Oral History Program Carla Vogel Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 1 August 2017 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Carla Vogel Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 1 August 2017 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 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: Vogel, Carla, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 1 August 2017, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Carla Vogel 1 August 2017 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Carla Vogel, conducted on August 1, 2017 in her home in Ogden, Utah, by Lorrie Rands. Carla discusses her life and her memories involving World War II. Alyssa Chaffee, the video technician, and Amy Higgs, Carla’s granddaughter, are also present during this interview. LR: It is August first, 2017. We are in the home of Carla Vogel in Ogden, Utah, talking with her about her memories and experiences during World War II for the World War II and Northern Utah project at Weber State University. My name is Lorrie Rands, conducting the interview. Alyssa Chaffee is here as well as Amy Higgs who is also her granddaughter. So, thank you again for your willingness to sit down and talk with us. I’m just going to start with, when and where you were born. CV: The old Dee Hospital. Ogden, Utah in April 1932. LR: What day in April? CV: April 26. LR: You were born in the old Dee Hospital. CV: Over on Harrison and twenty-fourth. There’s a park there now. LR: Are both your parents from Ogden? CV: Yes. LR: What are their names? CV: Mother was Wynona Burrows and my father George W. Vogel Jr. after his father George William Vogel, who was in the Civil War. 2 LR: Both of your parents are from Ogden, but apparently the families came from back east somewhere. Do you have any idea what brought them to Ogden, Utah? CV: Ohio was where my grandfather actually came from. He did come out west after the Civil War. After he had hunted buffalo with Buffalo Bill for a number of years, then he came out here, kind of a prospector. He actually discovered alum down in the hills by Marysville. He owned all of that area where the Big Rock Candy Mountain is, but he sold it to Alcoa Aluminum many years ago. LR: What are some of your earliest memories of growing up in Ogden? CV: Well the first twelve years I was on Darling Street below Harrison, and now I’m on Darling Street above Harrison. My father gave me a Shetland pony when I was five and it had a colt. So, I had two Shetland ponies. I was in my first horse show when I was five. That was in 1937. I found the yellow ribbon from third place. LR: When you talk about horse shows, is it associated with the Days of ‘47 or was it just something different? CV: Down in West Ogden, we had a big arena down there. We did ice skating all winter, and horse shows and horse sales. It’s where they’d bring the wild horses off the desert to sell. It was quite an active part of the Ogden community, but no more. LR: That’s the Stockyards area that you’re talking about? CV: Yes, the Stockyards. My life was kind of around my horses until I got married. I just kept getting more. I had two mares so every year I’d get two colts. By the time they were two, I’d have them trained. I’d sell them and have two more to 3 train. It was just my life. Living over here by Thirty-Second Street, Iowa Ave, all these hills were just our playground. LR: You were five when you got your first pony so that would have been 1937. You’re in the middle of the Depression, so was that a struggle for your parents to provide that? CV: Yes. They actually had a little home, 1052 Darling. Our dining room set was beautiful; came on a train from Chicago, from Montgomery Ward catalog. My doll house was made out of an orange crate. Orange crates were made out of wood. They were kind of tall and narrow with the section in between. We used a lot of those for our chairs. Thinking back, I guess my folks didn’t have much money to spare. It affects the whole family. My dad had a fear of ending up in what they called the poor farm. LR: What did your father do? CV: He was a dentist. Back then, they would do a filling and it’d be seven dollars. I have some of his old dental books. The way I got all of my horses was from his dental patients that couldn’t pay for their dental work. If they had a horse, we’d go get the horse. The horse we got in Roosevelt, a thoroughbred race horse, the man couldn’t pay for his false teeth. So he says, “You can have my horse.” So we went up to Roosevelt. He said, “You might as well meet my daughter while you’re out there.” Her mother had died. Well there was no way my mother was going to come back and not bring her too. She and I were the same age, so I finally got a sister. Her name is Lola and we are second cousins and are still very close. 