Abstract: This is an oral history of Carl Hodson. These memories are from two different recordings conducted on February 12, 2007 and May 22, 2007 and concern his recollections of the history of the Marriott- Slaterville area. CH: I am Carl Hodson. I was born August 4th, 1921 in Marriott at my mother’s Aunt’s place. They lived in Marriott. They day that I was born my father was hauling hay and they were coming with a load of hay because he knew my mother was in labor and Carl Powell was helping him and he tipped a load of hay over on the way to the barn. They had to stop and take care of the load of hay. They always said they named me after him because my name is Carl. I have lived on West Wall Street all my life. Our old home is the home that is on the Nature Center today. My grandfather built the first part of it and then he deeded the place to my father and my father moved in with his father and mother and later on he remodeled the home and it is the way it was sitting in 1941 when the government took it from us, the remodeled home. We have pictures of the home when the government took it in 1941. I was married in 1941and my father moved what we called “ the old wash house” from off of the old place and moved it across the street and made two rooms out of it. My wife Louise and I moved into it in 1941 and we lived there in the two rooms until we had three children. No running water, we heated our water on a coal stove and the bathroom was out in the backyard. Once a week was what we bathed at that time, we had a wash tub that we put our heated water in. 2 When I was young, 12th Street was practically a one lane road and it was dirt and hardly a car ever went up and down it. Once in awhile I used to drive a herd of milk cows up and down 12th Street to the pasture every night and morning. Once in awhile you would have to drive the cows off to the side so a car could go by. It was a dirt road and then it winded a little bit in asphalt. It has changed from that until today there is so much traffic on it you can hardly get out onto 12th Street. I don’t remember the year it was paved, but at one time they didn’t even have snow plows in Ogden. Weber County hired my father to put four head of horses on a big “ V” and go up 12th Street and the city asked him to go right on up to Washington and he never did get paid by the city for plowing the snow for them. But he did it with four head of horses on a “ V.” As things went on, they kept widening 12th Street, industry changed. When I got a little older I started to farm, we started pretty young. In fact, I started thinning beets with my sister Dorothy. Dad would space them and we would crawl along behind him and thin the doubles out and take the weeds out. It was before I started school that we started thinning beets. As time progressed, we had a beet dump over next to the railroad track at 400 West. We hauled our beets over there with the horses and wagon. When I was in school my Uncle Dolph Perry, would always help Dad with the sugar beets and take them to the dump. My mother did the weighing of the sugar beets for years and years— probably as long as they had the dump over there. They had the dump there before I was born. 3 Later on, they did away with the dump and we had to take the sugar beets over to the factory. Julian Powell hauled them for us for awhile and then dad bought a truck and he hauled them with a truck for awhile. When the truck wore out we went back to horses. The last year I farmed I hauled 350 ton of sugar beets from 12th Street up where Peterson’s is, that is the property that we owned and I hauled a lot of the sugar beets from there. I would make five loads a day with a team of horses. If I had them loaded up at night we made five and if I didn’t have them loaded up at night then I got four. But I’d haul five and a half ton of sugar beets plus, with a team and wagon, over to the old sugar factory. By that time, the sugar factory had closed up. They piled them over there and shipped them up to the factory in Lewiston. I went from thinning beets and working in the field until they did away with sugar beets. We no longer have sugar beets around here. That was one of our main crops. Sugar beets, potatoes, tomatoes, grains, we grew everything. We had two tomato canning factories; Del Monte and Blackington. I hauled tomatoes to both of them with a team. I was about the only one that was still using team of horses. I hauled to Del Monte and I hauled potatoes to Stratford’s potato seller with a team. I used horses until the day I quit farming for a living. I had farmed all my life but I quit farming for a living in the fall of 1951 and went to work for the Amalgamated Sugar Company stacking sugar over at the big warehouse on Wilson Lane. During the depression we had a drought. That was before Pineview Dam was built. My father was one of the instigators of getting the Pineview Dam up there. They had a drought and it got so dry that when we planted sugar beets, 4 there wasn’t enough water to harvest part of them. The government put in a well and pumped water into the ditch but it wasn’t enough to supply all the water we needed. Part of our crops we didn’t even harvest that year. That was during the depression and that didn’t help the depression situation either. I have lost my train of thought. With the canning factories here and the sugar beet factory it made a lot of difference to people around here because a lot of the women would work in the canning factories. That supplied a job for a lot of the women during the depression and even after the depression. After things got better, the canning factories were still here and a lot of the young girls