Oral History Program Margaret Conolly, Kaye Cox, Maurine Kirchhoefer, Barbara McMullin, and Donna Roberts Interviewed by Rebecca Ory Hernandez 14 November 2011 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Margaret Conolly, Kaye Cox, Maurine Kirchhoefer, Barbara McMullin and Donna Roberts Interviewed by Rebecca Ory Hernandez 14 November 2011 Copyright © 2023 by Weber State University, Stewart Library 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 the 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 and Davis County Communities Oral History Collection includes interviews of citizens from several different walks of life. These interviews were conducted by Stewart Library personnel, Weber State University faculty and students, and other members of the community. The histories date back to the early settlement of North Ogden, and cover various topics including the History of Fort Buenaventura, city government affairs, controversial issues, Latinos in Ogden, personal everyday life experiences and other recollections regarding the history of the Weber and Davis County areas. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management University Archives All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Margaret Conolly, Kaye Cox, Maurine Kirchhoefer, Barbara McMullin, and Donna Roberts, an oral history by Rebecca Ory Hernandez, 14 November 2011, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Miller circa 1939 Miller circa 1953 May 18, 1972. Fighting back tears, Dr. and Mrs. William P. Miller recieve standing ovation from some 1,000 admirers during program honoring the retiring Weber State president Wednesday Mary and William Miller circa 1980 Miller Family Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Barbara McMullin (b. 1032), Maurine Kirchhoefer (b. 1933), Donna Roberts (b. 1936), Margaret Conolly (b. 1939) and Kaye Cox (b. 1943); otherwise known as the “Miller sisters.” The Miller sisters are the daughters of William P. Miller, who served as President of Weber State College from 1953-1971. The interview was conducted by Rebecca Ory Hernandez, on November 14, 2011 at the home of Donna Roberts, in order to gather the Miller sister’s stories of their father and of their experiences with Weber State University. ROH: Today is Monday November 14, 2011. This is an oral history with the Miller sisters in order to talk about their dad. Present is Rebecca Ory-Hernandez, historian, and the four Miller sisters as introduced and the granddaughter, Annie Lyons. Later in the interview we will also speak with your fifth sister, Barbara Miller McMullin. Would each of you introduce yourself? KC: I am Kaye Miller Cox and I was born May 31, 1943. DR: I am Donna Miller Roberts, married to Stan Roberts, born November 22, 1936. MK: I am Maurine Miller Kirchhoefer, born November 19, 1933. MC: I am Margaret Miller Conolly, born August 24, 1939. MK: And there’s Barbara, who was born September 22, 1932—fourteen months before me. ROH: You each have specific stories to tell and we will go through them one by one. We’re going to start with Kaye. KC: I’m starting with one of my earliest stories. Dad would always read the paper in his easy chair and the back of the chair was high enough that we could get 1 behind him and comb his hair. He had nice, wavy hair. While he read the paper, we’d put curlers in his hair or comb it and part it and have a great time. We learned a lot of patience from our dad and our mom. Dad had a lot of meetings in Salt Lake City. My sister Margaret and I would go with mother—dad would let us off downtown—and we would shop. When it got fairly close to when we thought he would be through, we would go to the Hotel Utah and wait in the lobby. Sometimes the wait was very long. The Hotel Utah is now the Joseph Smith Building. It had beautiful chandeliers at Christmas time and a huge tree and staircases. Margaret and I would ride the elevator and go up and down the stairs and go around the balcony; we pretty much memorized everything about the Hotel Utah. Mother never got anxious. We learned that we had to just wait and he would come when he was through. We would take a lot of road trips. Dad was really fun and we would learn a lot of history on the trips. The college was growing and they were doing a lot of building, so any time there was a campus that was on our route, we would stop and spend several hours going through buildings and checking them out. It would get to the point where Margaret and I would see that there was a college town coming up and try to distract him—we would do everything we could to keep him from realizing there was a college campus so that we didn’t have to get out of the car and sit on the grass and wait and wait and wait while he checked out all of the buildings. Our dad never raised his voice at us and he never swore. He never argued with our mom. That’s very important to me. Every year at Christmas time, 2 mom and dad had a party. It was for the entire faculty and all the staff at the college. Mother would cook forever in order to get all the food ready. It was like having a wedding every Christmas. She would make cookies, she would make brownies, she hand-dipped chocolates and butter mints—everything you could think of, she would cook it and freeze it and have it ready for that day. For the invitations, they would send them out and since there was not enough parking for everyone, they would have half the people invited between one and three, and the other half invited between three and five. The house would fill with people—it was the Arnie Ferrin home on Harrison. It had a circular driveway and there would be cars all up and down the driveway and down the road. It was a fabulous party, but in the kitchen we were really busy. ROH: Did you all help with the baking and cooking? KC: Mother did most of the cooking, but we helped do the dishes and serve the food and make sure everything was out and carry chairs. One year, I was expecting a baby. The party was on the sixteenth—I was due on the twenty-ninth but I knew I was in trouble. I went into labor during the night and I kept telling the doctor, “I cannot have this baby. I need to be home. There’s too much to do.” He finally sent his daughter to help with the party in my place so that I would quit bugging him. Another thing they always did at home was have the student body officers over for breakfast when they were elected. We would help our parents fix breakfast and serve it. It was a nice, relaxing way for the student body officers to get to know each other. 