Oral History Program Sterling Barton Larsen Interviewed by Allen Larsen 23 July 1980 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Sterling Barton Larsen Interviewed by Allen Larsen 23 July 1980 Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii 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. Archival copies are placed in University Archives. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description The Weber State College/University Student Projects have been created by students working with several different professors on the Weber State campus. The topics are varied and based on the student's interest or task for a specific assignment. These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ 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. 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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Larsen, Sterling Barton, an oral history by Allen Larsen, 23 July 1980, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an interview with Sterling Barton Larsen, conducted by Allen G. Larsen, his son. This interview took place at various intervals between July 10, 1980 and July 23, 1980 at the home of Sterling Larsen, 2154 North Main Centerville, Utah. AL: Dad, would you tell me when you were born and a little bit about your life, a little bit about your family and what it was like where you grew up? SL: I was born October 28, 1921, in Moab, Grand County, Utah to John Parley and Mary Viola Barton. Allen, your grandmother and your grandfather both had interesting histories in Utah as your grandfather was a Utah pioneer. Your grandmother was an original member of the "Hole in the Rock" group even though she was just a small girl when they went through. The Moab, I remember, is considerably different today than it was then. There were very few cars in town, dirt roads, a lot of sand and a lot of really desolate country. I was the seventh child born to my parents, and I presume that being the youngest of the family, I grew up considerably spoiled. Some of my earliest recollections were going morning and evening to the corral along with brothers and sisters and our cups to have two or three cups of good warm milk right from the faucet. My brother Reid, they tell me complained quite a bit about having to get up early in the morning to bring in a lot of wood to heat water the day I made my arrival. My brothers and sisters I guess spoiled me - I remember them putting me on old "Pet" before they'd go to school and I'd usually be there when they came home at lunch - and I'd be on her again in the afternoon, I rode that horse around town from my earliest recollections. We had big black walnut trees that surrounded the house and a whole lot of "Thorny trees" that surrounded the block. The "Thorny" trees had great big thorns two or three inches 1 long. We'd crack the walnuts, get a cup full and sell them for whatever we could to get a little spending money down to the old country store. Eggs were a means of barter - I got paid in eggs for doing odd jobs around the house - mopping, sweeping, whatever. Down to the store I'd go with my eggs to trade them for lemon drops or hard tack or popcorn right out of the old barrels at the store that you don't see anymore. You could usually find me up pretty early in the morning on Sunday morning, down around the pool hall, picking up old whiskey bottles to take in and redeem them, I think you got a nickel a piece for them. Of course, I guess most of that went towards candy too, I seem to have quite a sweet tooth. Being a farming community I remember going to the fields with my father, the horses seemed as big as elephants to me then. Dad was quite a lover of good horses - kept good horses to work with. I remember going to the fields with my older brother, my dad and whoever else would be along, haying. Hay was put on "slips" which was just a platform built right on the ground. You'd slide over the hay, put it up in big stacks in the field with big slings and a hay pole. Dad was a good fruit farmer - a good, all-around farmer. As a matter of fact he held the record at one time of raising corn in the state of Utah at 165 bushels to the acre. We raised peaches, cantaloupes, watermelons, all types of garden produce. Of course you had to raise most of your food in those days. You bought only those things in the store that you couldn’t provide or take care of locally. I remember going to the fields one day with Dad and he was pulling stumps out of the orchard with a three horse evener, I don't know if you know what a three horse even is but it's a big oak plank that's about 6 feet long and it's set up so that you have one single tree and a double tree. They use three horses on them. Dad hooked on the stumps and of course the horses broke the three horse evener. Not to be 2 out done out a day’s work he went and got the old treble trees off the old sulky plow that were made of steel. He came back and hooked them, onto the horses and hooked them on to the trees again and it wasn't long till the horses had just folded the treble trees up into a pile of junk. AL: Can you tell me about some of the experiences you had with your brothers and sisters and your friends? Who did you play with and what games did you play as a young boy living in Moab? SL: Well that was at a pretty early age, we left Moab when I was seven, in 1928. I can still remember some of the old childhood friends that I had, I seemed like we were always over to one of the big irrigation ditches or canals swimming. My brothers and sisters were quite a bit older so I really didn't play with them too much. It was more with the neighbor kids. We had some good neighbors though, Rowene and Albert Beach, I was always up early in the morning to give Albert an apple when he went to work. Rowene was one of the best sugar cookie makers in the county. She always had a good supply of sugar cookies. Like I say, our travel was by horse back most of the time or with the team and buggy. Trips to LaSalle would take a couple of days and it was fun traveling in the wagon, sleeping out at night. We lived in LaSalle in the summer time where Dad had another farm also. We had an old log cabin - our water was brought to the house in barrels from wells, Saturday night baths seemed to be about the most usual thing of the week. It was always interesting taking a bath in an old laundry tub. My mother made the soap in the fall. After the hogs were butchered, she'd render the lard and make it into soap. A lot of this soap was used not only for washing clothes but also for washing otherwise. Grandpa Barton died in the spring of 1925, and I remember going to the 3 funeral with my mother. He lived in Virgir, Utah, and we took the bus down old sandy roads to Monticello. That was a special occasion for me because I remember seeing a bear that day run across the road and up into one of the little gullies. I remember when the family got their first automobile, a 1927 Dodge sedan. There really wasn't any place to go, the town was so small that you could really walk around it in a very short period of time. But we had interesting little trips at night in the cool of the evening. We'd drive out across the Colorado River out to the big "turn around." Just a little trip out and back with the family was an "airing" or an outing. Travel in those days with autos was kind of precarious - particularly when you took a youngster like me with them. I remember when some of the family went to Salt Lake at an earlier period and they weren't in our car. They'd had a flat tire and just patched the tire and pumped it up to see if it had any more holes in it. About that time I jumped off the fender and lit on the tube. It wasn't long till it had another hole in it and I'm sure I had a very warm backside for short period of time. But it was an interesting period of time in our life, life was much more simple and easy, I remember probably my first church project was when I was about 5. We lived only one house from where the church house was being built and I was I presume, self-appointed water boy, I carried the drinking water to the men while they worked and while they built the church. The Colorado River area provided good side trips. The family would go down in the evening or on a Saturday and go fishing for catfish, pick up a few carp and other varieties. The valley was quite hot during the summertime. Course it provided one of the best locations for trowing watermelons and cantaloupes that there were. We always had a good watermelon patch that Dad planted near the road that was accessible to the kids in the town. This was their patch to steal watermelons from. The 4 family patch was planted in with the corn, I don't know whether the kids knew there were watermelons in the corn, but they respected it anyway - they were happy stealing watermelons out of the patch that was planted special for them. I only attended the first grade in Moab so really my early recollection of school life is not too good at this point. The people that I went to school with moved, away from Moab as did we in 1928. I've kept in touch with two or three of them over the years. Only one of them as far as I know has died at this point, and the others have drifted off. Of course, they have their families, we have our families and we just don't get together very often, we don't spend the time with phone calls and letters and keeping in touch the way we used to. Funerals and weddings in those days were, you might say, big events. People had to travel long distances and of course when they did they would stay for several days and the families had an opportunity to get together to reminisce and the kids to play. Dad being a farmer transported a lot of his own goods. It was a real interesting day when he would come home and you would clamber up on his freight wagon and get into his grub box. He always made sure that there were extra special goodies - lemon drops, ginger snaps, whatever. He would always make sure that enough was saved so that the kids could always raid the old grub box and have a good time with it. Dad's first wife and five of their children died when they were very young. He only had one daughter by the first marriage that lived to raise a family. She married a Ross Wilson and moved to Driggs, Idaho. I remember a visit there in 1923. That was a pretty good trip from Moab to Salt Lake, on up to Idaho, up to Driggs. It was a real fun time though. There's a big contrast between the Teton country and the Moab area. Lots of trees and grass and shade and good fishing. Dad had several cousins who were working up there as well as my half 5 sister and her children, I think it was that trip that made Dad decide that he was going to move to Salt Lake. He could see that there wasn't too much opportunity or advantage for the family to stay in Moab. My sister Golda had gone to Salt Lake and gone to the University of Utah and was a teacher, I think Golda probably liked to spoil me more than any of the other brothers and sisters. I remember my first pair of knickers that she brought me from Salt Lake. I tell you it was quite a wrestle and a struggle for them to get me dressed in those knickers with the little high top button shoes. I think I put up a pretty good struggle, but then being the smallest member of the family, that seemed to be my mode of dress on Sundays and best days from then on. There's some contrast between then and now. It seems that children were to be seen and not heard when they went to church. My mother had a good pair of knuckles and she could rap you pretty well on the head if you got a little unruly or wanted to be a little more talkative than you ought to be. The move to Salt Lake I presume was kind of traumatic on all of the family. I remember we moved into an apartment house just north of Sagle Gate and we stayed there probably for two or three weeks while the family was looking for home. Then we moved to Murray, Dad found a 51 acre piece of ground that had a nice home, barns and chicken coops on it. And of course, he was getting well along in years. He was approaching 65 at this point so went in to raising chickens; he kept a kept a beautiful garden. He could raise most of the produce; kept two or three milk cows; raised our own alfalfa; kept a hog or two. He would take the wheat to the mill to have it ground. We'd have the flour and bring home the bran and the "shorts" to feed the hogs. Course you always brought home the Germade mush. I think the families now days are missing a lot in not being able to eat off the farm the way the families did in the early days. I think we 6 had more wholesome food. It was better food. It was perhaps a real common diet, but I think by and large it was better for us to eat that way. It was 1929 when the Depression started. My recollections of the Depression was not one where I had to worry about providing for a family but just being a member of one. Everyone seemed more or less to be in the same boat and no one seemed to feel that they were poor or rich, either way. It was a case of people trying to work together, to live and to struggle along and do the best they could. Of course being on the farm, I think we had it a lot easier than perhaps some other people did. Golda was a school teacher and she still lived at home and Josephine was just finishing her nursing course and she was a nurse at L.D.S, Hospital, Reed had just graduated from high school and he was working for a firm in Salt Lake, We lived two miles to the south and west of Murray so it was a couple mile walk for the kids to catch the bus to Salt Lake - only in those days it was the old street car. It seemed to provide a pretty fast and reliable means of transportation. Those were hard times for lots of people. There were families around us who didn't really have what they needed- to buy clothes and to buy food for the family. Christmas was always meager. I remember one year that I came into possession of some duck eggs. I raised seven or eight great big ducks and I know that they went to the market that fall and I'm sure that they bought my seal that I got for Christmas that year. Like I say, Christmases were kind of meager but then we were happy to have what we could. We made a lot of homemade candy; made honey candy by the can full. We made taffy and it was always fun to pull hot taffy or honey candy, lay it out in long strips, let it dry and then crack it off in long pieces. I remember that the winters were particularly hard in the early 30's, we had a lot of snow and storms out of the northwest. The east-west roads would drift 4 or 5 feet 7 deep. Automobile transportation was out of the question except for on State Street, so the automobiles were left at home which meant you had to walk to and from there - it was a mile and a half to school. Many a morning I'd walk to school with the temperature 25° below zero. You'd