Oral History Program Dean Hurst Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 6 January 2017 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Dean Hurst Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 6 January 2017 Copyright © 2024 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. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The World War II "All Out for Uncle Sam" oral history project contains interviews from veterans of the war, wives of soldiers, as well as individuals who were present during the war years. The interviews became the compelling background stories for the "All Out for Uncle Sam" exhibit. The project received funding from Utah Division of State History, Utah Humanities Council and Weber County RAMP. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Hurst, Dean, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 6 January 2017, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections and University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Dean Hurst circa 1945 ...-:'11 • , , .... .,,.,. -"'-- I.;,·· &"' '--_;;;;".. ,. flllllll --- Dean Hurst ready for a jump circa 1945 - -If 1,.--- 1-r ----l!i'l- Dean Hurst 82nd Airbourne Honor Guard circa 1945 '' I ', -- Dean Hurst next to model of Weber State University's Bell Tower circa 2010 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Dean Hurst conducted on January 6, 2017 by Lorrie Rands. Hurst discusses his early life in Ogden, his service in the paratroops in World War II, and his experience as a student at Weber College. Also present is Michael Ballif. LR: It is January 6, 2017. We are in the home of Dean Hurst in Ogden, Utah. We are talking about his growing up in Ogden and World War II, for the World War II in Northern Utah Project. I am Lorrie Rands conducting the interview, and Michael Ballif is with me as well. Okay, Dean, thank you so much for your willingness. I greatly appreciate it. I’m going to start with my normal question, when and where were you born? DH: I was born in Ogden, Utah, December the 4, 1926. That’s 90 years ago. LR: Yes, it is. Were you, were you born in the old Dee hospital? DH: I was born at home. My family had a little home my father and mother built: 450 Darling Street, in Ogden, Utah. I was delivered by a Dr. Merrill. My mother had had an earlier baby, my older brother, Farr, and he had been born at the hospital. I don’t know whether it was because there was some trauma that developed at that time or whatever it was, but she felt more comfortable delivering at home, so she did. All of my subsequent brothers and sisters were born at home as well. LR: Interesting. Who were your parents? DH: My father was Leo C. Hurst, and mother was Deseret Ione Salt Hurst. LR: Were they both from this area? DH: Yes, and it’s a rather interesting thing. My father was actually born in Colonia Dublán, Chihuahua, Mexico, which is a story in and of itself. I don’t know whether 1 you want to go there, but his parents went there when the LDS Church had colonies, and he was born while his father and mother were living in Mexico. They were non-polygamous, they were just living there because his grandparents were. So Dad was born in Mexico, came out when he was just six years old, and they settled in Ogden. Mother was born in Wilson Lane, which is adjacent to Ogden. So basically, they were from this area and grew up in this area. LR: What did your dad do? DH: My father was a carpenter. Largely he worked as a truck driver for Burt and Locker Lumber Company, which was a local lumber company downtown. He started to work there when he was just 15 years old. It wasn’t common to go always beyond the eighth grade, but he happened to be there when Mr. Burton needed someone to drive a truck to deliver some lumber. Dad did, and stayed there for 17 years, then went in with his father and brothers as contractor and carpenters. He largely built a lot of this home, with my help. LR: Wow, and your mother, what did she do? DH: My mother was an amazing person. She was basically a homemaker. There were something like 40 foster children that my mother and father took in over the years. During the time I was away, they were beginning to take in foster children from various agencies in the town and then in the state. I say she was a stay-athome mom, but she was a very busy, busy woman. LR: Yes, she was. DH: In addition to that, and this may not be related to what you’ll be asking about, but Father and Mother were heavily involved in a girls’ camp in North Fork for 24 2 years. It’s where they spent all their summers together. They did some amazing things there; it wasn’t just custodial, it was program development. There was a branch of the LDS Church that functioned there. They were extremely talented, busy, well-oriented people. LR: Sounds like it. I’m curious, do you feel like your parents helped shape the person you are today? DH: My parents were the most amazing parents, and a lot of people will tell you that. They were very active in the LDS Church, and I grew up in a relatively conservative family home style. As I think back over the years of my mother and the circumstances of my birth, here, let me just mention an example. My father was terribly burned in a gasoline fire just a day or two prior to my birth. He was taken to the hospital, and my mother delivered me a little bit early because of stress, I’m sure. She’s concerned about him. I had an older brother, Farr, and my mother’s mother was trying to take care of him and to help her. In those days, women stayed in bed for 10 days. Different today, isn’t it? It was unique then, though. The thing that was traumatic about my father was after he had been burned, he found that his legs were very badly burned. He was hospitalized because infection set in, so he was struggling for his life. Mother, whose own mother was taking care of her, developed the flu and had to leave. My aunt who lived nearby had a child about my age, so she was not able to help Mom out very much, and my older brother fell down the basement steps and put his teeth through his lips. I developed pneumonia, and my little mother was challenged to 3 take care of a sick baby while she was recovering from childbirth, worrying about her own mother who was sick, and her husband who was in the hospital. It was an amazing story, and I thought for her to go through that kind of trauma, it kind of was typical of her life. Whether we get to it or not, there’s a branch of stories concerning my mother, who was told she would never live past 35 years of age. She died at 94. She climbed Ben Lomond peak, where she and my father were custodians of that girl’s camp. She climbed it I don’t know how many times, but the last time was at age 65. So her life was extended; it’s an amazing story. LR: Sounds like it. Now I want to know the story, so if we have time we will come back to that. DH: Okay, because that is a story in itself. LR: I’m hoping we have time, because I really want to come back to that. Let me ask you, I know that you were four years old when the Depression started. What are your memories of growing up during the Depression? DH: I have a very different memory of the Depression, even though it was the hardest of the times. I was born in 1926, and 1929 was when the Depression really started. My father was still in a semi-recovering mood. He was technically out of work for the better part of six months. But his boss, Mr. Elmer Burton, saw that my mother had a load of coal and groceries during the time that Dad was out of work. When he went back to work, he was so badly crippled he could hardly work, but Mr. Burton kept him on salary. My father was the only one of my uncles that was working. Mr. Burton kept him on at the salary of $15 a month, which at 4 that time was a livable wage. Within a year or two, he was making $17 a month, but he was employed. He did very little work. He kind of stood around down there and did little menial tasks; his legs kept him from doing much manual labor. I’ve always blessed the memory of a man, a boss who took care of his workers. You don’t see that in today’s environment, no. I grew up and it was not an easy time. I can remember my grandfather taking me down to buy a pair of shoes. I can remember Christmases being very frugal, but largely made memorable when Dad, who was a carpenter, made a desk, a rocking horse, things like that for the children so that we didn’t rely too much on the stores. My memories of the Depression: I was well aware it was there. Before mother and father married, Dad was working at the lumber company and his father, who was a carpenter, helped build their home. Mother helped lathe and plaster the home. So they had a home when they moved in. It was the only home that my immediate aunts and uncles had. When they were out of work, they lived at our home. It was a little two-bedroom home with a partial basement. I can remember living in that home when we had a biffy out back; we had an outdoor toilet. They hadn’t developed either gas or sewer. We had to have an outdoor privy until I was nearly six or eight years of age. I’m well aware of the stress, you had 12 people in that home at one time. My aunts and uncles on both sides of the family; my mother’s sister, her husband and their children one time, and my uncle on my father’s side, Uncle Ern and Aunt Lydia on the other, that lived in our home. I was very, very much aware of the Depression. 