Oral History Program Joseph Allan Clegg Unknown Interviewer November 30, 2003 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Joseph Allan Clegg Interviewed by Unknown 30 November 2003 Copyright © 2015 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii 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. Archival copies are placed in University Archives. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description The Weber State College/University Student Projects have been created by students working with several different professors on the Weber State campus. The topics are varied and based on the student's interest or task for a specific assignment. These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ 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. 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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Clegg Joseph,Allan an oral history by Unknown. 30 November 2003, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Joseph Allan Clegg. The interview was conducted on November 30, 2003, in Riverdale, Utah, by an unknown interviewer. Mr. Clegg discusses his education and his experiences at Weber State University. JC: My name is Joseph Allan Clegg, I am being interviewed in my home at Riverdale 1007 W 4050 S. It’s Sunday, the 30th of November, 2003. I was named after my grandparents, born and raised in Heber City, which I graduated from high school there and during our senior day, they had people that came from different colleges that told us about their education program and extra-curricular activities. I was a state wrestler my senior year and they offered a tuition scholarship at Weber State, which I came to Weber to gain an education to pursue the Wrestling activity. We worked the summer of ’65 after I graduated to help get money to get in school. Because of our family’s income, I was able to get a loan and a grant and when I first started college, I got on with the fine arts building. There was a—I can’t remember the guy’s name—that was over the parking lots, and I’d go out and gather up paper at 3:30 in the morning and whatever trash was left in the parking lot, to help keep the campus clean. Then after that, about a month or two later, I got transferred over to the union building, and we took care of their floors and cleaning the, what’s that called, the pool room. UI: With the bowling alley? JC: Yeah, it’s a game room, type thing. UI: Yeah. 1 JC: They have bowling and pool, and so anyway. UI: I know what you’re talking about. JC: So anyway, we helped take care of that, and between this job and the grant and the loan, I was able to go through school with the understanding that when we graduated that we would pay the loan back. The grant was given to me. After I met my wrestling coach, his name was Tom Lowe, he was actually the head gymnastics coach and he had wrestling also, but we met, after that I was able to get on the—left the union building—and got on at the Athletic Department. There I was taking care of towels. I would wash and dry the towels for the athletes and take care of them there. My freshman year was, as far as grades go, when you leave high school you have a tendency to, you know, I was the co-captain of my wrestling team in high school, kind of a big duck in a small pond back then, but then you go to college and you’re a small duck in a big pond, as far as your reputation goes. So, it was more of getting acquainted and lots of girls to date. My freshman year, I probably didn’t do as well on the grades as I could have because I think I was getting an A on my social life. My brother and I roomed together at Wasatch dorms, there was three dorms and the boys had Wasatch and the girls had Lasalle and Stansbury. I roomed with my older brother who had previously gone, I think two semesters to BYU and then we both, when I graduated, decided to go to Weber. It had a great education program because he was going into teaching and that was the avenue that I was going to follow. Enjoyed the sports part of it. Freshman year I took stuff like weight training and build my generals for the first two years, and because I was working my way 2 through, there was times when I just took twelve quarter hours, you had to take twelve quarter hours in order to be a full-time student. I think the most I ever took was a seventeen hour load for one quarter. I went on and spent the first two years in the dorms, dorm life was great. Maybe it was from high school, being around my little brother, he came the year after my sophomore, and we roomed together, but we used to do a lot of pranks. My boys asked me about my college days and some of the things that we did were, um there was a person from Iran, some of the dorm guys used to call him camel talky, because he talked about the camels and stuff, and they thought it would be fun, one night, to—over where there’s parking and stuff now at Weber State—they used to have a big pasture behind the President’s home of the college, I think his last name was Miller. They had a horse, and so we took a horse and went over and put it in this students room that was, like I said I think it was Iran. No it was Pakistan. He came back and opened the door and got a big surprise, everybody got a big laugh and then we took the horse back and put it in the pasture. We got some kids from Tremonton, Gary Cannon and Dan Rhodes. They went home for the weekend to Tremonton and we went down to the Standard Examiner and got a bunch of newspaper out of the dumpster and went back and wadded up paper and entirely filled up their room, so when you opened the door, you couldn’t see their beds or desk that they studied at or anything. Probably the worst thing, which we didn’t plan, they were up on the third floor, it would be the south end of the dorms, on the third floor, going out the stairwell. Somebody from the dorms, it didn’t go on our floor, had thrown a match into the newspaper and it 3 blackened some of the brick out there and the fire department was called. So, we kind of got in a little bit of trouble over that. Another incident is that it had snowed outside and we were all the time looking for fun things to do, and from the summer before we had about two or three thousand fire crackers that we decided we were going to put out in between the dorms, and they had curfews on the girls at ten o’clock, so we took all these fire crackers and put them in newspaper and put them out in between the three dorms. And when the dorms found out what we were going to do they got binoculars, and when the firecrackers were going off they were watching the girls come to the curtains in their night stuff, so they kind of got a kick out of that. Dorm life was good. Like I said, we studied in the dorm rooms and I stayed there the first two years. We ate over at the union building, we had cafeteria food, and it was really pretty good food. Let’s see, my junior year, I moved out of the dorms and went to, it was actually 986 Maple Street, it