Oral History Program Pearson Ballinger Interviewed by Richard Sadler 1973 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Pearson Ballinger Interviewed by Richard Sadler 1973 Copyright © 2023 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 Weber State College Oral History Program was created in the early 1970s to “record and document, through personal reminiscences, the history, growth and development of Weber State College.” Through interviews with administrators, faculty and students, the program’s goal was to expand the documentary holdings on Weber State College and its predecessor entities. From 1970 to 1976, the program conducted some fifteen interviews, under the direction of, and generally conducted by Harold C. Bateman, an emeritus professor of history. In 1979, under the direction of archivist John Sillito, the program was reestablished and six interviews were conducted between 1979 and 1983, with additional interviews being conducted by members of the Weber State community. In 2013 the campus prepared to celebrate the 125th Anniversary of Weber State University in 2014. In order to document the student experience, interviews were conducted with Weber State College Alumni on an ongoing basis. ____________________________________ 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: Ballinger, Pearson, an oral history by Richard Sadler, 1973, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections and University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an interview with Pearson Ballinger, conducted in 1973 by Richard Sadler. Mr. Ballinger discusses his many jobs in his youth, the red-light district of 25th Street, and prohibition. This interview uses outdated and potentially offensive racial language. RS: 1973, of Mr. Pearson Adelbert Ballinger by Richard Sadler in the Social Science building, Weber State College. Mr. Ballinger, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself? Where you were born, what your early life was like? PB: I was born October 16, 1900 in Ogden, Utah, about Wall Avenue. In those days, everyone built homes around the railroad, which was the hub of the town, of course. When I was about five or six years old, people started to move away from that area. They went further east. As they left, our place was taken by socalled black people—we called Negros. As far as I’m concerned, they’re not all bad people. I do amount they had very few opportunities to better themselves. They had two choices back then, and that was, they had to put the red cap on the railroad, or a shoe shiner in the barbershop. In those days, I’d imagine in the neighborhood of about 15 or 20 barber shops. The women could have two choices. They could either be hired “hired girls,” they called them, or prostitutes. Most of them were a little bit of both. I remember that there was not anywhere for them to go to school—not like they could do much to improve their lives, anyway. Nationally, a few blacks have done things like attorneys and doctors and so forth, but very few of them. I was five years old when I started school. The location is where the Old Elk’s Club is now; it was just off of 25th Street on Grant Avenue. It was one of the 1 first schools in Ogden. It was called a Central School. East of the Central School, Chinamen of the era lived—or existed, I might say. They had the fireworks concessions and the laundry concessions. There were a few herb doctors among them. We, of course, had it all figured out as kids that they smoked opium underneath the streets, somewhere; we didn’t know where. They hung their meat out to dry, always, the fish and the poultry. We used to claim they hung and skinned rats out on them; I doubt that very much. Of course, the Chinese came into Ogden from the Pacific Coast on the old Central Pacific. They worked from the coast to Ogden to Promontory Point, and the Union Pacific worked from Omaha to Ogden. The Union Pacific brought Irishman with them, most of them. Of course, they settled in Ogden also. The outstanding factor appeared to be, however, the whole city was a railroad. The trade house, the transfer point, the round house, there’s an engine tender there, fireman, brakeman, and so forth. All night long, the engines would run up and down the tracks about a block from where we lived, ringing their bells and tooting their whistle and so forth. I’ll tell you, it got to be that you had to have that noise to go to sleep. I will remember that when I moved—we went up to college when I was 20 years old—I couldn’t sleep because it was too quiet. That don’t matter much now. I’m very, very sensitive about the name I got. I’m sure I’ve never learned to fathom the reason for that. At the age of ten, I got my first job, which was passing corn flakes for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes Company. They were introducing them about that time. A fellow in a buggy took myself and my cousin around all 2 over town. We’d leave them the Corn Flakes. We’d ring the bell if possible and give it and put it in their hand. If they weren’t home, we’d leave it in the doorway. I remember I had a bad case of dysentery during that process, so I went back to the buggy and told our boss that that’s what I had. “Well,” he said, “ask the next person if you can use their john.” I went to the next door and a little girl came about my age. I wasn’t about to ask her anything, so I went down the road. Pretty soon, I found one and I asked him. He said, “Hey, you drive the horse and I’ll take the Corn Flakes.” I don’t think I was very good to him. At the end of it, we went down and took care of the red-light district—from door to door. In that day, it was well established—just off of Grant Avenue and 25th Street. The policemen was stationed at the entrance to the Alley, we called it. It was known by either the ‘Electric Alley’ or the ‘House of the Painted Lady’ and so forth and so on. Anyway, the character named Belle London ran the place. She lived in quite a pretentious hotel in the middle of the alley. The girls that she got with would come in at 18 or 19 years old. They’d serve a few years in the hotel with her, and as they got shop-worn, they were put out in the cribs. The cribs were the things that we canned; they were in little adobe rooms, about 10 by 10. They worked there, but they didn’t live there. I was in the process of passing the Corn Flakes; we went around