5 I had one pair of shoes for—we called them a pair of best shoes—and a pair of play shoes or work shoes. When I came home from school, I would change my clothes into my play clothes and put on my play shoes to play. I remember the food Mother prepared was low-scale; we ate a lot of sauerkraut and were lucky if we could divide a wiener. I remember going to the store and buying 25 cents worth of sirloin tip. That’s the little part of the sirloin that they generally cut off because it’s kind of fatty and they don’t go with the sirloin. That would feed our entire family. It was a unique neighborhood that I grew up in. Part of the reason the Depression was as minor to me as it was is that both sets of aunts and uncles and grandparents all lived within a hundred yards of each other. My grandfather, when he came back from Mexico, bought that interior lot where you see the gas company is today. That was my neighborhood, my playground. That’s where my cousins and my aunts and uncles, we all lived, and we leaned on one another. When someone was out of work, it was like having surrogate parents. My Aunt Lydia and my Aunt Annie were like surrogate mothers to me, as Mother was to their children. But I have to tell you, I feel sorry for the kids of today that don’t have what I had during that time of the Depression. I had trees to climb in; I had a big field that we could play baseball; I could dig in the dirt, build undergrounds; I could climb boxelder trees, which were prolific in that area, and build tree huts. I had a remarkable childhood—the happiest childhood—and I feel sorry for the kids of the day that lived in side-by-side homes. Our homes were in a kind of an open 6 area between those confines of 29th and 30th and Washington and Adams. Utopia. MB: Going along with what you’re saying about growing up, I know you said you changed into your play clothes after you came home, so what did you do for fun during the Depression? DH: I’m glad you asked. As I mentioned, I was out of the house in a flash after changing my clothes. With my cousins around us, we had a variety of things we did for fun. We’d play Kick the Can and Run, Sheep, Run and a host of night games. I also had a vivid imagination. I would play make-believe, just kind of play as we were going along. We had a field for baseball; we had built a swing and a chinning bar that we used to exercise, so I had a very active childhood. It’s been interesting to me that I grew up in the same neighborhood that my father did, when my grandfather lived in that first home. My dad climbed the same trees, dug in the same dirt, played the same night games, swung on the same rope where he fell and broke his wrists out of the same tree that I swung on. It was a fun, fun childhood from that regard. MB: Sounds like utopia, like you said. DH: Well, it was. We lived only a couple of blocks from the Carnegie Free Library, and when I was old enough to be trusted to go up there, I would go up to those little basement rooms because I loved to read. The old library, of course, is long gone, but it was kind of a semi-basement room, and I can remember going, spending hours at the library. But my childhood, it was one of a series of activities. You guys wouldn’t know what rubber guns were, but rubber guns were 7 a contrivance where we used the inner tube tire to cut and make—you know what an inner tube is? MB: Yes. DH: Well, you take an inner tube and tie it in a knot. You had a wooden rubber gun you would cut out with a clothespin acting as a hammer, stretch the rubber band over the gun back so you had a trigger. With all my cousins, we’d choose sides and have rubber gun fights, one side against the other. That was a major part of my childhood life. We’d play Fox and Geese in the snow—that my mother taught us. We’d build snow forts, have snowball fights. My life was just a series of fun and adventure. I was probably a poorer student than I should have been, but I don’t believe there was the strictness in school that you have today. LR: Where did you go to school? DH: I went to Lewis Jr. High School. Lewis was right on 29th Street, so it was very close to my home. I found a shortcut to go to it where I could go through kind of an undeveloped street. Ogden Avenue was a street that never finished going through the block, so I would cut through there and then climb a fence to be in the backyard of Lewis School. I could be to school in five minutes, so it was very convenient for school. LR: So that’s the junior high you went to. What elementary school did you go to? DH: That was Lewis. It was called Lewis Jr. High, and you went from first grade through 10th. There were four schools in Ogden at that time: Washington, Mound Fort, Central, and Lewis, that all went from first grade to 10th grade, and then went to the junior/senior year at Ogden High School. 8 LR: So you went to Ogden High School? DH: Yes. LR: You were in the new school by then. DH: Yes, the new paint smell was still at Ogden High when I started. The first students, if I remember right, attended in 1939, so when I started in 1942 it was still a new school. It was bright, shiny, and a beautiful school. Quite a change from Lewis. Lewis was a converted railroad hospital, named after a doctor or something, so it was kind of a rebuilt school. It had wooden floors that they would oil periodically to keep them nice and clean, and it was a death trap from a fire standpoint. They added a wing to it, but Lewis Jr. High School was very choice, with all those childhood memories you have in going to school. LR: When you were going to Ogden High, did you recognize at the time the significance of that school, of what it had taken to build it? DH: I don’t believe any of us did. We were very impressed with the fact it was a million-dollar high school, and that really raised eyebrows. We’re in the middle of a Depression, and no one could quite understand how we were able to build a million-dollar high school in an Art Deco style. It was magnificent. I don’t believe it really registered on us; it was beyond our comprehension really. I grew up in an era where, as I mentioned, out-of-work uncles had to depend sometimes on WPA or PWA or CCCs or all those organizations that President Roosevelt had been instrumental in getting going. I had a deep respect and love for that school. It is unique, however, to bridge something: much as I enjoyed my years at Lewis, and I had fine teachers, but my interests were centered in art. I wasn’t the 9 smartest kid on the block when it came to math, but I was a good artist; I could draw well. I had an art teacher that for some reason had a favorite that he showed more attention to than he did me. When I went to Ogden High, one of the best art teachers that lived in the state was B.Y. Adeline, but I didn’t take an art class. I was so concerned with the service in the war. Some of my earliest memories are listening to that madman in Germany when we were listening to Little Orphan Annie, Don Winslow of the Navy, Renfrew the Mountie, and those fun games we’d listen to on the radio. I was very much aware that there was something bad going on with a man named Hitler. When the war started in 1941, I was 15 years old, and my only thought was to be in the service. I didn’t take a class in art at Ogden High School. Had one of the best opportunities to do it. Odd that I leapfrogged that, because that later began to be one of my major professions: commercial art and fine arts. These paintings you see are mine. But all I wanted to take were classes. Well, I joined the Army Air Cadet Program. You joined at age 17, and when you were 18, you went directly into Air Cadet training. I joined that. All I could think of was flying. My childhood interest, talking about other things I did, was model aircraft. I built flying models, gas models. I used to pedal my bike out to the old Ogden Airport, which was further out south into town. I took classes in theory of flight, navigation, meteorology—everything that had anything to do with flying. All I could think of was going in at age 17 to the program, so I wasted a lot of my high school years. 10 I was very active in drama. I had always been. My mother had taught me poetry that I did all over the place: church, schools, and a variety of places. So I was heavily oriented towards the dramatic, and those were my fun classes. I was in school plays, and never was the lead in a school play, but I always was interested in dramatics and theater. Ogden High had ROTC, and I ended up as a Lieutenant, which wasn’t that high because everyone had gone already. My mother started me in school when I was a little bit young; I was five when you should have been six. She said she knew I was ready for school. She wanted me out of the house, so I was a few months younger than everyone else. It was harder for me both athletically and when it came to dating. I mean, a girl that was six months older than me was on a different level; I was subordinate to them. So it had its challenges, but it was interesting that many of my graduating class in 1944 had already left for the service. There were relatively few of us left, which gets into the next chapter relative to Weber College. It was fascinating to see the guys that had been the early officers: the Colonels, the Majors and everything in ROTC, gradually winnow out. I rose from the ranks of Private to a Sergeant to a Second Lieutenant just about the time that school ended and I graduated. So it wasn’t that great of an achievement, though it was interesting, wearing my ROTC uniform. You had buttons instead of bars and stars, but I took a few salutes downtown when I wore my Sam Brown belt and my officer’s hat. The new guys in the service from Hill Air Force Base would salute and I saluted back, but it was embarrassing. 