CA: Jim Gillespie became the president of the NAACP in Ogden after Marshall White was killed. Then Betty Gillespie succeeded him and been there for years. They were really a nice family, good kids, and just good people. WA: Jim married twice. CA: Oh did he? I just knew Betty. CT: Yes he had a son named Bob. His granddaughter, Adrian is advisor to the president of Weber State University now. She just got married a little bit ago and to a real nice guy. In fact I just saw her and I saw Betty up at a function up at Weber State this last week. She’s looking a little fragile but she’s still getting around. WA: That Bob Gillespie was one of the all-time great athletes at Ben Lomond. Then later it was at Weber, a triple track athlete. CA: You know one of the things that use to pop up on 25th Street and was never there for long because the law would shut them down, but these gypsy fortune teller shops. They would come into a vacant building and put up their blankets in the windows. Cover the windows with these gypsy blankets so you couldn’t look into the place. You had to go in if you wanted to see what was going on. Well once you got in there good luck because they were a pretty tough element. They moved because they’d be there for a week is about all and it was vacant again because the law had run them out of town. When those people would come into our store you just had to get your employees to watch them because they could steal you blind in no time. 25 CT: Oh yeah? CA: Yes, even little kids. You remember those shops don’t you Ward? WA: Oh yes. CA: They were a problem on 25th Street. Every tavern and every restaurant had punch boards and pull tab spindled, where you pay a quarter and pull five out and if you got a winner you’d look up on the wall and you’d won a box of chocolates or a cheap fishing rod or something. It was just a form of gambling that everybody knew what was going on. WA: Every café everywhere had those things. CT: Yeah I remember seeing those punch boards when I was a little kid. Yeah you’d punch out a thing and pull out the thing on the back. CA: You’d buy a square, it’d be five for a quarter and then you’d get the other five free, course it was figured into it. One of the restaurant owners that had one told me that they bought them, a board for fifty dollars. When they’d sold it, they sold it for one hundred dollars. They kept a portion of that and then the company that distributed the punch boards around kept a portion of it, but you won Glade’s Chocolates or Sweet’s Chocolates or a cheap hunting knife. You know probably cost them a dollar. WA: What was kind of funny too was the fact that except for the actual beer taverns, I mean that’s all they were as a kid you could go into any one of those places. You could go in the Mecca or the Mint. Like I say we’d go in there with little betting cards and our dollars or pick out magazines. 26 CA: Kids were a fixture on 25th Street, newsboys and shoe shine boys and kids that were just trying to make a little extra money to help feed the family. They were completely safe, nobody ever bothered them. Do you remember a guy named Alex Hurtado? CT: Yes, I knew Alex. He used to tell me how he’d sell our newspaper. CA: Yes he was a 25th Street kid. CT: That’s why he was so tough. CA: I didn’t know he was tough. He was always a real amenable guy as far as I ever saw. CT: He was but I mean I saw him and he was real short, I saw him go nose to belt buckle with some guy, a real big guy at the Republican Convention one year and Alex won. You didn’t want to fight with Alex, he was a tough little dude, but I knew where he got it. He wasn’t mean tough, he was just predetermined he was going to win. CA: He went to work for Al Homan selling Florshime Shoes down in Salt Lake and he was so good that when Fred M. Nye put in a store in their basement called The Cellar, part of that was a Florshime franchise and they brought Alex up to manage that. Al Homan did and he became a pretty prominent businessman in Ogden and really well liked. His best friend was Dick Richards. In fact they went into business together owning a gym together out in Roy or somewhere. CT: Alex is one of the reasons this place got saved. I mean he worked with the editor at the Standard and people on the chamber to save the station. CA: That doesn’t surprise me at all. 27 CT: I admire the hell out of Alex. He was a great man. CA: He sold Standard Examiners and carried a shoe shine kit on 25th street. WA: By the way