each one of them, and there the ladies were. The ladies crossed, dressed up and smoking cigarettes, which we had never heard of before, either. It was quite a 3 dramatic experience, to say the least. There were some ladies that fascinated me, I don’t know why. I can’t understand the whole proposition of why they do it and how they get that way. I know that there were many attempts to run the question, but they would have just told a bunch of lies anyways. RS: The houses that they lived in, the prostitution district wasn’t right on 25th Street, then? PB: Well, it opened on Van Avenue, but it was back by all the business buildings. RS: Now, would this alley be on Grant—between 25th and 24th? PB: Yeah. It was called the Electric Alley. Why? I don’t know that either. RS: Were the police in league with the prostitutes? PB: I don’t know. It was legal. RS: It was legal but not on the books, or…? PB: I think it was on the books. See, you know, they saw pictures that were funny. Well, they weren’t funny, they were trying to… This Belle London—Bella Coplin was her real name—they called her Belle London, Controller of the Underworld. The mayor had told them that the Chief of Police was coming around. The Chief of Police took care of his share of the work. Then they had the owner of the newspaper. I don’t think we can put his name. You could probably guess it. It’s been told that a lot of old newspapers, in those days, didn’t handle politics. They didn’t write an article that was being reported, they wrote up their personal opinion. They vilified the opponents to their way of thinking. No punches pulled at all. But anyway, they picked the mayor and the councilman and all that for years 4 and years, the three of them together because they controlled everything. How far did I get ahead of myself? You don’t want my history? RS: Sure, let’s talk a little bit about you, what you have been doing. For example, what was it like going to school down at the old… PB: Well, hell, I mean, it was great. After that, I got another job at the canning factory. There used to be about 10 to 12 canning factories in Ogden and the surrounding area. Now there aren’t any. The big reason is that, you see, the canning factory here can only operate during the growing season. You can only can peas when they are growing. You can only can tomatoes when they are ripe, and so forth. In California, they can keep the canning factory running year-round. But in the off months here, they had to keep their main men employed: their superintendents and machinists, their main factory man, the one who ran the cooling machine— what they called the “turning” machine—that was the one who would put the caps on the cans and all that. It had to be maintained. So they were actually paid salaries for, oh, let’s say eight months of the year for practically no return, except for them taking care of the machines and all that. Anyway, now there are none; there isn’t a canning factory operating in this area. Everything that we eat here in cans now comes up from California, which was natural because it is economically sound because they can operate all year down there and can. It’s cheaper than it is here, even though they pay much better wages. At 12 years old, I went to work steady. The passing of Corn Flakes was an initiation into the canning factory, and in those days, you worked 10 hours as 5 your regular shift. Ten hours, ten cents an hour, a dollar a day. Then, if you happen to be working any overtime or something… Well, you worked six days a week, anyway. But, Sunday—if you wanted to work on Sunday, you just got the regular rate. Now, when peas came in, they didn’t pick peas; they would pull up the whole vine and load them on a hayrack. They’d bring them into the canning factory from all over the intermountain country. They would just chill in what we called a viner. It was nothing much more than great big drums with paddles attached to them on the side. They’d beat these vines until the peas were knocked loose and rolled down and we’d box ‘em. When the vines had been shed of peas, they would be put on a saddle—I’ll tell you more about the saddle. From there we went up and we shook them and a few more leaves got out. Then they’d go up to a grating machine: that was a long, cylindrical proposition with a big hole at the far end and a small hole at the top end. Peas were grated on that thing. Now, if you like big peas, that’s fine. That’s not how I like mine, though. You got to pay more for the little ones; they were the most popular. We called them “shives”. That’s where the peas go, the name of one shive or two shive or five shive or six shive, because they were really shive. They kept going around, and the peas would keep falling into rotation, until at the end, they were all gone, because they had found a hole where they could drop into. From there, they went down into a hopper and onto an endless belt. There were a lot of women sat on both sides of this belt. If the peas didn’t bounce when they hit the belt, there was something wrong with them, because they’d been 6 smashed. Of course, then they picked that out. I don’t think they threw a hell of a lot away. From there, they went over into what they called a blancher. They would steam them up a little bit, and from there, they went over to the filler. The exterior rolled up the tin cans, and they hired little boys to go up there and put the tin cans on the shoot and send them down to the core. The little boys, of course, would urinate in one of the cans first if they felt like it, just for the hell of it. There were a couple of them. I was a Sunday school boy. Twelve years old, I had never seen that. They smoked cigarettes, chewed tobacco, now urinating in tin cans and everything else. Anyway, there was no food or drug administration or inspection in those days. It didn’t matter. Then they went down into the sculler machine, so they would come down in a chunk. “Kachunk, kachunk, kachunk,” and so forth [imitating the sound of the sculler machine]. Here was a vat of liquid, salt, sugar and so forth. It went into the can along with the peas. Well, they came out of there and went into what they called the sanitary shipping machine. Years ago, they used to make a tin can, and about the time I started, they would discard the tin can that was made up of a completely closed can, except for an opening about the size of a 50-cent piece on the top. On that was placed a disk, and around the edge of the disk is where acid was put. Then another machine sautered that down tight. That was how they filled them and worked on them. But the sanitary machine, they went to the full can and the full-sized lid, and the machine rolled around and crimped the edges. It was broken most of the time, of course, but they weren’t too panicked. 