3 A famous story in our family is about how I was a good student in high school and I wanted a scholarship. When I graduated from high school, dad said, “You can apply for a scholarship. That would be great.” So I did and I got a scholarship. Then he said, “Okay, now you can give it back. You know that you can earn one, but people will say that you got it because of me. Give it back and I will pay your tuition.” So I did that. I went to school for a year, then I got married and I didn’t go back to school for a few years. When I did, I had a child and I asked dad if I could get a scholarship. He said no. I said, “But my name is Cox now, people wouldn’t know me.” He said, “No, I will lend you the money so that you can go to school.” So I went to school and paid dad back. It was quarters in those days—it was 1967. At the beginning of winter quarter—there were two quarters left—the person that was over the Education Department said, “We’ve been looking at our students and noticed that you don’t have a scholarship. We have one that is available that would carry you through the end of the year.” I said, “I have to ask my dad, I don’t know if he’ll let me.” They said, “Don’t tell him.” I said, “No, that won’t work.” [Laughter] But dad did allow me to take the scholarship, so I had that for the last two quarters of college. It shows his integrity—he never wanted anyone to be able to accuse him of doing something dishonest or taking advantage of his position. Another time that he showed his integrity to me was when my husband and I bought some property with the hope that someday we would be able to build a house on it. There was a bridge at the president’s home that went over a pond. They were going to move the house and they needed to put a road there 4 and the bridge was going to be taken down and destroyed. We asked if we could have the bridge because our property had a gully. They said, “No, you can’t just have it. It would have to go up for bid because it belongs to the state of Utah.” Well, nothing ever came of it and the bridge got put aside; it deteriorated and fell apart, but I didn’t take something that didn’t belong to me. That was how Dad was about everything: very honest. My dad grew up in the country and he liked to have a garden. The president’s home was on 4012 Harrison and there was a circular driveway and a gravel path that went around behind the property to a big barn. Dad created a space for a garden and tried very hard to make a garden grow, but he had a hard time. He would come in late with his hat and his gloves after he’d been working out in the garden. I’m going to tell one more thing about our mom. ROH: Would you tell us your mother’s full name? KC: Mary Wilcox Miller. She also grew up in Syracuse. Mother only had a high school education. She was afraid to be the wife of a president of a college. Dad would assure her, “You’re just as good as anyone.” She ended up being admired and adored by everyone. She was a great lady. She ended up receiving an honorary doctorate degree in humanities. She entertained a lot of people in our home and two of the people that I remember really well were Eleanor Roosevelt and Vincent Price. DR: You know, Kaye, you just reminded me of something. None of us graduated from universities before we got married. We all quit when we got married and dad never said a word. Later, we went back and finished. Well, Kaye and I went back 5 to school at the same time. We had children that we were taking care of and one of us would be in school and the other would take care of the children. Anyway, after we got through, my department chair, Bill Henry, asked me if I wanted to teach part-time in our department. I said, “Yes, I’d really like that.” It started going up through the ranks and my dad said, “That’s really nice but no, you can’t do that.” The vice presidents overruled him and said, “What could she hurt?” So I ended up teaching part-time for five years, then I got a Master’s degree and taught full-time for another twenty-five years. It’s now the Department of Telecommunications and Business Education. The highlight of my life is all those wonderful years of teaching that I had. I’m going to go back to when we were kids. We used to go out to Syracuse every Sunday night. We’d go to Grandpa Miller’s and then to the Wilcox’s. We were doing a lot of stuff and when it was time for us to go, dad would go find us and hold our hands and we’d go running down the road. He always had coins in his pockets and you could hear those coins while we ran. I remember that vividly. And he loved Sen-Sens—I didn’t think they still made it, but they do—and he always had Sen-Sens in his pocket. That’s one thing that he really liked a lot. ROH: What is Sen-Sen? DR: It’s like a tiny licorice or breath mint. You know, he lived in a house with six women and I grew up not knowing that men used the bathroom because I never saw him in the bathroom. People talk about the toilet seat being up—not at our house. He even put in a showerhead down in the basement so he could shower 6 there. He would get up early and shower and be ready to go before any of us got up because he knew that once we were up, he would never get to it. He fixed cream of wheat for us every morning so we always had breakfast. Mother also had the officers from the Men’s Social Club come over and she taught them etiquette classes. Years ago, Jim Folger, was a real good friend of our dad’s—I don’t know what his