do you subscribe to the Utah Historical Quarterly? CT: No I don’t, I need too. WA: Okay I’ll get you a copy. Anyway the reason I mention that is, there was a terrific article in the last issue on Bill Glassman. CT: Oh was there? WA: Yes and I didn’t realize what a terrific kind of influence he had on the early history of Ogden. CT: Oh this was Bill Glassman who was the mayor of Ogden. WA: Oh yes he was mayor and he started the Standard. The Standard was his baby, but the article was so well written. I’ll bring my copy down next time. CA: I gave my copy to Rich Brewer. WA: Yeah because in there it tells about the mayor, Alex Brewer. I know that Alex Brewer was Richard’s great grandfather. CA: No his grandfather, Alex was his grandfather. WA: Oh his grandfather? Oh okay. CA: It was his grandfather, it was J.W. Brewer’s dad. WA: When I talked to him he thought it was his the great grandfather. CA: I talked to Rich, I asked Rich. WA: He was J.W.’s dad. 28 CT: Yeah it’s interesting to see how many of your early powers at the Standard were heavily involved in politics here in town. You had Mr. Glassman and you had a guy by the name of Frank Francis. CA: Oh yes he’s in this article. Frank Francis and Ward and I knew he was a banker but the Frank Francis you know or you’re referring to was the editor of the Standard Examiner. Yeah they go back a long ways. CT: Yeah Frank Francis that I’m talking about he started the Ogden Examiner and then it was bought by the Standard and he became their executive editor or something and for years and years he wrote that column in the paper. That’s why I want to find out about him. Now you say he’s still got a son? Is his son still alive and does he live around here? CA: He has a son, Bob Francis that was my year in school. WA: He’d be a grandson of the one he’s talking about. CT: Yeah, any idea where I can find any of those people? WA: Is Bob Francis still alive? CT: I think so, yeah as far as I know. WA: Yes you could probably find that out through the Ogden High Alumni. Janice Vause might be able to help you find some of those. If not they’ll refer you up to the high school. CT: Oh the alumni okay. Yeah I’d love to find out more about Mr. Francis. CA: Oh you’ve got to get him that article. WA: The old Francis’s that we knew, the son was a banker but he wasn’t just a banker he was the best banker Commercial Security had. 29 CT: Why? What did he do? WA: Well he was one of these guys that he never went by the book. He was notoriously known for backing people who nobody else would back. CA: Handshake contracts you know? CT: Okay. WA: He just terrific at reading people and they always said he could look you in the eye and shake your hand and could tell you all about a person just with that. A really nice guy too by the way. CA: You know newspapers have been in a sad decline for the last two decades probably. Boy when Ward and I were kids the Standard Examiner was a big deal in Ogden, it really was. You knew the people that worked for them and they had a business page editor, Robinson, and they had a society page editor. WA: The old gal, Alice Pardo West. CA: Alice Pardo West. They had a guy named Glen Perrins that wrote a column called Sol’s Sun Shine and Shadow. WA: Perrins wrote a column too what was it called? CA: That’s what I’m talking about. WA: Oh okay. CA: Yes he wrote Sol’s Sunshine and Shadow and then Al Warden had his column everyday called, patrolling the Sports Highway and Ensign Richey… CT: Yeah I knew Ensign he was the sports editor when I started at the Standard. CA: Yeah he replaced Al Warden. CT: I loved Ensign he was such a great guy. 30 CA: Abe Glassman was a great guy. CT: Yeah he was the publisher there. I never knew a Mr. A. Glassman because when I got there they didn’t have a publisher, they had a general manager. A guy by the name of Jack Banks and Murry Moler was the editor then. I loved Murry, I’d go in and sit in his office and he’d tell me old newspaper stories. WA: Yes he was a great story teller. CT: Yeah he was a great bullshitter. CA: He was a bomber pilot I think during WWII also. WA: Was he? CT: I didn’t know that. WA: Well you know so many of these guys that served in WWII never ever did a lot of talking about it. It was also interesting on WWII because we were just kids and my mom’s family was an Irish Catholic family. Nine sisters and one brother, one boy, but then the sisters they were all about ten years older, twenty years older than we were. They almost