7 Then they’d go down from there into a big iron basket. They were possibly, oh, 40 inches in circumference. They were so heavy they had to be lifted on a hoist, and you’d put those down a ‘retorque’, they called it; three baskets of retorque. When the retorque was full, you pulled a lid down, and it was kind of balanced on one end. You threw some bolts in place and tied them on up the length of a pipe until it made a very solid seal, and then you’d take the temperature up to about 350. When you’d turn the valve, the steam would come in. Well, I was bigger than most of the kids, and I got the job of being a cook when I was 12 years old. I used to scare the hell out of the kids because I didn’t know anything about steam; you know, it’s just water. Then you’d mark the sheet up there and sound the buzzer. Well, after a half hour the buzzer would go off, so you’d go over and turn another valve and let out the steam for another ten minutes; you’d take your iron pipe again and do these bolts and throw the lid up and bring the hoist down and get them out. Well, peas had to be cooled right away, if you are going to cook peas. I mean, you take tomatoes or fruit or anything else, your string beans, it didn’t matter; they didn’t have to cool. But something that makes the peas, you have to cool ‘em, so back in the warehouse, they had a pool of water. Well, it wasn’t really a pool, it was a reservoir. It had to be quite a joy to pick up a basket and send it out to the back and let it get a little bit lower. I mean, you had to go two ways. You had to go forward and lower at the same time, or else you’d flop into that pool and drown the warehouse. There was about four of them. Somebody 8 had to go out there and throw a piece of iron pipe across there, and you’d let them down on that and bring the hoist back. It was fun to do that. Around three o’clock in the morning I’d get off. You’d start at seven in the morning and work until two or three o’clock, not much more. Then you’d go home, if you didn’t have any more to do. Of course, the cooks were the last to leave, so I was generally there along with the janitor. I’d get home at say, three in the morning, and seven o’clock in the morning would have to start over. Now, the only part that I liked to bring up here was: in those days, there was no inspection of food. Also, the fortunes were built on child labor. There’s no question about that. Of course, there was no union. What is interesting about it is that I’ve been on both ends of it. I’ve been hiring, and I’ve also had the child labor thing. It’s been quite interesting to watch, you know, if you didn’t have to work in it. RS: How long did you work in the canning factory? PB: Oh, several years. I think the worst job I ever had was during this off-time from the canning factory that I was telling you about, where they kept people on to repair and replenish the equipment and putting the machinery and whatever. One day they took me and put a rope around under my armpits and lowered me down into a boiler. Those boilers had been jacked up on several logs laid and jointed together, so the thing to do was to tear the fire brick out. I was to sit on the bottom of that floor, was at least a foot deep accumulated over the years, and every time I’d loosen a brick, I’d fall into that soot. I worked at that all day long. Really, I prayed that one of those bricks would hit me on the head. I was 9 frightened down there. It was pitch-black; you couldn’t see a thing, and soot was flying around you all day. I’d go home, and my mother was always quite an aggressive woman and I didn’t dare cry in front of her. We weren’t allowed to cry. So I made up that I had soot in my eyes. I’d go home, I’d look a Negro. I’d be black from my body to my face. Then I got another beautiful job, that was raising the sagging floor up. You’d get on your belly and wiggle around underneath the floor and place jacks in place, and you jack it up. The top of them turned on a screw; they could put a boogie bar in them and turn ‘em around. Pretty soon, the floor would start to grow in a certain amount. Then you put some other boards underneath the color that’s already there. Then the floor would be raised—which of course it had been—so you’d crawl around on last years’ tomato juice that seeped down there and lots of other sorts of rats and animals, raise the floor. Well, I didn’t care much for that either, but the next job I got was still worse. These lads, they could sell pea vines to farmers as cow feed. They built a cement saddle, and the juice from the pea vine had eaten through the concrete. So now they built a wooden saddle. It was made up of flooring inside and shiplap outside boards about, oh I’d say, 18 inches. Until then, you got to fill her up, but that had to all be tarred, so I got the position of running the tar. It was about the first of June before the peas started coming again. I don’t know why, but if you would get some of that tar on your hand, it would take the skin right along with it. They didn’t give any gloves; I didn’t happen to have any. You would go up five stories and lean over the side and paint the raw boards, and I got so that I don’t 10 like heights and I don’t like depths. Anyway, I’d done it. I was about 14 then. Well, I got too old for that, and then of course I told you about canning the peas. Well next they [tomatoes] came in mail. The mail used to come in on freight cars; they weren’t hauled in by a horse and wagon. There weren’t any gasoline vehicles yet, so they gave me a job. They’d bring out a box of tomatoes and they’d dump it on a revolving plate of iron. I was supposed to pick the bad ones out. Well, I picked too damn many bad ones out, so I got fired off of that job. Then they let me carry the tomatoes from the inroad they come out of, in tubs, over to the girls that peeled them. I don’t suppose that a lot of people believe it, but tomatoes are graded now, very, very carefully by what they call a ‘mold count’. If you get any foreign substances