4 LR: What year was this? CV: Well let’s see, we were thirteen. LR: This was right towards the end of the war. CV: Yes. So, they raised her. LR: I know you were just a young girl, but did it ever occur to you that you were in the middle of a Depression when you were growing up? CV: No, it didn’t. Not at all. We just had to be careful; that was all. LR: What did your mother do when you were young? CV: She never worked after she got married. After my parents died and I would find their papers, whenever it asked for her occupation, she wrote “entertainer”. She was a professional singer. She had her own radio program on KLO on Sunday nights. She played the organ and the piano and the accordion. I grew up listening to polkas on the accordion. I just loved polkas. Then, after 1956 or 1957, they started going down to Palm Springs, California. For the winter they bought a mobile home and put it in a trailer park. She was kind of the activities director from then on. She would be the master of ceremonies at all their programs and parties. She organized a novelty band. She had up to forty women in her novelty band. They played all over that California valley, Coachella Valley it’s called. There’s a couple of her trophies on the counter. They would play at the National Date Festival several times. It was just a big fun thing that they did. They used kazoos. My dad would make trombones out of old TV antennas and they had three gut buckets. I still have one. I have it in my garage. LR: What is a gut bucket? 5 CV: A gut bucket, you have to see to believe. I could demonstrate it for you. It’s a big bucket. You turn it upside down, attach a rope and you have a handle on the rope. So you put one foot on it to hold the gut bucket down and then you pluck it and it goes boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom; like the bass fiddle. LR: So it’s an improvised musical instrument. CV: Yes it is. I don’t know where it ever got that name. LR: What year did she have her band? CV: Many years, until she got into her late eighties. Then, the women were just passing away, so it got kind of small. She was a ball of fire. LR: How many siblings did you have? CV: A brother. George. Until he got to high school, he went by the name Junior, even though he wasn’t a junior. They gave him my mother’s maiden name for his middle name or else he would have been the third. LR: Where did you go to elementary school? CV: Quincy, which is now the Rancho Market on Twenty-Sixth Street just above Monroe. LR: And junior high? CV: Polk. We moved up above Harrison, so I went to Polk Jr high. LR: Did you go to Ogden High? CV: Yes. It was two or three blocks away. AC: Were you musical at all since your mother was so musical? CV: I played the piano pretty much my whole life. 6 AC: Did your mother teach you? CV: No. Louise Knight, my neighbor, taught me. Then I took, for many years, from Wilma Bunker, who actually played with the Utah Symphony. Then, fortunately, I asked Mother if I could play popular music instead of classical; so I took, until I was in college, from Ed Berry. AC: What kinds of composers did you play? CV: All the old standards - Night and Day, Temptation, and My Way, Frank Sinatra’s theme song. I just kind of love it all. LR: What would you do for fun while you were growing up? CV: My horse was the main thing. One day, my brother and two friends, we went on our horses, a couple of them had to ride double, up in the foothills. We found a big poison ivy patch. I don’t know whose idea it was, but we decided we’d just kind of roll around in it. It was fall so they had little berries. We took the berries and crushed them. My friend, Penelope Dovenspike, did not get poison ivy and I didn’t get it, but her sister and my brother were just so sick. Their faces swelled up where they could hardly see. It was just awful. Shows you kids are really not very smart. I don’t know how old she became before her parents realized her name should be pronounced Penelope, nut all through Polk school, she was Penelope Dovenspike. They moved here just because of work at Defense Depot. LR: What do you remember if anything, of Pearl Harbor Day? CV: Oh, that’s interesting because I don’t now remember anything about it. I’m sure I did back then. It’s one of the things I was going to mention. When something big happened back then, down on Twenty-Fourth and Washington, there would be a 7 news guy saying, “Extra! Extra! Read all about it.” All the people that didn’t take the paper, they’d go down and get their papers. I’m sure that was probably one of those big days they printed extra papers and sold them on the street. LR: I know you don’t remember that day, but do you have any memories of the attitude and the atmosphere that was occurring at that time? CV: Nope. I don’t. My grandpa died when I was nine. He was ninety-nine. I remember that, but I do not remember Pearl Harbor Day. Maybe my folks just didn’t make a big deal out of it. I don’t know. LR: What is the first thing you remember about being involved in World War II? CV: I remember we knew all about Hitler. That was big. He was this huge enemy. Lola and I, the other girl, she actually ended up being a second cousin; we were so scared of Hitler coming to America and coming to Ogden that we had a place in our house all planned out to hide if he ever came. It was in back of the coat closet by the front door. There was another little door, narrow, and then back there was a whole pathway back to the furnace vents. That was our hiding place. By then we had moved over to that big house there on Thirty-Second and Iowa, a big three level house. Mother and Dad made a bomb shelter so we had our own bomb shelter in our home. It was all totally cement and they put bunk beds in it, built them into the side. We had lanterns and food. LR: Was this built during the war or before? CV: Well during, yes. LR: Building that bunker was a result of what was happening in world? 