all had two boys practically didn’t they? All went into the military, all went in the service and the closest cousins that we had were Bob and Dan Sabin and they served. When we were just kids we’d follow them almost like you’d follow baseball stars and where everything was. We couldn’t wait for Bob and Dan to come back from the Marines just to tell us stories. Tell him what Bob told you, the only story he wanted to tell you was about his best friend dying in his arms. He wouldn’t talk about anything else after that. Yeah most of the ones that really served they didn’t want to talk about it. 31 CA: They went through Bougainville and Tarawa, Guam and Iwo Jima and Okinawa. A lot of bad battles and they didn’t talk about it in those days. WA: The two brothers, one was in the 3rd Marine and one was in the 6th Marine division and they both served on practically every major island from Guadalcanal to Okinawa. CT: What were their names again? WA: Sabin, the Sabins, S-A-B-I-N. Bob’s boy, we just had dinner with them. They came up to have dinner. CA: That has to be one of the most memorable days in my life, was the day that WWII ended. I would come home from Quincy Elementary School and catch a bus. For a nickel I could ride a bus from 28th and Quincy down to 25th and Washington and walk to our store. I’d work for two hours every day for fifty cents. Well I went down there one day and it was just precisely the time that WWII ended and the town went crazy. It was just absolute bedlam for I don’t know how long it lasted because I had to go home. My dad let me go up and participate in that celebration. There were conga lines going the length of Washington Boulevard and horns honking, sirens blaring, bells ringing and it was just, the killing had stopped. Anybody that had a relative that was still involved and we had a cousin on Okinawa and that was just a horrible campaign, the 6th Marine division just took awesome casualties. We knew that he was going to come home now and you didn’t know that the day before that. So it just was a… WA: So that was interesting because I think the government induced propagandized prejudice against the Japanese and they did such a thorough job of it. My aunt 32 Marge that had the two boys that were Marines, damn Jap was one word because that’s all she would ever talk about. Then later I had a very close friend, Ukio Shimamura, who I played football with and everything at the junior high and high school, close friends still. I can remember, he was at my house visiting and my aunt came in and she went back in the back. She told my mom, they all had tempers, she said, “What are you letting that damn Jap in your house for? What the hells this all coming too? What did my boys fight for?” My mom said, “Quiet down Marge he’s a friend of Ward’s.” She started carrying on and finally my mom said, “Marge, Ward picks his friends and we support what he does. If you don’t like it get the hell out of here.” Bam! Out she went, slamming doors. She didn’t come back for about three weeks. CA: Ukio and his family were interned at Topaz in one of the internment camps and those were pretty austere places. They were tar paper shacks in the middle of nowhere. WA: Yes he tells quite a story about that. CA: He was and is a really good friend. WA: They were really prejudice on Japanese. CT: One of the things that we’ve got in the archive, I’ve just discovered from all these donated newspapers, was the day the war ended the Standard put out an extra that they were selling on the street. There was a copy of that in there if you want to come see it when we’re done. This isn’t the day’s paper this is the extra that they came up with. We’ve got it over there right now, but the town just went nuts huh? 33 CA: Yeah because Ogden was a militarized town. We had Hill Field we had Clearfield Supply Depot we had Utah General Depot. Bushnell Hospital was… WA: I’m certain you went out to make deliveries to the guys in the war camps. CA: Prisoners of war. WA: Yes they’d buy any ball they could. It didn’t matter if it was a water polo ball or anything round they cleaned us out. Ray, our old guy that dealt with athletic equipment, he’d load up the old convertible with every ball we could pull off the racks. He’d take them out there, and it didn’t matter whether it was a basketball because all they used them for was soccer. Everything this side of a football they used. CA: They were mostly Italian, they had a few Germans too. WA: I thought they