Oral History Program Gerald Young Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 26 June 2019 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Gerald Young Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 26 June 2019 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 Utah Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum honors men and women whose lives exemplify the independence and resilience of the people who settled Utah, and includes artists, champions, entertainers, musicians, ranchers, writers, and those persons, past and present, who have promoted the Western way of life. Each year, the inductees are interviewed about their lives and experiences living the Western way of life. ____________________________________ 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: Young, Gerald, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 26 June 2019, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections and University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Gerald Young 26 June 2019 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Gerald Young, conducted on June 26, 2019 by Lorrie Rands at the Ogden Union Station. Young discusses his childhood growing up on the YR Ranch, his experience in the ranching business, and his involvement in the rodeo. Also present is Alyssa Dove. LR: Today is June 26, 2019. We are at the Union Station in Ogden with Gerald Young talking about his life for the Western Heritage Museum and Cowboy Hall of Fame. My name is Lorrie Rands directing the interview, and Alyssa Dove is with me as well. It's about 11:00. Gerald, thank you so much for your willingness to do this. I'm really grateful. Let's just start with when and where you were born. GY: I was born in the community of Oakley, August 5, 1930. LR: And did you grow up in Oakley? GY: I grew up in Oakley. Been there all my life. LR: Where did you go to school? GY: South Summit High School. That's in Kamas. Kamas is five miles south of Oakley. LR: So growing up in Oakley, where did you live? Did you live on a farm? GY: Well, I lived on a farm. I was born and raised on a cattle and sheep ranch, and, of course, my father died when I was four years old. The winters got so bad, my mother moved over to town—which is a half mile away—and built a house. So I lived there till I was out of high school. LR: So you originally were living on the ranch, and she moved into town? GY: Just a half a mile over. LR: Did you still work on the ranch? GY: Yeah, I grew up on it. When I could get back and forth in the summertime, then I would bike over, or I had a dog that I made pull a hand sleigh back and forth. But I live in the same home now as I was born and raised in. LR: As you were growing up, did you have any siblings? 1 GY: I got two older sisters. LR: Okay, so you were the baby. GY: I'm a baby. LR: I know it's subjective, but what was it like growing up with two sisters? GY: Well, because I was the baby, at any place they went, they looked after me just like hound dogs. Wouldn't let me get out of their sight. I didn't know any different growing up. They were just my sisters and I felt good and comfortable with them. It was good. LR: What were some of your hobbies that you enjoyed as a young boy? GY: Well, as a young boy, we had to make our own fun. You know, there was no anything in town or anything like that. When I got big enough to hay, we hayed the Weber River between my home and Oakley City. Two or three of the other boys around town, we meet after we'd get through haying and swim in the river. Wintertime, we used to have a whole hill that comes down into Oakley, and we'd get these little hand sleighs and ride up and down the hill. It was right along the road, but no traffic. It was just a lot of fun. As kids, you make friends and go down on the river and fish and do whatever we really wanted to do. No one reported to anyone. LR: You said you would hay. What does that mean? GY: Well, we'll put up hay in the summertime in the range, cut the hay. Of course, in them days, we used all horses. Horses to mow with, horses to rake the hay, horses to push the hay in there, and the horses on the dairy. It lifted up and dropped it. It was all loose hay, and we had a couple of guys on a haystack to stack the hay. I got put, when I was big enough, on the scatter rig. That was, after they moved the hay all off, a one-horse rake, and you'd rake back and forth across the fields to gather up the loose hay that they had lost. I thought that I'd come to the end of the earth, be out there in the fields and rested around the haystack. It was so hot, and that old 2 horse we had, she knew when to turn around, where to go and come back. She didn't need me to guide her. You look back on it and it was a good experience raising up on the ranch. LR: When you were younger, would you go to school in the fall and winter time? GY: Yes. I went to school and had a little schoolhouse here in the town of Oakley. I went there until, I think it was the fifth grade, and then they consolidated the schools. Then we went over to Kamas, and there was a bus that came back and forth; picked us up and took us