Oral History Program Scott Van Leeuwen Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 17 July 2013 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Scott Van Leeuwen Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 17 July 2013 Copyright © 2014 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 Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial houses flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. After World War II, the railroad business declined. Some government agencies and businesses related to the defense industry continued to gravitate to Ogden after the war—including the Internal Revenue Regional Center, the Marquardt Corporation, Boeing Corporation, Volvo-White Truck Corporation, Morton-Thiokol, and several other smaller operations. However, the economy became more service oriented, with small businesses developing that appealed to changing demographics, including the growing Hispanic population. ____________________________________ 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: Van Leeuwen, Scott, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 17 July 2013 , WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Scott VanLeeuwen July 17, 2013 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Scott Van Leeuwen. The interview was conducted on July 17, 2013, by Lorrie Rands. Scott discusses his experiences with 25th Street. LR: It’s July 17, 2013 and we are here with Scott Van Leeuwen in his store on 25th Street talking about his memories of 25th Street. My name is Lorrie Rands and I will be doing the interview. Scott, thank you for your time, we appreciate this. How long have you been here on 25th Street? SV: 55 years. LR: What prompted you to have your store here? SV: I was married when I was 17 years old and I was working at a grocery store out in South Ogden and the fellow that used to own this store, Abe Rubin, was looking for a hired hand. My uncle sent me down and I applied for the job and got it. I was about 17 or 18 years old. He said to my uncle, “I thought I was going to get a man and you sent me a boy, but I hired him.” I worked for him for about 20 years and then I bought him out and he worked for me for about 15 years. That was in the late 1970’s. LR: Was this the store that you worked in? SV: This actually used to be the China Temple Café. If you look right through this doorway you can see those guns in that far room, and that was the original Gift House back there. After the China Temple closed down, we knocked that hole in 1 the wall and came into this place. This used to be a very popular place as a Chinese restaurant. LR: Originally, in 1960? SV: We were all in that little store next door right at 120. We came in here in the late 1980’s. LR: Why 25th Street? SV: 25th Street is where Abe Rubin had his store originally and it was a gift house, that’s why it’s called The Gift House still. He was catering mostly to the people that were getting off the train. 25th Street was bustling with everybody coming home from the war and this was Junction City. The trains go north, east, south and west out of here, so it was a junction point and a drop off spot for a lot of servicemen. Abe had a sandwich shop and little assorted gifts. He kept it that way until the war effort ended and then he had to find something new so he started to make punchboards. Punch boards are little squares with a thousand punches in them and he would give rifles and pistols away if you got the winning number. He did that quite successfully for a number of years before I got here. Then, the federal government imposed a tax that made it impossible to make any money on it, but he had a lot of sporting goods leftover so he started to sell sporting goods. He went into fishing and tackle and sporting goods and a pawn shop. That’s what we are doing today. We don’t do the fishing and tackle anymore, but we do a lot of sporting goods and a lot of custom made jewelry and a pawn shop. 2 LR: Did you ever think of leaving 25th Street and getting into another store? SV: Actually, Abe Rubin had a couple of kids my age and I just assumed they’d be the ones taking over the store, so I bought a piece of ground across the street with the idea that I’d stay on 25th Street and just build my own store. When that time came near Abe said, “Why don’t you just buy this one?” I said, “I’m sure your kids wouldn’t like that if I bought the place.” He said, “My kids are too smart to run this place. You’d do it for free. They’d think they had to make money every transaction and they’re not going to make a success out of it. I want somebody that I know to have a stamp on it.” So, I stayed here. LR: Did you ever buy that property? SV: I bought it and sold it when the new development that went in with all the apartments next door. I think I paid 6,000 dollars for it and I sold it for $50,000. LR: That’s a nice investment. SV: It wasn’t bad. LR: What are some of your memories being here on this street? SV: In the 1960’s, it was an entirely different street than we have today. There were a lot of dubious characters running around. As you look up and down 25th Street, you’ll see all these businesses with the name plates on the front that say it used to be a house of ill-repute or a saloon