walk that mile and a half to school and on one or two occasions you'd get there and find out that the old furnace or boilers had frozen up and were out of commission and then it would be a mile and a half back home in the cold. AL: Where was the school located that you first went to in Salt Lake? SL: Well, I went to Murray. I went to the old Bonaview grade school which was on about 2nd West and 40th South. Then I went to Liberty school for one year and it was on about 60th South and about 1st West. I attended Murray High School which was on State Street at about 5th South. AL: Which grades did these schools have that you went to first? SL: Well, I went to grade school which 2nd through 6th grade. The high school had 7th through 12th grades, Murray was not a large town; our class of graduating seniors in 1939 was one of the largest groups that Murray had ever had and our group was a little over 100. Course you knew everyone from the seventh to the 12th grade. We knew most of the people in town and you just got acquainted with everyone. There were only 3 grade schools in Murray at that time. AL: Can you tell me a little bit about what Salt Lake City was like when you first moved into it? How big was it? SL: Well, a lot of the old landmarks in Salt Lake have long since disappeared. There was a long gap between Murray and Salt Lake. There was perhaps a drug store and a gas 8 station at 33rd South and State. There might have been the same at 21st south and of course the old county hospital there at 21st South. I know they had an old Hippodrome at 9th south and I believe it was State Street. They had an old wrestling arena at 9th south and Main where Grand Central now is. Of course Salt Lake Theater has long since disappeared. The movie houses are probably what we remember best because that's where we spent a lot of time. Movies were 10 cents. The old Gem theater, the Star theater, where the Center theater is was an old Aurbach's store before they moved over to Main Street and 3rd. So, Victory theater has long since gone off from Broadway about where the Paris company is built. Some of the other theaters were located where they still are but they're under different names now. AL: You mentioned the trolleys - how did the trolleys work in those days - where did they run? SL: Well, the trolleys ran from Midvale on State street to Salt Lake; the avenues; up to the L.D.S. Hospital. They went up to the University of Utah, along 13th East, 7th East, 5th East. They ran out to the fairground. You'd take the trolley out to there, then you could catch the old train out to Saltair. Saltair was quite an entertainment place at the time. The beaches were a good place to swim. And of course the old giant racer at Saltair was one that anyone who's beer on it would never forget. It had a drop right down across the water that makes Lagoon's racer today seem rather mild and not too interesting after you've been on the other one. But we had a lot of fun at Saltair, of course the fairs in the fall were something to look forward to. I don't suppose that the hot dogs today could compare with the ones we had then, at least our taste buds were better and keener. It was always a treat to go to these kinds of places. We didn't have 9 these things every day of our life. You'll never have the pleasure of eating a package of Spencer popcorn, one of the best packaged popcorns probably that was made. It's unfortunate that someone still can't produce an item like that for people to have. AL: Let's go back to high school a little bit. Maybe you can tell me some of your favorite subjects in school, what you did for activities in school? SL: Well, Allen, in high school, I don't ever remember that I was too keen on studying. It seemed like I put in just about as much effort as it required to get through the class, but I did fairly well, quite by accident, I got started on a track career. One day when I was in the tenth grade (I was rather small in the tenth grade, I was only about 5'2" and I didn't, weigh very much) they needed someone to run the half mile with one of the fellows on the track team. So I proceeded to run with him and I beat him by quite a distance. And from then on, it seemed like the half mile was my undoing from then till high school and on through the University. My track experience in school was what helped me and benefited me in going to school. I hadn't intended to go to the University and I was working at a gas station in Murray the day we were to register. My sister Edith who was four years older than I am came to the station and told me in no uncertain terms that I was going to the University of Utah and proceeded, to take me by the hand and take me to the University and get me registered. I got a small track scholarship. Seems like our tuition was only about $37.50 a quarter so for a little over a hundred dollars a year you could attend the University. My track scholarship paid me about 25.00. I think my four years at college cost me about $650.00 and that included my books and like I say, I did have the scholarship that helped out. We were a little more fortunate on books, they didn't seem to go out of style quite as rapidly then as they do now. You could buy a 10 book for 3 or 4 dollars and use it for the quarter and then you could sell it for 50 cents, a dollar less than you paid for it and buy a used book from someone else. There's been considerable change at the University of Utah. There were only about 500 students the year I graduated in 1933. This is an interesting fact that I had the opportunity of graduating before I went into the service, I'd taken ROTC my freshman and sophomore year and we had just signed a contract with the government that we would continue taking ROTC as long as we were in school. This was along in about September of 1941 so when Pearl Harbor came about and the country was involved in war I never registered for the draft. They left us in school. We stayed there until we finished and then along about April they didn't know what they were going to do with us. This was April of 1943 so they decided that we could have our choice of where we wanted to serve. We could go into the Marine Corp., the Air Force, the Navy, the Army, whatever we wanted. But we had to just volunteer and enlist, I presume that about of our ROTC class elected to stay in the Army and so on May 5th we went up to Fort Douglas and we enlisted in the service. We went through the regular rigmarole of army physicals and shots and were outfitted with good old khaki uniforms, I remember we came out on a Saturday and that was the night of one of our University dances and of course our class shewed up in our good old moth ball smelling army clothes. I think your mother will remember that night - it's one that she's likely to forget, AL: Why don't you tell me about some of your favorite classes in school and any interesting things that happened in school at that time? SL: In high school, history was one of my favorite and better subjects. It seems I always did quite well in that, and when I went to the University I took some history classes and I 11 soon found out that history wasn't my main "Bag." I don't know how I became involved in accounting but I got enrolled in the school of business and I took economics and accounting. Consequently I wound up being an accountant. I do remember one of our interesting high school teachers, Paul B. Stone, he taught shop and woodwork. He was quite an interesting individual. This is back in 1937. He put a glass of water on the desk one day and he said that there was enough energy in that glass of water that when we figure out how to get that energy out of it there would be enough to drive an automobile to California. He said that they should be able to test and check engines. He said that they would make equipment that they would hook up to an engine to tell how it was running. I feel that he was a man who had a lot of vision and that he was looking down the road an awful lot farther than most people at that time. Most of my high school friends went to the University for a year or two and those who didn't take ROTC with me; it wasn't long before they were in the service. Some got scattered and lost and not too many of the people that I knew in high school I kept as lifelong friends. We moved from Murray in 1939 into Salt Lake to 16th East and 9th South. There was not too many homes up on the east side. The foothills were pretty bare. There was nothing in the fields between East High School to Sunnyside Avenue to the Zoo all the way to the hospital and the armory and the industrial complex. That was just all open field. So there's been some considerable changes that's gone one in that east bench since 1930. AL: Why don't you tell me what your first job was that you can remember, how much you got paid, a little bit about your first work experience? SL: Well, my first work experience that I can remember was when I was about 12. That was in the beet fields out in Taylorsville, Bennion, West Jordan. Anyone who hasn't had an 12 opportunity to thin beets and bend their back in the sun has missed a good part of their life, I wasn't too crazy about thinning carrots, weeding onions, and doing this kind of work, but we soon graduated from that into the fields and the grain fields. The grain was cut, put up in a bundle, stacked in the field, then it was hauled from the field and put in a big stack. Then in the fall, the thrashing crews would come around with their big old steam engines. They'd set alongside the stacks - they would usually have two or three of them stacked right close together so they could pull in between them - throw the grain sheaves into the thrasher, and haul out the grain. Then we got a little more modern, we got some different types of thrashers. We'd haul directly from the fields. We'd throw the bundles into the wagon, pitch them into the conveyor and the hoppers then haul the hay and the grain away. All the hay was pitched by hand. It was loaded onto the wagons, taken into the barns and taken up into the barns in great big stacks. That was always interesting. It was hard, hot work, but I did that until I graduated from high school in the summertime. Course the pay wasn't too great. Some of the kids felt they were lucky if they would get hired for a month - then they would get 30 dollars a month and room and board. We felt that we'd had a pretty good day if we could make a dollar. Work all day long, sometimes from 5 o'clock in the morning until 9 or 10 o'clock at night - on those days you might make 2 or 3 dollars. But 2 or 3 dollars bought an awful lot more. We'd ride our bicycles. I remember my first bicycle, that was quite interesting. I gathered up a frame from one fellow and a wheel here and a wheel there, handlebars from someplace else and a seat. And of course you always kept adding. Pick up fender or buy something extra to put on it. That's how we went to work was on our bicycles. AL: Do you remember your first date? 13 SL: Oh, I remember my first date - it was my childhood sweetheart. She was in the fourth grade and I was in the fifth grade. I threw away here, just this last spring, a great big Valentine that she gave me. We stayed quite good friends until I went to high school and then we seemed to get lost. We never dated after high school except for once in 1933. That was the last time I dated her. AL: Back in those days, what would you do for a date? What was a typical date like? SL: Well, a typical date was probably more than anything roller-skating. We had a lot of fun at Jerry's gym. There were a couple of good roller rinks. There was one on State Street between 4th and 5th South, I'd forgotten about that. I can't remember the name of it. Down at Jensen's hamburger shop on 17th South on the corner of State, we'd buy a hamburger for a nickel, malts for a dime, Big Hire's root beer for a nickel. If you bought two hamburgers, a malt and a Hire's root beer, I can guarantee you it was just about all you could eat. Transportation in those days was a lot of fun. I remember I was a junior in high school and I had a friend that lived just around the corner from me. He and I bought a '29 Chevy. A little black coup. We paid 39 dollars for it. My mother and dad wanted to know why we wanted an old car like that. This was 1938 and Lee Nichols, my friend's father died that winter and he had a Star coup which he kept. I bought the old Chevy from him. My sister had just sold the family car and bought a '35 Plymouth. Then we traded the '35 Plymouth and bought a '37 Dodge, I remember that first winter. Every cold morning I had to get up and get out my little black Chevy, and push the Dodge down the road to get it started, I'm sure there was a purpose for buying that old car. In those days some of the mechanical problems was just a matter of knowing what to do. Finally a mechanic said, "You don't need to have problems with that car, bring it in and 14 I'll fix it for you." So we did and he drilled a little tiny hole in the carburetor. I don't know what it did but after that we didn't have any more problems starting that old '37 Dodge. AL: Why don't you tell me about how you met Mom and the dates you went on with her? SL: Well, I met your mother in April of 1943. I noticed this cute little brown-haired, browneyed gal walking around the campus so I made it a point to be at the library when she was there. Finally I got acquainted with her schedule and found out where she lived. I called her up one night and told her who I was - she lived on 11th East and about 30th South - and asked her for a date. So I went on my first date with her in April. I told her that night that I was going to marry her and I guess she didn't take too much stock in that, she didn't believe me anyway. She look a little in disbelief. AL: Where did you go on your date that night? SL: Well, she could probably tell you more about that than I could, I don't remember too much about where we went or what we did. It was only two or three weeks later that we went to that military ball all dressed in our khaki and moth ball suits. But it wasn't long after that we graduated from the University on June 6th and we were in regular army then. They had taken the old Nielsen field house and had taken out the indoor track, the archery range and the basketball floor and put in a solid oak floor. They had bunk beds lines up row on row, I don't know how many hundreds of beds they had in there. They built extra showers, toilet facilities and they had the ASTF program going - bringing in people to go to school. And in as much as most of us lived in the Salt Lake area we still lived at hone even though we were in the service. The people that were from out of town lived in the Nielsen Fieldhouse. We had a bunk there that we could occupy if we wanted. We fixed the meals in the old union building. That's where we mostly ate our 15 lunch, we still