title would have been at that time, but dad was working at the state office of education at that time. Jim Folger wrote to dad and congratulated him on being made president of Weber College. Later, when dad was made president, Jim gave that letter to him, but the letter had been dated years ahead. That was a real surprise to him. Our dad was probably the most honest person with the most integrity of any person I know. I remember a time when I wanted to borrow some folding chairs. I had company coming and I knew he had some over there. I asked dad if I could borrow them and he said, “You know, Donna, you can borrow anything I have, but those chairs don’t belong to me, they belong to Weber College.” What a great lesson to us about being careful with things that really were not our own. On the south side of house on Harrison, there was a gravel roadway that came in and Maurine and I both had boys about the same age—they were about three or four. That yard was huge and they could go out all day long and hide and play. We never gave it a thought. We found out years later that those two little boys used to take the gravel and fill up the sprinkler boxes—the hole in the ground where you turn the water on and off. Every time dad had to turn the water on, he 7 took a little shovel with him and cleaned out all the rocks the boys had put down there. He never said a word to us about it. ROH: How did you find out? DR: Mother told us, not too long ago. MK: He never reprimanded the boys. DR: He just cleaned things up. That’s the kind of household we grew up in. Everything was quiet and peaceful. I don’t think he ever asked for our report cards. He didn’t really see what we were going to take when we went to Weber. He never asked what our grades were. That reminds me—when I went to Utah State to get a Master’s so I could work at Weber longer, I was quite upset about a class I was taking. It was a four week class and I had to do something like a thirty-five page term paper every week then stand up and defend it. I was really nervous and I was talking to him one day and he said, “You know, Donna, we get so concerned about trying to get an ‘A.’ It’s not that big of a deal. When you graduate, people are going to see that you got a Master’s degree, not ask you what grade you got in Issues and Trends.” [Laughter] One of the last couple of things I want to say about him is that his office was always open to anyone. Anyone could go in and see him any time. Several years ago, we were having a lot of riots and lots of problems with black people in the East. One day he came into work and his secretary said, “You’re going to find some interesting people in your office.” He went in and there were several black students in his office. He went in and handled it in his usual way—he was so 8 good at working with people. The guys walked out happy and everything was fine. Towards the end, when he was kind of retired but still had an office in the Education Building, he would often stop in to see me. It was so wonderful to see that big, sweet man walking down my hallway. Anyway, he came down and sat in my office like he often did and he said, “You know what happened today, Donna?” I said, “No, dad, I don’t know what happened today.” He said, “They’re going to name the Administration Building after me. Can you believe that? Me, of all people.” He was absolutely thrilled and excited to come and tell me that. He didn’t make it to when the building was dedicated, but we were all there and it was a special time. I still go up and see his name on the building and the beautiful oil painting of him. Anyway, we had a very special life and we feel very blessed. When Kaye and I graduated with our Bachelor’s degrees at Weber, graduation ceremonies were held in the stadium. It was really exciting because our dad was able to hand us our diplomas. They took a picture of us that was put in the Standard Examiner. In the picture, we’re on either side of him giving him a kiss on the cheek. It’s a darling picture. MK: I’m remembering back to when we were little kids. In the morning, when it was time for us to get up for school, we’d hear dad walk up the stairs and we’d automatically turn over because dad would wake us up with a backrub. What a special memory. He was a very gentle, kind father. 9 He was very thoughtful of mother. I remember that quite often on Saturdays he’d give mother a rest by taking us down to the office with him. He was the assistant superintendent of the Weber County schools at that time and he had an office downtown. He’d turn us loose and we’d play on the chairs and go in and out of the doors. He just told us not to touch things that weren’t ours and then he’d go to work. I don’t remember our father ever raising his voice at any of us or our mother. He was never angry or quick to temper. He was just a quiet, gentle person. So we’d play on the chairs and turn in circles and when it was time to go, we’d leave. I remember that quite often when he’d come home at night—and we knew he’d had a busy day—he’d say to mom, “Go sit down and let me finish this.” He was very thoughtful. Dad grew up as a hunter and a fisher and he had five girls. He wanted desperately to have someone to hunt and fish with. He went, quite often, with his friends and he’d bring home a deer. He got it cut up and put it in the locker and this was what we would eat. I remember a time he came home and smelled that deer cooking and said, “That’s enough.” He’d had enough venison. [Laughter] I don’t know whether he went hunting after that or not. When he was working on making the college a four-year college, he desperately wanted that—and he personally traveled to every legislator in the state. He met with them wherever they were and sold the plan for a four-year college. He made it possible because he personally visited every single person who would vote. 10 Dad was a great diplomat. There are always people problems and he was able to handle things. He knew what to say and how to say it. In