or a legitimate hotel. Those were all there in the 1960’s and it was a pretty rough and tumble street. It was the first street in Ogden because of the railroad and Ogden grew from there. It grew east and got up to Washington Blvd. which became the major business section. In the 1970’s 3 they tore down most of the buildings on Washington Blvd. to put in our mall that eventually failed. That’s where these new developments are coming in now like the high adventure things that they’ve put in by the river. At that time, 25th Street had a lot of really interesting people and I remember hundreds of guys and every guy had a hundred stories. There was just a wealth of people that were in and out. We had people from all walks of life. Early on, 25th Street was segregated. The Gift House is one of the very few places where they’d cross the street and do their business and then walk straight back over to the other side. That was the first time I’d ever seen anything like that. Eventually, that changed and everything became a little bit easier later on in the sixties. LR: Did you get any flack for allowing that? SV: No, nobody ever said anything to me. As far as the black community in town, they’ve been some of my biggest supporters. I go to just about every wedding and every funeral to this day. I’ve told lots of them that I feel like I’m part of the family. I did have a black guy break in here and steal some stuff one day and half the community called and apologized for it. I said, “There’s no need for you to apologize for what someone else did, doesn’t matter what color he is.” It’s kind of a special bond that I’ve had my whole life and I just love 25th Street. I tease a lot of people and say, “God, they closed down a perfectly good cat house and put in an ice cream store.” It’s interesting and I remember one time they had a meeting for the 25th Street Association and they had an Asian guy here that was selling bigger than average beers on the street. I went to the meeting and said, “It’s kind of amazing to me that you’ve got a place that was the 4 oldest bar in 25th Street and you’ve got a place that used to have a brothel in there and you’ve got a place that was known for fights and selling illegal whiskey, but now in 2010 you get mad because there’s one guy selling somebody a beer. You ought to hire that guy to carry that beer up and down the street so you can protect the image that you’re living on.” They didn’t think that’s what they were living on, so that guy isn’t here anymore selling beer. LR: When the railroad stopped being as busy as they were, did that affect your store at all? SV: Yes, it did. It affected all of Ogden. The club next door was cashing railroad checks every payday and if your check was 185.05, they’d keep the change on the end of the amount whatever it would be. They’d cash your check and then buy you a beer. Of course, one beer would lead to another beer and then another and before long they’d made their money back. They were like a bank down here. They were doing thousands and thousands of dollars of check cashing. The whole street was alive. I remember in the sixties when you’d look up 25th Street and look east you could see all these railroad guys coming down in their bib overalls and long white shirts on their way to work. A lot of them lived in Evanston and they stayed in different hotels on the street, even in the Ben Lomond Hotel. When that all quit, it was quite a blow to the economics of Ogden, let alone 25th Street. LR: You never thought of moving when it started to go down? SV: I just hung in here because I’d already had a pretty good reputation. We were one of two pawn shops in the whole city and shortly after I bought it, the other 5 one closed down so I was the only pawn shop for a long time and 25th Street was pretty centrally located. The parking was easy and we had some vacant lots from buildings they’d torn down. People could get in and get out. I never thought of leaving 25th Street. LR: Do you like the way it’s changed and the way they’ve brought it back? SV: When I got here, 25th Street was not anywhere you’d even want to be seen. We had a lot of people that would pull up in front, walk straight in here and do whatever they had to do and turn around and walk right back out. People would come down here Friday or Saturday nights and just watch the people as they left the bars. There were drunks walking up and down the street. It was a rough and tumble street nationally known. You kind of had to watch your p’s and q’s and know what was going on. Do I like what they’ve done? Well, it’s like everything else, it’s changed. You get places like Park City and Denver, Colorado that has their Lorimar Square and you get people that are interested in it. Pretty soon you have these old buildings that are 150 years old and are architecturally beautiful that people spend a lot of money to fix them up and make them look historically correct. LR: There are rumors that there are tunnels underneath the buildings. SV: I’ve got tunnels in the building right next door. In the next room, there’s a tunnel that goes east through several stores. As far as having a tunnel that is rumored to have gone from the hotel Ben Lomond all the way to the train station in the middle of the road, I never saw anything like that, but I can go downstairs here and go four or five stores that way without any problems, so there are tunnels. 