11 LR: Going back just a little bit, and you kind of touched on this, but I’d like to talk about it a little bit more. What were your first reactions when you heard about Pearl Harbor? DH: Oh, it’s vivid in my memory. It’s vivid for two reasons. One of them is our church. The Weber Stake was holding Conference in the Old Tabernacle downtown, not where the present Tabernacle stands, but on the southeast corner. So we were right in the middle of a session of Conference in the morning when someone walked in and handed the Stake President a piece of paper. He came to the pulpit after a speaker had finished and opened up the paper and announced that Pearl Harbor—and we didn’t know where Pearl Harbor was—had been bombed by the Japanese. My memory of Pearl Harbor Day was unusual in the respect that I was in a church sitting, and we were shocked. Not only had they divided our stake—the old Weber Stake was divided into the South Ogden Stake and the Weber Stake—but we were cut asunder as a nation with the war. I was in a school play at Lewis, and our drama teacher had scheduled a rehearsal for that afternoon, the afternoon of the announcement. She felt we needed an extra rehearsal. We never generally did this on a Sunday, that was a no-no, but she felt that we needed it. As we were walking to rehearsal, my friend Eugene McMullen was walking with me, and we were talking about this dastardly deed that had happened. We couldn’t believe it. Japan in those days was considered a nation of cheapness. The cheap toys and the cheap things that we saw made in Japan was almost a common statement for being cheap, substandard. We couldn’t believe that here was a nation that had dared to attack 12 us. We thought we were the biggest, strongest nation in the world, and here’s this little pitiful Japanese island that’s bombing us!? I remember talking to Eugene as we were walking to school and I said, “It will be over by Christmas.” Little did we know that one of the kids in my neighborhood, Eldon Pierce, would be one of the first in our neighborhood to die of gas gangrene in the Philippines; that a number of the students like Bob Goodmanson, who was our student body president at Lewis when I was in the seventh grade, was killed in an airplane. The son of Dr. Merrill that delivered me as a baby is one of the bodies in the USS Arizona, killed on December 7. I remember December 7. I remember going to school, and this would have been the following day of school, on Monday. Now, I might be mistaken on that; it seems to me we listened to the broadcast when President Roosevelt referred to the Day of Infamy and the declaration of war. I’ve always thought in my memory that that was the following day of school. All I remember is we were in school when that was announced. I thought it would have been on Monday. It may have been a day or two before Congress said that, I’m not quite sure. My memory doesn’t trigger there. LR: You’re correct, it was the very next day. DH: Oh, was it? That’s my memory of it. I remember being there in that assembly where there were those two shocking things that had happened so quickly and so unexpectedly to my young and fertile mind. It was very memorable. LR: As you started into high school, all you’re thinking about, from what you said, is that you wanted to join the Army Air Corps and just fly. 13 DH: I wanted to do more than fly. I wanted to be a P-38 pilot. I had built models of the P-38 and P-39, P-47 was just coming on line, and the P-51 hadn’t been invented yet. I lived in a world of airplanes, and I wanted so much to be able to do that. Very few of my 17-year-old cadre, we were kind of in a body when we were going to all these classes. Very few of us ever ended up flying; it’s one of the reasons I ended up a paratrooper. That was the closest I could get to flying! LR: Because you started school early, you graduated early. You were only 17. Did you take some time to start college? DH: Well, this is an interesting thing. At that time, very few people in my family went on to college. I think the main reason I started at Weber in 1944 was there was nothing else to do. I was working. At age 15, I was working in stores and at the Naval Supply Depot doing men’s work because of the need for manpower. So I really hadn’t thought of going to school other than I had a couple of friends who were going to go. My birthday was in December, we graduated in June, and I worked at the Naval Supply Depot for that summer. Before December, my friend said, “Why don’t we go to Weber College?” I said, “What’d I do there?” He said, “Well, you’re interested in art and flying.” Weber, at that time, had some classes relative to flying. They had a program for the Navy Air Cadets, they were enrolled at Weber. Not when I started; they had been there from 1942 to 1943. When I started in 1944, it was largely because I was going to go for maybe one quarter, and it was kind of a fun thing to do. It was more fun than it was school, I’m afraid. 14 LR: I have a quick question before we move on. You worked at the Naval Supply Depot. What did you do there? DH: The hardest work you can imagine. It was unloading boxcars and loading goods, some of them very heavy lifting. Hard work in July and August, and I worked there two years, 15 and 16, until I went into the service. I worked at Lowell’s Hardware, and I was working at Tanner’s for Men. I was very busy and fortunate that there were a lot of jobs open. LR: Do you know what you were unloading? DH: Yes, a lot of it, particularly at the Naval Supply Depot, would have been not only soft goods; I’m talking about clothing and those kinds of things. The things that I remember that were the hardest, when I talked about lifting things that were heavy, were automotive parts. You didn’t always see what they were because they were in boxes. One of the dreams of working there was to be a forklift operator. That was never entrusted to a 15, 16-year-old kid. But I can remember they had women’s crews working too. They didn’t put us together; they worked separately, but I can remember young ladies doing some really hard work out there too. I remember unloading boxcars where, I would estimate some of them would be 40 or 50 pounds in a package, which can be a little onerous, hour two or three. LR: I want to make sure I heard you correctly: the women crews and the men crews, they would not work them side-by-side? DH: Well, they worked side by side, but there was different groups. We had names for it, but you worked in a group with about eight or 10 fellows, with one adult male 15 supervisor. The girls had their same thing, with a feminine supervisor. There were times when we would be working close together, but never integrated from lifting the same packages, or the same bales. I honestly think many times, given the association at that time, that they thought girls were weaker than men. They weren’t always doing as heavy lifting as we were. I’m aware that sometimes they had some of the lighter duties, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t work hard. LR: So, going to your time at Weber College, I want to know about the… did you call it the Polygamy Dance? DH: You’re leapfrogging, you’ve got to go back a minute. My first brush with college was before college started. It was tradition, and you’re going to get into a lot of traditions. In 1923, a tradition started where the students were going to go up every year and have a flag raising where they’d put the purple and white and the American flag on top of Mount Ogden. It only lasted for a year or two, because it was a long hike, and you didn’t go up from the Snowbasin side. The only route really was the one from Taylor’s Canyon over Malan’s Basin and then on up. That’s a story in itself, and it was almost a unique tradition that we had. When it became too hard to do that, they just went up to Malan’s. That was very successful. During the war, they stopped you from going up Malan’s. Strong’s Canyon was a source of water, and they had a guard posted at the base of Strong’s Canyon to prevent people, because it was one of the sources of the drinking water. I don’t know if that lasted the entire war years, but it was at first when we were all in that semi-frightened state of, “What’s going to happen?” 16 So my first experience with Weber College was to go on what started as the Mount Ogden hike, then became the Flaming W hike, when the students at Weber would build a fire on the top of Malan’s Peak. I remember as a kid, my father seeing a fire on the mountain at night one time. Dad said, “Well, that’s those college kids. They’re building a fire up on Malan’s Basin.” I was familiar with that, but by the time I got in school at Weber, they didn’t have access up Strong’s Canyon to get up to Malan’s Peak. So they had the Flaming W hike, or the equivalent thereof, at Coldwater Canyon. That’s up Ogden Canyon just shortly past the narrows, and it’s a lovely little hike. It’s a well-developed trail, but much smaller. It wasn’t like the Basin. My first experience with Weber College was going on a hike where we hiked up the Coldwater trail. Some of the faculty, Thatcher Allred and others, would tell stories, a little bit of the history of the school. By the time I came home for my first furlough in 1945 from the service, they were back up at the Malan’s Basin. LR: When you did the Coldwater Canyon, what year was that? DH: That would have been in September of 1944. It was homecoming. The hike used to be associated with homecoming in earlier days. It would have been within a day or so of attending class. LR: I read the interview you did 10 years ago with Rick Randal; that’s where I’m getting some of my questions from. In that interview, you talked about how there really hadn’t been a dance at Weber College in quite some time. DH: It’s an interesting thing. When I started in 1944, if you want to back up a year, there had been a Naval Air Cadet program at Weber from 1942 to 1943. So there 17 had been men on campus, but it wasn’t a co-educational type thing. They did not go to the same classes. They lived in the old dormitory on 23rd Street, which is the former Weber County Building. That’s where the Air Cadets were stationed. When I started in 1944, there hadn’t been a dance; the school kind of shut down from 1942 to 1944. There were 500 students when I started in 1944: roughly 450 women and 50 men. The only men were those who were waiting, like me and a couple of my friends that were