and even some of the wives that were not tied down with their family would go to work in these canning factories peeling tomatoes and things like that. We raised peas— the old pea viner sits right in the middle of Marriott in the Marriott home and we would haul peas to the pea viner there. During the depression, the railroad was a main force here, it was the hub of Ogden. Anyone that had a railroad job during the depression was sitting pretty, and they were in good shape. One spring we sold potatoes we pitted them in the winter and then got them out of the pit in the spring and sold them for twenty cents per hundred, and they had to buy a sack to put them in on top of that. It was hard times, but I wouldn’t change my childhood for anything. I would not trade my childhood for any of the childhoods of today. We were taught to work. Everyone had some milk cows, two, three, up to— we had between fifteen and twenty all the time and the milk check was our 5 main income until the crops came in in the fall. We traded veal calves to the grocery store for groceries. Even during the depression we were never hungry. We didn’t have all the money that we wanted. I have a school ring, it cost eight dollar, and I graduated in 1939. Even at that time dad didn’t have eight dollars to give me to buy a school ring. My brother Grant had eight dollars and give it to me and I bought my school ring and I still have it today. I remember the price of gas. Bingham’s had a store on the corner of 1200 West and 1200 South. Gas was eighteen cents a gallon. I used to go home from school at noon for lunch part of the time if I didn’t take lunch to school. I would go down to the old chicken coop and get three eggs and take it down to Bingham’s store and trade the three eggs for an ice cream cone. Things were close, things were cheap, but everything was in comparison. Groceries were cheap so it didn’t cost a lot of money for groceries and things like that. We had our own produce and our own potatoes and stuff like that, our own meat and milk so we were in good shape as far as something to eat. We never went hungry but we didn’t have all the money we wanted to buy things. I had two pair of overalls, one to do the chores in and one to wear to school. I had two good pair I would wear one pair a week, one shirt and one pair of overalls a week and then they were washed the next Monday and I wore the other pair for a week. When I went to high school even at that time I had a pair of pants, one pair of pants for the school year and a couple of shirts. The teacher took us up to Malan’s Peak, on a geology trip and I wore the whole cuff bottom of the pants off. The last two or three weeks of school I had to wear my 6 church pants to school because we didn’t have enough money to buy another pair of pants. When I was over in the old home, we had a coal stove in the kitchen, and we had a dining room and a front room with a pot belly stove in there and it would heat them. That is the only heat we had in the house. We had the wash house that is my front room today. It was moved off of DDO and across the street when we lived in it. That was where mother did the washing. She had a coal stove up there and she would go up and heat the water in an old copper boiler on the coal stove and every Monday was wash day. She would heat the water up and that is the reason it got the name the wash house. We got running water in the house and we still had the coal stove, but we had a hot water heater where the water was heated with the coal stove, and it went through kind of a little reservoir in the side of the stove, circulated, and heated the water into the water tank. Then mother would get up at four o’clock in the morning and do the washing. In the winter time she would put the clothes out on the line and they would freeze dry and then she would bring them in and roll them up and put them in the basket. The next day she would iron them all. At that time we got an electric pump so we could pump water out to the barn so we had water for the horses and cows. Before that we had a well, with a bucket in it. You pulled the bucket up with a pulley and dumped it into the trough for the cows and the horses to drink. At one time we had a well out at the corner of the house, just off the corner of the house by the cement and we had a pitcher pump in it. Then we 7 would use the well to hang our butter and milk and stuff down into the well to keep it cool. A house was built so that the walls were thick and even when dad built on to the original adobe house he made a three brick wall where he built on. We never had pipes for inside the house even though we didn’t have any heating in the house at night. Once in awhile they used to heat up an old flat iron and put it in the bottom of the bed and get your feet warm when you first went to bed. Ordinarily we never had to have anything. Me and my brother always fought to see who was going to get out behind the old kitchen stove. Dad would come out at a quarter to five in the morning and call us and he would light the fire in the kitchen stove. He would always have it prepared at night ready to light in the morning and he would light the fire in the stove and then we would run out and get behind the stove because it sat out a couple of feet from the wall. Me and my brother would go out and get behind where the heat was going up the stove pipes while we put our clothes on. That was our heat until we got out to do the chores. We always had the chores to do with the cows and the horses. We had six head of horses and around fifteen head of cows usually. We would go out in the morning, dad would get us up in the summer time, and we were