to Kamas, then brought us back. LR: So that's where you went to junior high? GY: Everything was all one: high school, junior high, everything. LR: Oh, really? All one building? GY: Well, a pretty good-sized building. We was the largest class that graduated, in 1948. I think we had 31. So there wasn't a lot of people and kids. LR: As I was going through and reading this, it talked about how many—on the ranch that you worked on, it was huge. The YR Ranch? GY: Yes. LR: Wow. 10,000 ewes and 120 mother cows. GY: Yeah, we did a lot. When I first grew up, it was more bent towards a sheep outfit. There was cattle there, of course. The sheep went to the West Desert in the wintertime, and just north of Oakley in the summer. Of course, I grew up going up and down with my uncle with the sheep. I was just always gone. I didn't really care for the sheep, but I had no choice. When I got to high school, I got appointed to go out on the West Desert and campaign for some of the herders when they take vacations. I thought I was at the end of the earth. But it was okay; it was nice. Then of course, as I got a little older, I went out high school more. My uncle was getting to be an old gentleman, and he just started to learn me what they had 3 to do and take care of the sheep. Of course, we had cheap herders to herd the sheep. A couple of guys on the ranch took care of the cattle, irrigated, and put up hay and that type of thing. LR: Did you want to take over the running of the ranch? GY: I never even thought about it. I just loved it and had no choice; I just kind of moved right into it and helped them. I grew up with a lot of older people; hadn’t worked with the kids or anything. It was people in their 50's and 60-year-olds; it was old, old people, I thought, at that time. But anyway, I grew up and I learned a lot from people who’ve had the experience. It was good experience. I had the chance to go to college, but at that time, I think I figured out, I was smarter than the teachers you go to college with. But it was only just a year or so out of school, and I just didn’t know a damn thing. I should have went to college, but I didn't. LR: Who were some of the people that you looked up to as a young boy? GY: Well, there was not many. There was a gentleman by the name of Ralph Richards. He was a stake president. He used to work there on the ranch, and I had a lot of experience from him. I honored him a little. Right up until he died, he was kind of a mentor to me. Then my uncle. He treated me, took care of me just ‘bout like he was my father, but it wasn't. And of course, he didn't live there. He lived in Wanship and then later moved to Salt Lake. He made out to tell the guys what to do and where to go and all about that. That was a good experience, growing up there. I didn't know anything. That was my whole world, right there. We had a pretty good-sized ranch right there, had 500 acres just south of Oakley. I still love it. After he passed away, I had the chance to either take the cattle outfit or the sheep outfit. And I was tired of the sheep; I was just gone all the time. So I took the cattle outfit. Then I increased 4 the cattle because there was no more sheep going to be around there, so I increased the cattle to what we're running now. LR: What happened to the sheep? GY: Well, we sold them to another big sheep outfit and then sold some of the range up to 22 guys. We couldn't sell it, and we had a gentleman that was taking care of his estate, and we got together—he was over a big government loan agency in Salt Lake. He says, "Hey, if you can get a bunch of guys together, we can loan them the money to buy it." So I got 22 guys together and we bought the range. Then we divided up and started running cattle on the mountain, and that didn't work out too good. None of the guys wanted to run cattle, so it ended up being me running most of the cattle up on there, and I took care of that mountain up until three years ago. Ten years ago, we sold it to two big guys. They invented the laptop computer and they had money to burn and all they wanted to do was investments. So we were happy to take care of and run it for them, right up until three years ago when it resold again. Then I just didn't want to be involved with some of the people who bought it. That got rid of the cattle; got through the mountain range. LR: So when did you… It talks about [how] you tried your hand at bareback riding and steer riding? GY: That wasn't long, right after school in that period of time and maybe just before I was out of school. At that time, there was people turning cattle heads out on the roads, and us kids—there was three or four of us—would run 'em into one of our crowds there, and we'd just ride them and play with them as long as we wanted to. Turn them up back out on the street. Then my uncle had a little band of horses there, Morrison Colts. When he was around [and] the boys were around, we'd run them over to town and do one-horse-shoot and try riding them. It just grew from there. 