Oral History Program Ron Homes Interviewed by Wess Marriott Circa 2019 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Ron Homes Interviewed by Wess Marriott Circa 2019 Copyright © 2018 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Marriott-Slaterville City Oral History Collection was created by the residents of the town to document their history. Each participant was provided with a list of questions asking for; stories about their childhood, schools they attended, stories about their parents and grand-parents, activities they enjoyed, fashions they remember, difficulties or traumas they may have dealt with, and memories of community and church leaders. This endeavor has left behind rich histories, stories and important information regarding the history of the Marriott-Slaterville area. ____________________________________ 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: Homes, Ron, an oral history by Wess Marriott, Circa 2019, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Ron Homes Circa 2019 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Ron Homes, conducted circa 2019, by Wess Marriott. Ron discusses his life and his memories of Marriott- Slaterville, Utah. WM: Ron we are going to have a fun time here together talking about your life. You have proven to your community that you are of great value. Your experience is what we are after. We wanted to understand a little bit about you and your family and how you effected the community and the fun things and exciting life that you lived. RH: Okay. WM: So my first question is, tell me basically your birthday and where you grew up. RH: Birthdate is September 21, 1937. WM: Ron we are excited to have you with us because your background experience is what we are after. We need to understand you, how you got here, what you did when you got here, when you were born and the kind of experiences that you had in your life. Ron I’m really happy to see you, I’m Wess Marriott and our purpose today is to talk about you, that may be embarrassing a bit but really it’s for the purpose of historical purposes. We really wanted to get an idea of your life. So let’s start by asking you the question: What was your birthdate? So how old are you? RH: I’m 81. WM: And your birthdate? 2 RH: September 21, 1937. WM: Where were you born? RH: I was born in Ogden. WM: Alright and where did you first live when you first came to the city? RH: We come from Liberty. I lived up there for a little while and then moved down here on 12th street over there. It was—we called it the Hippo House. Across the street was the DeVrees’. I lived there until I was six years old and then my parents built a house down on 700 south Which we moved out there when I started school. WM: Where did you go to school? RH: I went to school at Wahlquist at the junior era. It was just a regular school then. WM: What does it mean to be a regular school? RH: Huh? WM: What was a regular school? RH: The regular school? WM: What was a regular school? Elementary school? Junior High, High School? What was it? RH: It was just a school that went from kindergarten, I guess up to ninth grade. When I first started there, it was a long time ago, yeah it was called Wahlquist Junior High or Wahlquist school which was a school for—you know, we went there from 3 first grade clear up to the ninth grade. Then we went to Weber. When I was in the seventh grade, they changed it to a junior high. So I stayed there and went all the way through Wahlquist. WM: So how big were your classes? RH: Oh we had probably twenty in my class. WM: Tell me a little bit about your family? How many in your family when you were growing up? RH: I had, of course, my mother and dad and I had two older brothers. WM: What were their names? RH: Sherman Homes and Lamont Homes. I had a sister named Louis Homes and a little brother that came a long way there, named Reed Homes. WM: How late? RH: It was quite a bit later. We all used to tease him about being a mistake, you know? Yeah, we lived down there and of course that’s the old pea viner that was down there. WM: Was it really? RH: Yeah, so we would sit out on the grass when the peas was harvested and we would go out there and pull off some and sit there and eat them and get sick. WM: So what time of year was that? RH: That was in the fall, probably October. 