up at quarter to five and we would go out. I don’t know why but after I got older I loved horses and dad always let me get the six head of horses ready, curry them, feed them, water them, and put the harness on them. They would go and do the milking while I got the horses ready. Then we would go in and have breakfast and we 8 were out in the field by eight o’clock in the morning. In the winter we had to stable the cows so there were the stables to clean and the cows to take care of in the winter. We always had to feed and bed the cows and clean the stables in the winter. In the summer, sometimes we would put a little corral in the corner of the pasture and we would have our cows trained so we could just walk up and sit down to them and milk them right in the corner of the pasture and never had to put them in the stands to milk them. We fed our fields off in the fall that way. We would put the cows out in the hay field that had some after growth, the third crop hay and they would feed that off and we would go to the field and milk them. We had a place over in Wilson, forty acres over there and we usually left the cows over there until the first of the year because we had feed over there and the barn. We’d drive over there and milk them, me and my two brothers and dad. We’d put the two cans of milk in the back of the old car and the warmth from the milk would kind of keep us warm on the way home after that. I remember when we got the first side curtains for the car and we thought we were in heaven when we got those side curtains to keep that wind from jumping into the old car. The side curtain was just a flexible piece of canvas with a place in it we could see out. They just clipped onto the side of the car to the door and they opened with the door and stayed right on the door. I started school in the Marriott school in first grade and Miss Robins was my first grade teacher. At that time, if a teacher got married they couldn’t teach school anymore. They only taught until they got married and then they couldn’t 9 teach anymore. After they were married they were supposed to raise a family and take care of their family. So they wouldn’t let married women teach in school. Dad and some of them talked to Miss Robins, she was engaged to Floyd Burnett and he was the principal of the Marriott school, and they were going to get married but they talked them into waiting a year and teaching one more year and she was the best first grade teacher that there ever was. I called her “ Flossie,” forget her name right now but they got married and they moved. Floyd Burnett was principal of the Marriott school and he started basketball in Marriott. He took us over to the old church, we had baskets in the top of the old Marriott church and they had the floor up there. The M- MEN even played games up there. He would take us over and practice us after school starting in the sixth grade. That is how one year, four out of the five starters on Weber High’s team would have been from Marriott if Freddy Powell hadn’t had a heart murmur. They wouldn’t let him play first string, they used him as a substitute. But four out of the five of Weber High’s team were from Marriott. Later on, we had three— the two Morris brothers, Clyde and Floyd Morris, and Delbert Bingham— they had been eligible to play on the M- MEN team but they decided to go up to Weber College. They were first string at Weber College for two years. It was just a junior college and then they went to Utah State and the three of them were first string at Utah State for three years. Marriott has had a good basketball team. I have a trophy that I am going to bring over here. It is a cup from North Weber Stake, at one time there was only four stakes, Weber, North Weber, Ogden and Mt. Ogden were the only four 10 stakes in the area. We played the M- MEN ball in those four stakes. They brought the other stakes in for a tournament at the old Weber College gyM-Menasium, that is where they held the playoff, and after that the two winners from that tournament went to the church finals in Salt Lake. The Marriott ward went to the church finals at that time once and later on we went twice. The last year was, I think, the spring of ’ 44 and ’ 45 Marriott went to the church finals down in Salt Lake. Julian Powell was our coach most of the years. We didn’t have many players but we played Plain City the last year. We played Plain City three different times in three years and there was one point difference in all three games. They beat us twice and we beat them once. We both went to the church finals in Salt Lake. Marriott had a nice ward, a fairly good sized ward. We had all of what we called Butler’s Bench and Broom’s Bench. My mother was raised there and my grandfather farmed there, there were a lot of homes there. In 1940 the government decided they wanted a supply depot here in this area and the Ogden Chamber of Commerce was given the job of finding the place to locate it. There was a place out in Farr West that had about two homes on it, and it was just salt grass pastures. It would cost hardly anything, just the price of the ground to buy it. It wasn’t even top soil. There was also a place out in Cainsville, and they both had railroad to them, they had spurs taken to them from the railroad. The place out in Cainsville was about the same, salt grass and sage brush and very few homes. The Ogden Chamber of Commerce said it has got to be close to Ogden. So they took— I counted them up one day and it was fifty- two homes just out of 11 Marriott that they took for— it was called Utah General Depot when they took it. We had to be out in 1941. I was married the twelfth of June in ’ 41 and