8 CV: Yes. They would have drills, the whole city. They would have a blackout night. I really don’t remember the details of it, but it would be a certain night that everybody would turn off all their lights. So, that was just part of the defense. LR: Do you remember if they would do anything in school, like drills, to prepare you for certain things that might happen? CV: No. I don’t remember them doing that in school but there were Victory Gardens here and there. In fact, we had sixty-four acres. Amy eventually ended up growing up on some of those acres that my dad owned; finally got houses built on it. We had a big Victory Garden and anybody could come over and plant anything they wanted. There were a few around town. LR: So your Victory Garden was almost like a communal garden? CV: Yes. LR: What do you remember about rationing? CV: That was the first thing I remember. We had stamps and coupons. In those days, all the women wore dresses and they had to have their nylons. That was a big deal. My mother, that was hard on her because you could only get so many. Gasoline was rationed, so you had gasoline stamps. Of course, it cost about fifteen cents a gallon back then. Shoes and rubber; they stopped making tires out of rubber because they were using it for the army equipment. So they learned to make tires out of rayon. They made margarine. It’d be in a bag and then they would give you a little packet with orange coloring. You’d put that in and then you’d mix it up and make your own butter. 9 LR: I heard that tasted terrible. I talked with one woman who said to this day she cannot eat margarine. CV: We thought it was OK. Maybe it did taste bad but I don’t remember that part. We used it. My mother used margarine even though we made our own butter; we had a cow. She used margarine quite a bit. LR: What else do you remember about rationing? CV: Coffee; they were very rationed on that. That’s really about all that affected us. LR: I was going to ask you if your mother ever painted her legs. CV: I think she did. Yes; I remember that. LR: Would she do the black stripe up the back? I know a lot of the women, when they were painting their legs, they would try to actually recreate that on their legs. CV: I didn’t like that. I was so glad when they quit doing that. In high school, me and my friends, we’d go to Salt Lake shopping and we would wear high heels and dresses. That was just what we did. We’d kind of dress up to go to Salt Lake, but even shopping in Ogden, we would wear dresses but maybe not high heels. There is a DVD that I did record. Channel seven made it once, called Ogden in the Fifties. It’s very interesting. There’s also Salt Lake in the Fifties. They’re fascinating. All the women were in dresses; all the men in suits and hats. When we went on vacation, Dad would be in his suit; Mother and I would be in our dresses, out in the desert in Arizona even. LR: During the war, did your mother stay at home or did your parents find things to do that directly helped the war effort? 10 CV: As I recall there was some sewing going on at the churches, but I’m not really sure. She didn’t go out and become a welder or anything like that. I don’t know if they made quilts or clothes or what. LR: Do you recall ever getting and buying the little bond stamps at school, the ten cent stamps, and putting them in the books? CV: The S&H Green stamps. Oh, I’ll say. I still have a book of them but they quit honoring them thirty-five years ago. Oh yes, that was big. They actually had an outlet store downtown. We’d go shopping with our green stamps. Years later, another company thought, well we might as well get on it, so they made Gold Strike stamps. That was pretty much just the same thing. It was so fun to go shopping with your book of green stamps. LR: Is there anything else that I haven’t asked? CV: Yes. This is in my memory like it happened last week. When the news came the war was over, we went out in the front yard over here on Thirty-Second and Iowa. Kids started coming and people started coming and we were hollering. My brother hopped in the little 37 Ford coupe and ran downtown. On Grant Street there was actually a fireworks store. It was oriental people that ran it. He came dashing home with an armload of fireworks, so we had this great big fireworks show the rest of that day. All the neighbors came and it was just wonderful. It was