5 At one time I decided, "Well, I bought some horses," and I decided that might be the game to play, is to go into the rodeo business. So that grew into a pretty good business, and I rodeoed for 25 years. I didn't do the big rodeos; I did a lot of the rodeos around Utah and some up in Idaho, couple over in Nevada. It just grew to where I couldn't take care of the cattle ranch, so I up and sold my rodeo outfit. But through that 25 years, I met a lot of good people, and that's where the RMRA come into it. They made that association. LR: From what I was reading, it's almost like you would find a horse, whether it was broke or not, and just decide, "I'm going to ride this," and hop on its back and just see what you could do. GY: Well, we did that, but we never had bareback breakings like that. We'd have a rope and put around 'em to tie them up to the fence, get on them and somebody turn 'em loose. Anyone could last a jump or two. That was a lot of experience we did just as kids. There was about four of us did that, and that's where the experience of wanting to be in the rodeo business kinda started out. Then it looked like I was pretty good, so then I started buying some horses that we thought would buck and try them out. The ones that was good we kept, the ones that wasn't we sold, and then just got to the point when you got too many damn horses around the ranch for that. It wasn't making any money, so I started leasing them out to some of these rodeos. That's where we started the rodeo business. LR: As you were growing your business, you said you stayed with the smaller rodeos here in Utah. What was your favorite rodeo to work with? GY: Well, I suppose the best one is in my hometown, Oakley. I've been on that board for... Well, let's see. Three years ago, they give me a belt buckle for 65 years. So I'll have been there for 70 years this year, on that committee; I've been the chairman all the way through it, and I still [am] the chairman. We've growed up from a little 6 small rodeo, like maybe a couple of hundred people would show up to it, till now, our bleachers hold 6500 people. We have four nights, and we sold out here three weeks ago, every ticket. We're one of the big rodeos. This year, we got put on the tour system with PCRA, so we're one of the tour rodeos. That's coming up here on the 4th of July now. It's been really interesting, and I've known lots and lots of cowboys [who] come and go over the years, and I take care of getting the contracts that we do and everything goes to take care of the rodeo. We hired a stock contractor which we've had for a great number of years, Bar T Rodeo. That's who I sold my rodeo stock out to was Swanny Kerby. I worked for Swanny for a lot of years, loaning him livestock he took to his biggest rodeos, and so that's my favorite rodeo I've got. I did, one time, when I was doing it at Lagoon over here, started a one-night rodeo, and I had that from June for three months; every night, put on a rodeo over there. At the same time, I had another set of horses and bulls and stuff that we went to these other towns and rodeoed with. So I've been in the rodeo end of it since probably '48 after getting out of school. Somehow, I just grew up into it. LR: It talks a little bit about wanting an arena and that when you first started out, there really wasn't a place to do things. Even that, you helped build that up. GY: Oh, I did. That's right. When I first got doing it, there was a little place just down from my house that belonged to some neighbors. We called it the Grove, and there was a couple of little bucket seats they had. They'd been playing with rodeos for three or four years prior to that, just hiring a few horses and mainly riding cows and roping calves and that. The arena fence was Burton-Gardner fence. What that is, is snow fences. It's about five feet high, just wooden slats, and then cars would park all the way around the fence. That's where they had the rodeo. 7 Well, then about five, six years later, since I started into it, over in the middle of town where our school was, there was a little pond of water there. The town fathers filled that in with dirt, and we decided to put a new rodeo arena there. We rodeoed there for a lot of years, up until about 12 years ago. Then the town bought about 80 acres of ground where we're at now, and we built a new rodeo facility—a big rodeo facility with two outdoor arenas: one big outdoor arena, an indoor arena. Now, the people who buy tickets from us, we keep track of their zip codes, the towns they come from. We have people all over the country that come from New York... We got Park City 15 miles away from us, and they send a lot of people over, so that's been a good deal. There's only seven of us on that board, and we go out and get people to sponsor us. We've never had less than $100,000 sponsor for that rodeo. When I go to the meetings for the PCRA in Las Vegas, they have a roundtable discussion about that. Most of the big rodeos around, or a lot of them, the influence is on wine, whiskey, and beer. They have gardens, they call them, tents and all that. That's one thing we've stayed true to is a family-oriented rodeo, so we don't have any of that; we don’t allow it. The minute the rodeo is over with, the next week, we start getting in