were all Italians. CA: No they had a few Germans, but you didn’t go to them they were pretty hardcore. The Italians they didn’t see any kids unless they were out fruit picking or something. They used them to harvest cherries and stuff. Then they would see kids, but other than that their entire life was right there in Harrisville at the war camp. I’d go out and I was about nine or ten years old and thought, Jesus they’d shower me with rings they’d made for me, belts, all this handcrafted stuff and I thought it was really a neat excursion to go out there. Some of those guys married local girls and lived in this country. Rigo Delcarlo, they had Rigo’s Café here for years. WA: Rigo’s Café was probably a good of restaurant as any. CT: Well that’s why we had Miconi Tile here, Miconi was one. Miconi Tile… 34 CA: Oh is that right? CT: Yeah. CA: I didn’t know that. WA: They’re friends with the Shannafeld’s. CT: Yes Miconi he was on a submarine and he was captured when they sank the submarine and he managed to get off of it. I did a story on it for the paper years ago. Yeah he was the old gentleman, he installed my shower in my house in fact. CA: He probably knows Dick Shannafeld then or knew him. WA: Well he knows Mark quite well, Mark Shannfeld. CT: Oh okay, yeah. Mark is the editor over there now. WA: I was the bastard that left him out with a broken femur and Mark wrote that real scathing article. CT: Really? WA: He had his pie and whiskey and I gave him a little Tylenol 3. He fell and he was really hurting, so he sat there and smoked a cigar and finished off his pint of whiskey. We went out and tried to shoot to get me a moose and spent a half day before we finally took him into the hospital. Boy Mark thought that was just terrible. I raced up to the hospital, run right into the doctor and Dick says, “There’s the bastard that left me out there to freeze to death.” The doctor just laughed. CA: Did you know Vince Tasoni? CT: No I didn’t know him. 35 CA: He was a very prominent guy in town, he owned drugstores. He owned a drugstore down on 25th Street, he owned Depot Drug before Tom Purdue did. WA: Vince. CA: Vince, Vincent Tasoni. WA: Yeah he knew the street well and another person, if you ever wanted to get lower 25th, was George Pappas. He’s sharp as hell. He comes to our gun meetings. CT: Oh does he? WA: He missed our last one but he’d been to what probably three before that? CA: Yes, and he has a brother, Thomas Pappas, that’s just as knowledgeable as George. WA: They lived there just like we did. You spend so much time down there, a lot of free time down there. CA: Yeah they grew up on 25th Street just like Ward and I. CT: When did 25th Street start its decline? When did it start heading down or cleaned up if you will? WA: I think the decline on it was just about the time we moved on out of there which was 1963. We moved over to 24th Street. CA: It was bad before that though. WA: Now this is hard to believe Charles, when you stop and think about it. At that time my uncle and dad, my granddad had passed away, and they owned our store with the apartment up above it and then the next one to it with the store. They owned the barber shop and Morry’s Men Store and the little shoe shop, they owned all of that stuff. When they decided they wanted to build a better building 36 there they sold everything for $54,000. They wouldn’t fight it, they wouldn’t go to court. If they had gone to court, like Gus went to court for a little itty-bitty hole in the wall jewelry store, he got almost as much money as we did. They got $44,000 out of that little store. I think that’s about the time that 25th Street started really declining? CT: Yeah because the time I got here in 1978, it was pretty much, skid row was vacant. Its come up really nicely now. Of course part of that was the railroad but part of it was like you say they cleaned it up. So there was no businesses to attract people anymore. WA: The servicemen and the breakdown you know. In its heyday was when the military was really strong and see that didn’t just end right after WWII. They had a carryover about eight years, you’d say was the railroad still being a real factor? CA: Another person you might want to talk to regarding this is Eddie Simone that owns the Kokomo. See his mother and dad owned the tavern right next to our store, it was called Lee’s Tavern. It was Lee and Sue Simone and so I can remember Eddie and his sister when they were just little kids on 25th Street. He’s never