6 WJ: Earlier when we came in and asked if we could interview you, you gave us an example of segregation in the China Temple and I was hoping you could elaborate a little bit more on that. SV: Well, I had never seen anything like it. I came from Morgan, Utah and I didn’t even know a black guy. When I got to go to South Junior High School, we had about four black guys in our school. One of the guys was a track star named Eddie Castle. He held Utah state records for running the 100-yard dash and he was also the president of our school. I’d never seen prejudice and really the only black guy that I knew was president of the school, so when I came down here in the early sixties it was disbelief to me. I was sitting at the counter right in this room and a young black couple with a couple of little kids came in and sat down in a booth and it was like they didn’t even come in. They weren’t mean to them. They just didn’t talk to them. I sat there and watched it and somebody said, “They don’t let black guys come in here,” but there were a couple of them with a couple of kids and they just waited. Pretty soon one of the guys said to the waitress, “Pardon me, could we get waited on?” The waitress said, “No, we are not going to wait on you today, you’ll have to leave.” It was shocking to me, I couldn’t believe it happened. I only witnessed it one time, but it was pretty well known that they weren’t to go in there. In the mid-sixties there was a lot of racial tension in America and we had a little here. I remember one night I left the gift house and I was parked behind in the alley and there were 35 black guys down there all in their 20’s. They were locking arms and they were going to block the traffic from going. Well, at that 7 time you could go straight down to the depot through the “U” shaped road at Wall Avenue. When I walked into the club there was a guy sitting there having a beer and I said, “There are about 35 black guys out there making a human chain to block all the traffic.” He said, “Watch my beer, I’ll be right back. He went out and got in his 1960 Oldsmobile and looked at all the guys and they were all looking at him and chanting. He waited until the light turned green and just went. They could see he wasn’t going to stop, so they all ran to the side of the sidewalk. He went down and turned around at the depot and said, “Come on, get back together.” They went, “Oh, the hell with you,” and just broke it up. That was the only racial thing I’d ever seen as far as a protest, but it didn’t amount to very much. LR: When the Civil Rights Act went into effect, did things change overnight or did it take a while? SV: It didn’t change overnight. It had been hundreds of years coming and the Civil Rights Act made a law that you had to do whatever you had to do. I don’t think anything in Ogden, Utah has changed very much. I’ve got a very good friend named Joe McQueen. He plays the saxophone and he’s about 90 years old and takes a lot of older people out to the doctors and that’s his job. He’s a black guy who came from the south. He went home and his family said, “Joe, how come you can live up there with all those Mormons? You’re one of the only black guys out there.” Joe said, “The only time I knew I was black in Ogden, Utah is when I’d get up and shave in the morning because everybody treats me very well. We don’t have prejudices here.” If he doesn’t feel it, then I’m a long ways from it. I 8 think that here in Utah we were isolated from a lot of that and I think it’s a good thing. I have lots of black friends and I don’t think any of them have any problems here. AP: You also mentioned across the street and along 25th Street there were a lot of brothels. During the time you came here in the early sixties, there was a big push for anti-vice for stopping brothels and… SV: When I got here there weren’t a lot of brothels, but there were some working girls that would apply their trade walking up and down the street. I think Ogden City government looked the other way a little bit because it is a hard law. They did tighten things up after a while. With that kind of trade you always have a problem. I had a good friend of mine that went into one of the bars on this side of the street in the eighties and there were a couple of black girls and he said, “They were the friendliest people I’d ever met in my life. They’d give me a hug and a kiss and let me talk to them and then all of a sudden somebody roughed me up and threw me out of the joint. I was kind of ruffled up and I brushed myself off and looked down and thought somebody lost his wallet.” He reached down and got it to find it was his wallet and all of his money was gone. They took him in there and shook him down. If that starts happening you’re going to run into problems and that’s what happened a lot. They cleaned up the street and got rid of it. Did they get rid of prostitution? I don’t think so. I think it’s probably somewhere else, not out in front of my store right now. There were girls that were working girls just like there are today. You can make it illegal, but it may not work. I think somebody said it was the oldest profession. I think right after that came pawn brokers. 