4 WM: So were a lot of people involved in that, in the community? RH: Yeah, they mostly raised—what they had done was raise peas and hay underneath, alfalfa underneath. So when they took the peas off the alfalfa would grow up there. WM: I see terrific. RH: And they had that old pea viner down there. I don’t know if… WM: I’ve heard of it for years. RH: Yeah it’s quite the deal down there. Then there was the old Marriot barn down there and that silo. We used to go over there in that barn and had a rope up in the top there and we would swing down there. The kids that were down there—a lot of chickens are out there and they laid these eggs. When we would swinging, they’d throw these eggs at us. Got hit quite a few times, sometimes it was rotten eggs. WM: That’s great. RH: Then we would go over to the pea vinery there and play around and that and they of course had that big pile of vines there that went through there. It stunk like crazy, you know? All of the juice would go down and around it, you know? We would get up on top there and my brother jumped off there and went into that juice, it went right up to his armpits. When we took him home—of course we lived down the road about oh I don’t know, about a half a block—took him down 5 there and mom was mad at us. We had to squirt him all off and everything because he stunk pretty bad. WM: Well what did you enjoy most about family life? RH: Family life? Well, Just being with my family. I worked with my dad since I could drive in the truck then you know? WM: Tell me about your dad then. RH: My dad was a hay broker. He’d go buy hay and then ship it in and sell it. I remember going up there in Strevell, Idaho and Malta and he’d put us under the truck and we worked with bales of hay that went as far as you could see. We’d loaded and haul it all up and put it in the stack. Then in the winter time, dad would go up there and haul it out. But yeah, we stayed up there underneath the truck for about a month hauling. WM: What does it mean to be underneath the truck? RH: Hmm? WM: What does it mean to be underneath the truck? RH: That’s where we slept, you know? We had a roof over our heads. Of course we all took our baseball gloves so we could play catch in the meantime. Then they had a little store over there and we would go over there and get a Twinkie or a Mars Bar or something. WM: Twinkie and Mars Bar, you don’t hear that too much anymore. Okay, so tell me about your mother? 6 RH: Well my mom was a singer and they lived right across the road from us when we lived down there in the house. Grandpa would come over there quite a bit and see us every morning and talk to us. WM: What was your grandpa’s name? RH: Archibald Singer. We had a close relationship with him and he was a farmer. We would go thin the beets, had a little short hole and we’d go down there and take two out leave one standing, you know? Same way with the tomatoes. We’d grow tomatoes down there and hay. So we kept pretty busy all of the time. We was a hard working—we didn’t have much time for recreation. WM: What does that mean? Tell me about that. RH: About working? WM: Yeah, so you were working all of the time and didn’t play much. RH: Yeah, we worked quite a bit. WM: When did you get up in the morning? RH: We’d get up about 6:00, 5:30, 6:00. WM: And what did you do? RH: Well went and had breakfast. Mom would fix us some breakfast and usually Grandpa would come over and have breakfast with us. It didn’t have any indoor plumbing there. We was the last house in Marriott to get indoor plumbing. 7 WM: Oh really, is that right? RH: We’d have to run out to the outhouse, you know? WM: Sure. RH: Yeah. Quite a deal. We worked—of course, my dad was hauling hay all of the time and we would go with him and help him haul hay. So I spent more time with my dad in that hay truck. WM: So on a school day, what was the school day like? You got up at 5:30 in the morning and did some work and did you go to school or what? RH: Yeah, we went to school there and when school started, we went to the Wahlquist Jr. High. It was just Wahlquist then. We would go there and go to school and we’d probably get up and work a little bit before we went to school. Then we would go to school and then come home and work some more. WM: How far away was school? RH: School was about, I don’t know, a mile away from us. WM: So how did you get there? RH: Walked or rode our bikes. We always had a bike. Sometimes we would ride a horse over there because we always had a horse. WM: What were your favorite in subjects in school? RH: Lunch. I liked history and English. I didn’t like math too much, all of them fractions and things. We had a teacher by the name of Mrs. Folkman and I 8 always thought that she was about 100 years old then. She was a good lady and that’s what we did. WM: What are you very good memories—the positive things about your youth? What was there about your youth that was really exciting? RH: Well I liked to play baseball. We always played baseball. Even when we would go up and haul hay, you know, we would take our mitts and baseball. When we would get pooped so we couldn’t move anymore hay we would just sit down there and rest a little bit and play catch a little bit with my brothers. WM: Did you compete very much? I mean, were you on teams and had a league and so forth? RH: Oh yeah, we had one, it was called the Farm Bureau League. We had a team in Marriott. Every community, Warren, Riverdale, all of them little communities around there had teams and they called it The Farm Bureau League. Every Saturday we would go there and play. WM: Who was your coach? RH: It was probably when we started out, my dad did a lot of the coaching. WM: What’s his name? RH: Orville. WM: Orville. 