the 1960s, when all of the riots were going on, he just met the people and took care of the problem diplomatically and everybody left happy. He got a Doctorate degree from Stanford University when I was about fifteen. For several summers before that, he would go down to Stanford to attend classes. He lived in a little tiny place and mom stayed home to take care of the five kids. Dad would go back and forth on the bus to classes and wherever he needed to go. He carried stacks of cards with things written on them; whenever he had a minute, he’d pull it out and study his notes. It was expensive and we didn’t have much money, so one day sold our car for tuition money. He came home one day and said, “Come on out, we’ve got a new car. I want you to see it.” It was an old, dumpy car. He said, “Jump in. We’ll go for a ride.” So we went and we said, “But this isn’t a new car!” He said, “It’s new to us.” He was always very positive. ROH: Where were you living? MK: We were in Ogden on Maryland Drive. ROH: While he was going to Stanford? MK: Yes, he went every summer for as long as it took. I don’t remember how many summers. DR: At least four. ROH: Do you remember what kind of car it was? MK: An old Dodge. 11 DR: He loved Hudsons. MK: And he sold the Hudson to get a Dodge. [Laughter] One thing that I remember about dad is that he would go over and work at his office on Saturdays. If he ever went over and saw that one of the secretaries was there doing catch-up work too, he would come back home. He said, “I never ever wanted to have our two cars there.” He didn’t want anybody to ever think that he was being improper at all. He was always very honorable. He was a wonderful dad. We were very blessed to grow up in that home. MC: My name is Margaret and I went to school at Weber from 1957 to 1959. On weekends, we would always to go Syracuse to visit our grandparents and we’d go to dad’s family first and then to Grandma Wilcox’s. As soon as he pulled up, they would be on the phone, “Uncle William’s here and he’s got his hair clippers.” So all my aunts and uncles would come down and get their kids’ hair cut. And here my dad is with five girls and he’s cutting boys’ hair. He learned on his mission to save money that way. After all the men were through, they would sit around the table and play pinochle. The kids would be running around the barn and the silo—we were all over the place, but it was a fun time for us. When we would go on trips in the car, he liked to leave around five or six in the morning. Everyone in the neighborhood was sound asleep, so as soon as we went out of the house, we were not allowed to say a word until the car doors were shut because he did not want us waking up any of the neighbors. 12 We had a neighbor across the street and their name was Klinky and if we were yelling or something then our dad would remind us that we needed to tone it down because the Klinky’s could hear us. There was a home on Harrison that everyone wanted to go into. It was set back from the road, it had a circular driveway, and it was a great big white house with a big garage and a fishpond in the front. We’d go down Harrison and say, “Boy, one of these days I’d love to walk in that house.” Well, after I had graduated from high school in 1957, dad said, “Get in the car; we’re going to go for a drive.” We drove over to that house and pulled in the driveway. We just about died. We had no clue. Weber State wanted to buy the property and Arnie Ferrin owned the home. Arnie said, “If you buy my property, you buy my home.” That was the first time Weber State presidents had a house. Boy, did we have to be careful in that home. [Laughter] But we were pretty well grown up. While I was at Weber, we had social clubs. I was in LD and the boy one was called Excels. The two clubs would have parties and after a party, one of the boys said he had a key to the swimming pool, which was on the lower campus. He said, “Let’s go home and get swimming suits and then we’ll meet back here.” I said, “I won’t be coming back.” It’s a good thing I didn’t. The police heard them in there and the police caught them. They called dad and dad said, “Take their names and I’ll deal with them tomorrow at school.” So he started calling the kids into his office and after about the fifth or sixth, they came to me and said, “You told your dad.” I hadn’t seen my dad. But he talked to them—he didn’t get angry with them, he just talked to them. When we were eating dinner that night, I said, 13 “So you talked to the kids in the pool?” He said yes. I said, “I was with them, but I came home.” He said, “It’s a good thing your name wasn’t on that list.” [Laughter] They were amazed that he didn’t get angry and didn’t arrest them, just visited with them. In 1959, the basketball team at Weber State took first in the nation at Hutchinson, Kansas. My husband played on the team at the time and I was in a marching group called the Coleens, which they invited to go to Kansas and march. So we went and marched two or three nights in Kansas. They entertained us in their homes and had shows for us. One night, I was downtown and I saw dad. He had flown in because he knew we were going to take first place and he wanted to be there. He flew in the day after Governor Clyde signed the proclamation that made Weber a four-year school. He was so excited because that was his dream for Weber. ROH: What’s your husband’s name? MC: Richard Conolly. They called him Dick. It was fun for me to be in Kansas because I was dating him at the time. ROH: Were any of the rest of your sisters there? MC: No, I was the only one. When they were getting ready to tear the homes on Harrison down—they sold all of those homes and they were going to move the president’s home to Slaterville—there was a gate that didn’t open to anything. It was just a gate that hinged on one pole. We were building our home at the time and I asked dad if I could have that gate because it would fit that spot where we needed a gate. He said, “I’ll have to