two weeks later my mother passed away— had a stroke or a heart attack because she was worried so much we had to get out with no place to go and no money to buy a place with. The government just foreclosed and told you to move out. She worried so much that she was standing at the table spreading my little sister a piece of bread and just feel over backwards. She lived ‘ til about four o’clock the next morning and passed away in the hospital. It cut the Marriott ward in half, it really upset things. The problem was, after they took it they never actually used over a third of the property that they took and then they gave it back to Ogden City and that is where the Nature Center is and where Defense Depot of Ogden ( DDO) is today. They just turned it back over to Ogden City when they closed up. During the war they had a prisoner of war camp for the German and Italian prisoners over on the northwest corner. They would bring the prisoners and have them work in the field. It really had an effect on Marriott. It was such a small ward that if you had a home that you could move off they would sell the home back very cheap. We moved our outbuildings off, moved them across the street. Our old home is the one that is the home on the Nature Center today. That is where I was born and raised, in the home that is still on the Nature Center. One of about two homes that is left in the whole area. It was there before the government took over. 12 After mother died, my sister and her husband, Mildred and Ellis Slater, moved the house that my uncle had lived in. It was a frame and they moved it off of the area and moved it across the street and just East of the railroad tracks. It was a fair- sized house. My father and my two younger sisters moved in with one of my older sisters and her husband. Dad lived there for eight years until he remarried. My other sisters finally got married too, a little later on. My uncle Leonard moved in with them too. We used to get by with what we had. Mother’s death was quite a shock to us because it came so quickly. I had an old ’ 29 Desoto car and she had been up to see my sisters, in it to see how they were getting along with the house. My sister and her husband were moving. She came back and got out of the car and I got in it to take one of the fellows home that was working for us on the farm and she went in and fell, had a heart attack or stroke, whatever it was. That was the last I talked to my mother. When Weber High School was first built they didn’t have a football field. Dad let them use our pasture that was up there on 12th street to come down and practice football in. That is where they practiced football the first two or three years I think after Weber High School was built. When I was put in as Bishop, I think we had two hundred and eleven or two hundred and eighty- one members. It might have been two hundred and eighty- one members in the ward is all we had. Everyone had two or three jobs. At the time, before I was put in Bishop, I was explorer leader and superintendent of the Sunday school at the same time. I was in the Mutual Improvement Association ( MIA) and Clifford Blair was President and Martin Buck was the 13 counselor with me when we put on the ward reunions. The MIA used to put the ward reunions on at that time, so I had a chance to take care of that. I was the activity counselor so I am going to tell you a little bit about the ward reunions we used to have at this time. We used to have a two day ward reunion. On Friday they would let the Marriott school out at noon and we would go up there and they would have a program, dinner and a dance with an orchestra in the afternoon for the kids. Then on Saturday, we had a program in the morning, dinner, a dance in the afternoon, and then we would come back to another program at night and then a dance after that. During the intermission of the dance they would go down and finish up any food that was left down in the kitchen at night. We had to get the programs, at that time people were very giving of their time, it wasn’t anything to ask a person to come and sing or play an instrument or to put on something. I remember getting the Osmond brothers. When they first started out they were stood them on what used to be our sacrament table. They were so small that the four of them stood on there to sing. They were just starting out singing and I got them to come and sing at our ward reunion. Marriott and Slaterville just traded back and forth. Everyone from Marriott would go down to Slaterville and everyone from Slaterville would come to Marriott. We had them in the old churches. In the basement of the old Marriott church we cooked everything on a coal stove, later we finally got two coal stoves down there. We cooked everything— had to pack water in and pack water out, dump the water in a tub and back it out. The toilet was out in back. We got 14 along with that for a good many years. We put the water in when I was a counselor in the bishopric. I went in the bishopric in ’ 52 and that is when we got water in the church. Before, we had a pitcher pump that they used to put water in the boiler for the old heaters to heat the church. The old heaters would clang and clang when water would start coming into them. I was in the bishopric for nine years with Bishop Marion Powell and then I was called on the High Council and was in charge of the stake farm for six years until I got off the high council. When my oldest boy was old enough to go to Priesthood meeting I said, “ I am going to take him, I am not going to send him,” so I got off the high council at that time. I got back into the ward and then I was Explorer Leader and Sunday School