9 RH: They called him Pete. Pete Homes—that was what he was known by. Yeah, we played ball all of the time and that was one of the highlights of my life is playing ball. WM: How good were you? RH: I was pretty good. WM: What position did you play? RH: I played shortstop and third base. WM: Were you a good hitter? RH: Pitched a little bit. WM: Were you good at hitting? RH: Yeah. WM: Did you hit very many homeruns? RH: Did I hit any homeruns? WM: Yeah. RH: Yeah. When we played out there at Pleasant View, I hit three homeruns in the game. WM: Really? RH: Yeah, I was a pretty good hitter. WM: That’s good. 10 RH: My dad would say, “How are you doing?” and I would say, “Well I’m having trouble hitting that curve ball.” And he would say, “Don’t swing at it then.” So it was good advice. Then later on, Dad came two ins and said, “I got to have you work, do you want to play baseball in the spring or football in the fall?” So we had to make a choice, we couldn’t do either one. You were going to have to work or play. So I always picked baseball. Yeah, I was pretty good—I thought I was pretty good. WM: Did you have a lot of friends on the team? RH: Yeah, all of our friends were from the town. WM: Tell me your best friends names? RH: Hmm? WM: Your best friend. RH: My best friend? It was probably my brothers that were my best friends. Then I had another friend that lived in Hooper, Blaire Fowers. I had a lot of fun when we were growing up, we worked hard. WM: So what was fun? RH: Playing baseball. WM: Alright. RH: Playing baseball and harassing the girls. WM: My dad used to tell me that you didn’t get to go out on any holidays, they just had to work. 11 RH: Yeah. WM: Is that right? RH: Yeah. We were working fools. We didn’t have no running water. We had a pump in the kitchen there and a little wood stove. When we bathed, we had a regular bath tub. WM: Did you warm the water? RH: Hmm? WM: How did you warm the water? RH: With that stove. That warmed the water. Mom would get the stove going and then put a pale on there and then dump into the bathtub. Which I was always—I was littler so I always said that I bathed in bum water because the two brothers bathed first and then I’d get the bum water. WM: That’s cute. Well do you remember any difficult times for you or for the family? RH: Difficult times? I guess we were poor, but we didn’t really realize it because everybody around us was poor. WM: I think that’s a good statement. RH: So, I didn’t realize that we was poor until I went to Weber High School. I was a sophomore up there. Of course, then, kids from South Ogden would come and North Ogden kids would always go there. I don’t know, they always kind of made fun of because—my mother made my shirts out of grain sacks. 12 WM: Really? RH: My uncle Lee had chickens and he’d get these feed in these grain sacks. They had different colors and mom would make these shirts out of that. When I was a sophomore, the kids from out—the rich kids from South Ogden would come in there and say, “Man, that’s a pretty shirt. It looks like something you’d have with a chicken coop.” Then they would start, “Quack Quack.” When I first had my fight I could remember a kid calling me and harassing me about my shirt. WM: What did you do? RH: I poked him a couple of times, we’d wrestle, we poked each other. WM: Was that in the school or was that out on the playground? RH: It was out back on the baseball field. WM: Baseball fields are a pretty important place. RH: Yes, it was. WM: Do you remember any disasters or floods or any times when there problems in the community? RH: No, I don’t remember any floods or anything. Where we lived there on 12th street in that house, the gypsies would come in there and just across the ditch there. We were kind of afraid of them. Mom told us to stay away from them. They would come in there every year and camp. There were these three brothers that had their—they raised a lot of potatoes and grain and stuff like that. They had a 13 big farm there. We’d go over there when they were cutting up the potatoes to plant them. They’d cut the potatoes for half a day. WM: How often would the gypsies end up in your area? RH: Oh they probably stayed there two months. WM: What time of year? RH: It was in the fall. I don’t know where they