Community Oral History Leon Jones Interviewed by Alyssa Kammerman 25 January 2024 RootsBridge LLC Mission Statement RootsBridge cultivates connection in communities and families through the transformative power of storytelling. Our mission is to compassionately record life histories, honor unique experiences and promote empathy through shared narratives. By encouraging individuals to step into another's shoes, we cultivate deeper bonds between storyteller and hearer. In the communities we serve, we foster a sense of unity and compassion. We are driven by our passion for providing a platform for marginalized voices to ensure that every story is heard and none are diminished. We believe in a community where everyone feels connected and finds a sense of belonging. Project Description The Union Station Centennial oral history project is a companion to the Museums at Union Station’s “Heart of Ogden” exhibit, which commemorates the 100-year anniversary of the opening of the current Union Station building on November 22, 1924. In honor of the centennial anniversary, Ogden City contracted with oral historian Alyssa Kammerman of RootsBridge LLC to collect fifteen oral histories from community members who shared memories associated with the Union Station in Ogden. The interviews encompass the 1930s to the present day, thus documenting the period when Union Station was actively functioning as a train station and its subsequent transformation into a museum and cultural center. Community members interviewed included former railroad employees, Union Station employees, residents of Ogden, city employees, and museum volunteers. The diverse range of interviewees reflects the diversity of Ogden and provides a comprehensive view of Union Station’s impact on the community as a cultural hub and a place of shared history. ~ Oral History Description ~ An oral history is the spoken account of historic events in one’s life from the unique and partial perspective of the narrator. It is a primary source and unique interpretation of one’s lived experience. Rights Management This work is the property of RootsBridge LLC and The Museums at Ogden Union Station. 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 / as long as credit is given to RootsBridge LLC and Ogden Union Station. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Jones, Leon, an oral history by Alyssa Kammerman (RootsBridge LLC), 25 January 2024, Centennial Oral History Project, Museums at Union Station, Ogden, UT. Oral History Interview January 25, 2024 Interviewee: Leon Jones Interviewer: Alyssa Kammerman Abstract: This is an Oral History Interview with Leon Jones, conducted January 25, 2024, for the 100 year anniversary of the Ogden Union Station. This interview was conducted at the Ogden Union Station by oral historian Alyssa Kammerman of RootsBridge LLC. During this interview, Leon shares his memories as a member of the Union Station Development Corporation in the 1970s, and his efforts to help develop the Museums at Union Station. LJ: I didn't move to Ogden until around 1970, and I was working out of Thiokol, which is a long ways away and commuting a lot, and I just was not involved at all in Ogden until probably around, sometime in the 1980s. So when you're talking about the history of Union Station, I knew absolutely nothing about it until then. Or Ogden, as far as that goes. I mean, I knew where Ogden was and all, but... AK: No, that's good to know. I probably should have asked you that when we were talking last, so I apologize. So thank you for letting me know. Well, we'll go ahead and get started then. So today is January 25, 2024. We are in Leon Jones' home speaking with him for the Union Station Centennial exhibit. My name is Alyssa Kammerman and I'll be doing the interview, and on the camera is Ky Jackson. So, from what I understand, you married a Browning. Is that correct? Judy Browning. 1 LJ: Yes. We met at the University of Utah where we were both students, and then we both graduated from there and then moved to Wisconsin and then England and then North Carolina. And then back here to Ogden. AK: What did you do for work? LJ: I'm a chemist. I was a chemist. AK: And was it your job that took you all over like that? LJ: More or less. AK: That's cool. What did you do in England? LJ: In England? I was at a postdoctoral fellowship. We were at the University of Nottingham. AK: Okay. So I know that the Brownings have been very involved in the Union Station Museum. Was Judy interested in the Union Station? LJ: Not particularly. AK: Okay. So tell me about what got you guys involved in the Union Station Museum, then? LJ: Well, we lived in Ogden, we'd talked with Judy's parents a lot, and I think the thing that got me interested in Union Station was Tom Moore, who was the head of the Union Station Development Corporation, was very active in getting museums all up and running and things, and so he got me interested, and in fact, asked me if I would be a member of the Union Station Development Committee. And I said, yes, I would. I was on that for a fair number of years and got quite an interest in the museums especially; they interested me. I was already sort of 2 vaguely interested in the railroad – not particularly in firearms, actually – and so, I just got to know the station and everything else. And then, finally, the board elected me the president of the Union Station Development Corporation, and I did that for a rather short time. And the mayor at that time – and you can date this; I'm sorry to say I don't know the exact date – but the mayor was Matthew Godfrey. And he decided that he was going to abolish the Ogden Union Station Development Corporation, which was perfectly within his purview. It turned out that this development corporation, essentially, as that organization went over, never really existed, other than the fact that it ran the Union Station. And it was very responsible for much of the renovation of the Station and the rebuilding of the Station and the formation of the museums. And in fact, many of the artifacts were given to the Union Station Development Corporation and not to the city. And it was sort of hoped, I think, it was intended by the people that formed it and that ran it and gave things to it, that the corporation was going to run the museums. And the mayor just declared that it was a non-existent operation and abolished it. And so there I was without a job. So in Union Station, I felt that that was a rather... I don't know how to put it exactly… an unpleasant thing for him to do. And so I felt – and a lot of other people did, too – that the Union Station Museums needed an organization that was independent of the city to sort of overlook and, in a sense, try to keep the city in line with what they were doing with the museums. And for that, I discovered that there was already a Union Station Foundation in existence. Was kind of non-active, but was in existence. It had a president and a vice president 3 and so on. And so I took it upon myself to rewrite the charter of the Foundation and to set it up and find people to run it, and one thing and another. I stayed away, partly, other than that, from the foundation. And so I want to go back now a little bit and talk about the structure of the Union Station a little bit, and the development corporation, and finally, the Foundation. So, the original construction and habitation of the building and the museum's work was done a lot by the people of the city of Ogden, especially the families of the Brownings and the Eccles and some others. And they sort of got the building in shape and decided a little bit of what the museums were going to look like. And the museums themselves were done mainly by people that were interested and active in those particular areas. Particularly, we have a lot of old railroad people, retired railroad people, some active railroad people. We had people that were active in the firearms business, some that worked for Browning, and some that were just more or less interested for hunting and general things like that. But the firearms and the automobiles: we had people that were very interested in old antique automobiles that were operating, keeping them running. So they got everything sort of up and going. But by the time that we set up the Foundation, a lot of the activity down there had shifted away from the people who were making it. Certainly all the people that were interested in various museums were still on board. We got a lot of people from the Forest Service, surprisingly enough, especially on the Foundation. And some of them had been on the board before, but they were, in a 4 sense – didn't really realize this until I was reminded – but they were really a cornerstone of the whole thing. A lot of people from the Forest Service. When we set up the Foundation and got reorganized, the president was working for the Forest Service at the time: Jack McDonald. He was very influential and very capable in acting in the interests of the Union Station Foundation. Though there are many others, almost too numerous to mention – Engineers, Forest Service people right on line. And, in fact, eventually we hired a woman to run... Jack was the president, but she was the head operating officer, and eventually of the museums. She worked for the foundation: Roberta Beverly. And so when the mayor announced that finally, eventually, the Foundation was going to run the museums and the city was not, and somebody asked him, “Well, who is going to run the museums?” And he said, “Well, Roberta Beverly.” She had been very active in things and stepped in very, very well to run the museums for the Foundation, which we did. And the way the museums were run, the Foundation at that time – and by the way, earlier, too. This was all right from the beginning, even when the development corporation was there, the museums themselves were run essentially by people interested in the museums. They decided what artifacts were there. They went out and found artifacts. They accepted artifacts that were offered to them, decided which ones to take and some to reject, and decided how the displays were going to be. What was going to be in the displays, put up the workings, the words that were going to go with the displays and why they were 5 there and why they were important to the city of Ogden and to the museum and the railroad (in the case of the railroad museums). There