left, he’s down there to this day. CT: Yeah I know his wife Cindy real well. CA: There was a picture of her in the paper here just a while ago. CT: Oh yeah she busted a shoplifter. CA: Yes! CT: In fact I was at this awards thing, they gave me an arts award, and I said, “Did you know, it’s fun to see how Ogden has progressed from when I came here, 37 prostitutes would wave at you from the street and now if you do something wrong the shop owners find you and hog tie you to a garden chair on a sidewalk and then call the cops.” Which is a good thing, they’re taking care. WA: It’s all frontier justice again. CT: A little bit, yeah, exactly. WA: Either that or you look at some lawyer thinking, “Boy if this doesn’t stick I can sure sue the hell out of them.” CT: I think it’s a legal citizen’s arrest, it’s a fun thing. I need to go down and talk to Ed as well if somebody else hasn’t already. CA: Yes he would know a lot more. WA: Then George Pappas. George or Thomas, Thomas would be easier to get a hold of maybe. CT: It’s kind of interesting I was talking to Marcy Korgenski the other day and she was the deputy assistant chief. She said her mother used to tend bar on 25th Street. WA: Oh did she? I didn’t know that. CT: I didn’t know that either, I had no clue. WA: My daughter Amy, that was killed as a firefighter, She, Marge and Ted were really close friends. CT: Was Amy your daughter? Oh I am so sorry. I didn’t know how you were connected. Amy was such a nice person. WA: She would’ve turned fifty Sunday, October 12th. Yeah she was our youngest and she was so good to my wife and me. She was just everything. Course she loved 38 firefighting so we just went to the last of the old firefighters retirement parties which was about three weeks ago. CT: Yeah those guys are all pretty much gone now. All the people that were firefighters when she was here. WA: Yes they’re all retired. CT: I don’t know any of those guys down there now. WA: Yeah, but Margie was a good cop and Ted was a good firefighter. They’re good people. I wonder what tavern her mom worked at. CT: I don’t know, I need to ask her. In fact I’m going to sit down with Margie and do one of these things too. WA: Some of those taverns were pretty nice places, like the Club, that was pretty nice. They ran a pretty respectable business. CT: Yeah I went in there in the late 1970s and it was basically a bar, it wasn’t a bad place. WA: Now he always charged railroaders to cash a check, it was just a dime. He probably cashed more than anybody else. He was an interesting guy too because he was always selling whiskey on the side. CT: What was his name? WA: That was the old George Pappas. Old George Pappas came over and like a lot of Greeks they came over and they didn’t marry until they were fairly old. Then they went back and picked a bride up over in Greece. So he brought a bride back about twenty years younger than he was and preceded to have six, seven kids. George Pappas’ club would be the railroader’s number one place. 39 CA: Oh yes because it was the closest. WA: According to George Junior, for years he just used to charge a dime to cash a railroad check. CA: I know the Mint and Mecca was the change on the end of the check. The railroad had what they called a Rule G, if you went to work and were intoxicated or you were caught drinking on the job or coming to work drunk you were a rule H. WA: Rule H I think it was. CA: No it was G I’m thinking. Anyway, if you were drinking you were fired. So Pappas’ sold a little bottle of breath freshener and they did pretty good business selling that stuff to guys trying to clean up their act a little bit before they went down to herd a freight train out of Ogden. This depot was an exciting place during the war. It was just so busy you couldn’t believe it. What did they have, over twenty two trains a day came to this place? CT: I’ve heard the number anywhere from twenty to fifty to one hundred even. I guess it depends on how many sections each train had. CA: There was a horrible train wreck about 1943 where one train ran into another out by Lucin. CT: Oh that was on 1945. WA: End of 1945. CA: 1945? Was it that late? CT: It was right to the end of the war. CA: I don’t know why our dad did it to this day. It was on a Sunday and dad… 40 WA: Well our granddad had keys to the Red Cross Building in the Paramount Theatre. He went down to open it up. CA: He took us down to the depot here and when they brought the train in with the bodies on it they