letters about wanting to reserve a seat for next year. Usually around the last in May, we're about three-quarters sold out. But this year about the middle of June we're completely sold out, not a ticket left, and so I feel real great about that. I still have a lot to do with it, but my main love is cows. LR: When you say your main love is cows, what do you mean by that? GY: Well, my ranch, I run about 300 head of mother cows, and run them year-round and work with them and calve them and winter them and get them up to where, in the fall, we sell the calves or put them in a feedlot. I've never worked for anybody all my 8 life to have a boss. I've always been my boss, other than I was Summit County Commissioner for eight years, and four of those years, I was chairman of the commission in the early '80s. I'm still my boss. Then as far as that is concerned, I'm the chairman of the rodeo of the city of Oakley, and I'm still planning commission of the town. We're starting to see a lot of growth in our areas up there. So I've kind of had my fingers in a little bit of everything all the way through life, and my whole goal was just honesty. You never beat honesty. You never had to remember what you told somebody or didn't tell somebody. If you was honest to start with, everything worked out fine. LR: When in all of this did you meet your wife? GY: Well, I met her about in the early '70s. We got four children, and she died probably, oh, 20 years ago. She lived with cancer for 13 years before she died. We got along good, as far as that department. She helped me a lot, and I got so I depended on it and wanted her to, so that she'd come and go with me all the time. LR: What was her name? GY: Delora. LR: One thing I've noticed is it turns into more of a family affair. Would you actually go to different rodeos, or would you stay kind of put in Oakley? GY: Oh, I'd go to the rodeos. I'd take them and put them on and take care of them. We'd sign up the cowboys. We would transport all of our livestock to the rodeo and back. Most rodeos, you go the day before. A lot of times after the last performance at night, we would load our semis up and go home, and then the stock would be there on the ranch. I went to, well, every one of them, except when I had two rodeos the same weekend. Then I had a brother-in-law and a sister that was one outfit, and I stayed with the other one. 9 It was enjoyable. It was a lot of hard work, a lot of hours. With the long-haul home, we didn't get home until maybe 5:00, 6:00, 7:00 in the morning and got all that livestock out. It's a good part of my life. I wouldn't want to go back at the age I am now and do it again, that's all. LR: I believe you. It says here that you were instrumental in forming and organizing the Rocky Mountain Rodeo Association. GY: I was part of it, yes. It was three or four of us. That was early in the day when we started rodeoing, and I can't recall why we did, but it was the Rocky Mountain Association that governed the cowboys. That was mainly a Utah association, and there was a lot of cowboys. Then they used to put a newsletter out, so it made it good. I was part of that to start with. LR: So you said it was mostly a Utah association. How is it different from the PRCA? GY: Well, PRCA now takes in all of the United States, Canada... It's bigger. It's the highest you can get in the rodeo business, and ours was mainly local. I can say ‘local’ and ‘in Utah’, but we did go to Nevada for a couple of rodeos and up into Idaho for a couple of rodeos. But after I decided to sell mine out, another sheep couple of guys started up, and that RMRA only lasted a couple of years. It went under. LR: Oh, okay. I didn't realize that. So would you actually ride in rodeos? GY: I did a few of them when I was younger. I didn't want to ride and I didn't do very good either, but I did have a couple of friends who were a whole lot better than I was. It just got to the point that I was back there, then I started to buy the horses for us to practice on, them guys to practice on. Then as I started leasing the horses out, I thought, "You can't do both things,” and that was the best choice for me. But I still got my horses we operate our ranch with. 10 In one month, I'll be 89, and I still go every day. I help with everything on the ranch. I've got a couple of boys from Peru that I sponsor and bring over and they help me, plus my younger boy that's with me today, Weston. I've got an older boy that lives just a couple of doors down from me that had a stroke 15 years ago and he putters around, but he can't do much with us. LR: You said you had your hand in a lot of different things. The first thing it looks like you did was... Well, you've always been on the Oakley Rodeo Board. GY: Yes, ma'am. LR: And then you talked about the Summit County Commissioner. Why did you get involved in that? GY: I don't really know. My sister was the clerk in Summit County, and she just kept pushing me, "You need to do this." I think she didn't like who was the commissioner then, and she just kept pushing me. Well, she was the assistant clerk, and there was another gentleman that was a clerk, and they