were essentially, in the beginning, five museums, which would have been the Eccles Rail Center, the Utah Railroad Museum, the Browning-Kimball Automobile Museum, the Browning Arms Museum, and the Gem and Mineral Display. I think the board was called the Natural History... But anyway, the museums were essentially under the auspices of the Development Corporation and the city – except for the gem and mineral thing. And for some odd reason… It was run very well, and it was a very, very nice display that was run by Ivan Adams and his wife and probably the Gem and Minerals Society of... I don't remember their name, exactly, but they sort of ran it independently; They did their own financing, they did their own decorations, their own things, really quite independent of either the development corporation or the Foundation, until some minor spat or something. I don't know what happened. They were unhappy with something, and I don't even know what, I'm sorry to say, but they left, and went to the Dinosaur Museum out there with a display out there, and they just took all their stuff. They owned everything, by the way; The other things in the museums and things were owned primarily by the city, but they just took their stuff and left. The Utah History Museum, or Cowboy Museum – I don't know what it's called – they already had a museum and an organization. And, I think Susie Van Hoosier, who was actually probably the wife of a Forest Service person, and she was on the city council, she brought them in; along with, I think Allen Hall worked with them as well. They, in the same way as the Gem museum, set up their own 6 museum, but inside the building. And they also own all of their own artifacts and things, and the city did not. And they just ran it totally independently for a while and finally decided that it had to be run also by the Foundation, just by virtue of keeping it staffed and having it. They had their own staff, by the way, but selling tickets and things like that. Whatever. And I'm sorry to say, I don't even know what their relationship to the city is anymore. But they got along and we all got along very nicely. The foundation did a lot of things like the railroad museum and so on. And we had a really dandy engineer who worked with us on the Foundation who was also a Forest Service person. And we did a lot. We got grants and things from the government and the city and people from around that were very generous to us and worked quite well. And I think we got a lot done. And I think a lot of what you see in the museum down there was certainly started earlier, but was in the shape where we redid and rebuilt almost all of the display areas – the Foundation did in the time that we were in charge. And the main problem, and I think that’s unfortunate, is that rather than running museums, we were very busy and working hard just to keep the building in shape and operating; It's not very old, but an old building. I think the construction of it was a little bit rushed by the railroad when they made it, and it just requires a lot of work. There are just maintenance things—you know, plumbing and all the electrical and just all sorts of things were just… And the agreement that we had with the city was that they would cover anything over X amount of money, and we would do everything that cost less, but even at that, it 7 just didn't work. We couldn't keep up. Like the fountain out in front; it leaked, and one thing and another, and… That was a nice thing and we kept it running. By the way, you know, tried to keep flowers. So there were just a lot of maintenance work and things, and I think we could say that we may have fallen down a little bit near the end. Just, we kind of got swamped. And for another reason I don’t know, I’m sorry to say, I thought things were running along reasonably well when the city decided – I thought rather arbitrarily – that the Foundation would not be dealing with the city, with the museums, in fact, at all. And it just sort of said, “Not only don’t we need you anymore, we don’t even want you.” So I want to tell you now – I think it’s our suspicion, but doesn’t have any basis, other than it seeming fairly obvious at this point-juncture of time – that the city wanted to take the Union Station and turn it into a real estate development, unfortunately. I think that was the city’s view. Let me backup a little bit earlier. The city bought the Shupe-Williams property, and that’s an area of a little more than two-and-a-half acres. It was just immediately south of the Union Station campus and the laundry building. And the city bought it, and the building was there, and it was old and ragged, and the building burned down, and the city razed it and filled in the hole. Hauled everything away, and they were stuck with this. And for some reason, the city, right at that time, the city was running a little shy on money or something, and anyway, they asked us to buy it, and we said yes. And the city charged us... I thought it was reasonably fair market value, and we went out and raised the money, which was a fair amount at that time. It was around $500,000, which was 8 a lot of money in those days, by the way. Doesn't seem like so much now, but we raised the money and bought that from the city. And so not only did the city tell us they didn’t want us anymore, but would we please give them back the property that we had paid for? Which I thought was a little backhanded. Anyway, it turns out that they wanted to set up this development and everything else, and I can't say for sure, but they, of course, wanted the building to be part of the next part of the rehabilitation. I think they wanted to put retail in there. They wanted to run the Frontrunner and eventually try to get back Amtrak, to run them through the building and set it up commercially. The best way, I think, that they felt to do that was frankly, they said, to get rid of the museums. And up to that point, I think they had attempted and failed to run the museums. They did a very poor job, and I can tell you that they essentially took the main people that were running the museums and things, just told them to get out of the building and never come back again. That included myself, and another remarkable one was Lee Witten, who essentially was one of the people right from the beginning. And I’ve neglected to mention, a big part of the Union Station operation down there and the work by the Foundation was Lee Witten, who essentially ran his own job running the archives of the Union Station. There’s an archive of the whole city of Ogden. He was very active. He was collecting photographs of the city and all that, and most of which, I think, now the University is in charge of. And they just locked the door on him, said, “Nope, you run this place for 20 9 years, and you're not welcome here anymore.” I mean, just a complete severance of the whole past of the city of Ogden and this really vast archive. But anyway, Steve Jones, who was on the Foundation board for a while – a person that was very interested in the railroad and so on – started, along with other people, a website about the Foundation, about the operations of the museums and buildings. And there were also some other railroad people on there as well, and it got to be pretty active. In fact, the operator of the museums, who was sort of in charge of the museums and things - who was, I believe, Damien something-or-other – had accused me of riling up the volunteers, because the city got rid of a lot of the volunteers, and a lot of those volunteers up and quit, partly because of the way the city treated them. And so I was accused of riling up volunteers, which I had nothing to do with at all, of course, but so it came down to it, just kind of nasty. They were accusing me of things that weren’t right, and one thing and another, and… I don't know. I was very unhappy by the way, I and the volunteers – in fact, the people that ran the museums – were treated. Like the people around the firearms museum that were firearms experts. They knew everything. They were just told, “Get out.” “We’ve been taking care of the guns forever.” “Don’t come back.” The fellow who took care of the cars, I think – when the cars were running well, and they were in the parades and they were upkept and things, and the city took over the cars. I don't think they've ever even been started, to run things since then, just… And the same thing with the railroad museum: They took down 10 some displays, it seemed, rather arbitrarily. They came up with reasons, by the way, for all the things they did. But that was okay. Anyway, I think the city finally decided that they really made a big mistake, and that they just couldn’t run it that way, and that they should, in fact, make friends again with everybody and see if they couldn’t repair the Union Station museums, and feeling, the building, and all of the people of Ogden, who were very vociferous in their objection to what was going on. And they brought in Christy McBride. They gave her a charter, but her work has been much involved now with getting the city back interested and involved in things in the Union Station and the museums that are there. And I think she's done an incredible job. She was given a very difficult job to do, I'm sorry to say, because they really fouled things up. But she was probably the right person to come along to try to make it up. And so she’s doing that now, and I’m glad to see you people here. I think you’re part of that project as well, to build it up and get ready, obviously, now, for the celebration of the building. And we’re all in favor of that, and we’re hoping to get back again and get interested, and we're happy to know that we have new people in charge [laughing]. I'm chuckling because one of the big things I forgot to say is obviously that part of this all started when the city decided that the Union Station itself would be part of the economic development part of the city. Well, economic development as doing running, and trying to run a museum and keep up a historic old building and things was totally beyond my comprehension. But that’s how it wound up, 11 and that was part of the problem. Okay, so let’s stop there. Now tell me what you want to know. AK: No, this is all great. LJ: I'm just rambling on. I'm sorry. I mean, I know that you have questions and things, and I will say, I wasn’t totally ignorant of the Union