unloaded those bodies, they had them in canvas bags. They might have been body bags, but I think it was just whatever they had that they could put them in. I think there were twenty eight people killed. The crew on the one train was wiped out and they had them laid out like logs down there on the side of the track until they could get hearses and get them to a mortuary. CT: To the morgue at the top of the street there, yeah. CA: Is that where they took them? CT: Yeah that’s where they took them just up to that mortuary right up the street. CA: It was a horrible incident. CT: Yeah I’ve got that newspaper down there too. CA: We can remember that vividly can’t we? CT: I remember I was on the 50th anniversary of that. I actually found some of the people that were on the train back then and I did a story on them. WA: Oh did ya? It wasn’t a troop train. CT: No it was a passenger with passengers too. There were people in the passenger car and the engine went under it. A lot of those people were just scalded to death up there. It was horrible. WA: I think it had mostly military just because of the war. You know it must have been something keeping track of all those trains and everything else. I wonder who 41 had that responsibility. All those yards, you had four different unloading, four or five trails where if you wanted to go on a train you’d go down. CA: Oh yes you’d go underground. I think there were about four I think so they were on both sides of you when you came out. CT: Yeah there were eight or ten tracks down there I was told. In fact I’ve been looking back there just a little bit to see if there’s like a schedule that shows all those trains coming and going. Of course troop trains maybe they just came when they came and left when they left. WA: Yes but that’s how they all got stranded sometimes. They’d get stranded for a day and a half here. CA: That was awesome for a young kid to go down there and stand by the track and watch those big, steam locomotives. They were huge, come in hissing and making all that noise. WA: Have you had time to look through the scrapbooks down there? CT: Yeah I have actually. WA: They’re fantastic aren’t they? CT: They are. You talk about standing next to those steam engines down there though. The last time the 844 came in here I went and did that and you’re right, it’s awesome. You can stand next to a diesel locomotive, it’s nothing like standing next to that giant steam engine. I had a friend who stood next to that thing with me there and he just waved at it and said, “This is why we won WWII.” If you stop and think about it, how society can build something that big and that fast, they could go one hundred miles an hour. War is a battle of factories and we had 42 them back then. Just a fascinating time. I think about if I had a time machine I’d go back to the 1940’s in Ogden and see what it was like back then. CA: They had a passenger train that went to San Francisco, it went to Oakland actually and it was called the Streamliner. CA: That was the fastest passenger train I guess in the United States. It came across the Wyoming desert on the flats there by the red desert. They said it’d get up to 120 miles an hour and I know we’d go hunting and that thing would pass us like we were standing still. We were going down the highway doing sixty, but in that winter of 1948 it got stranded up in the Sierras with the snow and they had a heck of a time getting those passengers out of that thing. CT: I think I heard about that. CA: The train was called the City of San Francisco. WA: Right. CA: Boy if your dad had a job at the railroad when Ward and I were growing up your dad had a good job. CT: Ate well. WA: Yeah our grandfather on the Healy side, I guess he went on up through the ranks and was a brakeman, conductor and so on. They told him, “You want to make hedgehog? You want to be an engineer? No drinking.” So he quit drinking. Didn’t have a drop the rest of his life and he was a very successful engineer. Boy the engineers they were king of the hill. CA: Oh yes, they were. 43 WA: Still I always think of railroaders and I think of how many of those railroaders were drunks and yet they still maintained their work. CA: That was that incense they sold down at Pappas. CT: That’s what did it huh? CT: They still sell that I think. WA: Probably do. Well we’ve taken enough of your time. CT: Well gentlemen I’m running out of questions and I get the feeling we’re getting tired. I can’t begin to thank you enough.