waiting for our call-up, ostensibly to either go into the air force or to be drafted. It was very unique, and the thing that was so unique about it is that though there were only 50 men on campus, and those 450 girls, they were trying to carry on many of the traditions that had already been established. The Freshmen had to wear a green beanie, a little green skull cap. We couldn’t wear loud clothing. I made the mistake one time, because I figured there were more of us then there were of them, and I wore a loud shirt that my father had for square dancing. It was ripped off my back. We weren’t allowed to go into the front doors of any of the buildings. We had to go to the back doors. The few remaining students, they really enforced that rule. It was my first brush with college, and I thought it was great. They had a Spirit Club, but there were no men’s clubs. The men’s clubs that were so prevalent when I came back from the service—Phoenix, Excelsior, and Sigma Kappa—hadn’t been since the guys had left. The girls’ clubs were still very much going, and there’s an interesting chapter to that. So many of the men at the start of the war had joined the Army Reserves. A few guys like Dill Young, 18 Ensign Williams, and Bob Blair, some of the first casualties of the war, had gone a little bit before their class, if they weren’t in the Army Reserves. So in 1942, where that was largely a build-up to the war, we were still somewhat defensive. They had a special assembly, as I understand it, for most of the men that were going to Weber in 1943; a very sentimental assembly where President Dixon spoke. Some of the student body officers spoke, and one of the student body officers, after he’d been elected, had had to go to the draft, so it was kind of a shake-up year. They went en masse from Weber down to the Union Station in a group and sang Purple and White, from what I understand from those that were there, and it was very emotional. Many of those kids were the ones that never came back. By the time I got there in 1944, even though they were trying to carry those traditions on, there hadn’t been a yearbook or a dance since 1942 because we were a war-oriented society when I started. I make it sound like it was so frivolous and everything, but it was the best of worlds, and it was the worst worlds; best of times, and worst of times. I think most of us that knew we were going to be going in, it was almost a devil-may-care: “Have all the fun you can, you don’t know how long it’s going to last.” So it was in that period of time, that genre, that we really did some funny things unique to its time, things that we couldn’t do and get away with at any other time. Lawrence Burton and I led a brass band into the library. We had an American flag in front of us, a pair of cymbals, a bass drum, and Glen Eclen played the trumpet. We went in to announce some crazy thing like a war-bond drive we were having, so they couldn’t censure us. Wilma Gross just about had a 19 heart attack, and ended up being one of my very dear friends, but at that moment she hated me. We did a lot of frivolous things like that, the undercurrent to this being a very serious time. We did some really fun things, and one of them was the Polygamy Prance. Girls who didn’t look at you in high school, like me, were suddenly aware of us because we had a pulse, we were available. Lawrence Burton, who later became a Legislator in the United States House of Representatives, he and I were very good friends. We had a couple of others who got together and decided—and this is where the story differentiates in who tells it, but this is the Gospel truth, I was there. We got together with the girls in the equivalent of the Associated Women’s Students, AWS, and the freshman class officers and came up with the idea of having a dance where the guys had to take every girl that asked them, up to seven. We laughed about this because we went scriptural about it. In Isiah, first chapter, fifth verse it said, “In the last days, seven women shall take a hold of some man, saying, ‘Let us be called by thy name to take away our reproach.’” You’ll have to look it up. We came up with that mainly because you couldn’t take more than seven because we didn’t have vans or anything. After seven you had the right to say no, but up to that point you had to accept regardless of who asked you. The guys were very, very honorable about who asked them. Some of the cosmetically challenged girls had asked the number one guy; he had to, and they did. It was a great idea. This is the thing that is totally missing from the story, and I want to get it into print. We knew it was going to be a challenge with that 20 many girls and one guy trading off in dances, and knowing that some of them would take more. We did have someone who took more than the proscribed seven, I’ll get to that in a minute. Lawrence Burton, a guy named Grant Garner, and I had done a take on Hamlet when we were in high school. It was a farce and it was called Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. He was pure as snow but he drifted. It was a thing we did in high school that we ended up taking all over the city and the state. A Shakespearean lover would not have liked it, but it was just fun. Well, we had done that at Ogden High School, and we had the idea that we could do something prior to the dance to take up a little bit of the time. We thought, “We won’t do another take on Hamlet,” so we did the HMS Pinafore, without any of the faculty being involved with it or anything. We got together a cadre of students, and if you’re familiar with the HMS Pinafore, it’s his sisters and his cousins and his aunts. Lawrence Sand took the role of Captain Corker, and I did Sir Joseph Porter KCB, First Lord of the Admiralty, if you can believe it, because I can’t sing, but I could kind of ham it up. We had a number of the guys who could sing. There was the guy who took the role of Ralph Ragstraw, and the one who did the feminine lead, Gloria Perry; they had beautiful voices. We had HMS Pinafore prior to the Polygamy Prance. It was held in the old Moentsch Theater. The thing that was good is that everyone would come in with their ‘wives,’ and after we came up with the seven, we referred to them as wives. The little program that I have in my scrapbook, it’s called the Polygamous Prance. No one remembers that we had that musical first. We had a little 21 orchestra. We got two or three people together to form an orchestra on our own. We built the scenery; it was minimal scenery, but I remember building some props that looked like a Navy ship. So we did that first, and it was only half an hour to forty-five minutes, maybe, between the time people were meeting and greeting and everybody checking out to see who came. There was no secrecy in who you had asked. There are people who have said they kept that secret, it never was. We generally knew if a person had asked you, you said “I’m sorry, I’ve already been asked,” or whatever. Lawrence was one of the guys that thought ahead of the curve and had a neighbor that had a little milk delivery truck. In the LDS Church, they had little red Junior Sunday School chairs, and he put those little red chairs in the back of the milk truck and brought his ‘wives’ that way. There is a story that I heard that the guy who had more wives than anyone was a guy who said he brought his wives on a flatbed truck. I don’t believe that. He could have had a truck that had sides on it, and he could have used that, but I never saw it. He had nine wives. When you hear one of those scurrilous stories where they talk about someone having 20 or 30 wives—which is not true. They acknowledged who had the most. Parker was his last name, and he won with nine. After the play was over, which had taken up a certain amount of time, then we adjourned to the dance hall. It was mayhem over there, because you’re playing very short dances, and trying to dance with each one of your partners. President Dixon, May Welling, most of the faculty were there. The faculty used to come to everything. In the old days, faculty were part of the student body. It was 22 an amazing period of time that existed till I graduated. Many of the professors had left to go into war work; they could make more money working at the Depots than they could working at Weber. Those professors that stayed on during those difficult times, they were dedicated. They came to every function that we ever had. The dance was fun in the fact that one time they had a girl’s choice so that the girls could dance with someone else who wasn’t their husband if they wanted to. It really got confusing, but it was fun! We did a conga line, we tried to do group dances like Virginia Reels, anything that would act as a crowd mixer. There is someone that tells a story about linking arms and ‘dancing’ through the town causing mayhem; that didn’t happen. We all stayed together, and that dance terminated relatively early. The guys, following the dance, took their various dates home. Some of them spread their dates from various locales; it took a while to get them back home. That’s an interesting part of the story: who did you take home first, and who did you take home last? LR: Do you... DH: It just so happened, I’m glad you asked, that I was biblical about that too. The scripture is, “Those who are first were last, and those who were last were first.” So I figured that the girls that asked me last, it was after they had tried to ask others and they ended up with me. The girl that asked me first happened to be the girl I wanted to take home last, so it worked out. I said, “In order to be fair, I’ll take you in the order of the way you asked me.” So the girl who asked me last I took home first, and I remember so well when I went up to the door with my ‘wife’ 23 and looked back at the car, there were five little faces peeking up. That’s a story in itself, because