just the most wonderful thing that had happened. LR: This was in August of 1945? CV: Yes. 11 LR: So other than the fact that there were fireworks going on, did you understand that the war was over; that things were finally going to get back to normal maybe? CV: Oh yes. It’s just like everything was going to be wonderful. LR: I know you were not old, but do you recall those young men being drafted and going overseas? CV: No, not too much because they were not my brothers. There was one young man that had gotten real close to our family. He went in the Army. He was about the only one I thought about here. A couple of uncles. LR: You mentioning your uncle and showing us these photographs. Will you talk about him? CV: Yes. Spencer Burrows, my mother’s brother. He was married to Melba Burrows who actually was teaching at Weber College at the time. They just had one child, Patricia. He went. He was in the infantry. I do not remember the names of the towns. He was actually the first one there on German soil. It was the front page of the Standard Examiner. Mother saved it all these years and she showed me the paper. We were all so sad. They buried him there. That cemetery is huge, white marble. They do have white marble markers. I think it was around 1987 that Mother and Dad finally made it over there. One of our sons, George, went over year before last and had gotten acquainted with the man that runs this cemetery. George called me and said, “We would like to take something to this man. He’s so good to them. Do you have something?” I couldn’t think of anything. Then he said, “Well, he really likes western things, anything western.” Well, my dad made bolo ties. I got a picture of about eighty. He would make them 12 from scratch. When my husband died, I gave most of them away but I still have about ten. I had one with a big cowboy boot and one with a nice turquoise, so they took them over and gave to this man. He was so thrilled. He got his cowboy hat out of his trunk and put on his hat and his bolo tie. They all want to go back again. He took them out to dinner. They are building a memorial of some sort. Actually, the three soldiers, they all died instantly. There were German snipers in the trees, evidently, is what they figure. LR: Spencer Burrows was the first American on German soil? CV: In that area, yes. AH: I was going to ask about your memories with Lola and the Defense Depot. CV: After the war, there were all these Italian prisoners that ended up here in Ogden. By then, I was driving; so, I would take Lola on a Sunday afternoon and we would ride out there. It’s the road you’d take to go to the fairgrounds now. There was big wire fences and all these young soldiers would be standing around with nothing to do. We’d just go real slow and kind of wave at them and they would whistle at us and wave. It was just one of the most thrilling things that we ever did. What’s funny is Lola’s forgotten all about it. She doesn’t remember doing that, but we did it quite often. LR: Would you ever stop and actually get out and interact with them? CV: We didn’t have that much nerve. No, but we had the windows down. They were so handsome, dark and handsome. That is one of my absolute biggest memories of the whole war. One of the officers of the camp was renting an apartment from us. One of the prisoners was a professional chef, so quite often he would make 13 these beautiful dinners for this officer. Some of the time, he would bring some of it to us. It was just very exotic, beautiful Italian food that we got to enjoy. LR: Did your father own an apartment building? CV: Oh yes, several. This was a duplex half a block from our home. It’s still there. It was where my grandmother and grandfather lived. When Bob and I later were married, we lived there. So, I lived in my grandfather’s old home; my grandmother’s home down on Twenty-Sixth before it was torn down for the school; and now my grandmother’s home here. We lived in that duplex in the 60’s. After my grandparents died, my dad made it into a duplex and added on some rooms. It’s still a pretty nice place to live. It’s about 150 years old underneath. They put siding on it. LR: I’m assuming he had the property during World War II. Did he rent a lot of rooms to soldiers and their families? CV: Yes. That duplex was usually people moving in for the war effort. He had a little home on Thirtieth and Harrison that he rented until he sold it. On the other corner where an Optometrist has his offices, that was a triplex that he owned. That was a rental. Then down a hundred feet, down on Thirtieth, there was the building that used to be called Vogel’s Drive-In. That had four upstairs apartments. Sometimes, at my folk’s condo, I would see all of his keys. He made the remark once; he says, “I hope there’s no keys in heaven.” It was kind of overbearing, all the keys to everything. They would go to California for the winter, from 1964 until they died. They didn’t even lock their big home. We didn’t lock our homes back 14 then. None of us did. Nobody lost their car keys