check.” A few days later, he said, “Okay, 14 they said you can have the gate.” It still hangs at my house as a gate that doesn’t go anywhere. As we think back on the patience of our father and our mother—they were both such genuine people. Honest as honest can be. Dad was on the board of directors at first Security Bank; before he would go, he would bring the school car home and take his own because it wasn’t business for the college. We never got to touch that car—no one moved it or got inside. ROH: Do you recall when he was on the board of directors for First Security? MC: I know he was on the board from 1957 to 1959 and I think it went until several years later. ROH: What other boards did he serve on? MC: He was president of the Rotary Club of Ogden. He was in the Kiwanis Club for some time. DR: He was president of Kiwanis. At that time, he was the only person who had been president of Kiwanis and Rotary. MK: He was on the Sunday School General Board of the Church for eighteen years. He traveled many Sundays to stakes all over the state. MC: He would travel with Gordon B. Hinckley. ROH: Did he do any other church service? MC: He was in a stake presidency. He wasn’t very old at that time. I think his main church service was the Sunday School General Board. KC: He wrote lessons for the Sunday School manuals. ROH: What are some other stories about your dad? 15 KC: He would tell us, “Oh, do you know how they named Lavan?” Lavan is down by Nephi. It’s “naval” spelled backwards. It’s in the middle of the state and they called it Lavan instead of Naval. But let me tell you just a couple of other things. First, our dad was the very first Eagle Scout in Syracuse. That was quite an accomplishment. MK: The Eagle Scout badge that he received was one of the first three hundred ever made and my son has it now because he is the oldest grandson to be an Eagle Scout. Dad said, “When I have a grandson who is an Eagle Scout, I’ll be there.” That’s another great story. He had passed away by the time my son got his Eagle Scout, but my mother was there and she said, “Dad was there in the back of the chapel.” He said he’d be there and he was. KC: I’m going to tell you about the sign on Harrison in front of Weber. They built that when the college was moving from the lower campus to the upper campus. They made it with enough sections so that it would not just say Weber College, but would also fit the name Weber State University. They planned ahead so that it would fit. When he became president, the campus was down by the Moench Building on 25th and Adams. There was a home there for the president. It was an old bungalow house just west of the gymnasium. Dad didn’t feel comfortable having five girls in that neighborhood and he knew the campus was moving anyway, so he bought a home on 28th Street, just above Ogden High School. When the university bought the property that had been Arnie Ferrin’s, we moved into the home on Ferrin’s property. When the college needed to move that house 16 and put a road in, they bought some property north of 36th Street and it was going to be the new president’s home. It was Dr. Harline’s home. The house needed remodeling, so the university asked dad to move in and remodel it when the college moved the home on Harrison. Well, dad knew he was going to retire and wouldn’t spend extra money to remodel it knowing that a new president may want to change the style. The college owned a yellow-brick rambler east of the tennis courts, next to the football field. Dad and mother moved into that house and live there for four or five years before dad retired. When dad retired, they stayed in the home and paid rent. They didn’t have the equity of a home and didn’t have a home to retire into so when dad passed away, mother received a letter from the governor saying she could rent the home for as long as she wanted to. The new college president, Joe Bishop, remodeled the house. DR: You know what happened to that house? KC: We don’t talk about it. DR: Caught fire and burned to the ground. Well, I want to tell you a little about my dad and his brother. His brother, David Miller, was a professor of history at the University of Utah and he was an authority on Utah history. He wrote several books on Utah’s history. One that he particularly loved was a story of Southern Utah and the Hole in the Rock—the pioneers who camped up above and took their wagons down through that hole. My uncle loved to go down to Southern Utah and my dad loved to go with him. Once, when they went down, they hiked down to the bottom where the Colorado River ran through and there were a lot of different kinds of shrubs there, including poison ivy. They hiked down and when 17 they saw the poison ivy, they lifted their hands above their heads so that they wouldn’t get any on them, then they went through it. Well, they forgot that they had it on their pants. They rubbed their arms on their pants and came home with poison ivy all over their arms. MK: Uncle David was a fun man. He was dad’s only brother. ROH: Where did Uncle David go to school? DR: He went to USC. ROH: What was the black cat story you mentioned? MC: We lived across the street from Klinky’s, and Dorothy Klinky came over and babysat one time. We had a wiry black cat that would run up the back of the couch and scare her. She was petrified of that cat. We let it go, but she ended up having her mother come over because that cat would zip right up the back of the couch and jump up and scare her. I think the cat’s name was Licorice. We never went shopping for clothes. Mom sewed all of our clothes, but when it came time for new shoes, she would take the shoes we were wearing, put them on a piece of paper, outline the sole of the shoe, and come back with a size bigger. So we did not shop when we were little. KC: When we went to the dentist, we would be promised that if we were good at the dentist’s then we would get a pair of shoes. The dentist was horrible in those days. The drill was slow and there was no Novocain. It was awful. But you could look across the street at the JC Penny’s and know you were going to get a pair of shoes when you got through. 