had most of our breakfasts and suppers at home. At the University in ROTC we trained in horse drawn artillery. We didn't have mechanized units at that point. We just had the old French 75's that, like I say, were horse drawn. It was quite an interesting experience to learn to be a cannoneer - learn all the facets of army life from the other standpoint. We missed our summer training as Juniors. We didn't get go to our 6 week summer encampment, because they didn't have any place to send us. So at the end of our senior year, I remember we took the horses to pasture. We left the University of Utah early one morning and rode the horses to Park City, on through Park City over to Heber to the summer grounds. That's quite an experience to ride a horse for about 60 miles through the mountains in one day when you think you've been used to doing a lot of riding. They sent us to DCS at Fort Sill. We left in the latter part of July for Fort Sill this was July of 1943. We took an oil burner through southern Utah, through Kansas and down into Fort Sill Oklahoma. That was quite an experience, arriving there, I remember the temperature was 116 degrees that day - quite a change from the area that we had here. AL: Before we get very much farther into your military career, why don't you tell me a little bit about how your health was through your life? SL: Well, Allen, when I was a real young man in Moab, I had whooping cough, I can remember that to this day. Whooping cough is something that people just don't want to have. From that day I don't like bullion, I just don't even want to see it. Seems like that's all I could tolerate - that's all I ate and that's all I had. Probably if it hadn't have been that my mother was such a good practical nurse I might not have survived that siege. I had a lot of bronchitis, a lot of congestion and lung problems as a young person. I know it 16 was because my mother was able to take care of the family the way she did that we were able to survive times like that. I remember about when I was twelve, about 1933 or 1934 my leg started to give out on me - I'd be walking or running along and my leg would just give out on me. The family took me into Salt Lake to see a Dr. Tyree, a bone specialist and he checked me over and he determined that I had osteomyelitis. They wanted to send me to the hospital for an operation, but my mother would have none of this without her practical experience being put to use a little bit first. So she took me home, made me a bed in the kitchen by the old coal burning stove and there I stayed for 6 weeks while she hot packed me. She cured me of this osteomyelitis - I never had to have an operation. And of course it was always a concern - family always wanted me to watch what I was doing - not to get any knocks or bumps or what have you but I was just about as rowdy a little boy as come along. And so I went into running I'm sure the family had a little concern about how my legs were but my health from then on seemed to improve and get better, I never became famous as a half-miler, I think I could have done much better than I did and I think that if circumstances had been otherwise I would have done much better. The year I was a sophomore at the University there was a Henry Born from BYU who had set the conference record in the half mile - he was a senior that year. In one of the dual meets earlier in the year I had beat Henry. Of course, they rated it as being a fluke - that I couldn't out-run him. So when we had a dual meet with Provo I was going to prove to them that I could beat him. Our first lap was rather slow and a little disappointing I'd had a little problem with my one leg that spring. It had been just during that week and the coach had me lay off and take it a little easy. But anyway, I stepped out and I was going to show them how that last lap should 17 be run. I ran about another 220 yards and my leg started to tie up and at the 660 mark I had to quit. My one knee had just frozen stiff, I couldn't bend it, I couldn't do anything with it. I spent a miserable rest of the year and rest of the summer. There was very little I could do, I couldn't bend my leg. I did an awful lot of walking - I walked as much as I could, I think if you’ve been in good physical condition and then have to stop and not do anything, it’s kind of aggravating and irritating. But that fall when I went back to school, my leg still bothered me and I went down and had x-rays of it. They found out that I had had a broken leg. It was a green break - it wasn't a clean break all the way through — it had just tied my knee and leg muscles up. I was able to work it out that winter but I never really came back to the running form that I had before. I think that if it hadn't have been for that one incident I could have gone on and been a fairly good half miler. I really didn't have to run all that hard, there weren't too many around who could beat me. When teams from Nebraska or Kansas or California would come through, then I found the competition a little better. I usually had to settle for second then because I didn't have the determination and I wasn’t in the condition that I should have been. When I went for my Army physical all I had to tell them was that I had had osteomyelitis and I would not have had to go into the military service. But I felt that if I was able to participate in sports, if I was able to run, and play basketball and do all those thingsthen I belonged in the army where everyone else was going. That's what I elected to do and to this day, it has never been a record on my military record as far as the army's concerned. 18 AL: Right now I want to go back and talk about the early- 30’s and 40's - maybe a little more about the recession. Maybe you can tell me a little more about your life at that point in time. SL: Well, Allen, from a youngsters standpoint I don't think the Depression had all that much effect on us. Your friends and neighbors generally had about the same problems. Wenever seemed to worry about whether we had too many or too little clothes, too much things to do. We could always make our time. We spent a lot of the summer evenings as neighborhood kids playing kick-the-can, run sheep run, tag and just enjoying life. The neighbors all had gardens. We'd wander from one place to another with a salt shaker in our pocket. We had green apples and tomatoes, carrots, whatever we could pick from the garden. Automobiles were always a fun thing to us. Our primary means of transportation from where we were to either Murray or Salt Lake. Gasoline was selling for about 15 cents a gallon and usually about one gallon was about all we could afford to buy at one time. I remember one evening we were going roller skating and our car was out of gas. One of the fellows came up with about a gallon of cleaning solvent, naptha gas, so we put it into the car. We had the prettiest blue engine as we rolled into town that you'd ever want to see. We had flame coming from every place on that car, but it ran. AL: How old were you at this time? SL: I was about sixteen, we had a lot of fun. AL: Were you driving at that time? What were the driver's license laws at that time? 19 SL: Oh, the driver's license laws were when you were sixteen, I don't know that they paid too much attention out on the farm area if they were driving before they were sixteen or not, I was sixteen when I got my license and was able to drive. One or two of my friends were a year, year and a half older, so we'd had cars for a year or two. You always had to be ready to repair an automobile, to make sure that you either got going or got home. You always carried a little bailing wire - good old “Mormon buckskin." It seemed like if you had a wrench and a screwdriver, an extra axle and a wheel-puller you could manage to keep the car running and get where you needed to go. We had a lot of fun as a family. Seemed like an older brother or sister was always getting married and every Sunday was, you might say, family homecoming. The family would come back home, have a good family dinner, make a freezerful of ice cream and have cakes, pies and puddings in the house. Your grandmother, you never really had the opportunity to know her, was an exceptionally good cook. She baked bread every day of the week except on Sunday and there was always a variety of custards, puddings, doughnuts, cake, pie or whatever for us to eat, We were a little over-indulged in the pastry side of life but the family did have a good time. I always managed to get in at least two Sunday dinners. Reed lived just a block and a half from us and he worked every other Sunday and they either ate earlier or later than we did. So I'd eat dinner at home and then go to his place or vice-versa. One Sunday I had it all worked out so that I'd have dinner with Clair and Vaughn, dinner with Reed and Mary, and then come home to eat. But when I came home, why, Clair happened to be there and told my mother that I'd had dinner with them so that spoiled the afternoon - mother wouldn't let me have dinner with them. But I had quite an appetite, I could eat right along with the best of them. 20 AL: Right now I'd like to move into the area of how you get involved in the war, places where you lived, SL: We left Salt Lake in late July and went to Fort Sill. When we arrived and were waiting for an OCS class they put us to good army use digging fox holes, building fortifications using camouflage. We entered OCS on August 16 in class 91 at the Field Artillery School, Fort Sill, Oklahoma. We had about 160 that started in our class and it ran for 17 weeks. The weeks were broken up into segments where you would study communications, motor vehicle transportation, signal communication, survey, mathematics and field problems and just general all around knowledge that you need for a field army. AL: Had the war broken out at this time? SL: Oh yes, the war had broken out in December, 1941, and this is almost two years later. Fort Sill was interesting place. It was hot, it was wet, and it was dry, it was cold. It was one of the posts where we said you could be walking in mud to your boot tops and have dust blowing in your face. OCS was rather tough, it was a rough session. They put a lot of pressure on you to keep you on your toes, to keep you working, to keep you busy. They wanted to make sure that you could take the stress and whatever came along with it. Fortunately we were with a group from our University, probably about 90 of us. We also had some from Oregon and Washington. We had very much the same in common, we were out of school, there were people who had returned from the Southwest Pacific to go to OCS so we became acquainted with them. As you recall, you became acquainted with Larry Drew and his Margaret and their family, Larry was one of the good friends that I made at OCS, kept track of during the war, and we followed them 21 afterwards and we're still good friends. You know their kids, we've been to their home and visited them. I think that you've enjoyed this association. Anyway, we did build good friendships with people and we enjoyed it. We graduated from OCS on December 16th, 1943, and of course we were sent home for the ten day leave before we went to our new post, I had applied for pack artillery school at Fort Sill which was to start in January. During this period I had been corresponding with your mother, we'd written letters. We were getting serious as to where we might consider marriage and when I came home from OCS, why I went and purchased a ring and I think that it was about Christmas Eve that I asked your mother to marry me. Much to my surprise she said that she would. AL: We were just talking about when you proposed to mother. Could you tell me a little bit about your wedding, where you went for your honeymoon? SL: That was just the proposal in December of 1943, we didn’t get married till May of 1944, so we've got five or six more months of army life and some interesting things to talk about. AL: O.K. Then tell me about some more of your army experiences. SL: We had one interesting trip home from OCS. Seems that transportation was a real problem in the group of our cadets had arranged for a bus trip from Fort Sill to Salt Lake City. We all clamored aboard the bus and we got into Childress, Texas, which was probably 75, 80 miles from Naughton, Oklahoma. We pulled into the bus station and they said "This is as far as we go," And we said "What do you mean, this is as far as we go?" They said that that's as far as their bus line went. Then we discovered that there were no reservations made ahead, no buses awaiting us, nobody knew anything about it. The bus company there did the very best they could. They rounded up several old 22 buses and after several hours we were heading for home. Believe me, it's a long way home from Childress, Texas, through New Mexico, through southern Colorado and up through Utah in buses that were out of date by 10 or 15 years. They would barely make it up some of the hills. As a matter of fact, a time or two we had to get out and almost literally push to get the buses up. Being young, we took it all in good spirits and after about 3 harrowing days we did arrive home. And I think we enjoyed it. AL: Do you remember what date this was? SL: We left on the morning of the 17th of December, and I imagine that we got home on about the 20th. While I was home on leave I got word from the Army that the pack school class for January had been cancelled. They had set it up some of the candidates that would be coming out of an OCS class wouldn't have graduated by that time. So my orders were changed and I was assigned to go to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. There were 5 of us in the group that had become good friends and we had made a pact that we would all go together to Fort Bragg. Course gasoline was rationed at that time - you had only so much gasoline that you could go on, a hard time getting tires and parts if you needed them. But anyway, on Christmas night we left Salt Lake heading for Denver to pick one of our party up at the old brown Palace hotel in Denver. We got as far as Little America and the car overheated - started to boil. We got out and found that we'd blown a head gasket and had a leak in one of the hose lines that they hadn't tightened enough when they put the heater in the car. So we had to do the best we could - we limped into Rock Springs. It took them most of the next night to pull the heads off the car and repair the gaskets but we were in Denver at the time we were supposed to pick this other fellow up. Then we headed for Memphis, Tennessee, and drove straight 23 through. It's a real interesting experience to be in the Great Smokey Mountains along 12, 1, 2 o'clock in the morning. Little mountain communities, everything closed up tight, no gas stations open, gas gauge reading almost empty. You'd sweat it out till you could