Station operation, because I had been in the station. I don’t know if I had taken the train out of there, once or whatever; I had taken a train out of there before, but the Amtrak used to run over there, and I took the train a number of times. And I remember even walking in the tunnels that went under the tracks, and I also remember the Foundation and the city closing up the tunnels. And I was really rather amused, because the city wanted to reopen the tunnels and things, and because I was partly there when the tunnels were closed off, I tried to tell the city that there was no way they were going to open those tunnels again. And they refused to believe me, but of course, they finally discovered there was no way they could open the tunnels again, just by the way they were closed up in the first place. And so I remember a lot of things about the station, but mostly it was all after the museums were all done and really up and operational, and before I got involved. But since I started…I’ll say, it was around the 1980s, so I had almost 40 years working down there, and I enjoyed it immensely. I just liked it. I like the old museums. Even the Gem and Minerals, I really quite like. My son’s a geologist, and of course, the minerals and things they had, they were all of interest to him as well as me. And the firearms was partly because of my wife’s family and their involvement with them. And I knew essentially nothing about, very honestly, 12 about my wife’s family’s business before I went down and started working in the museums and talked to the experts down there, who were a lot more willing to talk to me about the business and things, and what’s going on in Browning Arms. And in fact, my wife’s brothers and father were all actively involved in the business, of course, but had really no business talking to me. So the museums kind of brought me around a lot, and I got quite interested in firearms and in antique automobiles. I even wound up buying one and finally gave it to the museum, actually. And… Well, anyway. Now what? AK: Well, that's all extremely helpful. Thank you. So when I interviewed Charlie Trentleman and Roberta Beverly, they both cited you and Judy as being instrumental in developing the museum. They said that it would not have happened without you guys and the Brownings, and so I wanted to hear a little bit more about that. Who are Judy's parents? LJ: Well, her father was one of the younger sons, actually, of John M. Browning. Her mother was, I believe, from Farmington, and they lived back and forth between Ogden and Belgium. The Browning Arms company went to Belgium to manufacture their guns, when they decided they would manufacture them themselves rather than have other people manufacture the guns. People who were manufacturing Browning licensing were through all the largest firearms companies, not only in the United States, but probably in the world. But when they decided to start making them themselves – well, obviously they didn’t make them themselves – but they worked with Fabrique Nationale Belgium by a rather curious arrangement, I believe, by a guy who happened to be in the United 13 States, working for Fabrique Nationale, looking for bicycles, I believe. He was actually a great friend of the Wright Brothers in aviation. The Wright Brothers were bicycle manufacturers before they got to be in airplanes, and he was working for FN United States. He happened to run across Mr. Browning – that is, John M. Browning – and introduced him, I think, to Fabrique Nationale. And that was the beginning of a great relationship between the Brownings and FN. But John M. worked over there for quite a while to get them started and up and running, and then his son, Val, took over the work in Belgium. And the plant in Belgium was taken over by the Germans, both in the First and the Second World Wars and made firearms and things for the German Army. And Val was in the Army right at the end of the First World War, took over the work in Belgium. And I believe, other than coming back here to get married and one thing and another, he spent most of his time in Belgium working at FN and was back and forth until just before the Second World War, when he realized he had to leave again and move back to Ogden. It was essentially at that time that my wife was born, here in Ogden, but she went to Belgium back and forth a few times. But anyway, so they lived here through the Second World War, but after the Second World War, he moved back to Belgium to get everything started up again and get the production running again at FN. And so he was back and forth from Belgium a fair bit. But he had that nice house here in Ogden and things, and he got interested in the museums. One of the people in the city that was very responsible for the museums was Bud Mitchell, who was on the city council. He was one that I remember. And 14 of course, an employee of the city that ran the museums very, very capably for a long time was Teddy Griffith. When the Union Station Development Committee was running the museum, she essentially was the liaison between the city and the museums, and worked very well. And I can’t remember in that time there was any friction whatsoever between the museums and the city and so on, all due to the capable work of Teddy Griffith. She ran a really nice show. And I want to say, at the same time, another person who was very, very active was Mike, oh… The dentist. He was a dentist, but much more avidly, I think, interested in the railroad than dentistry. The railroad car in the south there was almost single-handedly his work. They got the railroad car, they refurbished it up and things, and I think he was even instrumental in getting the post office boxcar in and working. I was amusingly interested in the post office railroad car because it had run up through Idaho, and I was very familiar with it from having been raised there, and it had the names of all the funny little towns in Idaho. And I'm sure, when I was younger, I delivered newspapers that came in on the railroad; We used to go down to the railroad station every morning and wait for the train to come in and dump off the newspapers. And I'm sure that this railroad car was one that came by occasionally when I was waiting for the railroad. So that worked fine. And then, I will say, I’ve already said that Roberta Beverly had worked for the Forest Service, and we were very happy to have her on. And it turned out she was very capable, and I would say, somewhat hampered by the continual need for upkeep of the thing, which she did very well. 15 She worked with the city nicely, essentially. The plaza out in front and things, she did all that and got the city working with it and everything else. I thought she worked very well with the city. There was obviously some minor frictions over who should pay for what. And I want to say another thing: from the beginning the city kind of kept the museums a little bit isolated, partly because we were forbidden to hire lobbyists to lobby the Utah Legislature to try to get money. The city felt, I think, that they didn’t want people that the legislature could confuse as being part of the city asking for money independently of the city. So we were somewhat hampered by trying to directly… They did, in fact, give us the honorary title of the Utah State Railroad Museum, but no money came with it. And it was, you know, so… And I can’t totally say that was to blame for the city, that we couldn’t directly go to the legislature, but I think it kind of hampered us in our fundraising and all of these. The other person that you mentioned, Charlie Trentleman, was just… we had known him when he was with the paper and things, and he was very interested. And he was a great friend of Lee Witten’s in the library, and especially Lee's interest in photography and getting old photographs. Of course, Charlie was the same way, and we were very happy to have him on the board. And I’m not sure exactly if he went off the board, or… I, really awkwardly, I… The foundation and the board wanted to operate the museums. That partly was my interest, so when the city didn’t want us to operate the museums anymore, ‘course, I kind of lost it. But I was told to get out of it anyway. But then it got around that the city decided that they wanted to run 16 the museums, and they wanted the Foundation to solely raise money for the museums, and not just for the museums, but actually for the actual renovation and things at the station, save the museums. The foundation was solely set to run the museums, not so much the building, but the city wanted them to raise money for the building. So there was a time there when we had people on the foundation board that were interested in museums and things, on the history and whatnot, like Charlie, and even I was urged, but I didn’t so much. But after I left, they did try to get people on the foundation board that were more able and capable of raising money for the city, and raising money was never one of my strongholds. I was perfectly willing to do it, but I did it somewhat reluctantly, and felt that to raise money, you needed to get money for programs. Like, you had to say, “Would you give us the money for this rather specific program?” And when they got money from Mr. Browning and Mr. Eccles and things, that was just exactly the way they got it. They said, “This is what we want to do. We want to build this kind of new museum. This is what we'll do. We would like you to give money for it, and we’ll put your name on it if you want, or not. And please give us what you can.” That was for specific items. The city then wanted the Foundation to raise money for the general operation of the thing; that is, the money that we were supposed to be getting up. And, by the way, was going to go straight to the city – and is still that way now – and that we couldn’t go to a donor and say, “Would you give money for this or that,” like, for instance, to refurbish the railroad museum. We couldn’t go say, 17 “Would you give us money for this?” We said no. It was the program of the city, and the city wouldn't tell us what they wanted to do, and so I got mildly disinterested. That wasn't what I wanted to do. That's not what I felt the purpose of the foundation was for. And the city and I were sort of loggerheads, and that was okay. I think under Christie McBride, we're trying to make friends again. AK: Going back a tiny bit: It seems like kind of the hinge point was when Mayor Godfrey decided to do away with the Development Corporation. And from what I understand, the Development Corporation ran the museums. But did he want the Foundation to basically be a free Development Corporation for the foundation? Sounds like it was mostly volunteer, but was the Development Corporation paid? LJ: The Developement Corporation was all volunteers. The Development Corporation was essentially spearheaded when I got interested in it by Tom Moore, who was a schoolteacher. He taught English, History, or Literature, or something at Weber State and was very, very active in the museum and things. And a very good friend, by the way, of not only me, but Mr. Browning. And he was kind of a charmer. He could go to Mr. Browning and say, you know, “We need money for this or that.” He sort of reluctantly would give it to him. But no, it was all volunteers. But the people that were on it were typically interested in some part of the museums. Like, there were railroad people that were on the board and things, and firearms people – eventually, myself included. And automobile people, and people from the gem and mineral museum; We had all sorts of people that were interested in the museums on the board, as well as the people who were there, mostly, because they were donors or wanted to be or 18 whatever. But mostly, they were all people who were interested in the museums. They were all volunteers. I said it was called the Development Corporation, but it was essentially to refurbish the building in the beginning and set up the museums. AK: Okay. Do you remember, what was the state of the building when you first started working there? Was it still pretty rundown? LJ: It seemed all right, and sort of always did seem all right. You know, there was this kind of crumbling from inside and things. There's a river that runs underneath the building, by the way. It was sort of down a ways, but there's a very high water table in that part of Ogden. And especially if it was rainy or something, or the snow was melting in the spring, you can just go in and look in the bottom, as I recall, by the elevator shaft, and there was just a river running down there open. You just look right down and see it. And in one of the flood-y years, the basement flooded. In fact, we had a vault in the basement that belonged to the firearms museum, and I remember going down there and having to get all the guns off the floor and stack them up and dry them out. And then I built a whole bunch of racks up off the floor to put the guns up to keep them off the floor for the next flood, which I don't think ever happened. So there were just little things like that. The public doesn't see a flood in the basement of the Union Station, but they were there. And so there were just these little things like that. AK: That’s a fun behind-the-scenes story. 19 LJ: You know, the building always seems to be in pretty good shape. They built an addition: On the back of the station was a big awning that just went out to the tracks, and they covered that all in, and that turned into a little art gallery there that, in fact, my wife built for ‘em. And the other thing: that’s the annex to the Browning Theater. And in fact, even the breezeway between the main building and the theater was all just sort of tacky add-ons that were just sort of thrown out and things, and they were just constantly needing just some little thing, that repair or whatever. But generally, the buildings were pretty in good shape. I think the architects wanted to redo the building for something, whatever. They could always find some reason to do it for safety reasons; The building was going to fall in or something. But by and large, I think the main buildings themselves were pretty structurally sound. But things like, unfortunately, the theater and things—there's a big row of windows across the top of it, and they're just thrown in. They were single-pane glass and some of them have been painted over, and some of them were broken and things, and they all had to be repaired. We did a lot of repairs, a lot of redecoration of the lobby and the… Not so much the lobby because the paintings up on the wall were pretty sacred; no one was gonna touch them. But we did a lot in the Browning Theater. And in fact, by the way, in the early days, we had plays in the theater and things and it was really fairly active. And we had a lot of things going on there. And so, that's sort of faded away. And I think the city now is coming back to some of those things, especially events. And I think, amusingly, Roberta Beverly convinced everyone that the museum was haunted, so they had witch hunts 20 down there and, you know, the ghost hunts and whatever. I think she even got them down in the basement once. Anyway, they did that. The city sort of was trying to continue that kind of a Halloween tradition down there. AK: Okay, I'm curious about the story behind that. So how did she convince everyone that it was haunted? Did she truly believe that it was haunted? LJ: She may have. I don't know. Maybe people came to her who gave her the idea that there were ghosts in there and things, but… Well, I don’t know. But she kind of enjoyed doing the Halloween bit and things and got that going. So… I’m out of my league. Though there may be somebody who even thought they'd ran into one in the halls upstairs or other. But I don’t know. AK: You mentioned that Judy helped with building the art gallery, which I didn't realize. Is she an artist herself? LJ: Yes. Right now, she does mostly draws and things, and does paintings. There’s some around the house here, of course, but, you know. And they had, every month or so, some typically local artists, and some artists that came from as far as Idaho and even California, bring their works and have a show in there and sell art. And some of it was decent crafts, but mostly it was art things that came. And they had, when they had gallery openings on the first Friday of the month or something. They were always open and selling, and so they would have artists there and things. And they did that for a long time. And plenty of art here came from those shows and things, and that's really totally different artists. AK: Now, is this the Myra Powell Art Gallery, or the one downstairs? 21 LJ: No, the Myra Powell Gallery was much different. The Myra Powell Gallery had mostly nothing in it, but there was a fair collection of Myra Powell’s stuff, and occasionally when we wanted, we would have a separate show up there in the gallery upstairs – which, by the way, the foundation pretty well redid. And that was more of a separate, and there was a Myra Powell art collection itself – not all by Myra Powell, but a bit of it – and things that were a part of a permanent collection of the museum. And I presume those paintings were all stacked up on the walls. I don't even know where they are now. AK: And was Myra Powell a local artist, then? LJ: Yes, but I didn't know her. I think she died before I got involved. AK: Okay. Were you involved in creating the Myra Powell Gallery? LJ: Not myself. Most of the work was done in the gallery. We just started cleaning it up and polishing the wood and making benches and a ramp that goes down into it and things. The space there was really just a conduit between the north and the south end of the building upstairs, and the south end wasn't really used a lot. Sort of right from the beginning, the eastern part of that was rented out, and I think it was rented out all the time that I was there. The city collected rent, and I think they finally did give us the rent from those offices that were up there. And then across the hall from that was a trainman’s room; They had larger events, but not typically Union Station events. If the Foundation had an event or whatever, it typically was in the lobby or in the museum or in the theater. And that up there, it was mostly rented out to people to have events. And one of the events that was popular were Mexican weddings, by the way, and when some of those got very 22 raucous and things – in fact, shooting up other people out in the parking lot – well, we had to stop running Mexican weddings. But there were a lot of other groups that went up there too as well. But, yeah. AK: So I'm curious to hear the story behind becoming designated as the Utah State Railroad Museum. How did that come about? LJ: Uh... I'm not sure, exactly. I think some of that kind of came about around the same time that we got that locomotive from the park in Salt Lake; and a lot of that was done by the city, and the state kicked in some money to ship that thing up here. That was actually kind of fun. That was really quite a deal to truck that locomotive up here from Salt Lake. That’s a big, big piece of stuff and very heavy, and yeah. Anyway, it was supported by straps. They were just like packing straps that they used to hold things down on trucks, but in this case, they lifted them. They were huge, big woven things. I'm having a little trouble coming up with the dentist’s last name. But he was fairly much implicated in getting the designation for the Utah State Railroad Museum. And we did that. And I think that was done a lot through the Foundation and [unintelligible]. And the city, of course, was involved too, and the hope originally was to have that designation. AK: So that way you could get more funding from the legislature? LJ: Well, that was the hope, yes. But. We got some funding from the legislature, which was trivial, pretty well, except for going to specific projects, like when we had a project like moving the locomotive or things like that. They would kick in, but. 23 AK: And which locomotive did you get from Salt Lake? LJ: Oh. The big steam locomotive that’s in the Union Station. It was at LIberty Park, the park down by the railroad station in Salt Lake, the park there. And unfortunately, then, as now, it was full of homeless people. They would climb in the locomotive and camp out and everything else, and were just staying. So the city finally decided to fence it off. I don’t know why they have it there; the place it belonged was in the Utah State Railroad Museum, which I think we were by then. And so they brought it up here. I think they thought, originally, that they could just put it on the tracks and run it up. But the Union Pacific is very particular about what they'll let on