9 This street has really cleaned up a lot. 25th Street used to have 8 foot wide sidewalks so you were always really close to people on the sidewalk. Right behind the stores was the 25th Street Red Light Alley, as they called it. I remember when I was a kid before I came to work here, it was a pretty big thrill to be sixteen or seventeen years old and get in the car and drive up to Red Light Alley. I think some of the owners of the businesses would have a red lights hanging up there for somebody to look at. I don’t think they were really businesses with red lights, but it was pretty exciting when you were 16 or 17 years old to come down here. It was a dark alley and real rough. The electric wires overhead were really a jumbled mess and it was pretty good to drive up there and feel like you’d really done something. It was kind of a scary thing, but it was exciting. LR: You grew up in Morgan and when you got your job here at the Gift House, did you move to Ogden? SV: I was born in Morgan, Utah and that was during WWII. My dad went into the war effort and he was a counter-intelligence guy so when the war got over he stayed there. I lived with my mother and grandparents, the Dickson’s, until about 1950. Then, we moved to Washington Terrace. Washington Terrace was war housing and my dad eventually became president of the board of directors of Washington Terrace. It was him and a few other guys that got together and moved all that housing around and made a real viable city that’s still called Washington Terrace. They have a big park up there named after him and it’s still a really nice city. He died when he was 90 years old and I’ve had people coming in here my whole 10 career that say, “Without your dad, I wouldn’t have had a house.” I’d say, “Don’t tell me,” and I’d go to the phone and call him up and say, “Somebody here wants to talk to you.” He was hired on at Hill Field as a GS-3 and when he retired from Hill Field he was the highest paid guy on Hill Field. Everybody thought Abe Rubin was my dad, but he wasn’t. George Van Leeuwen was my dad. LR: So you lived in Washington Terrace and you’d just commute down here every day? SV: Yes, it’s about eight miles. LR: How would you do that? SV: I had a pretty nice old car, a 1948 Ford that would come down that hill pretty good. In the summer I’d ride my bike back and forth. I live now in Marriott- Slaterville and I’m a city councilman out there and I’ve ridden my bike back and forth from there. It’s about eight or nine miles to my house and with this new trail system that they’ve done I can ride almost all the way from my house to here on those trails. It’s a pretty good ride. AP: As a kid, growing up in Washington Terrace, did you spend a lot of time down here before you started working here? SV: I spent very little time here. This store was a very popular store, they had discount rifles and a lot of ammunition that was cheaper. My dad actually brought me in here the first time when I was probably ten years old. When I got married at 17 years old, I came down here and bought a diamond ring for my wife. After a couple of years, I went to a jewelry store and bought another ring for her and 11 found out that the one that Abe sold me for 100 dollars was worth more than the one I paid 600 for at the jewelry store. I’ve had a love for this store ever since I was a small boy. In Morgan, they had a store called The Valley Implement and it was like this. It was kind of crowded and jumbled, but to me it was very exciting. I thought there were two things I wanted to be when I grow up, a cowboy and a store owner and I’ve managed to do both of them. LR: Is this something you plan on passing on to your family? SV: The kids that are in there right now are my grandkids. I have three grandboys working for me. One just left on a mission to Mexico and my son also works for me. His daughter keeps the books for us and my wife keeps the books with them. It’s very much a family business. I’m not going to quit, I’m just going to walk out one day and not come in as often. Everybody knows what they’re doing and everyone has a piece of the pie, so it’ll continue to be here long after I’m gone. I was 16 or 17 years old when I came here and I’m almost 71 now, so it’s been a heck of a life. It’s been a million-dollars-worth of fun and I’ve made a million-dollars- worth of friends. WJ: You mentioned Joe McQueen. Is there anyone else that you’re still friends with and do you feel that there’s a sense of community with the people who spent a lot of time down here? SV: I knew Annabelle Weekly. She was a very popular girl who owned the place across the street called the Porters & Waiters Club. She was a really dynamic kind of a girl and a mover and shaker. I couldn’t get into naming names and remembering names. Willie Moore has been here forever and ever and Eddie 12 Simone from up the street at the Kokomo Club. These guys have all been here and been lifelong friends. I’ve known them for 55 or 60 years. I can’t tell you how many good friendships are spawned from this. I can’t go anywhere any time without somebody recognizing me. I went to Hawaii not too long ago and I got off the airplane and knew six