Oral History Program Byron E. Folkman Michael Cushman 10 May 1971 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Byron E. Folkman Interviewed by Michael Cushman 10 May 1971 Copyright © 2012 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 Special Collections. 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. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Folkman, Byron E, an oral history by Michael Cushman, 10 May 1971, 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 Byron E. Folkman. The interview was conducted on May 10, 1971, by Michael Cushman, in Ogden, Utah. Folkman discusses his life and experiences he has had. MC: Begin by telling us your name and we’ll begin from there. BF: I'm Byron Eugene Folkman. I was born in Plain City, Utah, late in the first decade of this century. Moved to Ogden when I was three weeks old, In fact, my family was living here and we only went home to Plain City to be born. MC: You were born on November 27, 1907, correct? BF: Yes, late in the first decade. My mother went home when I was born and the family, grandmother's home, my grandmother’s home in Plain City, which was the custom in those days. People only went to hospitals to die. Since then I've lived most of my life in Weber County with intermittent living in Colorado, Nebraska, Idaho, Texas, and California; some of it in connection with the army, military life. Uncle Sam arranged my itinerary: how I dressed, when I went to the bathroom, and everything else. However, this mountain climate seems to suit my temperament best. I would like a higher altitude and a colder climate. It doesn't fit with my wife’s ideas so we've settled on here. Nevertheless, I have watched this Northern Utah area, been a part of it, watched it and been a part of it, sometimes been an influence, not always for good. I have worked here; I have thinned beets, pulled rhubarb, cut asparagus when rhubarb and asparagus was only a half a cent a pound. And I've picked strawberries for a cent a cup, raspberries for two cent a cup, cherries for a cent a pound, if they had stems on, one 1 half a cent a pound if you picked them for the canneries without stems. I've been involved in my share of mischief, and been invited to stay in the reform school, never brought to trial for a childhood offense. But the truant officers and the police officers have been threatening me on many, many occasions. MC: That was while you were going to school? BF: Yes, as a juvenile. Not always without cause, however, there were a few times that I was accused without cause and I still resent it. MC: Can we go back just a second. Your ancestors, your grandparents, I believe, were settlers in Plain City. And who were they? What were their names? BF: Four generations back there were Folkman, Sharp, Maw, and Palmer. All eight came over from the old country as converts (to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints). Now the maiden names of the wives. I can only recall one, one of them was Bailey. No, two, one of them was from Belgium… Just a moment; it's gotten away from me. I might recall it later. MC: Okay, now they were all converts. They all came (from Europe). BF: They all came, yes. MC: Did they come across the plains with handcart-companies or wagons or…? BF: Handcarts and wagon companies, but after ’47, after 50, all of them arrived here by ’57. MC: 1857? BF: Yes, And later on they were sent to, called north, and they settled south of here at Nephi and various places in Utah County and were called to come to this little- 2 settlement of Plain City which was named after something near Nauvoo. Farr West and Plain City were both of them named not because of... MC: ...out here. BF: …but they were named in remembrance of somewhere around Winter Quarters and Nauvoo. MC: What was the reason for settling Plain City? BF: Brigham Young said to come up here and settle. You know every time he would get enough converts around he'd say to go out here and take the land, go out here and take the land. He sent them to Arizona, or to Mexico, or to Idaho, wherever he thought there was a protective region, he called them and they went, just like a missionary's called today and he goes out to do his duty. Duty to God or whichever way he looks at it. Now this doesn’t mean that I agree with it. I've several nephews that go on missions. But nevertheless, they were called from south of Salt Lake County and came to Weber County. And later on some of them apostatized when the railroad got here and they moved on to Oregon, Washington, and became very successful people in that area. Much more successful than the people who stayed here by the way. MC: You mentioned before we started this interview that they left when they weren't afraid of Porter Rockwell anymore. BF: Well, yes, because they were always afraid of the avenging angel or the destroying angel. MC: What, uh, yea, in what form? 3 BF: Well in… Now listen; this is the way a couple of my grandmothers told me the story that if you did not come through with your tithing, next year your grain fields were apt to burn. If you fought back, there could be retaliation. Your grainery might burn. Now it might have been due to putting green hay in the barn, what do you call that type of thing? MC: We always called it wet hay. BF: Yes, well, there's another thing. MC: Well, were they afraid of Porter Rockwell himself or…? BF: Yes. MC: Well, were they afraid of an angel per se or the Lord, afraid of the Lord, so to speak? BF: No, they were afraid of Porter Rockwell. Now some of these people were pretty rugged. They were tobacco chewing, whiskey drinking elders. And they couldn't quite go with all of it. Some of them never became polygamists; on the other hand, one of my