the tracks. But I think even they knew that this thing wasn’t, and might break down on the tracks somewhere, or may be too heavy for some of the tracks. I don't think they wanted to run the risk of blocking the railroad traffic by hauling that up, so it was brought up by truck. By the way, the dentist's name was Mike Burdette. He was just a great railroad aficionado, and part of his work on that was taken over by Steve Jones. And by the way, our archivist, Lee Witten, was also a very great fan of the railroad. They had a group that was refurbishing a very old locomotive – An old Denver Rio Grande, I believe; narrow-gauge railroad. They had the locomotive, they had all the parts there, mostly for the locomotive and the tender, and they were working very actively on rebuilding the tender, which they finally did. And they worked in the signals called the Trainman’s Building, which was on the extreme north end of the building, and they worked on this locomotive and the tender. So they got the tender pretty well done. They got a good start on the 24 locomotive, and then nobody knew who owned the locomotive. It was just [mimics explosion]. And it was finally discovered that possibly the state owned it, and there was some problem with the ownership. I think they finally… So the people that were working on this locomotive and things were the Locomotive and Trainmen’s Group. There's a nationwide group, and there's a local chapter of locomotive engineers or something, and they wanted control; They wanted to own the locomotive, but I think the city finally got it. And then, that was also part of the final thing, that the city just locked the building and told the trainman they couldn't come in, they couldn't go in there anymore. And they were in there every Saturday morning forever, and a lot of time they just sat around and drank coffee. But a lot of times they worked on this locomotive. And they told them they couldn't go in there anymore. But this thing was full of equipment that they owned, you know, table saws and band saws, lathes, all sorts of stuff to do repairs and whatnot. And so the city made enemies of them as well. Just… Anyway. And the building is still locked up, as near as I know, and there's no interest or effort to work on that locomotive anymore. Another thing, just casually, is a homeless problem. One of the big snow blowers, like the big ones used by the railroad to clear the tracks – and they themselves were steam operated, but the steam was all used for the snowblower rather than for propulsion. So they were pushed in front of a locomotive, but they still had… They're sort of set up like a locomotive. The people running it are sort of sitting up above the snow blower and had a little room in there to keep them warm for the winter with a big coal fire going behind them. But the homeless 25 decided that they would live in the one owned by the Union Station, so the homeless would move into the snowblower. And then, of course, when it got really cold, they would just break off a big chunk of the wood that was part of the snowblower and build a fire in there to keep themselves warm. So there were repairs like that, and some of the things that are virtually impossible to keep people out of them. And the Locomotive and Trainmen Group really did a lot of work like that, especially out in the railyard. They did a lot of maintenance out there, just keeping those things all together, even as they were, people were trying to dismantle ‘em. There was another fine old car out there that I think the transients set fire to that was a dairy car that hauled milk around or something. And it was a fine old car, but it finally burned. We had to get rid of that. The foundation also owned a bunch of railroad cars that are not down at the station, that are out at the BDO now and always have been out at the BDO. A couple of which I was particularly fond of that we wanted to bring back in and refurbish were the Saltair cars. There was a railroad that ran from Salt Lake City out to Saltair, and they had these open cars. People just sat on benches inside, they were open on the sides. You could just get on in from the outside, and they had a canopy and seats down inside. And I don't know who organized all this, but we went out to Saltair, probably one of the last times. This was shortly after I was married, shortly after everything's restocked and sold there. Went out on one of these railroad cars. We were pulled out and we were shooting pheasants, and we were sitting along the sides of the open cars with our shotguns and shooting pheasants, and had a 26 picnic lunch, and everything. We went out to Saltair and came back. I don't think we shot any pheasants, or very few, but it was just kind of a fun experience. and then those cars wound up for the museum, but they went out to the BDO. And we wanted to bring ‘em in and work on ‘em, and there was just no room to put ‘em, and, so, just sort of were out there rusting away. And then we had a fellow who came in who wanted to run a railroad. I don't know what his deal was. He had a couple of locomotives, and he wanted to have a railroad museum of his own, or he wanted them to be operational. They were operational. He brought them down to us, and he worked very actively to try to get a part of BDO for an annex to the railroad museum where we could put the leftover rolling stock and put it out there and take care of the stuff that we had out there. We had a big building that we got from the city that we had this rollingstock and things in; some of what was inside the building was out in the air. And the city was very uncooperative about doing anything at BDO because they wanted that all to rent out and bring in money again.And we were going to run a railroad ‘cause we had the railroad cars and trains, and we were going to run a sightseeing railroad. First, of course, the great hope was to go clear out to Promontory, but it was finally realized that that was not feasible. And the big argument finally was – of course, this was when I was out at Thiokol – was going to make space shuttle things, and we wanted to put them on the railroad. Even NASA, with all the money that NASA had, couldn’t put the railroad out to Promontory, so it was rather certain that nobody else could if NASA couldn’t. 27 So we were gonna have a little thing that went out by the BDO, and there was a nice place out there where we were gonna have a circle going around, and the railroad would just go out from the station, go out across the Ogden River, and go out and circle around and have a little development out there with little shops, maybe, and the railroad would stop and things. And we did a lot of work. I really did a lot of work, especially with railroad people to get that going, and the city wouldn’t do that either. They were all set to build apartment buildings out on the place where the – I mean, wasn't anything out there then – but on the place that we wanted to make the big trip around for the railroad. So they wanted to put housing developments out there, and so they nixed that. So we have some bad conflicts with the city, by the way. Yeah, the things we wanted to do and things that just didn't work out. AK: I'm curious, you mentioned that you guys had purchased the Shupe-Williams location. What were you originally wanting to put out there? LJ: Well, when it became pretty obvious that the museum was just expanding beyond what they could do, and for the railroad museum, we just wanted to have that as a buffer that we could move the big heavy rolling stock stuff. There were tracks that went out there that had been there and could use a little bit, easily have been replaced and things. So, it was realized that we needed more space and so… We weren’t, by the way, at all opposed to some development down there. It needed to be done because the building itself needed to be refurbished and we needed new space to add things and put things in. 28 One of the original things that we wanted to do was in the laundry building. And the city, by the way, sort of nixed that. The laundry building roof had big gaping holes in it, but I think it's a good, sturdy building and all it needed was a new roof. And we figured out how we could put that in, and I think we could have afforded it. And they're giving us a special project, gone out and got money for it. But the city was just very lackluster on that. They didn’t seem to want to do it. Again, here’s part of commercial development: museums just don’t bring in money, and that’s.... Another thing – I’m not really sure how this happened – there was this guy who not only worked at Thiokol, but he was a state legislator from Brigham City for Box Elder County. And he was a master at rebuilding old buggies. He rebuilt old horse-drawn things; Buggies, coaches. He just had an absolutely amazing collection, and he wanted to put them in the laundry building. So he came down, and we met with him a lot, and we sometimes had his things; like one of them was a horse-drawn fire engine that we had in the museums for a while, and we wanted to move him into the laundry building. And we were going to put a stage up where there were people refurbishing them and have a restaurant in there and food and these buggies that were world-class. I mean, they were just, they really were. And it turned out he wanted us to hire him at some ridiculous salary every year to run them and things before he let us put him in there. And that didn't work out. I don't think that was the city’s fault at all, but obviously we couldn't afford to hire them and the city couldn't either, or didn't want to. So we just had a lot of fun projects going on; some of which didn’t work out, some that did. 29 AK: It sounds like the Union Station museum was really important to the community to start and to continue. Why do you feel that Union Station was so important to the Ogden community? LJ: Well, the station itself was, of course, important because the city was essentially built on the railroad. So I think there was certainly a city here long before the railroad, but Ogden sort of was built by the railroad. And there were just a lot of railroad people here, but even the people that were here were sort of brought here by the railroad. So the City was sort of centered around 25th Street and a lot of development down there. And then, oh, it's the Second World War, essentially, downtown, and I – by the way, I went to the University of Utah for a while – and Ogden’s 25th Street was just sort of abandoned by the city genteel to the railroad. And particularly the people who worked on the railroad, the colored people who worked as porters and waiters and things, and the conductors who did the heavy, dirty work, were just sort of given 25th Street. And so I think a lot of interest in the railroad, the station itself, kind of vanished because the railroads kind of went away. The passenger service went. And when Amtrak came, this was an Amtrak station down there for a long time. In fact, the foundation had its offices in the old Amtrak office, and then when the Amtrak stopped, there was no railroad activity down there at all until Frontrunner came in. And there was a lot of talk about the Frontrunner going right to the station and kind of coming through, and we were kind of opposed to that. I didn't think that anybody really felt like that was an appropriate place for the Frontrunner to come in, because the Frontrunner was different from the railroad and things. They weren’t for people 30 coming and going, you know, to California or Portland or back to Omaha or Denver. The Frontrunner’s for commuters, and a commuter doesn’t want to get off the train and have to walk through a building where there are people trying to sell ‘em stuff and things. He just, A) wants to get home or to work, or B) wants to use the bathroom. And we sort of felt that the Union Station itself was a little bit more important than being a big bathroom or a… So we were not at all opposed to putting the Frontrunner station where it is. They could have done more, by the way, to make the front runner station amenable, but that was between UTA and the city, and so I don't know. So we were mildly opposed to that, and… But that was long after it was done. So part of the interest of the city in the Union Station sorta came when 25th Street was all cleaned up, so it finally got so you could go downtown – People still sorta didn't, but where you felt like you could go downtown and things were still going on downtown and things. Then the Union Station got to be more important, and then the people in Ogden were more interested in taking care of it, and the railroad had given the building to the city. And the city decided, I think they had it for really quite a while before they even decided to refurbish it. And so they went out into the city and got people to pay to refurbish the building. And I'm sorry to say, I don't know what the percentages of things were between the local people and what the city put up, but the city had a lot of workmen down there and things. They did a lot of work, by the way. I don't want to diminish the work that the city did down there to get things running. 31 So I think the rise of the Union Station sort of came along with the re-gentrification on 25th Street. 25th Street was a long time in getting re-gentrified. Of course, by the fact they were tearing a building down there, the gentrification of 25th Street didn't work all that smoothly. But, no. And I think by the same token, the city was trying development to build commercially rather than as the local attraction, to put in shops and to bring attention to the museums and bring attention to the city itself, which is certainly the 25th Street. They kind of moved up to Washington Boulevard, which was kind of a nice booming area when we first moved here. Now even it's in need of gentrification. AK: It’s interesting that 25th Street and Union Station are so connected like that. LJ: Yeah! They're tied. They're just totally tied together. And by the way, a lot of people still believe that and think so. I want to just bring this up quickly if you're going to put a whole thing in: I talked about this guy, Mike Burdette, who was the dentist and the railroad aficionado, you know. There was what we called the Burdette plan, which wasn't his; it might’ve been his originally, but not just his. And that was, of course, put Wall Avenue underground. If the Union Station is going to be an important part of the city, and if this development they wanted to do all along the railroad tracks from like 23rd to 27th or 28th, all through there, and the WonderBlock that they're keen on developing – if those things are going to be workable and be places that people will want to come and work and live, they need to put Wall Avenue underground. It needs to be down there so that you have free access. People walking, bicycling can get from the city to the Union Station complex, and get around from even the WonderBlock, because people 32 like to get out and walk and they need to have open areas, and turning that into a plaza gives the open area that will make the development of the Union Station possible. It needs to be done. And by the way, I've even talked to people from UDOT, Utah Department of Transportation. They realize that it has to be done. There isn't any secret that if Ogden is going to ever thrive and have a downtown that is working, that Wall Avenue through that area just has to go. And that's a lot of money, by the way. I'm not minimizing the difficulty. And as I told you before, there's a high water table down there. You've got to take care of the water. But there are plenty of cities that have subways that are under water and underpasses and everything else that go in the high water. Just, it’s knowing how to take care of it. And so, some of my work now that started after we weren't really taking care of the museums anymore, was just trying to make the museums and that whole development down there more useful and helpful to the city. It helped the city. And trying to get Wall Avenue underground is so important to the success of not only the Union Station, but the WonderBlock and 25th Street itself, as far as that goes. AK: Yeah, that's an interesting idea. I think that would be awesome for the Farmers’ Markets they have down there too. LJ: Everything in Ogden would just come alive. AK: So I think we are starting to wrap up on our questions. So I only have a couple more questions for you. LJ: Yeah, sure. 33 AK: While you were involved in the Foundation and everything, what was the importance to you? What was your big “why” for helping to preserve Union Station? LJ: Partly… we weren’t living in Ogden, by the way, we were living in Pleasant View and I was working at Thiokol, and it’s a long drive out there back and forth every day. And I was getting tired of that. And I thought, “I need to get something else.” And I thought, “Well, we're sort of here in the Ogden area, and I had to get involved with some things down here.” And, as I say, I had met Tom Moore a number of different times and was quite friendly. And then, my father-in-law had given a lot of money to the Foundation, and oddly enough, not many people in that family were all that interested in firearms and especially in the history of firearms, which was kind of odd. Mr. Browning had collected all of the early firearms that were down there from his father's shop and his shop, and he sent his son, Judy's brother, out to collect them all and put them all together and get the various pieces, because the way they designed things is they took pieces from some guns and put them in others and just shuffled them around. And so he had to put them all together and get them all organized and together. And they gave him to the National Guard, and they put ‘em in an armory out in South Ogden. And then it turned out that the National Guard couldn't take care of them. Wouldn’t keep the museum open, wouldn't this or that, and they were just… it was pretty clear they didn't belong out there. And so Mr. Browning and the city and the National Guard all decided that they belonged in the Union Station, which they did. 34 And like I said, nobody else was really interested in the history of it. And so I thought, “Well, I kind of like history,” and one thing and another, I ought to get involved, not only with the city, but with that and this other stuff. And after I did, I got very interested not only in the operation of the museum—by the way, I was on the board of the Utah Museum of Natural History for quite a while. And so I was interested in museums, and I was interested in being out in the community and working, and this was a natural fit for me. AK: So, were you involved in putting together the gun museum then, or was that mostly Val Browning who was in charge of that? LJ: Putting the museum together? Not originally. We did a lot of different work. There have been a lot of iterations. The original museum, the cases weren’t adequate to protect the guns from being stolen and things. So we made new cases, new lighting, new organizations of the firearms, and I helped with a lot of that, but a lot of it was done. By the way, one of the great firearms people was Reed Betts. He was a retired colonel from the Army and had nothing to do with the Browning Arms Company at all or anything, but a very good friend of Mr. Browning's, and very interested in the museums. And so he was very responsive, in the way the guys were set up and displayed, and so on. Another person that was very much interested was Ward Armstrong, who had run a sporting goods store in Ogden for many, many years. He was a great firearms person. And so, I think we should have delegated those people to kind 35 of run the firearms museum which had been rebuilt, and Ward Armstrong, and myself. And then typically, if we needed something, new carpet or whatever, we’d go ask Mr. Browning. He said, “Oh, okay.” So, that was the way the firearms museums was. But setting up the basic things, no, I didn’t have much to do with. But ike that entrance to the railroad museum, getting the fresh wood and thinking, we did all that. The Foundation did all that. Built all that, built those ramps up there. We sorta rebuilt it. One of the fun things we did was moved a locomotive in there. I mean, it just barely fit. I mean, it was scraping the paint off of the walls and things, and we put it in there. And we had a master guy who claimed he was a bit of an artist as well, but he ran the Ogden Art Metal. And he sawed the thing in two, and then he welded it all back together after we got it in there. So that was a fun operation. AK: When you mention a locomotive, is that the train car that has the Hostlers’ model train layout in the windows? LJ: Yeah. AK: Okay. That's so