both kept on. So I said, "Okay. Fill the papers out and sign my name and I'll vote,” and she did. Then I went up against this guy. I didn't go out and talk or anything like that. I was pretty well-known through the country, you know what I mean? I thought, "Hey, if you get it, you get it. If you don't, you don't,” and that's the way it happened. That was a whole different experience. It took me a little while to kind of get on to it and learn the ropes. What you had to do, what you couldn't do. That was in the early '80s. There's something I did do that's kind of unique—I always thought it was unique. When the floods came early in the '80s and it washed out the causeway going over to Antelope Island, I knew the Parks and Recreation people for the state. I went to them and asked if they would lease it to me to winter cows on. Well, we 11 talked about it, and they told me afterwards that they said yes just to get me out of the office. But I did get a contract. But then, how was I going to get the cows over there? I knew a gentleman that ran the Green River with a big banana float barges. I went and talked to him, and he went, "Yeah, we can do it." So we rode up to three of them barges; we tied them together with a platform on it, some rails around it, and we barged a little over 700 head of cows back and forth to Antelope Island in the fall, and bring them back in the spring for five years. Then the state wouldn't renew my lease because they said, "Hey, we just won't do it." That's when we started promoting the buffalo on Antelope Island more. In fact, we hired that barge to haul all the materials over and built them buffalo corrals. So I was quite pleased that I could do something like that. Looking back on it, it was easy, but it was a lot of hard work. I've leased to Tooele Army Depot; put a bid in for it prior to that, and got that for five years to run the cows on, and then that ran out. So I bought an outfit down in Moab, a big winner outfit that's set between three national parks: Dead Horse Point, Canyonlands, and Arches. It sat right in the middle of it, and that was good. That was the only mistake—in my mind—that I ever did in my life, was when I sold it. I got kind of tired, and two old gentlemen who I'd had for 40 years working for me says they was done. [Being] 250 miles away, I thought, "Hey, I'm old enough to get rid of it." But afterwards, that was the biggest mistake I ever made: when I sold that outfit. LR: I'm curious how you got the cattle from your ranch in Oakley to these different areas. GY: With big semis. We could house approximately 35 head of mother cows on a truck, and then when they had to come back in the spring, then we had calves. We had to 12 bring their calves along, so then we had to come back down to about 33 cows and their calves. But no, I still got the semis at home. We use them all the time. That's how we got to cattle out to the Depot and Arches, and for 30 years to Moab, back and forth. LR: Is it hard on the cattle to be in semis? GY: Not really, no. I've never noticed it to be hard. Once in a while, I guess it'd be just jamming them. You'd get one that'd come out lame or something after you unloaded them. But when I was back in the rodeo business, them horses, you could just open the gate and they'd run right up the chute, one to go one way and one to stand off. After you'd hauled them a little, horses are smart, and so was the bulls. There was no problem getting loaded or anything. LR: I had no idea, but I'm envisioning them just knowing exactly where to go. GY: Well, yeah. Like those little horses in these big outfits—hey, just open the gate and they'll run right up in there. They'll stand sideways. Maybe a couple gets their heads the same way, but they'll go right in and tighten right up. With cows, sometimes you have to get with them and make them tight enough to get the last few in there. That just comes along with life, you know? It's no big deal. But to some people, probably would be. LR: It sounds daunting to me. GY: Well, that was life and it was a business and I enjoyed it. I still enjoy my life and my work today, but all of us knows there's writing on the wall for us someday. LR: Yeah, that's true. [To Alyssa] Any questions? AD: I do. It's about the term ‘outfit’. I think I understand what it means, but I don't know if everyone will understand what it means. Could you explain what an outfit is? 13 GY: An outfit? Well, my rodeo outfit… It's just a business. It was just strictly rodeo. What I mean is we had the horses, bulls, calves, steers, pickup horses, and whatever, and you just called it an outfit. My ranch is, you could call it, I guess, an outfit. Most of the time we call it a ranch, but sometimes we call it an outfit. I don't know where that saying comes from or whether all people use that or not. I don't have any idea, but that's the way I do it. Just quickly, down on the Hall of Fame pictures down there— Christensen, he [worked] for me for a lot of years. Val Leavitt, he's going to be honored this year, and he [worked] for me for a lot of years. And Jack Hannum, he was a calf roper and roped. He's down there. So anyway, I've