that was my ‘Dear John’ girl. That was probably one of my first dates with her as I remember, and I really liked her. That dance was February the eighth or ninth, and it was immediately following that dance that I went into the service. LR: The dance was in 1945, okay. I was curious. So you took seven girls? DH: Lawrence had seven, I had six; I didn’t fill up my quota. I was kind of glad because one of them, Betty Firth, lived out in Roy, and we were gas rationing. I used my father's car; I didn’t have my own, it was an old ‘39 Chevy, and I had a C Ration gas thing, so you had to conserve your gas. Lawrence had nine as I mentioned, and not everybody had seven. There were some of them that came with four or five. I don’t want to say all 400 of them participated, but there was a good number of them. It was more social, and I like to stress that, because it was a social evening as it was a dance. LR: Okay, I’m going to change gears a little bit, but you talked about war bonds and rationing. Let’s talk about war bonds first. How involved in those were you? DH: That’s really essential to this whole story. I’ve talked about the fun and games, but we were very much oriented towards the war effort. The young ladies, the coeds, had programs where they would deliver food care packages and such down to the Union Station for the troop trains. Ogden was the hub for all of those trains going through. It was remarkable the amount of traffic that was going through, and the girls were very much involved in that. We had scrap metal drives, aluminum drives; we turned in old phonograph records; there was the C 24 rationing, food rationing, and Weber was really on the cutting edge of that. War bonds and war stamps were very much a part of that. One of the more interesting events I can remember in that one quarter that I attended was they had an auction of both men and female. They took some of the prettiest females, and some of the handsome guys—I wasn’t in it—and had an auction where you would auction with either war bonds or stamps. Stamps were small and kept in a coupon book, like a ten-cent stamp. Stick that in the coupon book, fill it up so you didn’t have to pay $18.75 for a war bond. A couple of us wised up to the fact that there were stores in town that were supporting the war bond drives, so we would get them to commit to buying war bonds and then we used these in the auction. A little underhanded, but it enabled me to get a date with a girl that I long time admired. She was two years older than me, and I knew it was the only way I’d ever get a date with her. I remember that I ended up having several hundred dollars worth of war bonds that I had got from a couple of stores, or I had got them to give me the bonds that I could gamble with. So, it was fun. I forget how much we raised, but it would have been in the thousands. We were very much focused on the war; we were very much supportive of things like that. LR: I know you’re talking about Weber College, but how much of that did you participate with while in high school? DH: You had the same thing going into high school. If you look in my high school yearbook, you’ll see pictures. We were already having people come back, sometimes wounded veterans, which spoke in our assemblies. The school play 25 that we put on, The American Way, was a traditional ‘America the Beautiful’ type from growing up with the Walter Gunther family that came over from Germany. It morphed into the family tie-in with modern-day Germany contrasting with the start of the war. We put that on in 1942. It was an extension at Weber, what we had at Ogden High School. I mentioned ROTC at Ogden High, it was almost a prescribed thing, but I don’t know if that was ever mandatory, I just don’t remember anybody not wanting to be in the ROTC. It’s an interesting thing. When I spoke of the 50 men at Weber, there were a lot of those that were 4Fs. It wasn’t because they were physically impaired so much; my good friend, Bill Strong, was all-state end, but he had bad knees and was 4F. Glen Roberston, who was Colonel in the ROTC, was 4F with bad knees. When I talk about the guys at Weber, the ones waiting to go and the ones that were staying, I wouldn’t want to leave a pall of lack of patriotism or anything. They were good guys who were just unfit for military service. LR: Alright, do you have any questions? MB: I do. You have this Polygamous Prance in February of 1945, but then you turned 18 in December. So when did you get your draft notice? DH: You didn’t always go when you got your draft notice, it would be incidental. It’s an interesting thing; I wanted to know when I would be drafted, so I went down to the draft board to see how close they were to me. Remember in 1944, things were beginning to slow down. Lawrence Burton and I went down and tried to get into the Navy Air Force; that’s the first time I found out that my eyes weren’t good enough. He did; in his draft, he went into the Navy. I couldn’t. I didn’t get into that. 26 Anyway, I went down to Mrs. Schriver, or Schreever, and said, “It’s my birthday. how soon is my draft notice going to come up?” She said, “Immediately.” Well, I had registered already for another quarter of school, thinking that things were beginning to slow down and maybe they wouldn’t take me as quickly as they did, because sometimes you were gone the day you turned 18. So I went back to Weber and I was refunded my tuition. It was $19. MB: That would be nice. DH: That would be nice, but of course, I was delayed going in until the first of March. LR: Your first choice would have been the Navy, but your eyesight prevented it? DH: Well, first choice was Army. I tried to get into the Navy and couldn’t make it. So when I was drafted, my next first choice was I wanted to be anything but the usual. I volunteered first for the Marines, and their per-capita was full. I volunteered for the Navy, just because it sounded neat, and I was put in the Army. I thought, “You’re not going to do this to me, just plain old Army,” so I volunteered for the paratroops. People have always laughed and said, “That’s the closest you could get to flying, and then you never fly.” I didn’t know what it was like to land in an airplane till I had made six jumps. MB: So when you went in the first of March, where did you go? DH: Well, the induction center was Fort Douglas, and you went to Fort Douglas for basic: telling you where you were going to go, where you passed your physical and got your shots, and you’re in the army now. You took the pledge and raised your arm and swore that you would do all that life intended for you to do. I then 27 went with most of the Utah guys to Camp Maxey, Texas. We took our infantry basic there before I went into the paratroops. Uniquely enough, I was a minority in my group. Most of the kids were Hawaiian, Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino. They were kids from Hawaii. It’s an interesting facet that during the war, many of the Japanese soldiers from Hawaii were put into the 442nd Infantry Regiment, or the 100th Battalion. They were trained at Ft. Shelby, Mississippi, and the 442nd was probably one of the most decorated units in the war. After the heavy casualties they had taken in the Italian campaign, they began mainlining; they didn’t put the Japanese kids all into one unit. You were getting three or four kids in a family, I found out later when I served an LDS Mission, in Japan and Hawaii. I was in some of those homes, you know, where they were really hit hard. These were guys that used to be trained at Ft. Shelby with the Japanese, but they mainlined them in with the regular infantry, and they resented it. Plus, you had your Hawaiian kids who were unique in themselves. I have to tell you this story because it was my first brush with Hawaiian and Pidgin English. Camp Maxey was up right close to the Oklahoma-Arkansas border; Texarkana and Hugo, Oklahoma were two of the closest towns for passes. I remember the Hawaiian kids when I was beginning to get the lingo would say, “Eh, you go Hugo?” “Naw, no go Hugu.” “Why you go Hugo?” 28 “Eh, I no like go Hugu.” “Why you no like go Hugo?” “Eh, all the time you like go Hugu.” “I don’t like go Hugo.” “I asomali you ask me why.” It just broke me up, with the Hugo, Oklahoma and ‘why you no go,’ which is typical. “Why you no go? I asomali why you no I go Hugo.” It means, “Why are you mad that I’m not going to Hugo?” They’d mix a little Hawaiian; huhu is the word for angry in Hawaiian. “I huhu why no go Hugo. Asomali you huhu me no go Hugo you.” It was a language itself. I have to tell you it was unique from a military experience, because it endeared me. I loved these guys. There was some disparity between them and the haole though. Caucasian, white; haole is the word for stranger or white in Hawaiian, and there was some friction. We had some racial battles that went on. I can remember some fisticuffs where they didn’t mesh. You had a lot of those tough Hawaiian kids that were Puerto Rican-Hawaiian mix type kids that were meaner than the junkyard dogs. They may have been smaller in stature, but they were tough, and I can remember some very unfortunate encounters. But I got along with them great. They’d get their limu, which is seaweed, and poi, which doesn’t transport well, but they’d try to send it. I’d get together with them at their luaus they’d have when someone got a package from home. Saul Kaupuiki was the kid that slept just above me. He taught me a Hawaiian war chant, which is a bogus Hawaiian 29 song, but he still taught it to me. He was full-blooded Hawaiian, and you didn’t see a lot of full-blooded Hawaiians; most of them were hapas—halfs. I had a very unique experience, and I have to tell you, that I wanted to go with them when we graduated. The war was still on, but I signed up for the paratroopers, so those guys left to go overseas while I went to parachute school