18 We lived in Ogden, and then moved to Salt Lake when dad became the assistant superintendent of Utah schools. This was the job he had just before Weber State. Well, we were shopping for a house and all of us fell in love with this particular house, but it was just a little out of reach. So mother, for the only time in our lives, got a job to supplement our income so we could get that house. She worked at a little place called Immigration Market. Being the youngest, I was often alone when I came home from school. While we lived in Salt Lake, we got our first TV. It was black and white and the only shows on it were wrestling and maybe the Lone Ranger. I spent a lot of time watching TV. MC: The reception was terrible. The TV had rabbit ears but the programming wouldn’t even go all day. It would have some news in the morning, and then it would turn off and come back on in the evening. You could hardly see anything, but it was fun. KC: Another thing going along with the shopping: I remember my very first storebought dress. I was in the fifth grade. It wasn’t very pretty, but it was storebought. Mother made most of her dresses, too. I think she made wedding dresses and bridesmaid’s dresses. She made everything. One of the best Christmases ever was when dad got mother a mink stole. I don’t think I ever saw mother so surprised. She cried. ROH: Barbara has joined us now, so let’s hear her memories of her father. 19 BM: My name is Barbara Miller McMullen. I was born in Ogden, Utah, on September 22, 1932. One of my favorite memories of our father is his wonderful smile. He was always calm—never angry—mom did the chastising when we needed it. I remember that when he came home from work and sat down in his favorite chair to try to read the paper, we’d have curlers and combs and we’d play with his hair. He used to wake us up in the morning with a backrub and then he would cook our cereal and take us to school. He was very careful of Mom. When we were quite small, he would take us down to his office at the Weber County School District on Saturday mornings. We would play with the chairs and the sliding doors and have a wonderful time. He was so devoted to Mother and took such good care of her. He was so proud of everything she did and said. She was worried about being a college president’s wife because she was just a farm girl, but she was loved by everybody and admired by all who knew her. On Sunday afternoons, we would go out to my grandma’s house. Daddy had learned to cut hair on his mission and my uncles and cousins would all line up to get their hair cut by him. In the house, there was always a game of pinochle going on. My dad and our uncles would go deer hunting every year and that deer was our meat for the winter. It was kept in a locker and we’d pick it up every Saturday. I didn’t know you were not supposed to like deer meat. Everyone was appalled when I told them. Dad also taught us the evils of gambling, although not in a very good way. We were on our way to California and we stopped in Las Vegas for the night. He 20 went into the hotel to get our room and dropped a few nickels in a slot machine. Well, he came out to the car with his hat full of nickels. [Laughter] That did not teach us much that day. The only time I ever saw him really hurt was when he did not get one of the jobs he had been promised. It took a while for him to recover from that. My dad was a wonderful parent, a good teacher, a wonderful administrator, and a wonderful husband. ROH: You mentioned your mom had some problems with her health. Would you tell me a little about that? MK: It was usually a tooth. That’s why it took them so long to find it. She’d get an infected tooth and it would fill her body with infection and she’d be bedridden. I don’t know how somebody discovered it, but they finally realized that was what was happening. KC: The tooth didn’t hurt, but the infection was from it. DR: When Dad was gone all summer every summer and she was taking care of the five girls, we would go out to Syracuse and we would pick corn and beans and tomatoes and everything. We would can it all and by the time dad got home at the end of the summer, mother was so exhausted that twice she was in the hospital. MC: But she never complained. DR: We were the complainers. [Laughter] ROH: What was the job that you remember your dad being promised but not getting? 21 BM: He was promised when he left Ogden High as Principal, that he would be the next superintendent of Ogden City schools. That crushed him. ROH: What did he do after that? BM: He was going to take a job in Rochester, New York. Instead, he and mother went down to Salt Lake and he became Assistant Superintendent of the State Schools. MK: He had an office in the Capitol Building in Salt Lake. His next job was Weber and that was his favorite. ROH: Do you know anything about how your mom and dad met? DR: They met because of mother’s brothers. MC: They were in the same ward and dad was friends with mom’s eight brothers. MK: He didn’t notice her much when they were young. He didn’t look at her until he was home from his mission. When he got home, he took one look and said, “Marry me.” MC: Mom also had a beautiful voice and she had the lead in the opera at Davis High School for two or three years. MK: She also had the lead part in one of their ward music productions. When dad came home he wanted to know her better, so he got in that play so he could get to know her. They started dating and going out together a lot. In the winter, they would hitch up a sleigh and pick up some other couples and go over to Hooper to go to a dance. They’d come back in the sleigh, bundled up in blankets, and mother said that he would drop everybody else off and take her home last. They loved it. 22 Dad’s mother was a little hard to get along with, so he had decided that when he found a wife, she was going