finally find a place that you could buy gas. Anyway, from Tuesday morning until Thursday night I drove most of the way to Memphis. We finally arrived there and stayed that night. Everybody else wanted to go out on the town but I was too tired. I took a shower and I went to bed. Along about 12 o'clock I was aware that there was some people standing around my bed. They'd tried ringing the doorbell, pounding on the door - they couldn't wake me. They finally went and got the building engineer who took the door off its hinges. We came in and other people came in - they just wanted to see what sort of person could sleep through all that confusion and all that noise. But then like I say, the rest of them had slept most of the time and I had done most of the driving. And I was just getting the well-earned sleep that I deserved. We left that day and drove to Chattanooga, Tennessee. We stayed there that night. It happened to be New Year's Eve and I can't say that I enjoyed all that great of a New Year's Eve down in the south, I spent most of my time in bed again. We left the next day and drove into Fort Bragg to report in. When I got into Fort Bragg I had orders that I was to report back to Fort Sill for the pack school - it had been put back on again, just put back a week. So I immediately took the steps I had to clear the post, try and get reservations on the train, bus, whatever to get back to Fort Sill. When I got back to attend this class I found that there were two other individuals from OCS who were there from Salt Lake City. I'd gone to the University with them so it was quite enjoyable to know that you'd be in a group of people that you knew. There were only 11 of us in the course. The head instructor was a 24 captain who had been called back into the service. He had been a retired Master Sergeant. He was a real old time Army sergeant. And believe me, it was an eye-opener to serve under an individual like him. He was as rough and rugged as the day was long and he expected everybody to be just as tough as he was. Course, pack school required an awful lot of physical conditioning as well as classroom and book study. You'd have to learn how to take care of the animals, you had to learn horseshoeing, go through a corrective shoeing course. We had to be able to build a shoe, a complete fitted shoe, from a straight piece of iron. So we learned to use the forge, we learned to do what was necessary. We had to be able to watch the animals to see how their feet "broke" so that we could correct them so that they wouldn't interfere with them. An animal is no use if he flings his feet and one interferes with another and he gets himself cut and bruised. We had to learn how to pack and how to fit saddles to the animals. The pack saddle weighed 105 pounds and it had thick fitted sides and a series of thongs that went through it. You had to be able to take this saddle and by taking padding out or adding padding to it, put it back on the animal and get it where it would fit. Then you'd put flour on his back and set your saddle on it and see where it would take the four off. After you got them fitted as close as you could then you'd put the pack on their back when you were out using theme. When you'd bring them in, you'd take the pack off of their back. Any spot that was dry, not sweaty would tell you that that was a pressure point, too much pressure was being put on and the blood supply was being shut off. This would result in a loss of hair and a deep sore on the animal. You'd either loose the animal or if you had a good pack master he'd be able to take the padding out of the saddle and be able to fit it around that sore and that sore would actually heal while the 25 animal was being fitted. From an officer's standpoint we had to know all of these things we had to be able to do them. We had to be able to put the loads on the saddles properly. We had to be able to lash them. Using ropes is very hard on the hands. It takes an awful lot of conditioning. It takes a lot of rope pulling, a lot of weight lifting. We had a lot of walking, and a lot of field trips. Then we had a lot of fun - if you can call fun swimming on Lincoln's birthday in a lake at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. That's quite an experience. But the old pack master showed us how to build a raft out of pack saddles. This was accomplished by putting down a tarp, putting two rows of five pack saddles each, lashing them together with the lifting bars, taking them out and putting them in the water. Put your equipment and your gear in it and you could float that across a river or stream or whatever you needed to get across. It was a way of getting over. We had a lot of fun in doing this, we had a good riding class, we had a good instructor, a young lieutenant from Colorado, We did a lot of cross country riding and jumping. We learned a lot about animal management, animal care. Quite an experience to take a horse down an incline that was so steep that his back feet are a couple of feet out in front of his front feet. And he's literally sitting on his tail and he just slides to the bottom, while you sit on his back. We had to learn to swim the horses, to be with them, know where you had to be, how to swim them across the stream or where ever you wanted to go. They had a place at Fort Sill that was called Cavalry Cut. It was along the Medicine River in the Medicine Bluffs. It seems that during the Indian wars a cavalry troop had been caught on these bluffs by the Indians. The Indians knew that there was no way off of the bluff but under the cover of darkness the cavalry took their animals down this cut in the side of the bluff. Well, this old captain had always figured that he was going to take a pack 26 class down that cut and I believe that he elected to take ours because we did have some boys that were used to the outdoors. We had a lieutenant Hayden from Missouri that was a top hand with mules. We had some from the northwest and Utah who had been in the mountain and skied and of course I'd been around animals most of my life. So we went out and looked down Cavalry Cut. If you ever have an opportunity to look down the Hole In The Rock that was just about what you were looking at going down. Cavalry Cut. Perhaps I know a little bit how my grandfather felt when he took his team down the Hole in the Rock. But anyway, we went out and started doing a little pioneering along the trail, moving some of the looser, bigger rocks. We cut in a switch back or two and then came the time that he said that we were going to take our animals down. So the first trip we walked them down. We got the mules down about half way on one of the little switch backs that we'd cut and we had two mules that actually laid down right on the trail. They just didn't want to go any farther. But after a little bit of coaxing, seeing that we were going to go - usually an animal will go anyplace that you will go if you will take the halter shank and lead them where you are going, never turn around and look at him, never look back. This builds confidence in him that you know where you are going and he will follow you. And usually a pack animal can go anywhere that you can go without using your hands. So the next day we came back to the cut with loads on the mules. We didn't use any gun pieces, we used sacks of grain, boxes - and we packed the mules down. About a third of the way from the bottom, one of the mules lost his footing and he proceeded to roll head over tail down the cut. We expected that when he hit the bottom that that would be the last of that mule. But when we got to the bottom he was standing under a tree eating grass, going on like nothing had happened. 27 So we at least proved that Cavalry Cut could be packed. All pack classes after that had to follow and take their pack trips down Cavalry Cut. We had some interesting trips out through the military reservation. It's interesting to go out through an artillery range. The trees are all bare of leaves and most of the limbs. You'd see shells stuck in tree trunks halfway through limbs, unexploded. You walk out through the area and the mules kick up an unexploded round and of course these were subject to going off at any time. But with good fortune we never had anyone hurt. When we were in OCS they kept telling us not to touch any duds, this is ammunition that hasn't exploded in the field. On our tour out through the field on demonstrations, a party had picked up a 37 millimeter round and brought it back to their hut and in the course of playing with it, it exploded. The camp was covered, with pictures of the individuals and what remained of them after a 37 millimeter shell had exploded in their hands. The airplanes always like to buzz us, they seemed to like to scatter the mules. To see what kind of harassment they could give us. The artillery post was also a training post for liaison pilots - trained to fly their aircraft and be forward observers. So they'd come over the trees low and swoop down on the mule and try and scatter them for us - which they usually did. One day, one of the groups had had enough harassment so the Captain said, "Everybody pick up a rock and throw it." Well, as luck would have it, one of the rocks hit the propeller and they knocked the plane out of the sky. That pretty well ended the harassment of the mule trains by the aircraft in the future. A mule doesn’t trot like a horse, a mule ambles and when he ambles he has a slow swinging gait that averages about 6 or 7 miles per hour. If they're being herded and you’re on horseback that is one thing but if you're walking with your mules you walk about like they do. A mule can't pack a 250 lb. gun load and a 28 105 lb. pack saddle and keep in on his back indefinitely, so when you move with mules, you move in a hurry. It was nothing to figure on making a ten mile march in 2 hours. This kept you on your toes and kept you moving. They had some long horn cattle on the Fort Sill military reservation. My first experience at seeing first hand long horned cattle living out on the open range you might say. And believe me, they're something to look at. You just can't believe the length and the twist and turn of those horns and the fact that they stand just about shoulder high with a horse and they're not too friendly. They really don't care too much for you or the horses or anything else. So you give them a wide berth and you leave them alone. Mules are a real interesting lot. We had two in particular, one was called Stacy and the other one was called Pinky. He was called Pinky because he was pink with some gray spots on him. These two mules were about as fun loving critters as you'd ever find, They were always sparring with one another, nipping, kicking, biting and you'd think that they were going to tear each other's heads off but they were as gentle as little lambs - they would no more hurt each other as anything. Stacy was always fun to work with. He'd catch you unawares and he'd nip you on the butt or on the ribs or along the arm just enough to let you know that he "had" you but not enough to hurt you, I laid my field jacket down one day when we were putting them on the picket line and I had an apple in my pocket. And I can assure you that he get a hold of my jacket and he tried to eat that apple while it was in my field jacket. You can imagine what a jacket would look like after it had been gummed and chewed and munched on. Stacy would follow along with the herd but he walked where he wanted to walk. If he decided that he wanted to be number two in the line, he was number two - if he wanted to be last he was last. If he wanted to walk in the middle, he walked in the 29 middle. We'd cut him out on purpose from number two spot and chased him to the back of the pack and it wasn't long until he was number two again. He ever walked in the same spot twice. If he was number two today he might be number five tomorrow, but that was where he wanted to walk. One day we were laying wire with him, we had two spools of telephone wire, one on either side and a third one on the top. When the first one ran out we connected on the second spool and started to reel out the wire. But he hadn't gone more than two or three steps and he stopped and he looked at that reel and he turned his head around and he looked at that other reel because now the opposite reel was turning. He took another half dozen steps and he'd stop and he'd turn back around and he finally figured it out and he went on his way. Because of a load that a mule carries, usually about 350 pounds, if they lay down they can't ordinarily get up on their own. Every time we took a break and go sit in the shade, old Stacy would come over and lie down with us. He'd sit there and look at you just like he belonged a part of the conversation as much as anyone else. And when we got ready to go again old Stacy would take those big front feet and he was just big enough and strong enough that he could take that pack saddle, load and all and he could get back on his feet. Well, it wasn't long till the middle of March rolled along and our pack class was completed. I had hoped to be assigned to Camp Hale or to one of the pack units in Colorado but I wound up back at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, again. I wanted to get out of Fort Bragg I wanted to go to a pack school, so I applied for a battery executive course, which was a one month course. I got accepted to the course in May. I got leave and came home and talked things over with my prospective wife and we decided that we would get married in Sill when I went to battery exec. school. So she came to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, about 30 the 12th of May - we applied for a marriage license, had our blood tests and got everything arranged. On the 20th of May we got married in the old post chapel in Fort Sill, Oklahoma. I finished battery executive school and I found myself back again at Fort Bragg. Right at this time, the battle of the bulge was on in Europe and they were in dire need of infantry officers. Field artillery officers were being sent to the Fort Benning School for a crash course in infantry tactics. But because I had a military specialty with my pack school and my battery exec. school they didn't send me. I was bound and determined that I was going to get with a pack unit so once again I applied for a pack school at Fort Riley, Kansas. So in July I went back to school at Fort Riley through a Cavalry school pack course. It was somewhat different in that in this case we were from a mounted unit from a cavalry point of view rather than from a field artillery where most everyone walked. At the completion of the pack school, our class was then sent to Fort Ord, California, for some further training. Loading operations, tactics, and the like. We then were sent to Riverside Calif. This was in October and then we were sent overseas. I