in Ft. Benning, Georgia. I got there in June or July and was making one of my qualifying jumps when we heard that a bomb had been dropped. That was devastating. We wondered at the time what it was; I remember there was some conjecture. The word A-Bomb hadn’t come out. Some of us theorized that it could have been a dispersion of gas that ignited. We hadn’t thought of anything like an A-Bomb; it was out of our parameter of thought. The war ended there, and my buddies that I’d been trained with, most of them ended up in the Army of Occupation. Very few of them saw combat, so I don’t know whether I would have either. It was an interesting thing, my going to paratroops when I did; it altered the whole course of my life to a degree. I was put in the 517th as soon as I graduated because the plans for the invasion of Japan had already been set in stone. I was put into one of the airborne units that would have been jumping in Japan, which frankly would have been disastrous. There was maybe one really good airborne drop in World War Two; most of them were disasters. The 101st and 82nd jumping in Sicily, jumping in D-Day… they jumped okay in Operation Market Garden up in Holland, but the other, where you did a night jump, was disastrous. When you were trained to jump, you went out en masse, or you tried to. The fact is that by the time the first guy in your stick—and there are twelve 30 guys in a stick—got out of the plane, you’re gonna be a hundred yards apart from each other, at the closest. How do you gather up a squad, then a platoon, then a regiment, a battalion, a division? The airborne was a great concept, but it was terrible in reality because it is hard to carry it out. So I was assigned to the 13th Airborne Division, and they closed that as soon as the war was over, and then I was assigned to the one remaining airborne unit, the 82nd Airborne Division. It was a super elite division. General James Gavin, who was the general, had made all five combat jumps, one of the very few guys that ever made all five combat jumps. He started out as a colonel, went up to major general, and was the youngest major general. The 82nd Division was chosen to be the honored division, the lead for the victory parade in New York, so they got the guts, and I got the glory. Now, the 82nd made the victory parade in New York, which was a thrill in itself to know that you were there. I was with a lot of the survivors from the war. There were some that chose to remain in, but the majority of them were dead. The 82nd had 100% casualties in most of the battles it was involved in. We’re getting away from where Weber is concerned, but that was one of the thrills of my life. The fellow across the street, he is a modern day 82nd Airborne. He and his family were at church Sunday and one of his daughters came up and said, “We just saw it, we just saw it, we turned YouTube on and we saw the parade.” I had never seen a recording of it. Come to find out, you can see it on YouTube, the 82nd Airborne Division that’s the lead-off for the New York Victory Parade in February of 1946. The 82nd also made the victory parades in Boston, 31 Philadelphia, one other; there was four of them. That was probably the biggest thrill of my young life, being able to be in the company of heroes. One of the jumps I made, incidentally, after the war, was with General Gavin. This is an interesting story. You got $50 jump pay, and you got to jump once a month to qualify for jump pay. Sometimes you’d miss a month, but you’d sometimes make it up when they had a visiting Mexican general and we made two jumps in a day, or on successive days. On one of the days we were jumping a new plane. They were starting to jump the C-82, which later became the C-119. It’s the plane where you jumped out of the clam, the doors in the back. Almost every combat jump was in a C-47 with a right side exit. They did jump C-46s, where you went out both sides, which everybody was concerned about because the biggest danger in jumping was entanglement of chutes. We had very few accidents where your chute didn’t open or you had a Mae West, where the main line tangled. We were jumping this new aircraft, and General Gavin came down to the airfield where we were jumping, and he was talking to the pilots on a walkietalkie, but it wasn’t working. He was trying to find out if the wind was blowing. We had a little bit of a gale blowing. You didn’t jump if the wind was more than fifteen miles an hour; that was pretty bad, but we’d never jump if it was that high. He was checking it to see how it was on the DZ—the drop zone—and he couldn’t get through. He took off his soft cap, tucked it in his belt, went over in line with us, and at that time we weren’t packing our own chutes. When you made your qualifying jumps, you packed your own chutes, both main and reserve, and other 32 than that they were packed by packers. Most of them were female packers. They’d just throw them off the back of a truck in a big pile, and you’d go by and hope you were getting the right chutes. General Gavin walked over, stood in line, picked up a chute, stuck his hat in his packet, and borrowed a helmet. He didn’t have his steel, which attached to the helmet to keep it from popping off, and led our stick out of the plane. I jumped in the same stick as General Gavin. It was so cool to jump with him, because normally when you made a jump you went through a little routine. First red light was the alert, then the green light was the get-ready. So you’d stand up, and hook up, and then you’d do an equipment check. You’d check both your own, make sure you were all together, and then you’d check the back of the guy in front of you, to make sure that his risers hadn’t come out. General Gavin skipped all of that. He figured that we had gone through all of our checks, so he told us, “Everybody ready? Stand up and closing the doors.” So we all jammed into the doors, you almost went out in volume. He went out as jumpmaster. You talk about a soldier's general, General Jim Gavin was that. He had hurt his back badly on his first jump, Sicily jump. He had a compression fracture, but he made every jump and survived them. Amazing. Excuse me for going on. LR: Please, I’m glad you did. DH: I have to tell you one story. I really struggled whether I wanted to stay with that gang of guys that I had met in basic. We went through so much together. Infantry basic was very hard and very dangerous. For instance, I was acting sergeant, and my squad was firing into a pillbox and I was the closest one to it, so I had 33 them maintain their fire into the pillbox while I ran up, letting a grenade cook, and threw it into the pillbox. I’m making this sound like it’s a war story, and it’s far from that, but that’s the kind of training. It was hard. You had five seconds before that grenade exploded, and generally you tried to get it into the pillbox before they could throw it back out or something. I'm the closest one to it, crawl up within just a few feet; they’re still firing into it. I let the bouchon assembly fly off, and then count: one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand, five thousand, when I jumped on the pillbox. I only mention that because there were a lot of things we went through together, and you’d develop a closeness, and I kind of wanted to go through with them; I wasn’t sure I wanted to go in the paratroops at that time. I had found out that time being a paratrooper wasn’t just wearing boots and a different outfit, you got killed doing that, so I wasn’t too happy about going. Unfortunately, I was a dang good soldier. In basic, I was an expert infantryman, which was an elite status, because I wanted to do everything I could to make sure I was going to preserve my own life. There were only three openings that came up for the paratroops at that time, and I wasn’t one of them. I thought, “That’s okay, I’ll go with my buddies.” But one of the sergeants in the training group said “Hurst, I got good news.” He’s from New Jersey. “[With accent] Hoist, I got good news for ya. I got ya in, ya gonna go!” So I ended up going, and it turned out to be kind of an adventure, an experience in itself. 34 I’m going to the paratroopers. The very first jump I ever witnessed after I got to jump school, they took the new guys down to watch one of the jumps, and in this case it was a night jump. I was assigned to guide a watch, to make sure that he got down okay. I had a flashlight with a red thing on it. If he got hurt I’d wave that, and a meat wagon or the medics would come. I was to watch five guys, and a night jump isn’t totally black out, you can still see the chutes and everything. The very first plane load of guys I saw come out, two of them tangled, and one coming down on another chute. So, here’s two guys coming down, and the chute popped open, then collapse, and they came down. Fortunately, the one had deployed enough so they both came down and, to my knowledge, they weren’t hurt. The guy I’m watching came out of number five, and I’m running to follow him along, and he’s looking a little strange up there as he‘s coming down. I hear him yelling, “Help! Help!” He’s down about a hundred feet of the ground, and he’s got his feet caught in the chute; his feet had caught in the risers, the lines of the chute, and he was coming down head first. You come down in a chute at about the equivalent of jumping off a box car going ten miles an hour or so. You really hit the ground hard, and they plan it that way, to get you down as soon as you can, because you’re getting shot at while you’re in the air. Generally a combat jump would only jump three or four hundred feet ideally, five hundred mostly. So this guy’s coming down yelling “Help!” He gets one leg out, so he’s now coming down with one leg in the chute, and the first thing I can think of is to catch him, which would have drilled both of us. He fell just in front