Oral History Program Carol Wattis Casey Interviewed by Richard Sadler and Gene Sessions 31 May 2006 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Carol Wattis Casey Interviewed by Richard Sadler and Gene Sessions 31 May 2006 Copyright © 2011 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 Utah Construction Company/Utah International Inc. Oral History Project was created to capture the memories of individuals associated with the company. Several of the interviewees are family and relatives, others are personalities involved with Utah Construction Company/Utah International Inc. and some of the company’s prominent figures. ____________________________________ 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: Carol Wattis Casey, an oral history by Richard Sadler and Gene Sessions, 31 May 2006, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Carol Wattis Casey (born 1939). It was conducted by Dr. Richard Sadler and Dr. Gene Sessions on May 31, 2006. In the interview, Ms. Casey shares her recollections of her family and the Utah Construction Company, which was founded by Ms. Casey‟s grandfather, Edmund Orson Wattis. Lisa Largent was also present during the interview. RS: Carol, tell us a little about your early life. Where were you born and where did you grow up? CC: I was born here in San Francisco right at the beginning of World War II. I lived here all my life. I went to school here. RS: Where did you go to college? CC: I went to the University of California, Berkeley, and graduated in 1961. I went to school right here in the city day school. I did not go away to boarding school. We used to go to Salt Lake and Ogden on an annual basis—just after Christmas—to see relatives. RS: What did you do there when you went? Who did you visit? CC: Well, we rotated between driving across the Nevada and Utah deserts the day after Christmas, sometimes spending the night out in Winnemucca or Elko, depending on what time we got off. That was in the days when it was two lanes, long before the freeway, and we would go into Salt Lake City. Other times, we would take the overnight train from Oakland and come into Ogden. We usually stayed a week. So we would spend a little time in Ogden with relatives there and go down to Salt Lake and spend a little bit of time with my mother‟s family. 2 RS: What did you do for fun while you were on those trips? Did you ski? CC: No, we just hung out. It was in winter. I wasn‟t much of a skier. I think we went to Elko one time when I was about seven. I didn‟t really like skiing that much. I had one cousin on my mother‟s side who was my contemporary and I spent a lot of time with her. My cousins on my father‟s side were much older. As I say, I was the youngest of those cousins by quite a bit. My brother was the next youngest. RS: Tell us about your father and your mother and their families. CC: My father was the youngest of numerous siblings. I never knew my grandfather, E.O. Wattis. He died just before my parents were married in 1934. I never knew my paternal grandmother; I‟m not even sure when she died. He was the youngest. My father was born in 1899 and he was the baby of the family. I knew all of his older sisters. There was Edna; Marguerite, who was Littlefield‟s mother; Ruth; Ethel; and then Mattie, who was considerably older. I didn‟t know Mattie very well. I only remember meeting her several times. I knew Ruth, Marguerite, and Edna the best. Ruth and Marguerite both lived down in Southern California then, so we saw a lot more of them, and Edna was kind of all over the place. RS: What did your father do for a living? Did he grow up in Ogden? CC: He grew up in Ogden and he went, I believe, to the University of Utah before he ended up at Stanford. He graduated from Stanford; I‟m not sure of the year. He was born in 1899, so he must have graduated around 1922 or 1923. Then he went to work for Utah. From the stories I have heard, he worked in Mexico on some construction jobs down there. Then he came back, and, for whatever reason, left Utah Construction and established an insurance company called General Insurance. He had one major client and an office in the Mills Building. 3 He established that office in 1938 or 1939. He and my mother moved to San Francisco from Ogden in 1938, I believe. I was born in 1939. RS: He was probably pretty comfortable coming here after having graduated from Stanford. CC: My mother started out at the University of Utah and then ended up at Berkeley as an economics major. Then she moved back to Salt Lake where she met my father. They were married in 1934. RS: What was her maiden name? CC: Cannon. Her grandfather was George Quayle Cannon. He was a polygamist family and she was down through wife number…I‟ve forgotten. RS: How many children did your folks have? CC: Just my brother and myself. RS: How much older is your brother? CC: He is four and a half years older than I am. He was born in 1935. He was born in Ogden, I believe. RS: What do you remember of growing up in San Francisco in the „40s and „50s? CC: I grew up during the war but I don‟t remember anything about it. I was five when the war ended. I remember lots of things when I was growing up, but nothing particularly related to the war except one time when my mother was taking me into nursery school. She must have been planning on going to the market because she had rationing coupons in her hands. I looked up at her and said, “What‟s rationing?” She gave me some response which I don‟t remember. That was it. That is all I remember. RS: Do you remember seeing a lot of sailors and soldiers? 