Superintendent. Then I was made Bishop in June of ’ 69. We were always one of the top wards as far as attendance for our Aaronic Priesthood. Even when I was in the bishopric over in the old building our ward was always the top ward in attendance, both boys and girls the MIA. We had real good attendance. That is the only way we was able to survive when they cut the ward in half. Everyone was so willing to work and we had good attendance, a high percentage of attendance. That made things work out pretty good. Dad was President of the Farm Bureau here in the ward for years and I remember when I was real small he used to have Farm Bureau days up at the Ogden Stadium. They would have horse pulling up there. Dad would always take us up to the horse pulling up to the old Warren Farr Park. Then later on they formed the Farm Bureau Baseball League. Dad got a team organized and they played up where Leland Stanger lives today. I don’t know who the ground 15 really belonged to. Jimmy Reader put his cows in there for a long time, but I don’t know who actually owned the ground. Whoever it was, let them build a baseball diamond on it. Then we had a Farm Bureau League in there for a few years. I don’t remember just how many. Afterwards, the younger ones that played Farm Bureau ball had diamonds where they played. The Farm Bureau was quite important at that time. We had a good baseball team, I was old enough at the time, but we had a good baseball team. I never played. I went to the Marriott school for the first seven grades and then they moved the eighth grade from Marriott and Farr West into Harrisville. I went to Harrisville in the eighth grade. I played basketball on the Harrisville team in the eighth grade and then ninth through the twelfth I was at Weber High. For some reason they took Marriott and some of the ones around here. My sister said she started up there in the seventh grade, I don’t know for sure but I think she said she went to school up there from the seventh grade on. I had four years at Weber High where most of them only got three. We didn’t have a ball team in the ninth grade but I played for Weber in the tenth grade and the tenth grade league. I played for Weber in the tenth and then played for high school in eleventh and then the senior year I got cut off the team and I played M- MEN ball. We had a M- MEN team that year. I’ve lived here for eighty- five years now and it has been a wonderful place to live. I wouldn’t trade my childhood for anything. We went out at night— when I was a kid, a bunch of us— we’d get together and go play “ Kick The Can” or “ Run Sheepy Run.” After a hard day’s work we would still have fun. We would go 16 swimming in the summer down in the old Mill Creek. just off of 1200 West. I was in Clifford Blair’s place at that time and there was brush all the way around it, we didn’t have to worry about a swimsuit. That is where I learned to swim. When we got older we went over to the river where there was a deeper hole. We had a couple of holes in the old river where we used to go swimming. I graduated from Weber High in 1939 and at that time, it wasn’t actually during the depression, but things were not good. The economy was not good until after the war started, actually in ’ 41 when the economy started to pick up. But, I have loved where I have lived and it has always been good to me. One thing that my dad pounded into our head was honesty. I have been tested so many times, I have been tested, I don’t know why but I have always been given a little extra money or something and through dad’s example I have seen that if my kids come out of the store with extra change I have seen that they took it back. When I was in the service down in Mineral Wells, Texas, my two oldest children and my wife were down there and my daughter wanted a whistle. Her mother told her that she couldn’t have one and her and the lady she was with were walking down the street and here was this whistle blowing. She turned around and took her back and made her go back and give the whistle back to the man in the store and apologize. She was only three years old. That is the lesson we have tried to teach our children is to be honest. We have been tested. I found a ten dollar bill laying on the floor in the store one day and no idea who it belonged to. I didn’t know what to do with it, if I gave it to somebody they would put it in their pocket, I didn’t want to put it in my pocket so me and my wife just 17 stood there for a little while and there was a couple that came up and acted like they were looking around for something and they looked around and then they headed for the door. I just went over and walked up to the side of them and said, “ Did you lose something?” The lady says, “ I sure did. I lost a ten dollar bill. We were going to use it for a layaway for my boy for a Christmas present.” She just thanked me. But I have been tested so many times that way. Just the other day I went to a store and bought some stuff and a fellow made a mistake so he didn’t charge me tax and I spent almost a hundred dollars. So I called him back and told him and he says, “ Well, don’t make a special trip just to drop it off,” then he stopped for a minute and said, “ It was my mistake, just forget it.” I told him, “ If the mistake was the other way I’d be calling you too. I want to be honest,” and he said, “ just forget it.” But so many times I have been given something extra and had to go and give it back because that is the way I was taught by my dad and the way he lived his life. When I was younger, 12th street went down and went on down past where the highway is today and then down through Slaterville and then over through