guys before I got to the hotel. It’s amazing how many people have come through here. WJ: Did you ever spend any time in the Porters and Waiters Club? SV: I did. I went in there and ate and they had a really nice dinner. It was initially made for porters and waiters of the railroad. As the railroad phased out, everybody had to redo their profit base and that meant that maybe we were going to have a few guys come in and serve lunches and dinners. They had a really nice dinner over there. AP: When the railroad left, did you see a significant quick change or do you think it was a little bit Slower? SV: I think it was a little bit Slower because they just went ahead and started tapering things down a little bit more. The Union and the railroad were kind of keeping everything together, but as management started to trim jobs off the railroad they started to lose personnel and as personnel moved away it was kind of a slow movement. They’re running the trains now with one or two people on board when they used to have a whole crew on board. AP: So it was over time? SV: Yes. 13 LR: Is there anything else that you can think of about 25th Street and your time here that you’d like to share? SV: If I was going to say thank you, I’d have to say thank you to the people that have made my life a successful life. I’ve been able to devote a lot of time to helping other people and I’m a city councilman in the city that I live in now and I’m on the Weber Fire District Board of Directors, so I have a lot to do with Weber County and fire protection. It’s enabled me to do a lot. Most importantly, it’s the people and the friendships that we have. Where we’re sitting right here I call the knowledge center because if you come in here at 9 in the morning there will be six or eight guys sitting in here discussing politics and the world. One guy told me the other day, “I came in here because I needed a welder and I knew someone in here would know where I could get one.” This place has been home to me for 55 years and hopefully it will be home to my kids and then their kids. LR: It’s almost like a community center in a way. AP: Do you think that part of that comes because 25th Street has remained the same? SV: Well, I think it’s partly the community base, but don’t kid yourself, they’re throwing a lot of money at 25th Street. Not necessarily the government, but individual investors have. Property values here have sky-rocketed. There has been a lot of money spent and there’s going to be a lot more money spent. What I’ve seen happen is a guy will go in with a dream and he’ll start his business and buy the store for 100,000 dollars, then he has to remodel it and bring it up to earthquake code for another 25 or 30,000 dollars, then they’ve got to knock the asbestos out 14 of it for another 10 or 15,000 dollars so by the time he gets in there he’s over his head. He opens up a real nice antique store and goes broke. The next guy that comes in doesn’t have to pay back all that stuff that’s been done so he gets it for 30 or 40,000 dollars and he opens up a coffee shop and he goes broke. Then the third guy comes in and he doesn’t have to buy as much as the second guy did and he opens up a restaurant and makes it, but in the meantime there’s been 700,000 dollars spent on the business. Maybe the third guy has enough money and enough good luck to make it work. It’s hard. WJ: Do you think that the people who shop down here continue to come down to 25th Street because they feel an affinity for their community and they want to see their community survive? SV: When I came down on 25th Street originally, you wouldn’t come down on 25th Street. Somebody would call your mother on the phone and you’d have been in trouble because it was a rough place. As you go now, it’s a viable street in town and there are a lot of really fine eating establishments on the street. People are coming here because it’s 25th Street and they’re coming to see the history and the historical structures. They’re coming to look around and see what they did. I came down here last Friday afternoon and had a family dinner, we went to 25th Street, not because we felt a kinship to 25th Street, but because this particular place we went is city-renowned and has excellent food and excellent service and you can’t beat the atmosphere. WJ: Do you remember any significant buildings being knocked down during your time here? 15 SV: All of them. I have pictures of them knocking down the buildings across the street and the big Heely Hotel on the corner of 25th and Wall. They were beautiful buildings, but that was in a time when it wasn’t real Slick. I used to own a couple of buildings but I ran into the same things that the owners of these buildings faced in order to get it structurally sound and earthquake proof and everything else. You’ve got to throw several hundred thousand dollars at it. It makes you wonder if it’s truly worthwhile to get it done. I bought some buildings and paid them off and sold them and I did very well with them, but it’s one of those things that you just have to determine what you can do. The historical artifacts and things down here are amazing and they will keep a lot of people coming. LR: Thank you, this has been a delight. SV: Thank you very much. 16