when I was a kid because they were always in the ignition of the car. It was a different world. AC: It is super fascinating that you and Lola would go and flirt with these Italians. I was talking to another woman who said that she would do the same thing with the Italian and German POWs. Was there kind of like this draw to these handsome European men for a lot of the girls during this time period? CV: I don’t remember any of my other friends doing that. I do not. They might have, but they weren’t driving as much as I was either. AC: I just think it’s fascinating because they were the enemy. Was there that feeling of danger? CV: Yes. Just enough. We wouldn’t have got out of the car, even though we’d have been safe. It just was so fun, so thrilling. That’s my most fun memory. That happened after the war. A few years later, when the war was all behind us, this young man, Doug Stringfellow, came out into prominence. He was this great big war hero. He had been in the Bushnell hospital in Brigham recuperating from his war injuries. It turned out it was more just a jeep accident that I recall. They were just gushing over him and the story became embellished, that he was tortured. He really had quite a convincing story. He was just so honored. When I graduated Ogden High, 1950, they chose him to be the commencement speaker because he was this big hero. He gave a wonderful talk. It was a few years later, after I got married, he actually was living in my folks ward. I was married and away for a little while. One day on television they featured him on This Is Your Life with Ralph Edwards. This was a really big popular program. They’d get these 15 famous people and then they’d get all these other people in their background to come on. It was always a big surprise. He would have never allowed it to happen if he had have known ahead of time because the story just started to unravel. I imagine there’s quite a bit on the Internet about him. I found a letter he wrote to my dad thanking him for supporting him in his run for House of Representatives for the state. I don’t think it happened. That was a sad thing. He was crippled. He had a really bad limp and used a cane. It was not easy for him to get around the rest of his life. A very good person but just got carried away with the adoration. LR: You mentioned your husband served in Korea. I know he didn’t serve in World War II, but I’m kind of curious if he ever noticed a difference between the veterans of World War II and the veterans of Korea, if they were treated differently, if they had a different attitude? CV: He always felt like the Korean War was the forgotten war and they were the forgotten soldiers. He did feel that. As far as anything doing with World War II, he was in an orphanage at the time in Indianapolis so I don’t know what affect the war had on him. He did feel that they didn’t get the honor they should have had. The group he went over with, most of them didn’t come back. Since he knew how to type, he was not out on the front lines of North Korea, so he did come back. AH: We talked earlier about how you didn’t realize anything was going on with the Japanese Internment camps until much later. CV: I wasn’t aware of that going on at all, the internment camps. That’s a very interesting part of history. I think maybe as a family we might have ridden down to observe that camp down in Delta. I’ve gone since and now there’s nothing but 16 a few little foundations in the ground. It just was one of those things they thought was for the best. LR: I found it interesting that when you talked about being afraid, you were afraid of Hitler but you weren’t afraid of the Japanese. I find that interesting because we were at war with the Japanese before we were at war with Germany. CV: I know. It was Hitler that just took all of the news. It was like he was just horrible. I remember like twenty-five years ago, somebody back east was going to name their child Hitler. There was a great big uproar in the whole city. I do remember reading that in the paper. Young people today; that word doesn’t even mean anything to them unless they’ve read the history. To us he was the ultimate enemy. LR: Are there any other stories you’d like to share about growing up during World War II or did we cover them all? CV: I think so. I’m glad we remembered the Victory Gardens. LR: Let me ask you a final question. It’s something I’ve been asking everyone for this project and I realize that you were just a young girl during the war. How do you think your experiences or World War II overall affected or influenced the remainder of your life? CV: I don’t think it had a lasting effect. When it was over, it was just so wonderful. I don’t think it had a lasting effect that I know of. LR: I find that it all depends on how old you were during the war because I’ve noticed that those that were really young, for them it was just something that happened 17 and it really didn’t affect them as much as someone who was a teenager or older. I want to thank you for your time talking with us.