4 CC: I remember one cousin, Ed Dumke. He was in the Navy. I remember him coming up in his blue uniform, pulling his duffle bag. I must have been about four at the time. RS: You have lived in San Francisco for six decades. What changes do you notice here? CC: It is more crowded. Everybody has cars now. The pace is faster. There are a lot more commuters and people coming in. The city is very crowded during the day. You didn‟t have that. Well, you had it to some extent. I mean, the amount of traffic coming over both bridges and up from the peninsula is just unbelievable. It is harder to get around. The neighborhoods have changed. I was talking to somebody about it today. We happened to be over on Polk Street having lunch and there are many more restaurants than there were back then. It is a food city now. RS: A lot of tourists are coming in. CC: There have always been tourists, but there are many more tourists now. The Fisherman‟s Wharf is much more developed than what I remember. RS: You mentioned that everyone has a car. When you were younger, a lot of folks didn‟t have cars. CC: Well, if they had a car, the family had one car with which they would get by. I remember friends of ours around the corner—she would get up and drive her husband to work so she would have the car for the day. He would take the bus home. RS: Now, everybody has got to have a car. 5 CC: I do still know people who take the bus home because it is convenient for them and they live on a route. It is easy for them, I guess. RS: Did you meet Marriner Eccles? CC: I knew Marriner and Sallie. RS: How would you describe Marriner and his relationship with Utah Construction? CC: I can‟t shed a lot of light on that. I knew Marriner. I knew he was very involved with Utah. I never saw him in action. I knew him more on kind of a social level than seeing him interact in Utah. RS: What were your impressions of him? CC: I liked him. I mean, I was young and they were adults. He was very gracious, as I remember. I remember when he married Sallie, which, I think, was in the mid-fifties. I am not quite sure whether there was a previous Mrs. Marriner. I became aware of him after he married her. She had a daughter who was about my age and we went to the same school. RS: I think he had children from an earlier marriage. CC: I am not sure I have ever met them. RS: David‟s brother is Marriner Val. He was named after his grandfather and Val Browning. CC: I remember my father and Val were good friends. RS: Did you meet Ed Littlefield? CC: I loved Ed. I first became aware of Ed and Jeannik when I was ten or eleven. I don‟t know when he moved back. RS: He came to Utah in 1951. 6 CC: That is about when I remember meeting him. He and Jeannik were married. The kids were little. To me, they always lived in Burlingame. We would go down there every once in a while. I remember seeing the kids growing up. Jacques was always down in the basement constructing his little war games with his toy tanks. They were just kind of always around. We went to their house and they came to our house. I think my dad thought very highly of them. They were good people. RS: How would you describe Ed? CC: Well, he was very vigorous. He had a great business mind. Remember, I was a lot younger. He always seemed to be kind of in charge, but in a nice way. I mean, he was obviously a go-getter executive, but he was always accessible. He was accessible to me, which was nice, and he didn‟t necessarily have to be. Family, I think, meant a lot to him. RS: You are his cousin, but you are twenty-six years younger. Did that affect the relationship? CC: To me, he was an entire generation older. He was more like an uncle than a cousin, but we talked as equals. I obviously had a lot less experience than he did. He took that into account. RS: You were at Berkeley just as things were warming up in the early sixties. What was life like on campus there? CC: There was a Bohemian side and then there was the fraternity side. I joined a sorority almost by default because the housing crunch was…Let me step back. If I had gone to another type of college, I would never have joined a sorority. It just wasn‟t my tendency to do that. But we did it because there was a housing crunch. 7 RS: What did you study? CC: I studied French and journalism, neither one of which I have used. Berkeley was great, don‟t misunderstand me, but if I could go back, I think I would have done better in a small liberal arts college someplace. RS: When it is big and each class has 500 students, it‟s difficult. CC: I was overwhelmed and I was ill-prepared for the bureaucracy, having been nurtured in a small, private school. So when I got over there, I didn‟t know how to deal with it, so I just really didn‟t live up to my potential. RS: Do you remember people in your family talking about Utah Construction and what the company was like? CC: Well, we would hear wonderful stories and anecdotes about Boulder Dam. My parents went on their honeymoon to Las Vegas. Somewhere, we have an old sixteen millimeter film that we found and had the raw footage converted to video. RS: What year was that? CC: It was 1934, while the dam was being built. Mom talks about riding up the face of the dam in whatever the open box was that they took the workers up in. I remember seeing photographs of that. RS: Did your parents talk much about E.O. Wattis‟ role? CC: No, actually. Most of what I know I got from books. There was a really good passage in a book that was put out by the Copley Press called The Grand Colorado that had pictures of them in it. I picked that one up when I was in my twenties. I guess it was about a railroad…or they did something up Feather River Canyon. RS: Yes, Feather River Project. They built a railroad. 