in there, they’d go a bit rotten, and it shows up as a mold and they will fester. I mean people, maybe, have seen them, because you’d mail them, you’d put it back in the refrigerator, and when you take it out there will be some white spots forming around it. Well, that’s your mold. When tomatoes are too old it would also form because the tomato would crack and that mold gets in there. Anyway, I took too many away so I got promoted. I got the job to carry on the tubs of tomatoes over to the girls that were peeling them. They stood behind a table, and they had some of these little knives, and they’d dig out the stem part and pull off the other end. Then they’d throw the tomato in a bucket and they had to all be canned. That was what I was in—canning tomatoes. The funny part about it—well it ain’t funny, more like a tragic part about it, was if on the way to the peeling table you happen to drop a tub and spill it on 11 floor, you’d get a scoop shovel and throw it in the kitchen. Then there would be some upstairs that they would make ketchup. Well, the men that made ketchup [were always] chewing tobacco, spitting them in ketchup. Again, the tough little boys would want to urinate in it. They thought it was as good a place as any. They did a lot of damage to make it dirty. The worst of it was at night. After these girls had been standing there all day peeling the tomatoes, there was a certain slop over on the bench at night that was absolutely white. So then you’d get a rubber squeegee and clean all of that off into a tub. That would go over into the ketchup pile. Anything went in the ketchup pile. They’d cook it awhile; if it didn’t taste just right, they’d find some more cores or something to go in there. They’d fix it up. Like I said, there was no supervision or no Food and Drug—I think that it had been invented by then, I just don’t think that it was enforced. Nowadays, if you have a high mold count in a product…. This has happened to me all the time. If you buy something here and try to ship into Idaho and Nevada, and if you ship it across the state, then the government gets ahold of it and they’ll test it. If the mold count is too high, you get to bring it all back again into the city or the state where it was canned. RS: They’d send it to the city? PB: Yeah, they don’t want you too, but they had no jurisdiction. It wasn't a thing that you should have been but you did. Well, they didn’t make it into tomato juice in those days. It was all ketchup. Tomatoes weren’t bad, you didn’t have to can 12 those the same day that you got them. You could wait a while. You’d just run it straight into a small shipment, 10 hours. RS: Were you working full-time at the cannery? PB: Oh no. I was for a while; now, of course, you go to school, and after school I’d go to work. I worked Saturdays and Sundays. RS: Which cannery did you work at? PB: Well, it isn’t there anymore. It’s called the Van Allen Canning Company. RS: Where was it at? PB: Well, it was on 20th Street just below Wall. The building is still there. RS: Was it a major company? PB: No, you see, in those days, they were individually owned. That’s the difference in our industry today and a lot from—well, not so many years. There’s another story that I won’t go into now but, he and his wife ran it. He was the only man I ever knew that had a concave instead of a convex stomach. In our spare time we made boxes. All the boxes were wooden, and you didn’t have any paper stuff at all. So after this stuff had been canned—both the tomatoes and the peas—you’d take them out in the warehouse and put them in these boxes, which you turned on their side and put the open end against the box in front of it, which has been sitting there. Anyway, I’d go through that. I got a job with the railroad. That was big pay. You got $1.75 for just 10 hours then. You worked on the freight house, and my uncle worked there. My uncle was a very nice person, he really was. He would speak to you in passing and he’d speak to you at home. He was really a second father to me. 13 RS: What was his name? PB: Jenkins. In that day they hired mostly Greeks and Italians. There are three things that you were—a trucker, or store clerk. Well, in those days you’d load a car and go to San Francisco, and that car would be made up of anything that went into this Intermountain West here. They’d come into Ogden at the freight house, which they had just torn down, and which isn’t there anymore at all. Then you’d get the manifest of the car. That was a paper that told you what was in it. That would go to the boss of the gang. He was a checker. They were nice people. Anyway, five of us are running the trucks and pulling all of our stuff, and another one would be the checker. Then you’d take them and they’d give you a ticket with a track number and the car number and so forth. Then you’d pull those over there, just set them down and leave them. If you had a car going to Billings, Montana, that might be car 31. That would stay there until car 31 had been loaded by both shoving stuff and whoever had mixed cars in there. But they weren’t ever sent to their destination, they were sent here. Then the source of the boom: there would be three or four hundred people in employment, which of course is all gone now. Now, the railroad won’t take anything with these piggybacks, which are the little trucks—gondolas, is what we called them. Now, the trailers, they’re not gondolas; gondolas are the things that pull the mono on the flat car. They would do that, or they’ll take straight carloads of anything, but, they won’t take any mixed cars. RS: So you shipped them from car to car here? PB: Oh, yeah. 14 RS: How many people were involved in that? PB: Three or four hundred. RS: Three or four hundred. How long did you work on the railroad in that job? PB: Oh, a couple of years, I guess. First day I was there, I saw… investigations, and what they called the ‘Big Crane’. It may still be there, I don’t know. Anyway, they have anything awfully heavy, they took it to the Big Crane and run the car right underneath it. Well, this car happened to be loaded with steel plates, and they hooked some chains and cables onto it. The man that ran it was way up, maybe a story above the ground. He took it up a little bit and told one of them to push a chain over a little bit more because it wasn’t balancing properly. You understand? RS: I do, yes. PB: Well, this