to be a mellow, easy-going person. That’s what he found. They were married on December 17, 1931. Somehow, all of us missed the story of how they were engaged, but we do know that she had a red satin wedding dress and she wanted that dress so that she could wear it after the wedding to dances and things. They were married in the Salt Lake Temple. KC: Mother always baked bread. One of dad’s favorite things was to take a hot loaf of bread and rip it open and eat it fresh. Dad always whistled, too. He was always whistling. MK: Dad loved to see new places, so we’d be driving along and he’d say, “Where do you think that road goes?” I remember one time when we were trying a road to see where it went, we came to a little river that we couldn’t cross and up the hill were two big bulls. We looked at those bulls and we looked at that river and dad said, “Let’s find some branches so we can fill in a part of the river and get across.” We all tiptoed around, keeping an eye on the bulls, and found enough branches and sticks and things that we could fill up the river to get across. BM: I remember that one. Do you know which road it was? It is now a highway going from Huntsville over to Weber Canyon. KC: Trapper’s Loop. MC: We traveled a lot. We got the bug for travel from our dad. A lot of summers, when he had conventions and things to go to, he was allotted a certain amount of money. He would take that amount and we would drive. We ended up in 23 California a couple of times. Kaye and I had the opportunity to go back east for three weeks. We drove all over the East Coast. Dad snored. [Laughter] The minute he hit that pillow he was asleep. So Kaye and I would hurry and get in bed before he did, so that hopefully we fell asleep before he did, because it would take us forever to get to sleep while he was snoring. KC: Even the grandchildren remember that. MC: We used to go on some great trips. We’d go over to Bear Lake with a group—I think it was friends from his mission in New Zealand. At that time, they had little cabins and each family would have a cabin. We would go in the lake and at night we would have a bonfire and sing songs. We also went to Yellowstone a few times. We had the opportunity to go to California and stay with one of dad’s relatives who had a beach home near San Francisco. We could see the Golden Gate Bridge from the home. There were a lot of stairs from the home down to the beach—it was a small beach and it was cold, but we were bound and determined that we were going swimming. That was a fun trip. KC: The way we managed to go on the trip to Washington D.C. was dad used the money that he would have used to travel and stay in the hotel to buy gas and pay for us to go. I was just barely sixteen years old and I drove clear across the state of Rhode Island. It was quite a deal. Let me read you something that we found last night. It’s in a journal dated September 4, 1953. It says, “The State Board of Education met in Ogden at ten today at the School for the Deaf and Blind. I was notified that I had been 24 appointed to the position of President of Weber State College at a salary of $7,750. I take over as soon as possible. This is the most important position I have had to date. It makes me feel a lot better about missing the appointment to Ogden City Schools, because this will be a lot better job as the years go by.” BM: Dad kept all those little books—journals. MC: Weber State now has the majority of them. BM: You could ask what happened on a certain day thirty years ago and he’d go get the book and read it: we traveled this far, we spent this much for gas, we stayed here. ROH: That’s great. People don’t do that anymore. MC: We just get in the car and go. We don’t think about it. But, you know, money was so tight that they had a hard time. I remember we would occasionally get eggs from Mom’s parents’ home. They would kill one of the oldest chickens and that’s what Mother would cook for us. We wouldn’t get a young tender one, but that was all we had. KC: When dad was a young boy, they had a bunch of chickens and dad was out swinging a rope around— MC: It was dad and a friend and they were swinging rope around and it killed the chickens. They had to eat all that meat and Dad didn’t like chicken after that. KC: What happens is, if one falls over and another falls on it, the one underneath will die. So they kind of stacked up and there was a whole pile of dead chickens. That was a very bad day for dad. 25 MC: I’m going to go back to a trip when we went to California. It stopped at Hoover Dam and it was so hot that you couldn’t touch the handles on the car door—it would burn us. We had to use shirts to get in. So a lot of times my older sisters would take their shirts off— BM: We did not! MK: You did too! BM: I’ll never admit it! MK: We’d say, “Don’t look back here, dad.” MC: On one trip that we went on—Barbara didn’t get to go on this one—but dad came home after Thanksgiving and said, “How would you like to go down to Disneyland?” Now, Disneyland was new at that time. We were all excited. We drove, of course. We parked our car and sat there to watch the Rose Bowl parade. It was so fun. That, I think, was the only trip we went on without him going to a convention. KC: We need Barbara’s daughter, Lee Ann to tell her story. LS: I’m Lee Ann Strong, Barbara’s daughter. I was born in Salt Lake City, Utah on September 6, 1959. I remember being a grandchild when they lived in the president’s house. For us, it was a paradise to go and spend summers there. I didn’t ever want to go home. In their bedroom, they had two big beds and we all slept in there. Grandpa had to get up and go to work early and all we had to do was get up and swim or bake cookies all day. So we would all pile in that bedroom and he would come around to our side of the bed before we went to sleep and do tricks—he’d pretend he was putting something in one side of our 26 head and then pull it out of the other. Then we’d all have a race to see who could go to sleep