8 CC: Yes. By the time I became aware of it, they were doing things in Peru. My parents traveled down to Marcona, which was nationalized later. I never went with them, but they talked. They took several trips down there and became acquainted with some local Peruvians. They were in Buenos Aires when Eva Perón died; I remember that story. They went to Australia. I kind of remember moving away from it after I graduated college. I married and moved down to Southern California and I became less involved except that we started going out to Palm Valley Country Club. That had been developed by them, too. Because we lived in that area, our connections were continued in that vein. I never went to shareholders‟ meetings—except the last one. RS: The famous one in 1975? CC: I guess. That is the only one I ever went to. My mother invited me. She said, “It will probably be the last one, so why don‟t you come with us?” I had never gone to any of the others. RS: Do you remember anything about being there? CC: I remember Ed getting up to speak. I remember there were some cousins there and I don‟t remember much else. RS: Do you remember when the person from the W.H. Wattis side got up and said, “We‟d have a moment of silence for the founder of the company, W.H. Wattis?” CC: I don‟t remember. GS: There was a moment of silence as everyone looked around. This is a tough question and you are free not to answer it, but one of the questions that bedeviled me when I was working on this book was: You have these two brothers, E.O. and W.H., and they are like the same person. Then, as time 9 passes into the forties and fifties, you see the two families become very estranged. Do you have any sense of that at all? Sometimes you ask people and they say “Well, I won‟t talk about it.” CC: I don‟t know anything about the W.H. side. I know he died before the dam was finished. And then E.O. died right in the middle of the project. GS: So, you were not aware of the W.H. people feeling estranged from the E.O. people or anything? CC: No, I was unaware of them completely. Other cousins may know more. What was the source of it? RS: Well, there were some disagreements over leadership, and then the W.H. people sold their stock in the „40s, just before it began to go up. CC: Who did they sell it to? RS: I probably could have told you once, but I don‟t remember now. There was always tension among the children, who had been cousins, over who founded the company and who was the real powerhouse in it. It is so silly because these two men were the same man. They had a joint checking account until they were forty. That is how close they were. CC: So what led to the estrangement? RS: Disagreements about leadership. CC: They themselves disagreed or the family members disagreed? RS: Well, Marriner was involved in it. It is all in the book. When the two brothers died, Marriner kind of became the pilot force beneath it. The Eccles were major investors. But he was off in Washington and the E.O. people kind of were in attendance and there were some issues that occurred with leadership in various 10 branches of the company in the late „40s. And then, of course, Marriner brought in Ed in 1951. CC: I remember hearing stories about things going on in the late-„40s. It was about the time when…Who was Ed‟s predecessor? RS: Allen D. Christensen. CC: I remember Christensen. I remember my father, I think, expressing some sort of dissatisfaction with Christensen, but I don‟t remember the details. RS: Do you feel any roots in Utah, or are your roots pretty much in San Francisco? CC: No. Well, I feel a connection to Utah, but when I go back I tend to go to Salt Lake City. First of all, I don‟t think there is anybody left in Ogden that I know. I am still kind of connected with my one cousin on my mother‟s side; she was a Cannon. I still stay in touch, in a general way, with Zeke and Kay Dumke. I never see Ed and Carol. We just don‟t have any connection. RS: You knew that Denise and some of them have bought the old E.O. house? CC: It‟s my brother, his son, Denise, and Jacques. RS: As I said that, I thought, “Of course she knows, her brother is involved in it.” That might help bring a connection back to Ogden. We would like to see that connection re-established, obviously. There are not any family folks left here. CC: No, no I don‟t think so. All of the Kimballs are out here. Some of the Littlefields are here. Denise is in New York, of course. The Dumkes are in Salt Lake City. The other Dumke is up in Sun Valley and the third Dumke is back east. They are kind of all over. I think some of them are around here. LL: In Las Vegas? 