fellow got down like this to shove a chain lower, and the whole thing let loose. Everybody called out, “Order the electric crane.” I didn’t know what they wanted us to go for. We could have never lifted that stuff and got through, no matter how many of us went over there. But, we went near and here his back was, sticking out like that. This car—it was a coal car, open cart—and of course, they hooked up the machine on again and lifted it again. They got him out of there. He had been dead a long time. RS: It probably killed instantly, you think? PB: Oh, yeah. Well, anyway, another peculiar thing about it all—it represents the attitude of those days. My uncle, like I said, was a foreman of the place he ran, and in those days, the only thing that brought a trailer was a horse and wagon. Now, a few will go by, if you notice the ramp up to the platform, made out of 15 cobblestone. Well, at best, those things are slippery. I mean, you can’t—a horse backing up there, you know? Here, they’d have a great big load of merchandise. Up until 1930, everything going into this intermountain country was shipped by rail. You’d take over there a miscellaneous load of stuff—let’s say going to Cache Valley, but the deadline was at 4:30. So at that place, you’d get all these cups pulled up by a reliable car by five o’clock or six o’clock. Well, if you happen to be so dumb as to get back at 4:31, Uncle John refused to take it. You know what though? It’s really quite pathetic. They went to back these wagons up and the first place, I had to back them up a slope. The second place, the only footing I could get was on these cobblestones. One time, half of 25th Street was cobblestone and the other half was asphalt. Well, they shut that down trying to back that wagon; they’d almost sit down on their rear end in order to get it backed up. Then they’d get there one minute late and line it up. You don’t believe it, but in those days, the railroad was paramount. All these little trucks came out later. They had no other way to ship. RS: Would the Union at all [inaudible] on the railroad here, then? PB: I wanted to tell you about that. We had a strike one morning. Over these tracks, you had to put a bridge so that they could switch back and forth in the night. You had to have two avenues. There were six tracks that were always over, the whole length of the freight. You have seen the old freight? In order to get over to them—unless you wanted to wait around, which killed a lot of time—you went over to this bridge, or you put the bridge in and took it out at night and put it in the morning, which happened to be Sunday morning. Some big mouth, of course, 16 decided that we were going to get overtime that day. We were all sitting down on the bridge and all of our trucks. Uncle John saw us there, and he come down and he said, “Hey, you guys all paralyzed?” and we all would jump up and put the bridge back. Our strike wasn’t worth much. Anyway, in those days, as a whole, the Union had a strike. They had the union, but they never won. I checked in yesterday, old railroad man, and verified what I thought. The union never won from the railroad until around the later ‘20s. They’d strike, alright; the railroad would just bring in other guys, and then, by 1s and 2s, they all went back to work. They never got what they struck for any more than what we did that Sunday morning. I worked there for two or three years, then I went to work for a candy company, and that, of course, was heavenly. You only worked eight hours there. Of course, you worked six days a week again. I did get to have all the candy I wanted to eat. You weren’t supposed to take any home, but you could eat it. RS: How did you like working for them? PB: It was heaven. Well, I broke a leg. Outside of that. RS: How’d you do that? PB: Well, they shipped what they call a glucose—it’s pretty much corn syrup from the middle west. These were all standing on the end when they came out of the car. The thing you got to do is you’d hold onto one of those hundred-column barrels. You’d put your foot up on another one and get it rocking slightly and then you’d pull it over. Well, this was the first one that was in the car, and we had a bridge going from a platform over to the car. I got it pulled over alright but it hit the 17 bridge, and the bridge went and so did I, onto the ground. Then we used to have wooden pails. They don’t have those anymore. Did you ever see one of those? RS: No, I don’t think I have. PB: They’re a pail about that wide [holds up hands]. Oh, I judge that they were about 13 inches diameter at the top and maybe 10 at the bottom. Round lid. Expensive, terribly expensive. We’d put all of them up in there, all the candy in those things. They made all the candy there except Boston Baked Beans and jelly beans, burnt peanuts and that type of thing. That was called canned candy. It took so much machinery to make that they bought barrels from an eastern company that had the equipment to make them. It was there that I learned not to be bashful because—well, we had to practically joke about it. The boss was his brother-inlaw. One of the chocolates that you make… [Video stops] [Video returns] RS: You were telling me about making chocolate. What happened? PB: Well, to make a chocolate you have to have a center first. To make the center, you take a box full of starch. It was roughly—oh, about thirty inches, maybe three feet; a little longer than 18 inches across. It all depended on what you wanted to make, a square chocolate, oblong, or whatever. You’d pull down the lever and you’d make indentations in this starch, then you’d make up the candy. You’d put that on a hopper and it was arranged that as the box of starch passed beneath it, the streams of candy would come down and fill these indentations. Then after that, it would cool. You’d cool the whole thing and brush the starch away from the candy and it would fall down into a box. 18 Now, if it was a very fancy chocolate you’d roll it by hand. You had a little instrument, about so long [holds hands up]. It would separate it at the end—not separate, but the end formed a wire aperture about, oh, I’d say two inch. You’d throw it into a regular pot of chocolate about 10 inches in diameter. It was being heated by hot water, which was flowing underneath. You had to roll it around with this little thing and take it out and put it on a greased piece of