of me, about ten feet from 35 where you are, Michael, and the chute came down over back of us. When I got to him and pulled the chute off, he’s convulsing around, and he’s out of it. I did the only thing I could: I waved the flag, and I remembered first aid training, to loosen the clothing. I removed his parachute harness and got his helmet off, but he’s still convulsing around. I remember from first aid, one of the things you want to do is you want to reassure the victim. So I said, “You’re okay trooper, you're not hurt bad.” He said, “The hell I’m not!” He had a broken back. You went through the four stages of jump school, A, B, C, and D, and A was so dang hard that it washed many guys out on purpose. I thought, “I’ll go through all of those, but I don’t think I’ll jump. I’ll just do it to prove I could have,” because by then I would have jumped off the 34-foot tower, which was scary, and the 275-foot tower. I passed stage A, which was the masculine side of it, knowing you had the grit to do that. So I thought, “I’ll see how I feel,” because they said all the time, “It’s voluntary, you don’t have to jump if you don’t want to.” The first jump I make, there are two sticks of guys, and you jump twelve in a stick. I’m sitting on one side of the plane, and the first stick jumped, and they all came past me. I looked up, and there’s still a pair of boots standing in front of me, and it’s the only kid from Utah that I knew, a kid from Clearfield, and he’s still standing there with his slackline. The jump sergeant turns around and says, “What’s the matter?” He says, “Well, I’m not going to jump,” and he started unhooking. The Sergeant says, “Why?” 36 The kid says, “It’s voluntary, you said we don’t have to jump if we don’t want to.” The sergeant said “What are you scared of? You’ve never jumped before.” The kid says, “I’ve never been 1700 feet in the air before either.” Then the sergeant says, “You gotta jump just once to make sure.” They’re yelling this. So the kid starts to run to the back of the plane, and the jump sergeant and another guy grab him by both arms and throw him out. I look out the window and I see him; you’re supposed to come out of the plane all tucked in, keeping yourself together so you won’t get tangled in your chute. He looked just like a cat, he was holding against the side. I thought, “I guess I’ll jump,” so I did. The fun thing about it, the kid made every jump after that too. LR: This is fantastic. I have a couple of questions. When you were at Camp Macy, you talked about how there was a lot of that racial fighting going on. What do you think was the difference, because you said you were one of the few white people there that got along with them? DH: I don’t know, it just could have been the uniqueness of the situation. I’ve thought about this a lot. As a Boy Scout, I remember going to a Boy Scout camp with the boy scouts from the Buddhist or the Christian troops, and these were neat kids. I grew up by the Mukai family, the old noodle parlor. We were neighbors. Willy Shimazu at Ogden High School was one of the funniest little Japanese kids I ever knew, and there was no tension that I propelled. I guess there was some tension at that time, being with someone different, for whatever it was. I don’t know whether it was the romance of the islands or the fact that I got a kick out of 37 the way they talked. I don’t mean to make it sound like it was as chaotic as I may have inferred. It was maybe more awkward than it was anything else. You had the disparity in language, you had these guys that were a little upset because they, the Japanese kids, weren't going to be put in the 442nd Infantry. It’s an interesting thing, the 442nd were largely Hawaiian kids, the 100th Battalion were Japanese-Americans, Nisei, as a rule, and they didn’t always get along. The kids in the 442nd used to refer to the 100th Battalion, where they were mainland Japanese, as kotonks. I said, “What is a kotonk?” They said, “That’s the sound they make when they hit the floor.” LR: My other question is, you mentioned that you were put in the 82nd Airborne, and sent to New York. Did you go to all those parades that they did? DH: Yes. I was in an honor guard platoon. The whole division didn’t go. General Gavin, when the war ended in Europe, he developed an honor guard stateside, because most of the guys were discharged. I used to be six foot, and we were all the same height. We had special uniforms, we did special drills; it was A Company of the 505th Regiment. We had white ladder-lace boots, and we had a white ascot. Most of us had had enough ribbons on by the time, and you wore the divisional stuff. The French Fourragere was on the left shoulder, the right shoulder was the Dutch lanyard. You had a unit citation, which you wore not because you were there, but you were in the division that earned those. You had the American theater, good conduct, and victory medals; I had that plus my expert infantryman and my parachute wings. So we looked pretty gussied up. We looked like we were vets, and there were enough vets that were still with us. We 38 had guys from the 517th, we had guys from the 17th that had made the Rhine jump, so we were in the company of heroes. We flew to New York, we flew to Washington—which was the other one— Boston, and Philadelphia. I remember that because we were flying in C82s, and we were seated on benches. Somebody up in the front of that old C82 yelled, “There’s the Washington monument!” and all of us ran down to the front to look out of the two windows. The pilot had it on automatic pilot, and he came over the intercom, “Get back in the back!” Those were remarkable experiences. We would either march or form an honor guard, where we were on either side of the street for the rest of the parades to come through. LR: Okay, so all of this was happening in February of 1946. When were you discharged? DH: I was late getting back for fall quarter, I remember, so it would have been somewhere around October, November. LR: Of 1946? DH: Yes. I would say I was only in a total of 19 or 20 months, something like that. LR: Okay. So you come home and you immediately go back to school? DH: Yes. That first experience at Weber, where I took classes in what was called bacteriology at that time by Sheldon P. Hayes, classes from Thatcher Allred and O. M. Clark, and that marvelous cadre of faculty that stuck on when so many had left and gone through those really hard years of poor pay and working towards graduate status. That really changed my life, that one quarter where I had never thought of going to school. I thought I’d work as a carpenter with my dad, or I’d 39 work at the Watson and Tanner clothing store where I had been working, or I’d work at one of the depots like Hill Field. I hadn’t thought of going to college except as a what-else, and it’s kind of a fun thing to do. So that one quarter I thought, “I got the GI Bill to begin with, 75 bucks a month plus all of my school tuition and supplies.” I came back as an art major. I had beautiful art supplies: oils, pastels, water colors, canvases, stretchers, there was no limit. Well, there could have been a limit, but your books were all paid for, in addition to your seventy-five bucks a month. So it was both an incentive, plus I figured after the war, I just didn’t want to be a warehouseman and I didn’t just want to be a clothing salesman. What I really dreamed of being was a commercial artist, so I went back and took every art class available. When I first started at Weber, there wasn’t an art class. Fero Collete, who was my mentor in later years, was in the service himself. I think they said there was an art class, but it was kind of an itsy-doodle one. When I came back, that’s what my focus was on, and I don’t know if I was too degree-oriented, but I just wanted to be the best artist when I graduated from Weber. I went on an LDS mission first, and then came back and attended the University of Utah as an art advertising major, and started my own advertising and art agency. LR: Okay. If you don’t mind, talk a little bit about your mission. It wasn’t long after the war was over that you went was it? DH: Yes, the war was over, and all of us were coming back. Let me mention this, because this is post-war. I had the pre-war, the war, and post-war, which was an interesting thing, because all of a sudden that same 450 girls were there and 40 1200 guys, so it was revenge. The girls that would have nothing to do with you in high school, when there were only 50 of you, it was reversed. Well, all of a sudden, the colonels, the sergeants, the captains, and lieutenants were the top guys on the list, and you were one of the many while they were still one of the few. But it was a remarkable thing, seriously. Here you have guys that have been through some of the worst of combat. We had a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient, Wahlen, who was in our class, which was in 1946 when we came back. The majority of the vets were all back by then, and there were guys that had been in the Bulge. One of my friends had been captured, was a prisoner of war from the Bulge. There was an amputee, the guy that had been my sergeant in Ogden High ROTC; he was 101st Airborne and came back minus an arm. So these guys coming back, they picked up where they had left off. We were still signing yearbooks, and we’re still wearing the green beanies. A captain, or a navy lieutenant, or what have you, they came back and embraced that same spirit of Weber that they had from when they’d left Ogden High School. I’ve admired those guys, the ones that, rather than come back with a ‘this part of my life was cut off’ attitude, they embraced it. The men’s clubs started up, and you still got whacked on the fanny with a paddle by your big brothers in the class from the fraternity you’d join, for instance. You still had Hell Week. You still went through some