left your mother in Salt Lake. AL: Did she stay in Salt Lake or did she move around with you? SL: Oh, she went with me until I went to Fort Ord, California, when we left Fort Riley Kansas. We stopped in Salt Lake and she stayed there. I went on to riverside and eventually we boarded a transport. Our destination was unknown at the time that we got on. But we soon found out that we were heading for India. We were on a general class ship, the USS John Pope. We had about 5500 troops aboard and we traveled alone. This hip had about the fire power of a destroyer and it could cruise about 22 knots - it could outrun a submarine. We skirted the Hawaiian Islands and went around the southern tip of 31 Australia. We pulled into Kilbourn, I had been assigned as a compartment officer and arrangements had been made for those that had worked on the ship over to get off at Melbourne. But some of the high ranking officers found out that some members were going ashore and they made such a fuss that it wound up that if everybody couldn't go, nobody went. So all we got to see of Australia was what we could view from the port. AL: What was life like on the ship? Anything noteworthy there? SL: It was real interesting, you might say. You had two meals a day, you had breakfast and supper. The holds were jammed with people - the bunks were made literally from the floor to the top. It was hot and it was crowded. People were seasick - you literally had to force them out of their bunks and topside. You had salt water baths, there wasn't any fresh water. We had little or no PX services. They had oranges, or apples or a few cookies or whatever. But most of the time people spent playing cards or sleeping. Of course as soon as it was dark we were headed below decks and the ship was blacked out. We had one or two instances where they picked up two German submarines and I never knew that a big ship could move that fast. It was literally like stepping on the accelerator of your car when they poured the coal to the old thing to get it moving. We zig-zagged for many hours till they felt that they'd lost them. About three days out of Bombay, India, we had 2 British Corvettes pick us up and they escorted us in. All in all, life aboard ship wasn't too bad. Fortunately I never got seasick. We did have one terrific storm - it's hard to realize that a ship that's over 900 feet long that waves would come back over half the length of that ship. And we had a rather violent storm down in the South Pacific. It was interesting to watch for whales. They'd follow the ship and the 32 sharks would follow the ship waiting for garbage to be dumped overboard at night. You'd also run into flying fish. Other than that we spent 30 days just getting to Bombay. AL: I understand that you did some gambling on ship, why don't you tell me a little bit about that? SL: Well, I didn't do too much gambling aboard ship, fortunately I didn't take too much money with me. I only took about 25 dollars aboard but I got bored so I played a little bit of cards with the rest of them. Fortunately, I started to win and I presume that I probably won about 600 or 700 dollars before I proceeded to lose it all. By the end of the trip, why I had paid for my PX supplies and that was about all. There was one interesting hand that I had. I had been dealt four 6's and the two people who were between me kept doing all the bidding and I just kept following. When they were through I just raked in the pot. Course they started to protest but I told them I didn't think that they could beat four 6's with what they had been bidding on. They were a little chagrined to see that. Gambling wasn't one of my past times - I didn't do too much of it. The first morning in Bombay we boarded a train heading for Ledo in upper Assam, and believe me their first class accommodations were something to behold. They consisted of more or less a box car with an aisle down one side and wooden benches going most of the way across. That's where we sat, that's where we slept. We had cold rations, C rations, to eat on the way. The only drinking water that we had came from the engine. When they would stop, we would take our helmets and get a helmet full of water and let it cool down. We used that helmet literally for shaving, for everything. When we pulled out of the rail yard out of Bombay that was a sight to behold. There was a multitude of Indians with turbans and their sheets for their wraps. They swarmed over the train like a bunch of flied offering to 33 sell you any and everything. One soldier wound up with a baby. A woman had literally sold it to him. They would flip a knife in front of your nose and press a button and out would jump a blade a foot long. They could speak very little English and we could speak none of their native language. People slept when and where night overtook them. You'd pull into a rail station early in the morning and the platform would be literally covered with sleeping figures. Invariable 2 or 3 of them would die right where they were sleeping that night. The station masters would go around and wake everybody up and get them moving and out of the way and there were always one or two that didn't make it. When the train would come to a river, it stopped because there weren't any rail bridges across. We would either be ferried across or we would take our hand luggage and carry it across the bridge and board the train on the other side of the bank. We crossed three major rivers this way. We were on the train 8 days and 7 nights. It was a real experience. It seemed that most of the gambling money from the ship had wound up in the hands of 2 or 3 people who were aboard this train. They literally played cards 24 hours a day. The money would change hands from one individual to another and I believe it all wound up in one person's pocket when we finally arrived at Ledo. When we got into Ledo, my first interest was in getting a bath. We hadn't had a bath in 8 days. And believe me after that long, you want a bath. You wouldn't think of a place like that being cold even in December but it was cold. It was during the rainy season, it was wet and muddy. The mud over there is real slick. I spent December of 1944, Christmas, in Ledo in upper Assam, We had the normal variety of jungle animals. There were tigers on the edge of the camp, there were wild boar, and there were cobras. They'd kill a cobra or two every now and then right in amongst the tents. One individual had a litter of 34 pups in his tent and he woke up to see a leopard in his tent. That was the last night he let the pups sleep in the tent with him. There were stories and pictures showing people being treed or being chased in their jeeps by tigers. They weren't the friendly variety. We thought that while we were here we would do a little hunting so we went down and applied for a hunting license and we proceeded to check out a rifle and went out through the jungle hunting. I can say I didn't really relish the idea of going through cane breaks that were 15 to 20 feet tall following paths that were made by elephants, seeing tiger prints in their tracks that were bigger than your hand. There were wild boar all through the area. Fortunately, the day we spent out in the jungle hunting we got nothing more than good and wet from crossing streams and picking up a few blood suckers. AL: What were your duties at this time? What were your immediate objectives in being over there? SL: Well, we knew that we were replacements for a pack unit but we didn't know where they were or when we were going to join them. Shortly, I don't remember the date, probably about the 22, 23 of December, I was given orders to go to the airport and I got on a pipe plane. They were building a pipeline from Ledo into Kun Ming, China. There was some army units that had been fighting the Japs in Burma and they were pushing them back through Burma. There had been quite a skirmish at Michinaw during August and September. The Japs were retreating into Burma, back towards Rangoon. They hadn't gone back past what they called Wanting China, which is the border between Burma and China and this is where the Ledo road was being built. The road was under construction and the pipeline was being put in. I picked up a pipeline plane and I flew about 90 miles down the trail to a place they called Baum. We literally flew at tree top 35 height because there were Japanese Zeroes in the area. We'd fly up one side of the mountain, across the ride, down the other side of the mountain, down the valley and that's the way we got down there. There I joined the 613th Field Artillery Battalion which was part of a combat team. The first night I was sent to join C battery - they were all very happy that Lieutenant Larsen was coming. The other lieutenant Larsen happened to be with headquarters battery and I guess that they were a little disappointed with what they wound up with. Let me tell you the first 2 or 3 days on the trail were really something to experience. Those Burmese mountains may not be very high, but they run from oh, 1,600 feet to 6,000 feet and you might climb that distance up and down 2 or 3 times a day. My pack started out to be 2 or 3 blankets and extra shoes and extra fatigues and the whole bit and by the end of the 3rd day I was pretty well down to a towel, a mess kit an extra pair of socks and some flotation bladders to keep the pack filled out. This combat team was comprised of the 613th Field Artillery Battalion, the 612th Field Artillery Battalion, the 12th Dismounted Cavalry Unit and an infantry unit. Also a quarter master pack troop. All in all we had about 5,500 troops. We'd left the main road south of Ledo to cut the road below Wanting, China. Wanting was where the road over the hump was being put in to build a pipeline to go into Kun King, China. Our mission was to cut the road behind the Japanese and the Chinese were on the road pushing them back. The first day that we came into position to where the actual fighting was going on, it seemed like a great cheer went up. Everybody had walked for so long and they were so tired and walking downhill is extremely difficult. It wears your knees out. Everybody was in more of a mood to fight than to keep on walking. We got into position early in the afternoon, we were just getting foxholes dug and the guns dug in 36 and the mules in the park. The Japanese threw a round over us, then a round short of us and if you're in the artillery and you get one round over and one round short then you've got them right where you want them and you go into fire for effect. It didn't take us long to get the mules back and get the guns led on them and moved out of position. We moved over through another valley and up onto another little ridge and down in behind them. There was an old gulley, a big trench running across the hill. We set the guns in front of it and made bunkers out of this trench. I didn't want to be with the rest of them so one of the radio communications people and myself went 2 or 3 feet away and dug our own foxholes and logged them over and fixed them. All night we were wondering if we'd made the right decision - you've got your gun all leaned for the opening, your knife and hand grenades laid out on a ledge in front of you. After a night or two we got used to it. One morning we were walking around without our fatigue tops on, without our helmet on and a low round came across us. It was low enough that it felt like you could reach up and hit it and it dropped into the valley below us, everyone ran around looking for their fatigue jacket. Seems like you might as well be naked for all the good a fatigue jacket would do you but that's what we wanted to have. There was a big valley between us and the main lines and in this valley was where our drop field was located. They dropped all of our supplies, grain for mules, our ammunition, medical supplies, K rations and C rations was about the best that we could get. I went up forward after about 10 days to relieve one of the other forward observers and the first night there was kind of interesting. I was in a fairly good size bunker that had been lodged over and I got the diarrhea. I presume that it was from nerves as well as other things. You could never tell what the food you ate and water you drank would do to you. So good old Joe 37 covered me while I went out made a hasty retreat out into the bushes and then back into the bunker again. We were in this position for about 25 days. The Japanese would let you have the day to yourselves after about 7 in the morning until about 5:30 at night. Then they would pull out position, which we learned afterwards and they would come in at night and they would fight all night long. Actually a battlefield is rather interesting to watch, particularly if you're in back of the gun position where you can see forward. You can see the machine gun fire, the rockets and mortars, the artillery, whatever, it makes quite a spectacle. After the Japanese had pulled back down the road towards Rangoon, we started in pursuit. Being a pack outfit and they were motorized, of course they soon left us. We stepped at a little jungle area, a little clearing out from a place that they called Lashio. Here at Lashio I had quite an interesting experience. Lt. Mathews and myself had gone out to see if we couldn't divert some water into an old dry streambed that was close to our gun position. We'd drink beer, talking about the, various things that were in the jungle - tigers, leopards, and cats of all types, elephants, wild boar. I told him one thing that I'd like to see while I was over there was a black leopard. We hadn't walked more than five minutes when we came upon some big clumps of bamboo. A whole flock of jungle chickens came out of them - they're like Chinese pheasant, they’re a beautiful bird. At that time we were about 20, 30 feet away from this patch of bamboo and out walked one of the most beautiful black leopards that I'd ever seen in my life, what Lt. Mathews had to say to me after we had gone our way and the cat had gone it's way, well… All we had at the time was a .45 cal, pistol as a sidearm. We were here in this position for about 3 weeks. During this time, the war ended in Europe. We had a big celebration out in the jungle - big as we could make it. 38 During the evening we had movies, located in about the center of the unit. Ours being an outlying unit someone was always left on guard. As the guards walked back through the unit, the cats would follow you one way and as you turned around and walked back the other way the cats would turn and walk the other way. We had a tree that had kind of fallen over where the garbage pit had been dug and the cats came in there at night to scrounge what they could. Well, I figured that I was going to get me a cat so after a night or two, I spotted them out on the limb and I walked around it and pretty soon I discovered that the cat was