paper. Those are only fancy chocolates that were done that way. More common stuff like—you know, pink chocolates is what you’d call it. We’d call it number one chocolate. They weren’t very cheap. They were rolled by a machine. In those days, there were quite a few cream. I don’t know whether they have anymore or not. You ever see them? RS: Once in a while. PB: It’s a center that—it isn’t chocolate cream, it’s just a different flavored stuff. But they all had to be done by hand. They had to be all put in trays and put in one of those pails and shipped out that way. I think the main thing that I learned there was to not be afraid of girls. Some of these boys take big leaps at life, and they wouldn’t even talk to the girls that were dipping creams in chocolates. It would be very, very embarrassing to them. But they knew nothing mattered. Anyway, that was one of the family businesses of the town. RS: You mentioned one of the fellows that was a practical joker. PB: Oh, he was the one that would do it. RS: What was his name? 19 PB: His name was Payne, Jack Payne, and we called him Doogan. He was a pilot fighter in his spare time. At the factory you had two cools. There was the relative that didn’t do any work and the outsiders that did the work. RS: Who were the relatives, the Shupes? Williams? PB: Williams. They used to get barrels of vanilla extract in those days, and they would drill a hole in the top of it and get a soda straw and put it through there. You’d tip the barrel over, an old pint or quart of vanilla extract, and drink it. Then he’d get a plate of sugar and sleep it off while the rest of us worked. You couldn’t get much out of him. Anyway, what else can I tell about Shupe? An individual locally owned them and since they are gone. RS: Was the candy good? PB: Oh, yeah. But there you have the economics come in. Here come Mars Bars. They came from the south. They hired cheap help down there. There were a lot of whites and blacks. It was a lot cheaper down there. Now, you had to pay freight—you didn’t pay freight on sugar, but sugar was so… To them back there, it was a dollar—more or less—a bag; then it was sold to a candy maker out here because of the freight. Now, in other words, Chicago is the great candy-making center. They could get sugar from Cuba and bring it over to the Mississippi River and up to Chicago. Whatever they were paying for Cuban sugar at that time, then the sugar factories ‘round here had to meet the price. Often times you can buy, they’d have to pay the freight. You’d pay the freight on sugar from here to Chicago, and then you’d have to sell it for a dollar cheaper. That was also true on the west coast. You’d pay the freight on sugar from Ogden to West Coast and 20 then sell it for a dollar-and-something, a bag cheaper than you’d sell it to anyone in Ogden. Then of course, glucose, which is a very, very large part of your candy. It came from the Midwest. It’s made of corn. That was, of course, no freight at all. They were able to pay the additional freight for the candy. It was sent in some packages and cases. The cases took a higher freight rate than either of them, but they were able to pay that rate because of the reduced labor costs back there. Pretty soon, Mars Bars and your Baby Ruth’s and those other candies came in. RS: How long did you work for Shupe-Williams? PB: Two years. I worked there during World War I and then my sister taught me how to build a car. RS: Did you graduate from high school here in Ogden? Which high school did you go to? PB: Ogden High. It’s where the junior high is now. RS: About how many people were attending high school? How many were in your class? PB: Oh, it was only about a total of 600 in Davis County, I suppose. Maybe even Box Elder and Ogden. RS: Did any blacks go to school with you? PB: I don’t remember. RS: Any Chinese kids? PB: I don’t remember that either. It wasn’t the way it is now. In high school, you have to pay a dollar a day per student. I taught high school before, I know. All you are 21 required to do is get a role, and then they don’t care what you’re doing. All of this is because it’s the truth. At that time, I don’t know… Anyway, learned enough about the candy? RS: Good. PB: I went from there up to Utah State, and I had no idea whatever I could overlook the people and other students there. No one told me that I had any friends. In fact, my mother was greatly against me going to college. In those days, only about one percent of the kids ever went. RS: Why was she against you going to college? [The following audio, through the end of the interview, is corrupted and inaudible in places. The editor has attempted to make the dialogue as cohesive as possible but there are significant parts missing.] PB: I had a good job. I was a shipping clerk and I was making 105 dollars a month. What more do you want? Mother, I suppose—when you look back at it, in the objective manner, was terrible unsure. My father was making above wage as well in those days. He was making 90 dollars. They were renting two small houses, and yet, I was supposed to keep my good job for 125 dollars at that time. [Inaudible] … then I graduated from college in the 98%. But, that’s beside the point. RS: You went for four years to Utah State? PB: In those days, I think that I enrolled up there, including World War I veterans, and they only educated the ones that were wounded. If you weren’t wounded, you would have gotten nothing. But including them, it was under a thousand. So, we 22 got plenty of personal pension and all that. Of course, the teacher gives about six or seven hours a day. It wasn’t that bad. Maybe five, I don’t know. RS: What did you study? PB: I studied chemistry, and then one day, I saw a girl I wanted to get with in the English line. So I went over there and then I invited [inaudible]. Then I studied accounting. I graduated in accounting and then moved to administration. Before we leave, I’d like to make this point clear; I think it is very valuable. That is: in my youth, and my early manhood, and up to a few years ago—there was many a number of locally-owned businesses in this town. There was ShupeWilliams Candy Company, and there was the railroad, of course, going good. There was Scope. They ran the lumber yard. I imagine they employed a thousand people. They made sure it was overall good. There was another thing they couldn’t continue to do because of the cheaper