came from. They was there. WM: What made them different? RH: Huh? WM: What made them different? RH: I don’t know. Just the way they dressed and they were just gypsies. That’s all that was there about them. WM: Did you ever see any hobos from the area? RH: Oh yeah. The hobos would come up from the railroad. My grandmother, she’d always feed them. They had a thing on the front of, where the driveway was. They’d mark it so they’d know that that family would give you something. We were kind of scared of them hobos. Some of them wasn’t—they was hobos. WM: Well that’s great. So the people in the community, what were they like? What kind of organizations existed in the community at the time that you were growing up? RH: Well we always had the church. 14 WM: Tell me about the church. RH: We always went to church on Sunday. In them days, you’d go in the morning and have church and then we would go back at night to have the sacrament meeting or whatever. So it was kind of split up. We went to church all that time. My mother made sure of that. WM: What kind of church callings did your parents have? RH: My parents? WM: Do you remember? RH: Yeah, my dad was in the bishopric for a while. WM: Was he? RH: Yeah, he was in the bishopric and my mother was in the Relief Society. WM: How did you like church? RH: How did I like it? Well I thought it was kind of fun because we didn’t have to work. WM: Did you have a baseball team on—a church based team? RH: Oh yeah, we had a church baseball team in The Farm Bureau League. Every Saturday we would go. WM: Was it a church team or was it just a community team? RH: It was a community team but it was a good team. We had some good players. We probably—in the county they had about eleven or twelve teams, Plain City, 15 Farr West. We always used to come in about clear to third place. So we had a pretty good team. My brother was a pitcher. WM: Tell me about the people that were the leaders in the community. Can you remember any people who were? RH: Grant Hodson was a leader. Levell Butt. WM: What kinds of leadership? RH: Well Grand Hodson, he was a bishop for a while. Levell Butt was a bishop. Then Marion Powell moved in from back east and brought three girls with him. We was pretty excited about them girls coming in. I can remember every time that we would have to get the milk truck. My grandpa had about twenty head of milk cows and we would go over there and milk and put them in these cans and then a truck would come around from the Weber Central Dairy and pick up the milk. I know I used to throw rocks—I always used to love to throw things. I would throw rocks at this milk man. One time he just jumped out there and grabbed me and tied me up to a tree and left me there. Mosquitos took pretty good care of me. WM: How did you get out? RH: My brother had come along and untied me. So I didn’t mess around with that guy anymore. Good guys. Like I said, Grandpa had all of these cows that he would milk. When he’d go fishing—he liked to fish. He run around with Dr. Budge, another guy. They would go fishing all of the time and bring back these fish and we’d have to stay home and take care of the chores and milk the cows. 16 One of the things that I do remember is when they’d put up the hay with the old Derrick. My job was to ride the horse out there and—I don’t know if you know what a Derrick is. WM: No, I don’t. RH: It’s a thing that sticks up, it had a scoop on it. I don’t know they had metal scoops in there. Then we would pull up. My job was to ride the horse out there until that went up there and hit and then it would go in the barn and they would release it. My job was to ride that horse. WM: That’s great. So what was the economy like? RH: Well, we never went hungry. We always had something to eat. I thank my parents for that and my grandparents. I don’t know, it was just—I always had something to eat. We raised a pig and had a calf or a cow you know? We’d kill the pig and I can remember we had a big 55 gallon drum and put water in it and had a fire in it and we’d kill that pig and put it up in the air and then drop it down in that water. It was hotter than heck. Then they would scrape the skin off of it. That was always something that I always looked forward to. The pigs—we raised rabbits. We always had a horse. Never was without a horse. WM: How many cows did you have? RH: We just had two cows. WM: One was a milk cow. RH: Hmm? 17 WM: One was a milk cow or not? Or both were milk cows? RH: Yeah, both of them were milk cows. Darn things, you’d tie them up and you’d get milking them and then they’d kick the bucket over or something or hit you with their tail. So we would have to tie their tail up to their legs or something. Yeah, we milked them all. WM: Tell me about dating. When did you start