been around and I know a lot of people. I don't know if that's good or bad. LR: Probably a little bit of both. AD: Out of all the different things that you did as a cowboy, which one was your favorite? GY: Oh, I don't know. I always considered myself as a pretty good cowboy up until the last couple of years. I don't do as much on the horse as I used to. But I don't know if I had a favorite. As far as the rodeo, I put more effort into the stock, the livestock. Bareback, sat up on the bulls, and I didn't have time for that stuff. You can buy calves and raise calves, and they'll run for you till they get jerked over hard and they get sour, they won't run… even if they get jerked around a few times. Some of them, doesn't bother them. Some of them, it just kills 'em. Not like they lie dead, but they just quit. They just don't want to do nothing anymore. Same with your bucking horses. In my opinion, the good bucking horses, they get better every time they come out of the chute. Every horse you'll buck a little bit, but the poor horses, every time you buck 'em, they'll get a little bit worse. You can tell pretty well when you've got a good horse you want to keep. That's the way 14 all these big rodeo outfits do it. Nowadays, these big rodeo outfits, they go into a breeding program and breed their own horses. They get the good horses and then they just bring them back. Same with the bulls. In my day was when, like up in Wyoming, they quit using the horses and started mechanizing some to do their work and haying. I got in some of them old horses that come off and out of Wyoming. I had some really tough old horses, good horses. I don't know if that answers your question or not. LR: What is the best breed of horse for bucking? GY: Well, there's really no breed to it. Either a horse wants to and has got it in him and he'll buck, or he'll just buck a time or two and then run off on you. He's smart enough not to do it. But their big producers just went through all these horses. They've got some good marriages, bucked and kept with them, and the good stallions, they kept breeding them back. Now they've got some damn good horses, most of them. Same with the bull program; they got some good bulls. LR: Okay, I was curious about that. You talked about how supportive your wife was as you were working on your career. GY: Well, yeah. Anytime we did anything with the cattle, she was right out there with her gloves on, helping me do it. Even when we was down in the desert, she'd come down and help gather the cows and work there. As far as the rodeo, she did the secretary work. Her and my sister took care of all that. I didn't do any of that, hardly, so she was really supportive. She was a native from the valley up there, and I have to give her credit: a week before she passed away, we were bowling on a team over in Heber City for probably thirty-some odd years. The last Monday night we bowled, I sat there and fed the cord out—she had oxygen on—and she pulled probably a 500 series. She 15 died Friday. So, yeah, she never gave up for a minute. Nobody knew she was down and she never… Anyway, that was her. LR: It says here you have five children, but you said you had four? GY: Well, I lost one. He was 18, went boating with some friends down on Utah Lake. A wind come up and tipped the boat over and they drowned. LR: Of your children, how many of them have followed you into your [profession]? GY: One. LR: The one that was with you? GY: Yes. LR: Did the others just not want to? GY: Well, the one older boy had a stroke, and he gets so tired just doing anything. Then I got a girl, and up until she got married, she is as good a cowboy as you can have. Then I've got another boy, and he lives over at Elk Mountain and he's got a job. He flies once a week somewhere to Canada or the United States for this company. He makes more money in a year than I've made over a lifetime, I think, and he doesn't really care about it. LR: Your one son that does. Is he just as passionate as you are? GY: Yeah, but he's not a good worker as I am [laughs]. He knows that he's going to have to take it over when I'm dead. Well, I give him a lot of slack now towards that. You got to learn somebody to do it. I learned the hard way, I think I did. Now him coming up in the business, everything is a lot easier than it used to be years ago. But he does a good job, and he's got a wife that... They don't come any better, treat me better. So I know where I stand and what I can do and what I can't do [laughs]. AD: Do you have a favorite memory of ranching? GY: Well, it's pretty much an everyday deal. In ranching, you do pretty near the same thing each year, year after year. Wintertime, you feed cows; in the spring, you calve 16 the cows and you put them on the range about summertime, and then comes haying season, where you put the hay up. Everything on the ranch comes pretty near the same time of year. Then it's just a cycle, year into another year. You kind of look forward to it, too. I do. You don't get tired of one thing or another thing. AD: But what do you love about it? GY: The truth is, I don't know anything different than that. I would