between me and camp and there was a river on the other side of me. I beat a hasty retreat to camp and I was content from then on to let the cats have their own way about it. One night we heard a lot of wild trumpeting, there were elephants not too far from the position and believe me about 11, 12 o'clock at night when you're sound asleep and you hear some elephants trumpeting, it brings you up in a hurry. The Japs were making a push in to western China. Their idea of warfare in China was to let the Chinese have the villages and the rice paddies to do the planting and the harvest and in the fall when the harvest was due (in-this part of China, they raised three crops a years, they raised wheat and other dry crops and in the rainy season they would plant rice) the Japs would come back in and take the food supply. But they were pressuring Kun Ming and is where the Ledo road the pipeline ended. So they sent in C47 aircraft into Lashio onto an old dirt road in a field that had been cleared and they airlifted our entire unit to Kun Ming, except the mules - they walked them the 700 or 800 miles from Lashio into Kun Ming. In Kun Ming we were under the command of the Chinese combat command and we were stationed oh, 15 or 20 miles out of Kun Ming at a hostel where Chinese army units wore training. We were to act as trainers 39 and advisers and instructors to the Chinese. After 2 or 3 weeks I was sent out of Kun Ming down towards what we called French Indochina, which actually was North Vietnam, I was stationed about 90 miles north of Vietnam. There was a captain and myself and 2 or 3 enlisted men and 2 or 3 Chines interpreters and our purpose was to train Chinese artillery units. The Chinese are real peculiar. This business of saving face I found belongs as much to the Americans as much as it belongs to the Chinese. But you only suggest to someone that he might be doing something wrong - that there might be a better way of doing something. You don't stop them and correct them and tell them how to do it. It's very hard to hold your temper when you see a Chinese soldier working on a sliding breech block that’s polished steel using sand paper on it. After the third time of trying to tell him not to do this, I picked up the sandpaper and stomped it into the ground. And of course I lost face with the Chinese. You can work with them for months trying to get them to do something by the book, you might say, and then one day out of the clear blue sky they will do it just about as perfect as it can be done and you wondered if your training was ever going anywhere. This unit had been trained, partially by the Germans and they had done a pretty good job of training them. However, all of their gun drill was done German style rather than American style. We lived in a very small village and we had taken over an old temple that was on the top of a hill. The entire city had a wall around it with the exception of one side, the south side that was bordering it. The wall was built zig-zag and at every turn there was a pill box where it had slits in where they could protect the wall - looking down two sides at a time. They had peculiar customs - if they wanted it to rain they closed, the north gates and opened the south gates. If they had too much rain, they'd close the south gate up, Chinese 40 families always wanted sons as the number one child in the family and it was kind of a hard fact to accept the custom that if a girl was born, they'd wrap here in some bamboo and put her on a mat. There was a grove of trees that ran alongside the road just outside the city gates and you could see the little mats placed up in the trees where the babies were left to die. I have pictures of 2 or 3 of them where you can see parts of the body that's being decomposed. In china, it was not unusual to see people lying alongside the road dead from a day up to many months. You can tell you long they had been dead by how much clothing they had on them. If they were completely dressed they had been dead only a short time. Soon after, people started to pilfer their clothes and the bodies were just left unless someone of the family happened to be in that area. There were a lot of refugees so scattered up and down the highway there were an awful lot of bodies. Their burial customs were very peculiar. They have to wait for a particular day that will appease the gods. And so out in the cemetery which is usually on a hillside, the country is very rolling hills, you'll see the caskets there just waiting for the right day to come along so that the gods will be appeased so that they can get buried. There's very little woodland in China. Back from the 13th to the 16th century because of the Chinese bandits and the large marauding armies that there were, they burned down the forest. Of course the trees haven't really grown back except in some of the mountain country. Firewood of course is a premium in an area like this. They use a lot of cow dung and straw mixed together and made into paddies to burn in place of firewood. Actually there are hours and hours that we could talk about the time that I spent in Burma. We were there for about 6 months and we were in China for about 6 months training the Chinese and when the war came to an end with Japan we were all anxious 41 to go home. They put it out on a point system. You had to have points before being sent home. This came about as 1 point for each month that you had in the service and 5 points if you had combat time. They had variety of methods of adding up your points, I fell a little short of getting home immediately but I was assigned after the war to a Chinese headquarters and our particular job was to keep track of the petroleum oil and lubricants in the command area there. But finally, along the first part of October we got our orders to go home. They had asked for volunteers to go to eastern China and to stay on. Most of us declined because we wanted to go home. Finally we had orders to go the first available transportation to go to the zone of the interior. We left China and were routed back through India. When we got to India, we didn't know it at the time but they sent us out to an old B29 base that had been closed and they opened it back up to house us there. We had long strenuous days - we'd get up in the morning and have breakfast, come back and shower, write letters, so play a little volleyball, come back and take a nap and play volleyball again. Come evening we'd have a shower, have dinner and then we'd go play bridge till 2, 3 o'clock in the morning. This we did 7 days 'a week for about 2 months. After which time they literally "Shanghaied" our unit - they had sent us out there until they could get our orders changed. Then they took our unit and dispersed us to several units in and around Calcutta, India. We did get to have short leave in Calcutta before we were transferred there, I presume like every other GI that came through the area when you get back to a place where they now have Coca Cola and ice cream and the luxuries in life you go crazy. We went through for the first time and came out with a malt and a milkshake and a sundae and I suppose people wonder where you're going to put it, but believe me, you find a place for it. I was assigned to a 42 replacement dept., which had the responsibility of receiving incoming troops and processing them for transportation home. We weren't too far out of Calcutta and they'd house the troops there and truck them into Calcutta to board the ship and then on home. From October along in March the weather in India is gorgeous. The days are warm, the nights are cold - you sleep under 2 or 3 blankets - the air is so clear you could take all kinds of pictures without filters on your camera. It was really an enjoyable time other than the fact that everybody wanted to go home. I got assigned out to a port exchange warehouse. We had the ships some up the Ganges River and anchor and we would unload shiploads of beer and toddy and tobacco and everything that went through the Post Exchange - all types of supplies. A lot of these ships were still on the high seas when the war ended so they were still coming in and being unloaded. The officer in charge got sent home which left me in charge of the compound and along about April it started to rain. You get into the monsoon seasons and believe me, it can rain. You can about set your clock on it. At 2 o'clock in the afternoon the storms would blow up from the Bay of Bengal, the high winds would topple trees and in a matter of 2 or 3 minutes you would have water running-board deep on a jeep. It would run off of the buildings and collect in the low areas. Well, finally we got things settle around in Calcutta, getting places closed up. I had to ship and position out in different places for the British who were still going to be there sundry types of Post Exchange supplies. And I ran about 25 semi-trucks for about 2 weeks. I had orders to leave Calcutta on the 29th day of May. I was in the warehouse section - all the other exchanges had to close into me and then I had to close out, I had though that I would be on the last place going out but I had it all buttoned up and finished and done and I was sitting out at the airport on 43 the 25th of May. On the 27th of May the Major and two Ltd.’s of the exchange were to ship home but this was the first month that their accounts hadn't balanced and they had to stay and balance. So I took one of the seats on the plane and we headed for home. Well, we left Calcutta on the 27th of May, 1946, and believe me I was looking forward to going home. You can't imagine how hot it is where the temperature is 100 degrees and the humidity is 100, you are wringing wet literally about 22 hours of the day. The only time you had any relief from the humidity was about 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning. Your fatigues looked just like they had been dipped in a tub of water all the time during this monsoon season. There's a lot of interesting experiences I could tell you about in India and Burma and China and some other time we will do that. We left Calcutta and headed for Cairo. We landed in Cairo and we had a half day there. We didn't have time to go out and see the pyramids or the sphinx but we did get an opportunity to go in and see old Cairo and the new buildings that were being built. We did get to see the Taj-Mahal from a very low position. They flew the airplane in and around it and right down close. This was a C54, 4 engine plane. When we left Cairo we flew out through the desert, very low through the pyramids and around the sphinx. So we did get to see them from the air although it would have been interesting to have walked around them and been a part of it. We flew to Casa Blanca and we stopped there, but we weren't allowed to go in and around the city because it was just too dangerous a place to be. We weren't there more than 2 or 3 hours and we were off through the Azores, an island right off the coast of Spain and Africa - between them. We were there about a half a day - they had to do some checks on the aircraft. There wasn't too much to see there other than it was a beautiful island. From the Azores we had to leave about half the passengers. The flight 44 from there into Bermuda was too long to take on gas so they had to drop passengers and take on more gas. Bermuda is a beautiful area. We got to see most of these places from the air. We flew around them as we would come in and the beautiful beach err, the white sands and the beautiful flowers of Bermuda would make it an ideal place to stay. From Bermuda we flew into West Palm Beach Florida. We stayed there one night while we processed in to get ready to process home. Florida would be another beautiful vacation spot, at least at that time of the year it was. No doubt with the population, increase and the changes and things that have gone on it's not as desirable now as it was. AL: I just want to go back and ask one question - did you have any spiritual experiences during the war that you might like to relate? SL: Well, these are things that you think about in retrospect, not at the time they happen. I stopped short one day and for what reason and why I can't tell you, but I felt something against my leg and I looked down and I had stretched a booby trap wire just about as tight as it would go and not detonate. One afternoon for no apparent reason an artillery shell had come into the area, and of course, a forward observer's job is to be really out where he can see what's going on and what's happening and I headed for and literally dove into a big bunker. It was already full of bodies. I was the last one in just as an artillery shell exploded about 20 yards from it. Believe me you get a real different view of what it's like to be on the receiving end as you listen to that shrapnel slam into the logs and the trees about you. You think about these things in years later and other things that come with it and yes, it makes you think that for some reason or another some force gave you a push or gave you the inclination to do something that you ordinarily 45 wouldn't do. When we were in the Azores we heard that the plane that had taken off from Calcutta on the 29th of May - the one I was supposed to take - had caught fire for some reason after they left Italy. Apparently the pilots put it on automatic pilot and went back into the rear of the plane - all of the parachutes had been stacked at the rear of the plane - nobody was wearing any. They put the plane into a steep climb and then into a nosedive. They found parachutes and people survived. That was all they found and I feel that had I been aboard that plane I would have been one of those 7 people that they found because of the other things that happened and the fact that I'm here. This major that I knew very well and his two lieutenants that had been with him were both killed in this plane crash. Well, we're now coming to a happy part of the story. It had been two years since I'd seen any of the family. My dad had had a real bad attack while we were in India. All of our mail had been sent home when we were being returned to the zone of interior. Dad was sick, they didn't expect him to live, they couldn't get in touch with me. I didn't hear from them in over 4 months - course I didn't know any of this was going on until I made a phone call home. But the trip home was quite interesting. We took a good old train ride up the Atlantic seaboard. We were literally on a milk and paper route - you stopped almost at every crossing and picked up milk and eggs and delivered papers and what have you. But nevertheless, you're on a train and you're heading home. And little do I need to tell you how happy the day was when came down the canyon into Ogden. It was a day a person would never forget, to come into the station and meet your wife and your mother and your father and your sister and your