great grandfathers had five wives. Not only that but he was converted in Denmark and he converted his two brothers and his father. He came over here with one wife, went back to Denmark on a mission, and he came back with two more wives! That's kind of hard to explain in these days, but he did. But nevertheless, some of them never took more than one wife and they were the apostates. But all eight of my grandparents were born in the old country. Denmark, Wales, France, and England. None of them were born here. And their graves are scattered in the Plain City cemetery and in the Ogden cemetery. In fact, one of them was exhumed or disinterred, and brought from Plain City into Ogden where he could be with someone his grandchildren considered his favorite wife, not with three 4 other wives. Now I can show you where he was buried originally and where he is buried now. Anyway this is the way the town was. And my grandmother was widowed by a mine accident just north of Brigham City. A snow slide came down and wiped out the only gold mine on the Wasatch Front that ever paid dividends. MC: A goldmine? BF: Yes, it was a goldmine. I have researched the gold mine. I have researched its records and it was a salted mine. But he worked on it. MC: A salted mine? BF: Yes. You know what a salted mine is? MC: Yes. BF: It was salted. Nobody has ever found any gold in any rock of that type along the Wasatch Front, but he… MC: Do you know what the name of the mine was? BF: No. But anyway I've researched the mine and it was north of Brigham City; between Brigham City and Deweyville. And a snow slide came down. {Interruption} MC: You mentioned also that the fight between the Masons and the Mormons was still going on at this time when they came to Utah. What did you have reference to there? BF: Mormons are still barred in Utah from being a Mason. This fight carries back quite a ways. To Missouri and to Nauvoo, and all of it. But that's another long, far longer story. The fight has been going on and is still going on to this day. An LDS may go 5 somewhere else and become a Mason. He may be a Mason in Idaho, but he can't attend lodge in Utah if it's known. He has to deny being an LDS to attend lodge in Utah. MC: What… You said that your ancestors were here when the railroad first came. What did they have to do with it? BF: Nothing. They didn't build it. They didn't work on it. Oh, one of my great grandfathers went out to the driving of the Golden Spike. He's the one who left and later on went on to Oregon. MC: Now you said you worked for the railroad, is that correct? BF: I worked for the railroad for the Southern Pacific for thirteen years after I came out of World War II. I worked for them in Utah and California, in the sales department, not as an operator. I worked in the traffic department which considers rates, has to do with refrigeration problems in freight, freight rates, the value and quantity and quality of any crop (and) what it's going to cost you is you have a wreck. I worked in the passenger traffic department where you arrange tour parties. You arrange to see that traffic is accommodated to its full ability. Passengers, tour parties, coming out of Chicago arranged by some tour agency there, or in New York. They come to Fresno or they come to Merced and they want to go to Yosemite. They come to Reno and they want to the Tahoe country. You arrange their itinerary. You arrange their sleeping car accommodations, their baggage handling and all that stuff. And you also arrange for very important people, like formerly (President) Harry Truman and Thomas E. Dewey. In their election campaigns, traveling through California, their trains stopping, their speeches off of the platform, they didn't fly around, and they would stop at every crossing. And there's a lot of things involved including protection, and running a train 6 ahead, so that in case the track was torpedoed...dynamited those big things that would derail it. You'd run an engine ahead of it, kill the engineer, kill the fireman, but the President he…and the nominee for the Presidency, is protected. Now all these things must be arranged and the traffic department takes care of those problems we associate with the...associated with the Secret Service and the railroad police department. MC: This is after World War II? BF: Yes. MC: What was Utah like during the years, say between the time you were eight and World War I? BF: World War I. In World War I, I spent a lot of time anytime there was an extra edition came out, there was no such thing as radio. What radios there was, but it was Morse code. Every time there was something big happened, I would get downtown as quick as I could and get to a newspaper and sell extra editions. Sometimes you might sell as many as 250 if you got there quick enough. They cost you three for a nickel, and you got a nickel. And sometimes somebody'd give you a dime and say, 'Keep the change kid,’ or a quarter even. MC: A quarter was pretty big back then. BF: Damn large. Big as today's dollar I'll tell you that. You'd be surprised the meal you could buy for a quarter as compared against what you can with a dollar today. MC: What was Ogden doing at that time? What was the population doing for economy? BF: Oh, the population was approximately between twenty and twenty three thousand. The economy was based on railroading. There weren't any of the big flour mills. The 7 stockyards weren't even started. There was a packing house that went into receivership right after World War I. Later on it became Swift's by many changes of name. There were six banks, all separately owned, no branch banks. One on Kiesel Avenue, one near the alley in the Eccles Building, three on the east side of Washington