hate to have to go to work for somebody that would can me in the first 20 minutes. I've been my boss all my life. But I have to give credit. If I ever amounted to anything, which I guess [I did] a little bit, I have to give the whole thing to my mother. She raised me well all my life because I didn't have a father for myself since I was four years old. She kept me on the straight and narrow. I don't know how she did it, but she did. LR: What was her name? GY: Indre. I-N-D-R-E. LR: And was she from Oakley? GY: She was from Kamas, so she was a native to the valley. My father was raised in Wanship. My grandfather came up at the time that they was taking ground; the government gave him a homestead, and he worked out on the homestead and developed a lot of this country. The last, I guess, 50 years, I've been over the big reservoir, Mirror Lake. And over it, that's where the Weber River comes out of the Mirror Lake and comes right down through Ogden here. I have that to consider and take care of. Like I say, I got my fingers in a lot of different things. LR: You said you have Mirror Lake. What exactly—? GY: Not Mirror Lake, Smith and Morehouse. But I do run cattle right up next to Mirror Lake on Bald Mountain down in the country. LR: Oh, so do you own any of that? 17 GY: No, that's a government lease. They got that in the early 1900s. Whatever farmer or rancher is running on national forests, they give him a permit for that amount of cattle. But over the years, you can sell them to other people or that. LR: It's like I learn something new every day. Is there any other story of rodeoing or ranching that you'd like to share before I ask my final question? GY: Gosh, I don't know. I think that it's hard work, it's long hours, but it's rewarding. And by doing it, if you see something wrong or doing something, you say, "Uh-oh, I did that. I can see it coming." You know? It's like haying. There's strands or drops of hay, and you go around and you cut it, and the next one, "I did that." You know, just keep doing it. I don't know, I guess I got a lot of ins and outs if I thought about it long enough. So I've got no regrets in life, and I don't know any other life I'd want to live than what I did, because I was born and raised in it and didn't know any different. LR: I'm going to ask you a final question, and it's not a fair question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. GY: Okay. LR: As you look back on your life, what do you hope your legacy is? GY: Well, I hope that honesty is the first thing. You know, people I still have acquainted [get a] handshake. I do it. That's the way it is, knowing that a lot of things, it's got to be a contract. Gotta be down in black and white. But I can shake somebody's hand, and that'd be it. I'd live by it, even if I lost or made any for it. So I believe honesty is the best thing that I can say I did. I guess I got a few enemies, I don't know, but I can go around and talk to people, or say, "Hey, so-and-so said this about you: this, that, and the other." And hey, it sounds good coming from somebody else, what happened years ago. I think 18 that's about it. But like I say, I'll turn my paperwork in about when I reach a hundred, if they'll let me. That's going to be it. LR: Well, thank you so much for your willingness to sit with us. GY: I appreciate it and I hope you got anything out of it. I don't know what you're gonna do with it, but anyway. LR: Mostly, we'll just make it available to researchers. I'm always impressed; like I said, I've been doing this now for five years, and you mentioned names of individuals I've interviewed. It's so humbling for me to sit and listen to these stories. I truly appreciate hearing about this way of life that I've never comprehended. I'm a city girl, so this is fascinating, and I appreciate your willingness to share. GY: You know, when I was a kid, had to be 16 or somewhere in there, a lot of people had sheep on land up on the hill. In the spring, early, sometimes I'd miss school. They'd make me go up there—well, I guess they didn't make me, I don't know—to help the herders lamb and that. I could look downtown and see the ball lights on down there, and I thought, "Oh, it's terrible. They're down there playing and I'm up here, rain and snow and doing this." But, hey, it worked out. I just thought it was trying to tell me something I had to learn. But no, I've had a real good life. No regrets at all. Now, I fail to mention: one guy down there in that Hall of Fame is Ken Wilson. He's my best friend, closest friend. He's one that did all this, and he still is. He's the only one that's still on the rodeo committee with me. LR: I had the privilege of interviewing him. GY: He's a good kid—if I can call him a kid. But he's getting pretty feeble now. LR: I think it's funny you call him ‘kid’. I enjoyed interviewing him. GY: He's a nice guy. LR: I noticed—I assume—one of his kids is the mayor of Oakley? 19 GY: Yeah. LR: Wade? GY: Wade Wilson. He lives right across the street from me. LR: All right. Well, thank you so much for your time and your willingness. 20 Gerald Young 10:00 am Lorrie Rands Lorrie Rands 26 june 2019