mother-in-law. That was a moment to remember. It's odd to think that it took us three days to fly from Calcutta to West Palm Beach and three days to go by train up the coast 46 to Washington, then to Chicago then on over into Salt Lake. It was quite a trip all in all. I'm sure that you could appreciate that. AL: Dad, why don't you tell me some of the things that you did when you got back from the service? SL: Well, we got into Salt Lake about June 2nd and I had leave coming from the army - I wasn't discharged until July 26th so your mother and I decided that we'd take a trip to California to see Wanda and Murray and also to visit with Larry and Margaret Drew. Larry and I had met in the service and we became real good friends. So we made a trip down through Zion's and Bryce Canyons, went to Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam (which was then Boulder Dam) and then we went to Los Angeles and stayed a week with Margaret and Larry. We went to the beach, went swimming, had picnics, and just had a good time. Then we went up the coast to Santa Barbara where Wanda and Murray were and we stayed with them for a week. You'll have to get Murray to tell you about the rabbit dinner we had some time. We went out and bought about 4 rabbits and cooked them up for the four of us. You might also ask him about the poison oak berries he got down in his jockey shorts sometime. We did a lot of loafing, just relaxing, laying around on the beach, soaking up the sunshine. Then we went to San Francisco and spent a few days there, then on to Las Vegas, through Reno, Tahoe, and back into Salt Lake. I didn't know whether I wanted to go back to school or whether I wanted to get a job or just what. Apartments were kind of hard to find but your mother had a little apartment that had a bath and kitchen and a front room in it. It had a pull down bed. That was enough for home. I went to work for Interstate Brick Co. just hustling brick - taking them out of the kiln after they had been fired. I got to work in the tunnel kiln which was a big 47 oval oven and you had the fire in front of you and the fire in back of you. You're taking the bricks out and they're so hot that you can't pick them up with your hands, you have to use a heavy leather pad over your hands to handle the bricks. They have four of you taking the bricks out and four of you putting the bricks in and you have so many bricks a day to take out. Our work day usually started about 7 o'clock in the morning and by 19:30, not later than 11, we'd have our day's quota of bricks out and done and then we'd be finished for the day, I had a lot of fun - your mother was working for Dr. Robbins in Salt Lake, a dentist, I did all the fruit canning and bottling, I did the house cleaning, cooked the meals for her when she came home at night. We spent kind of a lazy summer. When school started I decided that I didn't want to go back to school which I have since regretted. But I guess in as much as I had just got my degree before I went in the service and spent so much time in the service in schools I thought it was time to start making a little money, although I could have gone to school on the GI bill. So I went to work for American Paper and Supply Co. as a bookkeeper. Wages at that timeI went to work for 125 dollars a month and I thought that this was pretty good wages. In looking back through some checks not too long ago we found that we would cash a check for 25 dollars every two weeks to buy food and miscellaneous expenses, I don't recall what rent was - probably about 25 dollars a month. Gasoline was probably 20, 25 cents a gallon. So it didn't take too much to live. There wasn't too much to buy - there wasn't too many appliances out on the market. You had to put your names on lists to get electrical appliances, for women to get hosiery or bath towels or sheets or any of the things that were just starting to come back into production following the war effort. I worked at American Paper from the fall of '46 until the summer of '47. That was the year 48 Lynne was born, August 16, 1957. We lived at 1127 East 2nd South so it was a short walk from there up to the Park building where the accounting office was - I worked in property management. It was fun coming home for lunch - having an hour for lunch, being with the new baby and enjoying then. I'd get off at 4:30 in the evening. We had bought a 1940 Buick from my sister Golda the year I went into the service. It had been left at home when I went into the service because your mother didn’t drive and Reed had taken it. He was working at LaSalle for a livestock and store company and they had Chevy Oldsmobile, Buick, and a variety of trucks so he took the car down there and had the mechanic check it out so I had a reasonably good car to come home to. We just enjoyed this period of time, I worked at the Park building until about March of '49 at which time we moved to Moab. We got our heads together with Reed - Dad had left us with 160 acres of farm there and Reed was managing a lot of the LaSalle livestock and store company accounts and business. So I went there to work and run the farm - we leased 250 pores to go with it - got all outfitted with tractors and harros and plows and a team and wagon and everything we needed. We lived in Moab and worked in LaSalle where the farm was about 12 miles away - we drove back and forth morning and night, 1949 was kind of interesting. I went there in March and until Bart was born on June 7th why it was a case of getting up at 5 o'clock in the morning, milking the cows, having breakfast, heading out for the ranch, staying until 7 or 8 at night, coming home, milking the cows, having supper and going to bed. Your mother and Bart came down to Moab when Bart was just two weeks old. On the way down the car was packed with baby cribs and things we had accumulated. We had Bart in the back seat in a basket and the only way we could get him out was to stop and lift him out over the top, Lynne on the 49 way down got hungry and we fed her a bowl of puablum. She sneezed and you'd be surprised how far one little kid can blow a bowl of puablum all over the interior of a car. Just a sidelight. We worked on the farm until November without a break. We went to the rodeo and after one day off, the next day I couldn't get out of bed. We'd spent so many hours on the farm that we were both exhausted. We had a two ton bobtailed truck that we hauled anything that would walk on and off it in the way of freight. Coal, sand, gravel, sheep, cattle, hay grain. We'd take a load of livestock to Grand Junction, Colorado. We'd bring back the better part of a year's groceries in the truck to last you through the winter. We did this until the fall of 1950. The Uranium industry was starting to boom in and around Moab, Monticello, the Colorado area. But this wasn't anything new, they'd been searching for uranium ores for years down there. We didn't get too excited about it at the time, I presume we should have. In the fall of 1950, your mother and I moved back to Salt Lake. We decided that the farming was too hard, there wasn't enough water, we really couldn’t make a go of it. So we loaded up our possessions in a pickup truck - I bought the two ton truck back later which I kept in Murray where we moved. I went to work of Otto Beuhner Concrete Products Co. They made precast stone, all types of marble work, terrazo floors, all kinds of things, I went to work there as a bookkeeper, payroll work, tax forms, invoicing, pricing of materials that had been sold, costing them out. I was always trying to move up the ladder a bit so I was always looking around for more work, more places that had a little better opportunity to go to work. I went and applied for a job at the Salt Lake Country Club in 1952 in February. I went to work for them as an office manager and accountant. After I had worked there for them for about 6 months they made me assistant manager. You've met Nate Hale, you 50 know him. You worked out at Oakridge Country Club when he was manager out there. This was a growing, struggling period of time. You have to realize that there was a big change in the economy from the depression years of the 30's to the war years of the 40's to the early 50's when business was booming, jobs were plentiful. However, we really hadn't come into the age of television and electronics and transportation which has made another big revolutionary step in our modern way of living. But in retrospect I think that it was a more relaxed, enjoyable lifestyle. Murray was a separate town of its own then, it wasn't one long business clear into Salt Lake. Sugarhouse was a separate area. It was more like living out in the country. We did more visiting with our families, our brothers and sisters got together every week. Saturday night dinners were fun to get together and go to. All kinds of cold cuts, lunch meats, pork and beans, potato salads, ice cream, cake, root beer, the whole works. For entertainment there was swimming out to Black Rock or Sunset beach, out to Lagoon, a little roller skating. Shows were the main source of entertainment. Television had just started to come along in the early 50's. You remember John Powell. We were talking about buying a TV set, he was going to help me get one at cost, and you know me, I have always tried to buy things at cost in my life. I told him what kind we were going to buy and he said that we were going to get the best one that we could get the cheapest - buy a good quality but one that the price matches the quality. We had a lot of fun with John and Edith Powell. We met them when we were living on 2nd South and 11th East. He had been in an automobile wreck coming down from skiing and he was in the hospital, not expected to live. We took care of their little girl, Dawn, for many months while Edith spent her time at the hospital. And we built a friendship that has lasted through our lives and we have enjoyed them. In 51 1954, we decided to move into Salt Lake, closer to the Salt Lake Country Club. We sold our home and rented an apartment at 2829 South 8th East and we lived there during the winter. In the summer we found a home that was being built at 27th East and about 37th South. We lived in the apartment until about October of '55 when we moved up there. You might recall that, you were born in '53. We had bought a little '55 Chevrolet. It had always been my dream that when I got out of college I was going to buy a new Chevrolet the day I graduated from College. They could be bought for just under 700 dollars. But the war came along and changed all of that. In the meantime, we had had a new '45 Chevy, we'd traded the truck for a '51 sedan. We got a '52 Chevy. We had a '54 Chevy, bought a new '55. These were all new cars. Seems like I had an obsession for automobiles. Seems like that's where most of our extra time and money was spent. We had a nice home there in East Millcreek. We lived there until 1957 when I took a job out at Oakridge Country Club here in Davis County as manager. It was during this period of time that we met Joan and Merrill Weber. They lived just diagonally across the street from us. We've been able to keep in touch with them over the years. He was a construction accountant and worked in Arizona and California. Finally he left that work and went into managing a complex for doctors, doing their accounting and tax work and what have you. We moved to Bountiful in the fall of 1957, October. Matter of fact we moved in on Halloween day. You of course remember 1005 East 1050 North (Maple Wood Drive). You walked many a day down that hill to school and back and forth. Whether it built your legs up or your lungs up or whatever, I don't know, I stayed at Oakridge Country Club for about a year. They had financial problems - a new club getting going. It wasn't an equity club I found out, I kind of went against the wishes of 52 Sid Ellison who was the biggest owner of the club when I found out that the membership were to complete the golf course and clubhouse and in 1930 after 25 years it all reverted to management. So I started to campaign for board of directors to get the club an equity membership. That caused a lot of hard feeling amongst certain of the owners. We had a program all worked out to where it would be purchased and the last minute the board backed out on the deal - wouldn't go through with it. So I was rather unhappy, so I quit and during the summer I went to work for Ferrill Bosch at Wilson Transport and Supply, I worked with them for a few weeks. Then I took a job and went to work for Gibbons and Reed Construction Co., as an accountant, I worked at Hill Field, they were doing all kinds of apron pouring, hard stands, taxiways. When the job finished there, they took me into the main office. The office manager wanted to keep me. They left me there during the winter - I prepared most of their tax work, I got their books all ready for the auditors to come in. They had a freeway job open up in Orem and they needed a project manager so they shipped me to Oregon, this only lasted 2 or 3 months because I spent 2 hours extra a day travelling. I was running my own car. The project manager did give me my gas, told me if I needed tires or any parts for my car to buy them. Then a company car became available and he gave it to me. The office manager came down and wanted to know what I was doing with a company car and I told him and we had a few words and that's where I parted company with him. I stayed in the Army reserve at the end of WWII because I knew that there would more wars coming up. A person might as well stay in and stay active. There wasn't any pay incentive at the time but I stayed in the reserve service for several yean; without pay. But finally in the early 50's I started getting paid drills, going to camp for 2 weeks - it provided extra income for the family 53 and it has since worked into where it will be fairly good retirement for a part time job. When October 28th of 1981 rolls around I'll be 60 and officially retired from the army and I'll have all the regular benefits of a retired service man with a small pension, I had a chance at a good job out at Hercules but that didn't work out so I quite Gibbons and Reed and went to working 1959 at Hill Field Air Force Base as an accountant. You know that I stayed there until 2 years ago at which time I had to take a medical retirement. I never could get the farm out of ray system, I always felt that a person should have a good dog and a good horse so I scurried around West Bountiful and I found a beautiful little filly colt, bough her from the man and kept her in the pasture down there. I always found time after work to go down regardless of how late at night and feed her some oats and rub her nose and spend some time. It wasn't long before a couple of years had passed. I spent my time breaking her and that's quite enjoyable to work with an animal, I