Farr West andcrawled over the river and then into Plain City. I have seen the change from when we used to have to go over the old river bridge. There was no overpass. You went across the railroad and over the river bridge and over into Wilson Lane or else you went on down through Slaterville. Then they put the overpass in and changed and put 1900 West in and that was really a big deal for some time. Then they put in the freeway, it was another expansion and then the Willard Bay Canal went in. There has been a lot of changes that took place in 18 the years that I have been in the community. It has been a great community to live in. I had a chance to sell my place here awhile back. The government wanted it when r a contractor wanted it to build another Internal Revenue Service ( IRS) building. We told them we would sell and then my wife and I drove around looking for a place where we thought we would maybe like to build. We both drove back in the garage and said, “ Let’s just stay here.” So we told them we changed our mind and we weren’t going to sell and I’m still there today. 19 Interviewee: Carl Hodson May 22, 2007 (“ UV” stands for “ Unidentified Voice”) CH: I am Carl William Hodson. I was born in 1921 here in Marriott. I have lived in Marriott all of my life. I lived in this house here since we were married. This room that we are in right here now was our home for the first seven years of our marriage. I think it was seven years. It was moved from over where the Nature Center is today. It was a storage shed, we call it the wash house because mother washed clothes in it all the time over there until we had water in the house. Mother used to have a coal stove with an old copper boiler and she would heat the water in this room and wash the clothes in the summer and winter in there and hang them out on the line to dry. When the government took over, Dad moved this over here and had it remodeled into two rooms. There was a petition put down. I suppose we had a bedroom and a kitchen and a coal stove and we had a big old radio that stood in the corner. We had three children in this one room and then for awhile my brother- in- law would pull up a cot in the kitchen and he slept here with us for a short time. This room here has been very special to us as a family. This is one of the Marriott ward basketball teams before I ever started playing with them. Starting from the right side on the back row is Clyde Hipwell, Deloss Bingham, Cornelius DeFriez, Marvin Buck, Wesley DeFriez, Clyde Morris, Euki DeFriez, Wayne Stanger, Julian Powell and Alma Slater. Clifford Blair was the coach and Delbert Bingham, Boss Bingham they called him, he assisted him at this time. He wasn’t coach with him very long but he was at this time. The Marriott ward had some of the best basketball team there were in the state. They 20 took a lot of the championships and we got trophies and that. We had been to the church finals in Salt Lake three years for the Marriott Ward. This is Bill Morris’s grandfather. Clyde was an outstanding athlete. He never did play high school basketball. He played M- MEN basketball and then he and his brother Floyd and Delbert Bingham decided to go to college. They went to the old Weber College when it was just a two year college and they played first string there, all three of them, for two years. Then they, all three, went to Utah State for two years and they finished their education and they were first string players on Utah State’s team for two years up there. My first memories of growing up in Marriott were quite special to me. I was born in the home where the Nature Center is today. There were seven of us in the family and I had a wonderful childhood. Growing up on the farm, I started driving a team of horses before I was eight years old. I loved the farm and being able to be out on the farm. My sister and I started thinning beets before we was old enough to use the hoe. We just went along and took the double beets out after dad went down the row and spaced them. That way we could help him load faster and do some of the work with him. We had a wonderful childhood. It was during hard times, but we were never hungry and we enjoyed our family life when we were little. We played games in the evening and all together as a family. Especially the children would get together and play Crokinole and games like that. We enjoyed each other. Crokinole was you played on a board and it had four pockets, one in each corner of the board. It had rings that you flipped with your finger and you had 21 what they called a “ tah,” which was a white ring, and you put them all in a pile and you split them with this “ tah” and then you would see how many you could get in the corner pockets. You played as partners. The two partners that got the most at the end would win the game. There was a black ring that you put it in the center of the pile. The one that got the black ring in got an extra twenty- five points. That is how you played the Crokinole game. We played “ Kick The Can” when we would get together. We’d get some boys and go down on Bingham’s corner. There was an arc light down there. In the summertime we would go down there and place a can out in the middle of the road and you’d go hide and somebody was supposed to go watch the can. You had to be able to slip in behind the one that was watching the can and kick the can. Everybody that had been caught was turned free again and they went and hid. Everyone had to be caught before the one that was watching the can got to go and hide. Then “ Run- Sheepy- Run”— I am not as familiar with that right now as I used to be, but it was another game where we went and hid and someone would