Boulevard... (No) west side of Washington Boulevard. There were six banks, all individually owned, no branch banking. Primarily a railroad oriented town, but there were three large wholesale grocery houses and three small ones. Now we don't have one wholesale grocery house worthy of the name. But as a railroad center, they could bring things here by the carload and they could ship things out where they went to Montana, Nevada, or what. They would bring them in by carload lots and they would ship them out to suit the individual grocer's needs. For instance, if something was to go to Afton, Wyoming, and it went from one of these wholesale grocery houses, they would package it and it would move by railroad to Montpelier, Idaho, and then would have horses and teams, six horse teams and a wagon, come down to Montpelier and go over the hill, a two and a half day trip. They'd make a round trip a week. And the same way with cheese factories in Starr Valley at that time. They would produce their cheese, load it in a wagon, and haul it in a wagon back to Montpelier where it would move by rail. But it all moved by wagon. In fact one of my grandmother Folkman's brothers, Alf Palmer, started the first cheese factory in Starr Valley, Wyoming, near Afton. Now there's only one. But they were small because they had to depend on everything moving by wagon. The milk wagons would go out as far as they could go, maybe three or four miles, and move it into a small cheese factory with two or three employees and go back round trip. Transportation makes the difference. Mileage and speed, speed and distance, however 8 you want to say it. The railroad in Ogden in those days would ship stuff to Evanston, Wyoming, Green River. Wyoming, the coal mines, at Kemmer, Suzy, or whatever you want to call them, up to Superior, Wyoming, a branch line of the UP, or they'd ship them over to Sunnyside on the Rio Grande that used to take off at Sissel to Richfield and that area. And if they were off rail, not on there, they would send their freight wagons in and haul it back with teamsters. They got about two dollars a day, maybe. And the same way with Montana points. The copper mines then were going pretty good in the area over near Arco and through there. A branch line of the railroad went out that far and then they would load it in a wagon and haul it out whether it was dynamite, powder, blasting powder of any kind, dynamite, all the food supplies, fuse, everything would be hauled by wagon at the end of World War I. That what used to be called the team track* the area just north of the freight depot, on the west side of Wall Avenue used to be lined up with wagons. They'd back them in there, take the tongues off, take the team away and put on a loaded wagon and take it somewhere else. Lumber, it was the same way. Unless you had a rail siding into your yard, your lumber yard, which was something. Now, and this is one of the reasons why the rails are done, every stick of lumber had to be picked out of a car, a boxcar, they weren't on flat cars unless they were rough timbers for bridge building. They had to be picked out of a car and put on a Wagon. Now they package it right at the mill in Oregon, Montana, Idaho, and it's in the house drying out. It's so green it even turns to look at the sun as it goes by! No, it's not quite that bad. You can say that. The same way they couldn't lumber anywhere unless they had a railroad right up to their door. Whether it was Payette Lakes, Idaho, Reasor, Idaho, some of these Montana points. Temporarily I can't think of any lumber mill there. 9 Well, Guild, Idaho, up there by the Big Spring. They build a siding right in there four or five miles. They couldn't operate if they didn't have it. MC: Where would we be if we didn't have railroads? BF: We'd have a clean ecology, there wouldn't be any… MC: That's true. What was…that was right after World War I. What was it like in the twenties, it was kind of roaring over the rest of the nation? BF: Well, in 1923 we had a great big panic. Wheat was practically... got way out of control, went was high. Up around about $2.00 a bushel when you could raise it for about 25 cents and the price kept going up and it wasn't worth it. Then there was a break in the market. A man by the name of J. Ogden Armour thought he had the wheat market controlled in his pocket and was making all the other wheat gamblers pay and he lost a million dollars a day for a hundred days. And a million dollars in those days was a pretty good size hunk of change. No income tax 0 Well, there was income tax of 1% on everything over a hundred thousand dollars. Pretty good. It was a World War I deal under Woodrow Wilson. It was passed and went along with some log rolling some vote trading in connection with prohibition. Prohibition would have never gotten through if it hadn't been for an income tax bill to accompany it. So prohibition went through. It was one of those funny flukes. About 1916, and the first income tax was coupled with prohibition. Anyway, later on in the mid-twenties why they built the Alhambra theatre, which is just being torn down. No, it was in the early twenties. I think it took them about as long to tear it down as it did to build it up because it was a well-built building with lots of steel in it. About that time the Eccles building was being rebuilt after it burned down in a beautiful blaze. 