remember your brother Bart said that he wished I had as much patience with you kids as I had with a horse. I guess I was just a little bigger than you kids and I thought I didn't have to have as much patience with you as I did with a horse because a horse was bigger. But I managed to break her without any help. She never bucked with me once. She'd been a good horse for the 20 years that we had her. One thing led to another, and I decided that we had to have a place and your mother went along with me. At that time you and Bart were working for Research Homes and we contacted them about building us a home. The one that we're now living in. We looked at their plans and they told us what they could build for what money we had so we had them build us a home here in Centerville where we could keep the horses in the back yard to have them close to take care of and ride. The hills were close, not too far to go. 54 The only problem is what with landscaping, hauling hay and cutting lawns and doing other things it doesn't leave you as much time as you'd like to have to ride and play and have the fun that a lot of people had when they would take their horses and their trailers and go out on weekends and stay for a week out in the hills and just enjoy the country. AL: Dad, maybe you could tell me if you remember any interesting experiences you had when we were little kids? SL: Well, the family always had lots of fun I thought. We spent a lot of time at Liberty Park when you were little, down riding the merry go round and the Ferris wheel. We also went to the zoo. As you kids grew older we took you to camp with us several times. You were probably too young to remember going to San Jose one of the years that we went to Fort Ord. We went to the world's fair in Seattle, Washington, in 1963. You should remember that. We went up the needle, up the coast to Canada over to Vancouver Island on the Ferry and then on down to home. We also bought a half ton pickup truck and a camper and went to California and spent about 10 days with the Drew’s. You should remember the times there going to the beach down to California State Park. They lived only about a mile from Disneyland. We went 2 or 3 days to Disneyland and Knotts Ferry Farm. You made quite a little tom-boy out of their refined little girl. At the end of 10 days I think that they were glad to see you go. You rode about any and everything there was to go on. We had a lot of fun at the cook-outs at the beach, playing in the sand, swimming. So we did get you to a lot of the places. Your mother was converted to the church and she and Lynne were both baptized on the same day in Sept. '55. We were sealed together as a family in the temple in May of 1953. Well Allen, we've covered the better part of 50 years in just a few hours of talking. There's some 55 things perhaps that I ought to tell you about your family. My grandfather, Christian G. Larsen was born Dec. 12, 1828, in Grice Belmont, Denmark. He was the son of Lars Johanson and of course, you know how the name-bearing goes back there, so he became a Larsen. When he came to the United States we lost the old custom of trading names. Your great grandfather was born before the LDS church was organized. He was in the king's service in 1850 when the missionaries came into the country. He was of the opinion that they shouldn't have anything to do with the missionaries and he and some of his friends went down to run them out of town. I presume that they probably could have done it but in the process they became converted to the LDS church and he was baptized. After he left the king's service, he stayed in Denmark on a mission. I think that he was on a mission for about 5 years there. After he had completed this mission he was given permission to immigrate to the United States which he did in 1857. There's some writings from my aunt Sara Lee Master. We have a lot of their history and their books. Your grandfather was born January 7, 1865 at Spring City Utah. This kind of makes him a Utah Pioneer. Dad lived a pretty bare and rugged life. His first wife bore him 6 children and all but 2 died at a very early age. His wife died before 1900. He married you grandmother in the early 1900's. Their first baby died and then there were 6 children born thereafter. Mother was a young girl and I think that I told you this at the beginning that she went through the Hole in the Rock. My grandfather was 23 when he went through there. He had the unique experience of taking his wagon through there alone. Apparently they camped in two sections. They took the first section through when it was completed and he was there with them. He went back to the second camp and got his family and when he got back that evening, there was no one there so he rough 56 locked the wagon and he went down the Hole in the Rock by himself. He didn't have anybody holding on to ropes or chains or pulling back to get him down there. There's always been speculation as to who took the first team down and I know Miller in his book discusses who took the first team and he discredits the fact that Grandpa Barton took the first team down because he was camped with the 2nd group. But others remember that he drove the first team down. He had a team that was blind - they'd had eye disease a winter or two before. They couldn’t get any of the teams to face this chasm down through there. So we feel and others feel that it was his blind team that they hooked on to the wagons, other horses of course behind them and took them down the Hole in the Rock. So, there's a lot of interesting history with your grandmother and your grandfather. Dad died on October 10, 1948 and he's buried at Moab, Utah. Mother was some 16 years younger than Dad. She became severely incapacitated through strokes in the early 60's. About 62 she had a real severe one which left here memory completely gone and Josephine took care of her for about 5 years - lifted her from the bed to the chair and back again. Fed her and took care of here and she died in 1960. She's buried in Moab, Utah. AL: Dad, you were talking about grandfather, your father. I understand that he was the offspring of a polygamist family. Did he ever say anything about that life? SL: Oh, dad talked about it. Of course we were curious and we asked him questions. Christian G. had 5 wives. He had children by 4 of them. Dad told about the times they spent together as a family. He'd have to stop and think who his full brothers and sisters were. They got along very well, there wasn't any animosity between the wives and the children. We had family reunions in the middle of the '40's. All of his family which 57 included his half brothers and sisters - all that could make it would be there. I'm sure that they had interesting times. He tells about the times when the federal authorities would be in town looking for those who were still living in polygamy. Course they never gave up their wives - they didn't abandon them. They would stay out of sight. I think a lot of the federal people did a token job of looking for them. AL: I remember you telling me a little bit about the Barton side of the family. You said that at one time they had claim to some property in Pennsylvania. Can you tell me a little bit about the Barton side? SL: Well, we'd have to check this back through the genealogy records to see just how the family came but the maternal side of your grandmother, my mother's side came from William Penn’s family. He came to the United States about 1680. He’d had a running feud with the King and his family was nobility there. He was a thorn in the side of the King, he'd been in and out of jail and they wanted to get rid of him, so he gave him a land grant which became Pennsylvania. There was a Penn Barton on yourgrandmother's side - his mother was a Sally Penn, That's as far as I knew they go but they had gone into Kentucky and Illinois. My great grandmother was born in Tennessee and they had some time joined the LDS church. My great grandmother was born about 1833 in Illinois - she knew the prophet. She was about 9 or 10 when he was martyred. She saw his body after he was killed. AL: Do you remember her name? SL: I'd have to get it to make sure. They didn't come West with the saints initially and I believe it was because a lot of them were left at Winter Quarters and various places to build wagons. My great grandfather was a carpenter and I'm sure that when we get into 58 more research there that we'll find that they stayed there to grow crops, build wagons, to help get the Saints moving westward. As I remember from reading the records they came to Utah in about 1849 or 50. But all four of my grandparents were early settlers of Utah and members of the LDS church. The little interesting history on the old William Penn estate as I understand it was that his estate had never been settled and wasn't settled until about 1943 or 49. One of my aunts was the only individual who had any records who could prove that the family was tied back in to the Penn estate. She was ill at the time and she was in California and by the time we got notice and she was well enough to get all the records and information in, it had been finished and closed. And so the side of the family that went back to the old Penn estate never received anything. It's kind of interesting to know that he owned at one time all of Pennsylvania. He gave much of the property to the Quakers. He was the founder of the Quaker group. That's a side of the family that will be real interesting as we have time to get in do some research and dig out some of the facts as to where the family came from and what they did. It's interesting to note that my grandmother Larsen walked every step of the way across the plains. She lived in Brigham Young's home, the Beehive house for a period of time after she came to Salt Lake as a companion to one of his daughters living there when she married grand-dad and went to Springville. AL: Dad, we've pretty well covered most of your life, why don't you just take a few minutes and tell me a few things about what's been going on around home, things that you are doing and what's been happening with the family and where you're going to be going from here. 59 SL: Well, Allen, we've had a real thumb-nail sketch of a person's life. We'll sit down and we'll talk someday and perhaps we'll have time to get into some detail on some things if you’re interested in then. I think one thing that I've always looked forward to was retirement. Back in the 70’s your mother and I started to look for a place where we felt that we could build a place and be comfortable and we finally settled on buying a little place up in Midway. We found 2 acres of land, Murray bought one acre and his wife's sister and her husband had bought 3 ½ acres. It was a beautiful place. You've been there, we've hauled hay off of it and we bought 7 ½ acres of hay ground over in Oakley, Utah. I always thought that we would build a home there, have some barns, keep a couple of horses, raise a beef or two, work the hay over in Oakley, just kind of relax and enjoy life. I thought I'd retire at age 55 from the federal service and work probably for another 5 years in the private sector, build up my social security. But then my health kind of changed all of that. I'd developed some neck problems, shoulder problems, pains. In getting checked out I found out that I had arthritis between 5 and 6 and 6 and 7 of my cervical spine. The discs were depressed and had bone spurs. I was getting some severe head problems from it. Actually at times it was one of the most weird feelings that you've had in your life. At times I questioned my sanity, I'm sure members of the family questioned it as well as a lot of people at work. So after being checked out by the doctors, I retired from Hill Air Force Base and things didn't improve any and I knew that there was something else wrong and we could never seem to quite lay our finger on. In 1970 and 71, I had a rib removed, the first rib on each side. I had this thoracic cutlet syndrome where the nerves and blood vessels coming up through the ribs were being bothered by the collarbone. My hands were going numb and I was 60 losing my strength. I thought that I was back in good health again, but a year ago, February, which would be February of 1979, I had vertigo, nausea for about 3 days I could hardly stand or walk or lay down. If I got my head in the wrong position the room would spin. Well, it was just plain hell for about 3 days, I looked in the mirror and I saw a little old man standing there. I knew I had more problems so I went and spent the better part of 3 weeks in the Veteran's Hospital in Salt Lake. They ran me through another series of tests - I had brain scans, electrocardiograms and electroencephalograms and angiograms and everything else on my head to try and find out what was wrong with it. Finally they determined that I had vestibular neuritis which was a nerve disease in the inner ear. And while they told me that there was nothing they could do to cure it but by taking motion sickness pills. I was able to control the vertigo and nausea and all the ill feelings that go with it. So they put me on 4 of these a day. I've since cut it down to one a day and then depending on how I feel I might take another 1 or 2. I seem to be getting along real fine. But that changed a lot of our other plans too. I could no longer take care of the hay grounds - we lost the interest of wanting to live in Midway after our grandchildren were born. You had returned from your mission and gotten married. Bart and Kathy and Lynn had returned from St. George and then the grandkids started to come along, Sam and Nathan and Sara and Erin and now Kathleen. With the big change and shift in the economy, we have an energy crunch that's bad and going to get worse. Transportation is going to be a problem - it's going to be expensive living. It's nice to live in an area where your family is living where you can be with your grandchildren two or three times during the week and enjoy them a little more. So we proceeded to work out a deal to trade the 2 acres of ground in Midway for a cabin site. 61 We have good friends, Paul and Denise Wiser who have a cabin there. You've put your hours and your time in getting a cabin going. And hopefully this summer we'll see it pretty well completed where we can all go to the mountains and enjoy it and have a good time. Our home presently is for sale, hopefully we have a real estate deal that is going through in the next day or two for a condominium over in Bountiful. Hopefully, around the 1st of August we'll be moved and we'll forget the cutting of the lawns and the watering and fighting the elements out here and we'll relax and enjoy over there. (Note: On August 3rd, 1980, they did move to the Villa Nova Condominiums in Bountiful.) AL: We'll go ahead and conclude this interview on July 23, 1980. Thanks Dad. 62