11 CC: Yes, they are pretty much based out of Las Vegas; that is where their family office is, but they are all over the place. There is one in Incline Village, and one, I think, maybe up here in the Napa area. I never know where Marguerite is. RS: Last October, when we held the Symposium, we took a bus-load of folks up to Uintah to show them your great-grandfather‟s home. There is still a granary there that he built. CC: I have never been to Uintah. I don‟t even know where it is. RS: It is south of Ogden. It‟s just a little, teeny town, and so if and when you are interested, we would be happy to take you and show you around. The Uintah Cemetery is kind of a quaint place and there are some Wattis graves there. They were there when the Union Pacific Railroad came down the canyon to create the Transcontinental Railroad. An original track from the Union Pacific Railroad in 1869 is still there. In October, when we hold the Utah Construction Symposium, we are going to talk a lot about the families that lived around Eccles Circle. CC: Is Eccles Circle where that house is? RS: Yes, it is on Eccles Avenue. It‟s the house that Ed was born in. CC: Is this the house that Zeke and Edna…did they take that house on at one time or did they live nearby? RS: No, they lived through the backyard. Two of E.O.‟s daughters lived in houses behind it. GS: E.O. bought the property and built the houses for his daughters. That goes through to the next avenue. The backyards were adjacent. RS: In 1889 the mayor of Ogden—the first non-Mormon mayor—said, “We are going to change the names of the streets that are now Mormon names like Young and 12 Smith. We are going to Americanize the city so we are going to call them Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Van Buren, and Harrison, and so on.” CC: I was in Ogden in 1997. I had been fishing in Idaho and I drove down. I was on my way through to visit my cousins in Salt Lake City. It was a weekend and I stopped off and found the city cemetery. I was looking for my father‟s grave, but I never found it. Nobody was there to point me in the right direction. RS: He was buried in the city cemetery? CC: Yes, he is buried there. LL: Your mother passed away not too long ago, isn't that right? CC: Four years ago. LL: She did so much for art and the fine arts in this city. Would you mind sharing some of your thoughts about her? CC: She made things happen, I think, in her own way. She was instrumental, I don‟t mean financially, but in other ways. She served on a lot of different boards. I think she was always active through a great passion for art, particularly the visual arts. Modern art was her great passion. LL: Was she an artist herself? CC: Not really. She drew and painted. I think she dabbled in it and enjoyed it. RS: And this was her home? CC: Yes. RS: When did they move here? CC: My father died in 1971. He had just turned seventy in the previous August and he had a full-blown heart attack in his office downtown. She didn‟t want to stay in the 13 house but she wanted the security of an apartment. Within a year of my father dying, she found this place and bought it. RS: Is it difficult for you to live in your mother‟s home? CC: We did some renovation. A lot of it is the same, but a lot of it is different. It is ours now. We kept a lot of elements of it, but you have to make it your own. I think you have to do that. Otherwise, you are trapped in somebody else‟s life. RS: Where did your mom get her love for art and her patronage ideas? CC: I think she developed it. My father had a very dim opinion of art. He wasn‟t particularly interested. In fact, she didn‟t start collecting until after he had died and she had a certain amount of financial freedom. RS: That is an interesting story because Jeannik told us that Ed really didn‟t like the opera very much but he would tell her he would take her to the opera if he wanted her to do something. CC: They negotiated, I‟m sure. I think there was a certain amount of negotiation with my father, too. He was an outdoorsman. He loved to hunt. He would hunt and fish. He would be with his cronies and this was the trade-off. Now my husband and I go fly-fishing up near Highland Park. It is wonderful. Good fly fishing. RS: Do you buy your flies or do you tie them? CC: We buy them. We just go in and say, “What are they hitting on this week?” You come out of the shop with a half a dozen that are the type you already had but that you left at home. The Harriman Ranch is beautiful up there. It is so gorgeous. We go into the fire hole in the park. We stay at the Flat Rock Club which is having its one-hundredth anniversary this year. My mother would have been 101 this year. My father would have been coming up on 107. 14 RS: We are appreciative your time today. When you come to Ogden, we will be happy to take you around to show you some places that you may not know. GS: You can see where the house used to be that E.O. and W.H. lived in. CC: They lived in Uintah, not in Ogden, right? GS: There is another house where their house was, so it is not the original house, but the granary is right behind it, and you can see where they were almost within spitting distance of the Transcontinental Railroad. That is, of course, how they got interested in construction. CC: They started out with mules, didn't they? GS: Yes, they took their team up the canyon. They were just kids. E.O. was twelve or something like that. He took a team up the canyon. He was barefoot and helped grade the canyon. That grade is still there. The Union Pacific has two rail beds. The lower bed is the original Transcontinental Railroad bed that your grandfather graded when he was a kid. And your great-grandfather, Edmond Wattis, was kind of the local child leader. He was the community leader. CC: Were they Mormon at that time? RS: Yes, which is why they came from England. CC: Edmond Wattis came from England? GS: Yes, he came from the London area.