cool. LJ: Yeah, we did that. None of that stuff was inside the building, and we just moved it in. You know, it was out in the yard rusting away. So yeah, kinda just fun little projects like that. And then, I kind of liked the old watches, and we had a time display in there, a display of old railroad watches. I don't think people realize that the railroad invented time in the United States. They set up all the time things. Everything was done by the railroad, universal time, you know, and the time 36 zones across, they were all set by the railroad. And in fact, there used to be, right on the edge of town in Ogden, a sign that says, “You are now leaving Central time and you're going into Pacific time.” Right? That was in Ogden, and they finally moved it out to the Nevada border. But when I first came here, it was there. So when I first started working at Thiokol, for instance, a totally different time zone than Ogden. But, and so, the railroad had this great influence on the time, and they, of course, wanted to have the time zone right there when they changed crews on the train. So it would be, if they were going west, they would be in one time zone for essentially their whole work shift. So, we did think time was very important, and railroad watches that they had were very interesting. There were some of the finest pieces of engineering and mechanical work and construction in the world at that time, done in the United States for these railroad watches. There was a lot of work, of course, on the clocks and things that ships used for navigation and whatnot were done in Europe. But for the little handheld things that the conductors could use and keep the trains on time, they were American. AK: That's fascinating. I did not know about that. Would you tell me about the story behind getting the Salt Lake Trestle wood into the museum? LJ: I think we actually got the impetus from that from the fact that the trestle was coming down, and this company had essentially bought – there might have been two – had bought the wood off them, and it was probably the wood off of the trestle. And sorting it out, and the company’s headquarters, I think, were here in Ogden, so people knew them, and they knew us, and they agreed to give us all 37 that wood. And I’m not sure that they didn’t even bring it in and help us bolt it together. And some of it may have been already bolted together, sort of in the way it is. And then we had pictures of the trestle and things, and tried to make it look as much as we could like the original trestle. AK: That's really cool. That's fascinating. Are there any other cool stories like that with the museums that you'd like to share for the video? LJ: Well, the canopy over the locomotives that are lined up there. We originally did not have the steam locomotives, even after the canopy was built. And then we brought those locomotives in, and people liked to take pictures of ‘em, and we made a little thing out there. We had to do something with that end of the building. And why was that, the windows were broken out or something? And so we designed and built that little ramp that goes up. The idea was that people would get up there and take pictures of the four locomotives in a row, and we did those. And another thing that we did that was only recently completed by the city was the big railroad turbine. We always did have that, but it never had turbines or electrical generators in it. It was an empty shell, but it was a very, very, very nice, fancy, empty shell. It was a wonderful experiment by the railroad to build an absolutely massive locomotive that could haul an unlimited amount, but it couldn't because of the traction. It didn't have enough traction with the tracks and things, so it turned out to be impractical, and it wouldn't go through a tunnel because the turbine stopped working when it ran out of air. And the railroad went to what they have now, which is a lot of smaller diesel locomotives. So you sometimes see a 38 train – not coming through here, but we see ‘em up in Idaho all the time – it has, like, ten locomotives on it pulling a train instead of one, which the big locomotives were designed to do, but were impractical. So that was interesting, and keeping some of those up. We were given locomotives that worked and tried to keep them working. We had a locomotive that we rented out to the Utah Railroad that they use that essentially belonged to the Union Station. And so it was fun working on that, and especially the, mostly the train people and the medical people redid the World War Two hospital car; They did that, essentially delivered it to us completed. And then we got the Post Office car, and we wanted to make them accessible to people, because I can imagine that neither of you have ever really been inside of a railroad boxcar to see what's in there, what's going on, or how much it will hold, or anything else. As we know, we had to make a way for people to see inside the Post Office car, to see how they sorted mail as the train was running, and also into the hospital car to see how the troops were treated when they were hauled off the battlefield. And we built the ramp up to those cars so that it would be handicap accessible, and put a handrail on, so we decided to put the Post Office car on one side, and the medical car on the other. So we built all those things. It was all fun. We had this terrific engineer named Russ Roller who came from the Forest Service, who was a great help on all of those things. And his wife was very interested in art, and she was very instrumental in helping us with the museum, with the little art museum that’s down there, right on the track, so. 39 AK: That’s cool. Do you know why so many people from the Forest Service joined the Foundation? LJ: I think part of it was that they were all sorta moved in here. And partly the same reason I did: they wanted to be a part of the community. They'd come from someplace else, and that was an easy thing. And very honestly, I'm not sure that the Forest Service kind of asked the people if they would become a little more involved with the community. I'm not sure. But, by the way, their interest was far away and above anything that the Forest Service saying, “Please, could you maybe get a little involved with the community?” Way far above that. They were very dedicated and hardworking and things, as were the whole families from the Forest Service people. AK: That’s awesome. Perfect. Well, let me see. I think that's about all my questions. Let me double-check my notes here... LJ: Well, I've told you a lot of nonsense; Things that are mostly my feelings about the whole thing, so… AK: No, it was great. Very helpful. LJ: By the way, we're encouraged by what the city's doing now, and I believe that we can come through a nice arrangement on how to take care of the building – which I think now, with the hundredth anniversary, the city is now, probably, hopefully committed to the building itself. And whether the museums stay there or not, I would be perfectly happy if they built an area separate from that building for the museum and for the railroad museum, especially the railroad museum. The railroad museum needs space to keep that stuff. People should be able to 40 walk down there by one of those locomotives, which they can now, of course, and look up and see just how damn big those things were. I mean, they’re a great engineering marvel themselves. And I have been to the finest railroad museums. The English Railroad Museum is just unbelievable. It's, of course, a National English History Museum, and the state government puts money into it and things. And it's just, it's nice. They have the royal trains in there, of course, the trains that were made to carry Queen Victoria around. And by the way, they were very fancy, very well-equipped and things. And it was kind of interesting, when we went to the railroad museum, it was at the same time an excursion went up to the Railroad Museum, but the locomotive that was supposed to be taking it, which I think was the Flying Scotsman or something, broke down and had to be brought up by the Harry Potter locomotive that was done for the movie, the Harry Potter train. And so that came up there essentially the same time we did. It was kind of amusing, but it was fun to go through the museum. And, of course, the San Francisco Railroad Museum, that is supported by the state of California, is also very nice and rather extensive and has good rolling stock and good displays. We would like to have done that but didn’t manage, unfortunately. But we could. Now if the city gets interested, we can get some money and build a specific railroad museum that should encompass some of the area along the new development down there. If not, I wouldn't be at all even opposed to running a train from down there out to the Business Depot Ogden and have a satellite museum out there that had locomotives and other heavy 41 equipment that you didn't want to make room to store in downtown Ogden. But that's partly up to the city. I’ve said a lot of negative things, and I felt very negatively about the city there for quite a while, and I’m feeling much better about it now. I think our new mayor – he got rid of the head of economic development, which I was really happy to see, and sorry to say – but we quite like him, the new mayor, and hope for the future. AK: I’m glad to hear it. In your opinion, Why is it important to have Union Station preserved for future generations? LJ: Well, the museum itself, partly because people need to know that Ogden was a railroad town, and that's there. And it is; Ogden is a, that’s it. I mean, when you stop to think of it, other than the locomotives and things that are parked around the Union Station, I mean, the site of the Union Station is in fact railroad, and what was here and things. You know, the Frontrunner is no fancier than a bus line or something coming into the town. I mean, it is the railroad, but it's not a railroad. It's something else. It's for commuters, not for moving stuff around. And the station is a great statement of that for the city of Ogden. For that reason, I think this is why it's important. It’s a nice building. It really is a good-looking building. It anchors 25th Street. It could be used, and I still think that the museums that are there are a good use for the building. I think the museum fits the building and the building fits the museums. But, if it's going to be something else, then, well, that's where we're going to be doing the involvement. AK: There's anything else you'd like to say in closing? 