first—before he started to snore. We’d lay there giggling and he’d say, “Please stop giggling.” He was such a great sport. We have great memories of that. KC: He’d cross his legs and put a kid on his foot—he had a size thirteen shoe—and he would rock them up and down. He would even do that with our kids. MK: When we were little, we’d stand on his feet. LS: When remote controls were new, he didn’t want anyone to touch the remote control. He’d hide it in his pocket and shake his change and change the channel while the remote was hidden. We thought he was changing the channel with his money. MK: That reminds me of the first time he brought a car home that didn’t have a horn in the middle of the steering wheel—it had the horn on the side. He’d say, “I can honk the horn, can you?” So he’d lean on it and honk it. We thought it was magic. BM: We had some wonderful trips with mother after our dad died. For most of them, we didn’t take our husbands. In fact, we started when our kids were little and we’d have a slumber party. The president’s home had an enormous yard with a great big willow tree. We’d go out there and spread out cots and sleeping bags. Then we started doing trips with just us and we had some wonderful times with our mother. Our father left her well enough provided for that she was able to take all of the children and in-laws on several cruises. I don’t think anything made her happier than having us all together. 27 KC: There’s also a story about mother and her Book of Mormon. Mother had eight brothers and one sister. When both parents had died, they didn’t have much. They lived on a farm and there was whatever was left in the house, so the brothers and the two sisters got together and they hauled everything out of the house. It was in the summertime and they made piles of items for the siblings to have as their inheritance. They numbered the piles and tried to make them even and fair because they didn’t know which one they were going to get. The rule was, if you got it, you had to haul it away, whether you wanted it or not. Mother had said, “I just don’t want the wringer washer—anything but the wringer washer.” As the oldest daughter, she had done an awful lot of laundry for her farm-boy brothers. Well, when they drew the numbers, mother had gotten the wringer washer. They took it home and hauled it down into the unfinished basement and put it in the corner. Well, one day they took the lid off and looked down in there and there was a book. It was an original Book of Mormon from 1830. It had been placed in there by one of her brothers. The story is that when mother’s father, Henry Wilcox, was on his mission in Ohio, he was giving out Books of Mormon and he came across a man who said he already had one. He gave it to our grandfather, who gave it to Uncle Hugh, our mother’s brother, for safe-keeping. Hugh stuck it in the washer for whoever ended up with the washer. The book was one of 5,000 copies. It was missing a few pages and those had been replaced with pages from a book from 1887. That Book of Mormon is now in the Syracuse Museum. We took it to a collector in Salt Lake and they valued it 28 at $50,000. Mother wanted it to be in the museum. Although now I know the college wishes they had it. One other thing that Mother inherited was three shares of stock in a state bank in Syracuse that Grandpa had bought in about 1927. She wouldn’t sell. The bank got sold from one bank to another and mother started to get dividends from it. Father teased her about her stock and her investment. This went on for years and years and the dividend got a little bigger. It was eventually sold to First Security. Donna and her husband went to the bank with mother because they wanted to see a copy of her shares. Mom asked, “So how much is it worth?” The teller wrote it down on a piece of paper and those three shares had become worth well over $90,000. She got quite a nice little nest egg from the three shares that Grandpa bought in 1927! LS: I’d like to tell the candy story. After Grandpa had his heart attack, he wasn’t supposed to eat candy and we would find candy hidden all over the house. He would hide it everywhere. KC: He had it in his tool shed! MK: He had it in all the drawers. DR: He had it hidden everywhere. LS: In that workroom downstairs, there would be a jar of nails and a jar of candy. KC: When we would travel, dad would find the hotel and then leave us to get settled. While we did that, he’d go find the local bakery and come back with donuts and sweet rolls. 29 MC: He used to come home from the store and say, “How did this candy get in here?” [Laughter] LS: He did all the grocery shopping. He’d take us with him and when we checked out, he’d say, “Oh, how did this get in here?” There would be a bag full of candy and he’d say, “Don’t tell Grandma.” MK: When I lived here as a single mom, when there were snowstorms, I’d get up in the morning to clean my car and the driveway and dad had already done it. KC: When he lived on Harrison, he would get up in the morning, shower, and put a baseball cap on to hold his hair flat while it dried so his curly hair wouldn’t flip back up. KC: We had a great life. MC: We did and I don’t think we realized it at the time. I also don’t think we recognized the position that dad held at Weber. I went to school there and I’d be talking to friends who had no idea that my dad was the president. Dad would walk up and put an arm around me and I’d introduce him. After he’d left, my friends would say, “Your dad’s the President?” They’d say, “You go to school for free!” I’d say, “Are you kidding?” [Laughter] MK: You couldn’t even have your scholarship. If dad loaned you money, you paid him back. MC: I held down two jobs during the school year. DR: They taught us thrift and how to be careful with money. BM: They were so careful with money. DR: But we never felt like we were without. We had a wonderful life. 30 KC: We had a lot of hand-me-down dresses. [Laughter] ROH: Thank you so much for speaking with me today. 31