was an apartment that we got with some of the kids off the wrestling team, Gary and I shared an apartment. We moved out and that was the year that I was engaged to Suzanne. Maybe I’ll back up, just one more quick story. When Suzanne was a sophomore, no she was a freshman, I was a sophomore, we told the girls in the dorms that we would bring a turkey for dinner, because we were invited over for a meal and we told them we’d bring the turkey. There was a turkey farm up past the college, oh I don’t know, probably a mile away from the college to the south on the mountainside. There was a guy that had a turkey farm, and we went over there and some of the boys had the idea they were going to just take them a live turkey, but it didn’t work out that well. I 4 had went over there and crawled underneath the fence and went over there and grabbed a, it seemed like a fifty pound turkey, but anyway, I got flocked because I startled it, and it kind of beat me up, gave me a black eye. I crawled back out under the fence and one of my friends said, well I’ll go and get him and he got a tire iron out of the truck, went in there. My other friend that went in there with me when I got took out by this turkey, showed him the turkey that got me and they ended up getting a couple of them. So when Suzanne had gone home for the weekend, when they came back looking forward to the turkey dinner, there were these big feet hanging out of the sink and the girls were in there pulling feathers and getting the turkey ready for Sunday meal. Suzanne didn’t think that was too funny, so she told me she’d fix my plate on the meal and I think they were kind of upset that we brought them these turkeys that still needed to be cleaned and they were feathered, so she put tobacco sauce on the backside of my turkey when she served it. So that kind of ruined my taste for that. Like I said, my junior year I moved out and shared an apartment. That year, in 1968, I had filled all my generals, I took three years like I said, with me working my way through. That year I took second on the Big Sky Conference. Both the kid from Idaho State and myself, we pinned all of our matches till the final match. We had to place first or second in the conference to qualify for the Western Regional for the Nationals, which we did. We had both pinned all of our matches and then we met in the final round and he beat me, I think it was ten to eight. So that was probably the highlight of my wrestling career was taking second in the Big Sky Conference in 1968. June of ’68, I graduated with an Associate of Science degree. Killed my 5 general, which I was glad I did because I had gotten two quarters away from graduating from Weber State, in their education program. Back then, they had a new program that was developed by, I think it was Dr. Cox and Blaire Lowe, it was called the Will Kit Program, and what it was were instructions that were put down in paper booklets, then instead of going to a teacher, you would go to these Will Kits, these instruction pamphlets, then you would go in and view some tapes on video. But basically the course was without an instructor. You could go at your own pace and finish the material and then go take a test at the testing center over there, and that would get you through the Will Kits. Before I could graduate, I was married and had one child and one child on the way, and got drafted during the Vietnam War in 1970. I had two quarters to go to graduate, student teacher and one quarter. So there I left Weber State for two years, going into the military draft Went to Fort Louis, Washington, then for my basic training, then for Clerk Schooling, I was administrative specialist and I got sent to Panama for a tour over there. Our second child was born pre-mature, so it was kind of a blessing that I got drafted. The military paid for her and it would have been really hard, going to school, to finish up with the huge bill that we had because we didn’t have insurance, we just had paid for our first one cash. Back then, Christine was born in 1969 and I think that a baby back then, a normal pregnancy back then was just a little over five hundred dollars. Now days I’m sure it’s a lot more, but the military, with Teresa being in intensive care six weeks, I know the bill was well over three thousand dollars, which would have really set us back financially. After I got back out of school, I did my student teaching at Roy High School. It 6 would have been January, 1993, excuse me, it would have been January, 1973 to March of 1973. I did my student teaching under Coach Nye, at Roy High School who was, when I was a freshman, he was our heavy weight wrestler for Weber State. I student taught three classes of health under Ralph Carter, then three weight training classes and I had the varsity wrestling team, which Coach Nye let me train their team and get them ready for their state meet, which was very enjoyable. I had a lot of vision problems during school. I had Keratoconus. I don’t think I ever read a book totally from cover to cover because I just didn’t have very good eyesight. But I did graduate with a really good rating on my student teaching. Graduated 1973 with a Bachelor’s degree with two hundred and twelve hours. And I think to graduate back then, you only needed one hundred and eighty-three, but because of the military and having the GI Bill when I got out, I went another full year and then graduated. Some of my most memorable classes were, Suzanne thought it would be good after we met, if I took a child development class from, I think it was Dr. Tribe, real nice lady. I learned a lot about children’s development and just really enjoyed that because it helped prepare me for family life. Another one was heredity, which was the study of genes, and that was from Burt Winterton. He was very popular at the college with his teaching methods. It was more of just looking forward to going and having the knowledge of how certain hair colors come about or recessive genes and that type of thing. College was good. I got exposure to all types of things. When I graduated, I had a ten thousand dollar loan to pay back and it took my wife and I 7 about ten years. It worked out really good, even though I didn’t go into teaching, I was making more money when I was going to school at the job that I was at than if I would have taught afterwards. But the skills and knowledge that I gained during school, I’ve always believed that it’s not a mistake to get an education no matter what you do, you’ve always got that knowledge to fall back on, and it just helps you to prepare and be a better person in life. Weber State, like I said back then, was a college, four year college. It’s one experience that I wouldn’t trade. It was probably one of the beast, better choices in my life and, mainly because of sports, it kept me going and I’m glad it did, it helped me get an education. UI: Anything else? JC: I think that’s it. UI: Thanks. JC: I didn’t go into detail about meeting Suzanne and stuff. 8