42 LJ: No, I don't think so. I've pretty well vented my feelings, and I think they might be a little different from a lot of other peoples’. And I think, the people I haven’t thanked in this are the volunteers. The volunteers down there, they just made everything. We realized that right off the beginning. Teddy Wood, she was sort of in charge of the volunteers, even though she was in charge of the people that make them go around. They make the museums interesting, understandable, and relevant to the people that come in and visit them. And the volunteers, they just did a fantastic job. Mostly, we get volunteers for the railroad part of it; It needed the most, that were essentially retired railroad people. And they were just super. They were just nice, pleasant people. Some of ‘em just old guys tottering around, and they did such a good job. And the same thing with the firearms museum; just old firearms people, hunters and things who are interested in firearms – not modern like you have for people that want to shoot up the neighborhood and have war with the next gang. People were shooting firearms, essentially, some of it for military purposes and some for sporting purposes. So we had both firearms-type people that were very interested and capable. And by the way, just a plug for the firearms museum: it was essentially one of the finest firearms museums. I mean Browning was indeed an international sensation, but he was well-known in Europe even before he was in the United States, partly due to the First World War and the pistols that FN were selling with his name on them. And so, if you look at LaRousse Encyclopedia or an encyclopedia and look up Browning, it refers to a small pistol. So this is an 43 important worldwide thing that we have here in Ogden, and it should be preserved, protected and things. And it belongs in Ogden and should be here, prominent, and a big part of the city of Ogden. AK: Absolutely. Okay, so one question that just keeps coming to mind, so I'm just gonna ask you is, do you have a favorite museum that you really loved spending time taking care of? LJ: Not really. I was interested in them all. I would say possibly, maybe least interested in the automobiles. Oh, well, by the way, that's one of the finest automobile collections ever. This guy, Matt Browning, was a cousin of my wife, a distant cousin. But anyway, he and his wife, who was a Wattis, by the way. Way back, her name was Kimball. They had a lot of money; they both did, and they collected some of the finest cars that were ever built, ever. And he had a shop there on… I can’t remember if it was on Kiesel or 23rd, but anyway, he had a shop there where he refurbished these cars, and he had people in there working on these cars and kept them in beautiful shape. All the cars were running, and he gave 10 or 12 cars to the city of Ogden. But while he was still alive, he rotated his cars through there. So they would just drive them back and forth to his shop that was on…it must have been on Grant Avenue. They would drive the cars back and forth. But they drove his cars and the museum cars out, exercised them, ran up to Brigham City and back and things. And then when he died, they put the cars that belonged to the city in the museum. And he took all of the others and sold them. And I think I was at fault, partly; We didn't realize what he wanted done with his cars while he was still 44 alive. We talked to him. We talked to his lawyers and things to try to get all of his cars, and he wanted his cars to be in the building that he built for them downtown. And somehow we didn't realize that that's what he wanted. And we thought it would be nice to make a really fine car museum in the laundry building, because it's one of the few buildings that's set up that could handle that because of the heavy laundry equipment; the floors and all that are solid enough. You could park anything in there. And I think he wanted them in his building. We didn't realize that. We didn't really push that we would take the building. We would keep his cars in there and keep his memory alive. It was stupid of us not to know that, but we just didn't. And so it didn't work out. They were all sold. I'll just tell you, he had one of the finest cars ever. It was a yellow Rolls-Royce Sedan that was built in the United States. They shipped the parts over and built, I believe, five cars in the United States. A perfect total solidly Rolls-Royce. Louis B. Mayer bought it for Marlene Dietrich, and then Matt and his wife bought it, and it was gorgeous. It was just beautifully redone. I mean, just an absolute work of art. Had a great, great history to it and things. And they sold it, but that's alright. We didn’t get it. He had a lot of other fancy cars too, but that was the one that I liked best. And it’d been in the car museum a number of times, and the ordinary rotation that he did with ‘em. AK: The car museum's so beautiful. You guys did a wonderful job. LJ: I always wanted to be there. AK: Well, thank you so much for letting us come interview you today. 45 LJ: Well, thank you. And I wish you luck in your coming around, and I'm sorry I couldn't tell you much about the building because that was pretty well… I was in it a few times when it was used by the railroad and things, but mostly it had been turned into a museum and the building. And by the way, I not only enjoy the museum, but the building itself. The building itself was nice. We did a lot of work to keep it up and things. I think partly the theater was a little underutilized. But the model railroad people used to have their big convention there. I guess they still do. They were out for a while and came back, one thing and another. So the whole building. And even out in the trainman’s building, rebuild and refurbish the old locomotive. I thought it was great to see how they worked and things that they did. We wanted to keep them up and try to display them especially. Especially, you know, we have two very large cranes down there. We wanted to take the two cranes and put them together and lift something big and heavy in between them. We were going to do that all on the Shupe-Williams property. We had great designs for that, to just really show these things off, how big they were and what they were capable of doing. And that and the snow blower cars, to really have people get some idea of how those things worked and how they could blow snow almost a half… [chuckles] not a mile away. I mean, I don't think most people never even seen a picture of those things operating and blowing snow. But they certainly did. It was, uh… AK: I can only imagine, just… Yeah, they’re huge. 46 LJ: And I worked on a railroad car when I was younger. I worked in a food processing plant up in Idaho, where they brought food in and out on railroad cars. We would go shoot produce out of this place. Also did food processing, but also made ice. We put ice in the ends of the railroad cars to keep the food cold while they shipped that around the country, and we loaded and unloaded produce and things in the railroad cars, so I worked in them. Typically, I spent a lot of trips on the railroad. My parents put me on the railroad to go visit my father’s aunt, actually where I stayed for the summer, but it was down in Shoshone, and I rode the train down there every summer and things. Usually they picked me up either coming back or taking me down. So I had a lot of history with the railroad and enjoyed it. And I think that the people, beyond the firearms museum, should realize that the firearms museum is there and that these guns were all made for hunters and for the military. But they need to know the railroads. They just should realize. And what it is now, you know, this is more than just a long, long string of road cars going from here to Omaha or here to the northwest. It was people, that… And the railroad now probably has almost unbelievably fewer employees than they had back then when they were running passenger cars with passenger traffic through Ogden. It was very important. It was typically, in many cases, they changed trains, but they did the things. And the history, by the way. The laundry building was set up to do the laundry, not only for the railroad, but for the parks that were run by the Union Pacific Railroad. They ran Yellowstone, and I think even the South Rim of the 47 Grand Canyon and the parks down in southern Utah. And those parks sent the laundry to Ogden to be done. They were shipped out of here, back to the parks after it was washed and ironed. So, this was a big hub for the railroad as well. And people don't think so much of the national parks and the railroad together but the railroads ran the parks for the government for a long, long time, and all that work was done here. AK: It's crazy how powerful the railroads used to be. And now it's, yeah, like you said, it's just a long line of cars, pretty much. LJ: ‘Course, I’m a little bit older than the average Indian, and I just, I love the West, the whole West – Intermountain West; not so keen on the West Coast – but I like the whole idea of it. AK: Yeah, definitely. Well, thank you again. I really appreciate your time and awesome stories. LJ: I'm happy to. You can see I enjoyed the work, I enjoy talking about it. I hope that the future generation will come around to realize what we’ve got here and see what we've got. I don't know how you interest them in it. Having projects done at the station and having schoolchildren come down, having it be part of their education to bring them out and things. I think that's a big part of what the school should be teaching their children, but aren’t. And the museum here, by the way, the Air Force Museum out there, to get the kids out and show them what the heck this place is all about. It’s not just railroad. And of course, the Hill Air Force Base is a big part of Ogden, too, by the way, that’s often neglected. I didn't talk about it at all ‘till just now, but it’s an important part of it. 48 AK: Yeah, it definitely is. And I agree, I think that having museums goes a really long way, because if you grow up with it, it becomes a nostalgic thing, kind of, so. LJ: Yeah. AK: Yeah. Well, thank you again. LJ: Well, I wish you good luck in Ogden. 49