10 MC: Did you see the blaze? BF: My father was still alive. And he carried me out on the front porch to watch that and all I could see was a red sky and that's all I can remember now. Was a red sky and it was dark. But anyway I watched them put the damn thing up. Put the steel frame up and pour the concrete around it and it was the first skyscraper built in Ogden. MC: What building was this? BF: The Eccles building at 24th and Washington. David Eccles was still alive. Another polygamist; had three wives. One in Ogden, one in Logan, and one in Baker, Oregon, where he made all his money. In fact, the main office, the headquarters office of the Sumpter Valley Railroad (was in Baker). It doesn't have an inch of iron in the narrow gauge that went out, logging railroad that went up into the Powder River Country and over into the Burton River Country of Oregon where he helped himself plentifully to the land, forest land. Logged it off and brought it down. That's where it made the Eccles fortune. Now he made a lot of other good investments. Later on when the Forest Service came into being he quit there, but the Sumpter Valley Railroad was known locally in Baker, Oregon, as the "Polygamy Central". Because he was a cohabiter, because of the Manifesto, he had one wife in Baker, Oregon. And the family that is now so well to do was the family in Logan. The family in Ogden "pooped the other way", and yet they're the ones that made the big sugar...tried to corner the sugar market, just like Ogden Mills did the wheat market… 0gden Mills was in the Cabinet when the 1929 crash came. So I used a wrong name. It was J. Ogden Armour who cornered the wheat market and put the entire West into bankruptcy. Well, they put themselves into bankruptcy by following his Golden Path. And then when they left their farms later on, 11 then a weed grew in there that was host plant, mustard weed that was host plant for a thing that developed into white fly which stung all the sugar beets and made them develop a new sugar beet. Ecology again. Any time you develop one thing and then abandon it, it doesn't go really back to sagebrush right now. It goes back to an intermediate plant. MC: What...you told me earlier, on the part we didn't get, about Saltair and Lagoon. BF: The Garfield Railroad. The name of the railroad was the Saltair and Garfield. You'd go from Ogden to Salt Lake and get on the Saltair and Garfield and go out there. Once you got there you had to stay all day. You took a basket lunch. Maybe had 25, 50, 75 cents left to spend on rides. The giant roller coaster, you watched it go around and finally you spent your money and when you spent your money your day was done. That is for most kids. And you earned that money by mowing lawns, digging weeds, picking strawberries, picking cherries, and other things of that nature. Apricots, whatever the fruit crop was and wherever you could get a job. And you hustled. MC: Well after you went once did it seem like a waste that you didn't go again or was this kind of a status symbol. BF: Well no, cause you had to go and you went every time you could and it was great fun while you had it. You lived it up. Everybody else was doing it. But you didn't have enough money to make more than one or two or three trips a year. Especially...my mother was a widow. My father was killed before I was seven in an industrial accident. And there wasn't compensation in those days. You couldn't sue and beat the big companies. You went without. Insurance wasn't… This is the way I lived and a lot of most of the town did live. Now the richer kids had more and some of their fathers had 12 automobiles. Some of the fathers who ran banks, other things like that, or they owned the Utah Construction Company. There's another family, the Wadis family. And boy they were wealthy. And the Brownings; certain ones of the Brownings were wealthy. Big wealth. I'm not just saying country club wealth. MC: What about now… I want to get a little bit about Snow Basin here. You were telling me that you brought the first group up there that was going to start Snow Basin? BF: No, I didn't bring them in there interesting them…to interest them into a financial development. I took them in there as a group of interested amateur skiers. MC: But they later developed it? BF: Well later… No, not a one of them's got a penny in it or got a penny out of it. We went in there for fun. And later on, especially Felix Cosio, coaxed the Rotary Club into investing some money into it. He talked it and talked it from a development standpoint. Kenny Pierce with the Forest Service. He left here about that time and went to Washington and the last I heard of him I think he was stationed at Las Cruces, New Mexico, trying to make something grow in that damn sand down there. Let's see, who else. Now there was another guy used to go in-there, Oh, he was just merely a glazier for Bennett's (Paints), Floyd Newey, Roy DeHawn, he doesn't ski anymore. He works in the front office of Anderson Lumber Company retail store. MC: You said you spent four hours to get up there. BF: We'd spend all day getting around over there. Yea, we'd spend all day. MC: You'd put seal skins under the skis? BF: Yes, haven't you ever seen them? 13 MC: No, I don't think I ever have. BF: I think I've got a pair in the basement. (Mr. Folkman produced a pair of seal skin covers used on the bottom of skis to aid in walking up hill on skis and a pair of ice cleats, devices with about two inch prongs which were strapped on the boots when climbing on ice.) At this point the interview with Mr. Folkman was stopped, although it very well could have continued for a greater length of time. I feel that Mr. Folkman has information about the period of time from pre-World War I until the present which is very interesting and of historical value. Farther interviews would be appropriate, especially on subjects such as the Mormons and the Masons since Mr. Folkman has Mormon ancestry and is a 32nd degree Mason. Also interviews covering the town of Ogden and the people in it during the 1920's, the 1930's, would be of value. 14