dating? RH: My wife, her name was Dixie. She moved into the community when she was about 13 years old. We took a shine to each other. I’d ride the horse up there and get her and we’d go riding down in the river bed there or something. Finally, I ended up marrying her when she was—I think she was 17 and I was 19 when we got married. Married for a long time. WM: So where did you settle down? Where was your home? RH: It was right there on the corner of 700 South there. That’s where I moved to. That’s where my home was. WM: How many kids? RH: I had, like I said, the two brothers… WM: How many kids in your family? Your children. RH: Oh my children. WM: Yeah. RH: Okay, I got one older daughter and three younger sons. 18 WM: Four kids. RH: Yeah, four kids. WM: Tell me about your family life. What was it like? Your family. RH: My family? WM: Not your parents, but your… RH: Well we had a close family. I had done a lot of—I trained race horses for quite a while. So the kids—when they’d come home from school, I’d put one on the horse walker and one would ride. We had a field down there and he’d ride down there and he’d exercise it. Then when I’d get home we’d—the first thing that we’d done was had momma would always have dinner at 5 o’clock. Then we’d eat dinner and then go back out there and mess with the horses or whatever. One time, we had about, I don’t know, seven or eight horses over there that we was training. My older boy, he was smaller. So he was my jockey. So we’d worked them horses. WM: Did you have your own land that you worked on when you trained the horses? RH: Yeah. WM: So how big of a lot did you have? RH: Well we had.. WM: Did you have several acres or what? 19 RH: I had two acres there at the house and then across the creek, we called it—the Moore’s Family had about ten or fifteen acres across the creek. We’d get— Clarence Buck, he’d come down there with his tractor and dig up the ground and we made a track around there. So we when we worked the horses we’d just go around that track and we made it pretty nice. WM: How many horses have you sold in your lifetime? RH: Oh man. WM: Hundreds? RH: Probably more than that. Like I said, we had two or three Blue Mares that had colts every year. I had a stud horse there. We raised quite a few colts and sold a lot of them. Had one horse, its name was “Eight Bars”. I bought him when he was just a yearling. He had come in from Texas. We raised him, he was a race horse. WM: Really? RH: When he won 22 races on the tracks. He was a fun guy. WM: Well that’s great. Where did you race him? RH: We raced in Pocatello. We went over to Rupert, Malad, hit all of them little tracks. Evanston. WM: Wow, you went a lot of places. RH: Yeah, just every Saturday you’d have races and we’d lower them up, put the kids up in the manger of the truck. 20 WM: In the manger of the truck? What does that mean? RH: Well my truck had a manger up there. A thing that went over the cab and it was open and the horses in the back. That’s where we put the kids when we went and then the horses in the back. WM: So when you would win something, what would you get? RH: Oh… WM: Was it a money prize? RH: Yeah, there was money involved in it but not a lot. That one horse that I had, he won $3,000 or $4,000. Then I sold him. He went to California to run. We made a little money off of him and he was going. WM: So was your purpose with horses, was it mainly to train the horses for people or your clients? Or what? How did that work? RH: Well it worked both ways, I had horses of my own. People would bring their horses to me and I would train them, you know? Then I decided that if I was going train other people’s horses, I couldn’t train mine or run mine because they’d think, “What are you doing with yours that you’re not doing with mine.” So I gave it up that way, just raced their horses and let mine stand there. WM: What did you do with your kids? What were their activities? Did they get involved in horses? 21 RH: Yeah, they was involved with horses and my daughter, she was in the queen business. She was about queen of about every rodeo around here. Malad, Hooper Days, we went down into Strawberry Days and she was. WM: Was that because she was pretty or was that because she was a horse person? RH: She’s a horse person and… WM: Was she smart or what? What was her talent? RH: She was pretty and she knew how to handle the horse. We dressed her nice to put into an impression on it. She won a lot of queen contests around. That was good. WM: Were you involved in a lot of rodeos? RH: Not too much rodeos. I had done a little roping but I didn’t take it serous. I rode one brown bull, that was all. It bucked me off good. SO I gave that up. WM: That was enough of that. RH: Yeah. WM: Rodeing—Days of ’47 and so forth were