have to come and find you. In the summertime sometimes we’d go over a quarter mile away and hide. We’d have to go and search out the fields and find where they were hiding. My Grandmother come from England. They went up the Mississippi to Missouri, up the Missouri to Ashton, Kansas and at Ashton, Kansas they got off. They had been so short on food on the boat when they were coming that her father had left all the food for the kids. Just a few days after they got to Ashton, Kansas he passed away, and he is buried in there. Grandma was sixteen years old and she walked as a pioneer all the way to Salt Lake City. She came with 22 David Valentine, the company clear from England on the boat and he brought them right on out to Salt Lake. They came as a wagon train, not as a handcart company, but she walked all the way. There was not room in the wagons so she walked, a lot of it was bare foot. Grand- dad came from England too. He came a little later. He was about sixteen years old when he was in Nauvoo with the Prophet. He and his father, John Hodson, bid the Prophet goodbye as they went down the martyrdom trail and went to Carthage Jail where he was killed. My great- Grandfather was a wagon maker and they stayed— after they left Nauvoo they just went across the border, I don’t know which state, and he made wagons for the pioneers to use to come out here to Utah. They both settled in the Kaysville/ Layton area and that is where my Grandmother and Grandfather met. Grandfather came up here, cleared ground and homesteaded. This is the ground that he homesteaded when they were first married out here. They lost seven children before they were five years old. Grandma lost her little girl and it upset her so bad she didn’t want to stay here anymore so they went across the street and bought two acres of ground off of Allen who had married Grand- dad’s sister. He had homesteaded across the street and sold them two acres over there. They built a log cabin on that and the log cabin is still here in the ward that they lived in. They raised several of their family in this log cabin. Dad farmed all his life. The boys all wanted to be farmers, but things were changing. There wasn’t enough ground at that time for three or four to make a living on one farm. I farmed for several years after we were married, then I had 23 to go out and get a job. My brother Grant wanted to stay on the farm so I went and got a job and he went to work off the farm. I have had some ground to run even though I had a job on the side. I farmed all my life. Farming is what I was going to do so I never thought I needed to go to college. That is one occupation you need college experience for now, learn all these new techniques and all the pesticides and insecticides and everything. You need a college education to be a farmer nowadays. I think the golden age of the community here was when I was real small. Life was so simple, we traded farm equipment and we did everything together. The farmers would get together and take care of one another. If something happened to one of the farmers the others would go in and harvest his crops and do whatever they had to do. I think that was the golden age. It was a real special time in my life when my mother died. It was the time of the pea season. The whole ward turned out and harvested the whole pea crop and took them to the pea vinery and took care of the crop for dad when my mother died. She was only fifty- five years old. We had just been moved out of our home over where it was DDO. She was worried and had a stroke/ heart attack or something. She died and the ward came in and took care of us at that time. I think the greatest disaster that I ever remember in the ward was the first few months when we were married we lived in the upstairs of my Uncle Rudolph Perry’s home. It was a two story building down on the corner of 1200 West and 1200 South. One Sunday morning it caught on fire and the fire department responded. They got down there but they didn’t know how to get the water out of 24 the ditch. We had it all backed up so they could pump it out of the ditch, which they had to do at that time. The fireman wasn’t experienced enough so the pump sucked air and they couldn’t get it primed again and it burnt the house to the ground. All of our wedding presents that we had— all of the nice things that we didn’t have room for in the two rooms here we had left down there in storage and it burned all of our best wedding presents that we had. That was the biggest disaster that we ever had in our life. I think some of the most influential people that I have known in the community is Bishop Richie and his counselor Lawrence Slater and some of the old timers that were leaders in the church. Bishop Richie was bishop for twenty-two years. Lawrence Slater was in there most of the time with him. They were a great influence on a lot of people. The Powell’s have been a great influence. Bishop Marion Powell was bishop for eleven years. I was a counselor to him for nine out of the eleven years. He had a great knowledge of things and he really got the ward going financially after we were divided. They took away so many members when they took the DDO. He was a great influence. Julian Powell lived here and was quite an influence in the ward. There have been a lot of people that have been outstanding members of the ward. The DeFriez’s— they were Dutch and they had a large family. They were a great influence to the ward. This is a Marriott Corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- Day Saints seal that has been in the Marriott ward for ever since it was organized I 25 guess, and even before it was organized. I am not sure