labor down south. That was [inaudible] Company; they made beer. [Audio cuts out] …from then on, there isn’t anything on the East Coast or the West Coast, and of course, that’s where our fathers are from. Now, that in all of itself is not too important, you see; not as much as your employing people, anyway, of course. That’s supposed to be the important thing. But from a standpoint of your educating people, from a standpoint of how you’re going to develop people, it is important. Nowadays, it’s very, very difficult to develop an individual. I mean you cut the development [inaudible]. You better. I mean, if you’re going to get anywhere, they’ve got to think a certain way. In other words, you got to work now—oh I’d say—where did I work? Oh, nobody 23 gives a damn. Nowadays, if you go to work for a concern that is controlled on either coast, your thinking has to correspond with your immediate superiors. The Rotary Club—I don’t know anyone there anymore, civically. Plus the Elders’ Quorum, plus the Bowling League. When you get through, you’ve got known that it does one dime, and there’s an individual thing—except the women. I’m not a great women’s liberator or anything like that, but I maintain that they do more thinking than men do, on account that’s all they got to do. They’re going to wash dishes and anything. But that’s beside the point too. The normal fact is that it’s almost impossible to develop individual enterprise and individual thinking in an individual anymore. Oh, you agree with me? RS: I think that a lot has to do with whether you have individual opportunities or company. PB: Well, you don’t. RS: And you don’t. But before we go back to college, do you mind if I ask you a couple of earlier questions? You know 25th Street has been regarded as quite a rough street. In that article I read of yours, you deal with the saloons somewhat— were there a lot of saloons on 25th Street? PB: About every other door. RS: Did the saloons come in with the railroad? PB: No, they were incidental. You see, you got a funny situation there. Around Ogden, there used to be a lot of silver and gold mines and logging down there and sheep herding and cattle punching. All that type of work. Well, those men wanted, periodically—they were all bachelors. A lot of them married prostitutes, 24 and they made good wives, I understand. But nevertheless, they all wanted to come in somewhere and have some fun and cut loose and howl, and they used to come to Ogden. Now, I remember a time on 25th Street when it was poison for Washington Avenue. We had good stores down there. RS: Who ran them? The prominent people in Ogden? PB: Oh yeah, I mean they [inaudible]. I don’t know how they got invited to church, but they did. The church went in and bought them. They didn’t even bother the alleys—Electric Alley. RS: So you didn’t see very many church people go down lower 25th Street? PB: Oh, no. You see, those days, women didn’t drink at all. Women didn’t ever start to even think about that during prohibition. All of that was about the time that they closed this Electric Alley, was around 1918. Well, they did close it during the war. RS: World War I? PB: Yeah, I can’t remember which war. Nevertheless, 25th Street was a lot bigger. The story used to be that here comes [inaudible] …man home, and he goes into one of these hellholes and spends all of his family’s money away. How much did you spend drinking whiskey and a bunch of shots, when beer is a nickel? You couldn’t get rid of it a lot and still get home, could you? RS: That’s right. PB: [Inaudible] …I don’t think many of them ever did. I think that they finally got tired of it. RS: Was there any agreement or—you mentioned the madam that ran Electric Alley, did she have interest in the saloons too? 25 PB: No, I don’t think she did. RS: She was strictly prostitution? PB: And politics. RS: And politics. PB: Of course if you were on the [inaudible] …some joker making [inaudible] there. Well, after they closed that, then she went out north of Washington. Do you know where that school is at? RS: Yeah. PB: It’s on Washington, just down a little, but she wasn’t there for very long. She went there because of the city limit. RS: Prostitution, then, stopped pretty much in the city for a while from 1918 to 1920. During the ‘30s, it was quite a big business, I understand. PB: Well, yeah, [inaudible]. RS: What was his name? PB: Shirley. He was born with a [inaudible] in him. There were a bunch of families in Ogden. [Inaudible] the Browning’s—those were the four most wealthy. Well, he took the idea that he hated the Chamber of Commerce, and he called people with money [inaudible]. Then he allowed bootlegging and prostitution, only, they would just upstairs off of 25th Street. You can go on there and see whether or not it’s there. He didn’t try to stop it. Across from us, from where I lived, was an old municipal building. They used to call it the Arc. It was absolutely square, just like how Noah would have built it. It was about a two, three-story building. They would take the prostitutes out there. He was the one that did. He came down 26 personally and dealt with it. But they were illegal. I used to have to walk up 26th Street from Wall Avenue and go to the 2nd Ward church, and they were standing out there. They just wanted to know if you wanted them to make a baby instead of… you know. They didn’t want to make money. But, I mean, it was allowed. It wasn’t frowned upon. RS: A lot of them were black prostitutes though? PB: Mostly. RS: On 26th Street? PB: I don’t think they were on the Alley or anything. RS: You think by the ‘30s, though, you’d picture that most of them became black prostitutes? PB: Oh, yeah. I guess it would depend if they were an amateur or professional. Frankly, I’d rather go to a professional, if it was me, because I got to use the damn thing. RS: Was there any connection between the Chinese and prostitution? PB: No. They had their rackets, they had their lotteries. They had the fireworks concessions or something. Fireworks weren’t wrong. Of course, you had a few kids got fingers blown off and you could hear it. They were allowed. I used to have, oh, let’s say three or four bags of fireworks. We had our candles to light the fuse, skyrockets and bombs. Nobody cared. In fact, it was more fun to live then. RS: It seems like Ogden, east of Washington and a little bit of west of Washington, was pretty