kind of a big deal in Utah, right? RH: Yes. That was probably the biggest rodeo in Utah. Of course, they had them— every little town had a rodeo, you know? Hooper had their rodeo out there. Hooper Tomato Days, they called it then. Malad, they had a little rodeo there. We just kind of went around to the rodeos. WM: Well you’re agriculture guy, has the weather changed much over the years from when you were a kid? 22 RH: Well yeah, I don’t think it snowed much now as it did then. WM: Really? RH: I can remember—of course, I was from the valley from up there in Liberty you know? Boy, they’d get a lot of snow up there. The cold and we’d go up there. Dad would take us up there and all of the kids in the ward in the back of his truck. We’d have straw on it and ride up there and have hot chocolate and doughnuts. We would sleigh ride down this big hill. A couple of years, we could just sleigh ride up over the fences and everything you know? Me and my little brother, one day when the snow was up there and they had a big telephone pole there. So we climbed up as far as we could from the snow and painted a ring around it. You could still see that it has a little bit of paint on that pole up there. That’s been a long time ago. WM: What other kinds of community activities, do you remember when you were a kid? RH: Every ward used to have what they called the road shows. We’d have skits that we had in our ward and then we would go around to another ward and another ward would come into us. WM: Was that fun? RH: It was kind of fun. I wasn’t much into that acting or whatever. WM: What kinds of things that were a problem? Like medical? Were there medical issues, periods when the flu or any other epidemics or anything like that. 23 RH: We didn’t have the flu. We had the chicken pox. That was quite the deal. I only had one chicken pox on me and of course it left a little scar. My older brother Sherman had the chicken pox and he had it all over. He had it in his ears, his nose, and all over him. I just had one. But when we would get the chicken pox, the county health commission would come out and put a quarantine tag on our door so people would come and if we had the Measles or Chicken Pox or whatever so we didn’t have an epidemic or whatever. WM: What kind of a car did you have when you were growing up? RH: Well I had a good horse. My buddy had an old ’51 Chevy car. He wanted that horse and I wanted the car, so we traded. That was my first car. My brother, they was always into cars. Always had something going on with cars and stuff. I never wasn’t much of a mechanic because I didn’t want to get my hands dirty, all of that grease and everything. They’d do the mechanic work. WM: Things changed a lot when cars came in. Everybody used horses prior to that or bicycles. RH: My grandpa used to use horses to do all of the plowing and cultivating and everything you know? I remember one horse died, we got another couple of horses, this team. We harnessed them up and then pulled that horse down to where they put all of these little animals. WM: Well it’s important that we understand the traditions of families. What kind of traditions did your family have? RH: Well, I guess just doing things together and going to shows. 24 WM: What does that mean? RH: We would go to the picture shows. We always had a show in the ward every Friday night. We would have picture show and of course they had that John Affleck Park, that baseball park. We’d go down there and catch or chase foul balls, you know? They’d hit them out and they’d go into the parking lot or something. We’d go chase them back, that’s how we got our baseballs. WM: Well it sounds like you had a fun family. RH: Yeah. We did a lot together and of course like I said, I worked with my dad for years. WM: What would you like your grandchildren would you like to remember about you? RH: Well I’d like them to remember that I was an honest man and I had a lot of friends. I wasn’t mean to them or anything. We enjoyed our family and had done a lot of things together. We went places and just a bunch of family traditions. WM: How old are you? RH: How old was I? WM: How old are you? RH: 81. Going on 82, pretty boring guy. WM: Not my impression of you at all. RH: Like I said, I had the same wife for 35 years and same house for a lot of years. So I was kind of boring. WM: Well it’s been fun meeting you and you are a great guy. 25 RH: I try to be a great guy, honest and trustworthy. Like I said I used to throw things. My favorite hobby was to throw stuff, rocks and anything I could pick up. I’d get in a lot of trouble doing that because I’d throw it at cars. WM: Well you threw a baseball pretty good then. RH: I could throw a baseball. WM: Well thanks so much. Thanks for your time. RH: Thank you, appreciate you.