when it was made but it is the first seal of the Marriott Ward Corporation. I feel that the stamp, the corporation stamp, was the leadership of the church and the leaders of the community. They had these stamped to seal their official business as a corporation at the time that the ward was formed and when it was incorporated. The Bamburger railroad was an electric line that ran from Ogden to Salt Lake. I guess it must have took care of Salt Lake. My parents used to go out to Salt Air on the Bamburger. When I went into the service in 1945, the Bamburger was still running and I caught the Bamburger and went to Salt Lake. I was inducted into the army at Fort Douglas down there. At one time the railroad went clear to Manti. Whether that was the Bamburger I do not know, but my mother and dad were married in the Manti temple in 1911 and I was wondering why they went clear down to Manti? They went on the railroad, so the Bamburger must have been clear to Manti and my Grandmother’s family, many of them were working in the Manti temple. That is where they wanted to be married, so they went on the railroad down there. When we were young there was a new family that moved into the ward and it was a young girl and a family. I kind of had my eye on her but she had her eye on somebody else. She moved in when she was twelve but I didn’t get to know her for awhile. After she got older we were in a roadshow where the wards took roadshows around to all the different wards in the stake. We were in the roadshow together and on our first date we went to Farr West. It was our last 26 place to show the roadshow and I asked her if she would come home with me and mother and dad were kind of in charge of the roadshow at mutual, so there was the van and some of the others in the family and all the room left was for her to sit on my lap in the back seat. That was our first date, the first time I took her home. Then we got together and we were married in the Salt Lake temple on the 12th of June 1941. We moved in to these two rooms here and then we had Donna and Brant. I went into the service and then my wife Louise and Donna and Brant, they decided they were going to come down to Camp Wolters, Texas and be with me while I was in basic. Them and another girl whose husband went at the same time, they went down and stayed at the Crazy Water Hotel in Mineral Wells, Texas. Then they came home and I came home and went over to Korea as occupational forces in Korea at the end of World War II. I was gone a year to the day. Nancy came along, she was born in 1947. So there were the three children and Louise and I here in the home together. We have raised seven children. We lost a daughter when she was twenty- five or twenty- six years old. We have still got seven out of the eight with us and we sure have appreciated our family. Our courtship went for about four years, but we didn’t have an expensive courtship, we had a lot of fun. There were four couples of us that got together and we were the only one of them that wasn’t married actually. We went to all the dances in the ward and the stake and different activities. We went camping together especially after we were married. We had a wonderful time together. Some of us was playing basketball so we went to the basketball games. That 27 was the reason we were with the others mostly, were because we was playing basketball together. One fellow didn’t play basketball. I remember one incident— we went to a formal dance. The oldest fellow that wasn’t playing basketball— he had a Jeep Willey. They were just a little car and we went to a formal dance and eight of us got out of that little Willey. People stood there with their mouth open wondering how we all got into that Willey with the women having formals on. Julian Venice Powell was real close to us too. We did a lot of farming together and we used to get together and take potatoes out of the pit. We would go down and sit in the old barn at night with the lights on and cut the potato seed. Juke and Venice would come down and help us cut the potato seed. Then we went and planted them. When we were in the sugar beets we would harvest our sugar beets and then go down to Julian Powell’s and harvest his sugar beets. We worked together on a lot of farm projects. They were very close, here in the second house east of us for many years. They came in to our home one night and our daughter had— it was our son that night— had croop and they had come down and were going to take him to the hospital for us and take us with him. When they got here the croop kind of loosened up so we didn’t have to. They were always real close to us, and we went on trips with them. Our first trip up through Idaho and Oregon— the six out of the eight of us that are together in this group went as far as Vale, Oregon on a trip. We were real close and shared a lot of experiences together. Julian has had a lot of influence on our lives. 28 One other thing that I didn’t find out until I was going through the records was that Hyrum Willard Marriott was the one that confirmed me a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- Day Saints I am not positive, but Moroni Marriott was the second bishop of the Marriott ward. My Uncle Dolph Perry bought his home from Moroni Marriott and there was a grainery on the property, and I am not positive but I would say, that Moroni Marriott probably built the grainery. After my Uncle died, my cousin Sarah Perry gave me the grainery and I moved it up here and it is still sitting behind my house here today. The house that Uncle Dolph lived in, it burnt down in the fire. It was on the northwest corner just off of 1200 West and 1200 South in Marriott.