much left alone. PB: I don’t know why. I’ve often wondered why they did. 27 RS: The church didn’t seem to really get uptight about it. PB: Well, I can tell you the real reason; I would be sure of it. RS: What did they say? PB: Well, the church usually looked over the prostitution for hanging out. I wouldn’t [inaudible]. RS: It’s hard to tell sometimes. PB: But, nevertheless, I want to give you this idea. As far as [inaudible] it was not a social attitude. A person who owned a saloon was not a social attitude. Even old Belle London used to send her daughter to the country 2nd Ward. RS: The 2nd Ward, huh? PB: Yeah. Of course, it’s torn down now, but she really did. I remember the girl. I want to put it this way, they were a way of living. Well, I have my own beliefs of how to raise. I have a variety. Nobody has an agenda. I have another one [inaudible] …Indian squaw. They got it all carved out. Somebody could perform the ceremony. They could point a gun or a hat whether they do. And of course, the story is that he was so loyal to his ward. It was an affiliation. Here’s another thing. In those days, even his own relatives—and I speak to his kids and cousins—minorities were very, very pronounced. But if you were white, you were forgiven. But if you were white and your parents were just barely white… [inaudible]. The Germans were proud ever since World War I. Catholics… They were different people. Absolutely different. You shouldn’t be messing around with Catholicism. Well, I don’t think you give a damn nowadays, 28 which one you are, which denomination you go to. Does it matter to you? Have you given it any thought? RS: No. PB: Well, I hired an awful lot of people in my life. I have never asked what their religion was. But in those days, well, you asked. You better belong. RS: Was that on the railroad? PB: No, that was [inaudible]. But they hired a lot of Greeks and Italians there. RS: Did they give different jobs because they were Greeks and Italians? Did they work on the tracks? PB: They were what you call the stowers. Yeah, look at this boxcar. They would come out and pick it up and take it inside the car and put it in the car and such. That when they switched they wouldn’t ruin the [inducible]. RS: Could a black ever have a job like that? He could just be a red cap? PB: Or shoeshine. RS: Or shoeshine. PB: No one would hire the blacks, especially to touch equipment. RS: How about a Chinaman? Could he have any job like that? PB: No. You see, the Chinamen were all [inaudible]. They had cues all up and down their backs. If they ever got around gray money, supposed to be for white people, they got the hell out of that cue, they did. I thought they went down with the miners and so forth. I think they got the China men [inaudible]. As far as minorities went, if you were a white girl—if a girl was born and raised in the United States, let’s say—and she married an Italian, she was also a 29 minority. They wouldn’t even think. Or a Chinaman or a Jap. Japs were very clever. In fact, at one time we raised more [inaudible]. We used to sell a thousand boxes of chocolate than the store when we owned it. Every year, we’d have people send them back East with their family. RS: Which store was that? PB: That was the old Washington Market. I don’t think you would have remembered. They’ve been closed since 1950. We had 20 years. Talk about minorities—we had them. RS: What was prohibition like? Was it pretty strictly enforced? PB: No, it wasn’t. Prohibition was what taught the women to drink. You see, I used to be a traveling salesman later in life, and we used to sell carloads of malt extract that was canned in cans, one after the other. We had picked that stuff—I had never made any beer. They called it ‘home brew’. Then you would let it sit and bottle it up and sell it. Sometimes it would blow up and spray everyone. Then you would go to call on somebody, and if you were halfway polite you would have to try to [inaudible]. That’s where women started to do a little drinking. They would go on wine. Well, my brother used to sell [alcohol] down in Price, Utah. He used to sell down there three or four carloads of sugar and chard—oh, kegs every year. But the Italians and Greeks went down there were dying to make wine. I went down to take his place when I graduated from college. I didn’t get very far, but every time you went on, they would want to be drinking. Some of them [inaudible]. That's where I made cans from. Red wine, I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t make it. 30 We didn’t ever do any drinking in college. One guy did, and they kicked him out of the fraternity. Another guy got a girl pregnant and they kicked him out. You couldn’t smoke on the campus at the time. RS: Which fraternity were you in? PB: Oh, it was a local thing. RS: Phi Kappa Iota. PB: Oh, yeah, we were very strict—at least, I thought we were. I don’t know what all went on that we didn’t know about, if we knew about it. RS: Did a lot of saloons on 25th Street close because of prohibition? PB: Oh, yeah. You see, there were nice saloons where nice people went, and then there's your mediocre, where they couldn’t make all the bottles if they wanted to. Then there were your [inaudible] saloons. They sold the same whiskey and it would come in barrels. There weren’t any brands or names. All that people would want is the bottles. Those kids that could find a few bottles, they’d get at least a dime, especially if they had a label on it. Somebody would come out and buy a special or certain kind of whiskey and turn the spigot on the barrel and that was it. [Inaudible] …company in those days. They were in wines and whiskey and so forth, tobacco. They ran this wholesale grocery too. The father was only in the grocery part of it. But I know for a fact that all these barrels—I don’t think they [inaudible]. They would put the bottle in the iron so it won’t be filled with cheap barrels. But those days they didn’t have those. I’ll tell you right now, the saloons in those days were much better than the honkey ones they got today. 31 RS: Free lunch was one reason they were better, right? PB: I don’t think it had anything to do with that. [Inaudible] …whiskey and then beer. RS: You could eat a lot too, I’ll bet. PB: Yeah, rye bread, bologna, sauerkraut, wheat, grapes, you know? RS: Have a quart of whiskey and a good lunch with it. PB: But of course, after that, whiskey… 32