of those same things, and it was just kind of a reemergence. I was a member of the Phoenix Club, which was so appropriate, because just like the Phoenix rising from its ashes, the guys came back and they 41 exchanged their steel helmets for their green beanies. I have to say that by and large, most of the vets that came back came back very serious about their education. They were serious-minded, but they still came back embracing many of those traditions. The Flaming W hike was held, they got the yearbooks going, football started again; they had dropped football, they hadn’t had it since 1942. When I started in 1944, they had five or maybe six guys for a basketball team, but that was the only sport they had. The other unique thing was there were still less than 2000 students. There were about 1700, I think at that time. This is when Dixon began stumping so heavily for four-year status and a new campus. One of my vivid memories is a good friend, Grulan Garfield, at an assembly, stood up and said, “There you got Utah State in the north with 29 buildings and 300 acres, and you got University of Utah with so many acres and I don’t know how many buildings, and here’s Weber with seven acres and four buildings.” The class of 1946 to 1948 were really the nucleus of the push for four-year status and a new campus. I remember going down with the student body President, Ernie Bingham, to the Legislature when we were pressing for four-year status and thought we had it in the bag. Dixon had really done some homework, but we had a couple of people that changed their votes, and we lost the four-year program and didn’t get it until 1959, I think it was. So there was a lot of history that came out of that. When I came home from the service, my friend George Stromberg met me at the door at the house down at 450 Darling Street and said, “You’re going back to Weber?” 42 I said, “Well, I guess I will.” He said, “Why don’t you come? There’s a club here where you can meet a lot of fun guys.” When I got home from my mission, he was the same one who was at the door saying, “Come let's go to the U.” There was a lot that happened in both the war years and the post-war years, which were so formative to what Weber eventually became. LR: Almost sounds like the veterans who came home just wanted normalcy, and were fighting for it, and that evolved into what it became. DH: Yes, you’ve probably hit it right on the head. Part of that normalcy was just the opposite of what they had had, and they were so glad to get back to it. It was a fun time. I’ve always said that was the period of time when America really coalesced, that total war effort, when we were all on one major plane. We’ve never seen it again. Those were glorious years; the war was over and most of the guys were back, and you still had the united feel, plus a great future. You had the GI Bill, you had the GI Bonds where you could get a home for vets who were married and what have you. It was a great period of time, and it was great to be a part of it. Incidentally, my older brother was trained at Weber. Weber really served that war purpose by training so many. In addition to that Naval Air Cadet Program, they were doing most of the training for Hill Air Force Base and the Ogden Arsenal. My brother was two years older than me. He went to Weber and he did okay in school, but he didn’t enjoy it. He went in what was called the technical education building and learned the machinist trade. When the war 43 came, he was declared an essential worker and given a deferment. He was working at Hill Air Force Base as a machinist. He chose to pass up the deferment and go into the draft regardless. They drafted him in the service, put him in the Air Force, because he was a machinist, and they put him back at the bench he had been working at as a civilian, only now he’s working as a private in the Air Force. Didn’t last there long, because they put him in the 509th Composite Group. Does that name ring a bell with you as a historian? You heard of the Enola Gay? LR: Yes. DH: The Enola Gay was one of the aircraft in the 509th Composite Group that dropped the atomic bomb. So my brother ended up in Tinian as a machinist, but he wasn’t flying the airplane. He helped in Wendover, where he was sent originally to develop the capacity to load the Little Boy and Fat Man into the cargo of a B29. So he’s in Tinian when the bomb is dropped, when I’m jumping out of airplanes, and my big brother is part of the 509th Composite Group that ends the war. So I’ve always said it was my big brother that dug me out of what could have been a hell of a hole. That’s an interesting story, and isn’t life interesting the way it kind of coalesces, emerges back and forth like that? LR: I agree. The one thing I really was curious about, when you went on your mission, you said you were in the Hawaiian Islands and Japan? DH: Yeah, and there’s a huge story in itself, and I’ll say this. When I was interviewed for my mission, they ask you if you have any place that you’d like to go. I said what was generally said: “I’ll go anywhere. I had the unique experience with some kids in Hawaii, I’d love to see them again.” When I stayed and they all left, I 44 said to them, “I’m going to come see you guys one time, I go come see you! You all the time remember, I go come see you!” Oddly enough, when my mission call came, it was to the Central Pacific Mission with headquarters in Hawaii, and I had no idea it was the Japanese mission. For whatever reason, they chose to refer to it as the CPM rather than the Japanese, maybe for fear that there was still some racial ambivalence that was going on, I don’t know. The mission lasted for five years: it started in 1946, I got there in 1948, and they closed it in 1950. I stayed over then in the Hawaiian mission. I learned a little Japanese and a little Hawaiian, just enough to get me in trouble in both, but it was unique. One of the guys on the Bataan Death March was one of our missionaries. He never married; he died young, the result of poor nutrition and what have you. He had developed beriberi. We had a Marine Gunnery Sergeant who went through the Battle of Tarawa. They had been fighting the Japanese and within months were called back as missionaries, and were great missionaries. Peter Nelson Hansen, the Bataan survivor, he volunteered for another mission and went back to Japan proper. Never did learn Japanese; he struggled and struggled and never could speak the language, but he transformed that hatred that we were taught when you’re shoving that bayonet into them to a kokoro kara love that came from the heart. I admired those kind of guys. Some of them that went on missions had been away from their wives for three or four years, and went on mission for another couple of years. That’s another story. I’m a great story teller, as you can tell, and an interesting story, you talk about life doubling back: one of my friends in the honor guard company in the 45 82nd was a fellow named Bob Titus. He was one of the few guys that had a little more collegiate experience behind him. He was a smart guy. He was a paratrooper, and we were buddies. He was Catholic, very devout Catholic, and I was a devout Mormon, and we got along fine. He smoked, I didn’t. He drank, I didn’t. But we were great friends. We jumped together, and the last jump I made was with Bob Titus, and then we were discharged, and he went back his way and I went mine. I graduated from the University of Utah and was working as an illustrator at Hill Air Force Base, having fun drawing airplanes; that was really close to the air, I loved that. I had a phone call. “Hey, is this the Dean Hurst that was in the 82nd Airborne Division?” “Yeah.” “This is Captain Bob Titus. I just flew in, I wondered if I could come by and visit ya.” “Heeze, where are ya?” “I’m just right out in Area C, where are you?” I told him where I was. He said, “Let's meet. Can you get over to the officers’ club?” I said, “Oh, yeah.” I get over there and there’s Bob Titus. He stayed in the service, was a captain, flew Korea. We had a good talk, visit back and forth and everything. He had gone back to school and got his degree at MIT. Ten years later, I’m sitting at my desk at Pearson and Curry and Hurst Advertising and Art Agency, I get a phone call. “Is this the same Dean Hurst that was in the 82nd Airborne Division who knew Bob Titus?” 46 “Yes.” “This is General Titus calling. Wonder if we could get together.” I said, “I’d love to.” He said, “I’ll come pick you up.” He took me out to Hill Air Force Base to his quarter; we had a visit. I had some pictures I had taken of him when we were in the military. I asked him, “You gonna be in town a few days?” “Yeah.” So I took him to Rotary Club and said, “This is one of the great stories you want to hear. This is one of my jumping buddies I jumped with in the paratroopers. General Bob Titus is a wing commander in Vietnam.” I have yet to talk to anyone within the past 10 years who was a general in the air force who didn’t know Bob Titus. LR: The name is very familiar. DH: If you google him, you’ll find him. This guy flew everything that the Air Force ever made. He was a test pilot. It used to be so much fun when I’d meet one of the generals from Hill Air Force Base or something and I’d say “You know Bob Titus.” “Oh, I know Bob Titus! How do you know Bob Titus?” “I was a PFC with him!” Isn’t that a great story? Well, he brought his wife, and my wife and I would get together and we’d go to dinner together; we exchanged Christmas cards. Then one year I didn’t get a Christmas card. I wondered what happened to him. I was talking to Mark Reynolds, a former local 47 General—he’s still around—and I said, “Whatever happened to Bob Titus? I used to hear from him. We got together and exchanged cards.” He said, “Bob died three years ago. Had a heart attack.” Wasn’t that a neat story? LR: Yes, thank you. 48