Oral History Program Dr. Walter Buss Interviewed by Scott Randall 13 March 1973 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Dr. Walter Buss Interviewed by Scott Randall 13 March 1973 Copyright © 2012 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. Archival copies are placed in University Archives. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description The Weber State College/University Student Projects have been created by students working with several different professors on the Weber State campus. The topics are varied and based on the student's interest or task for a specific assignment. These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Buss, Walter, an oral history by Scott Randall, 13 March 1973, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Dr. Walter Buss. The interview was conducted on March 13, 1973, by Scott D. Randall, at Weber State College. Buss discusses his time at Weber State College and his experiences as the head of the Geology-Geography Department at Weber State College. SR: This is an oral history report for Dr. Richard Sadler's Utah History class, Winter Tartar, 1973 at Weber State College. Its purpose is to obtain some of the history of Weber State College by Dr. Walter Buss. Dr. Buss has been with the college since 1933. He will relate some of the things he has done at the college, and some of the things he has done during his teaching career at Weber State College. He will also tell about the beginning of Southern Utah's National Parke, particularly Zion’s National Park. He will relate some of his experiences he had in the Parke and how he become involved with the Park when it was first started in the early 1920's. I would like to get your name, place of birth, your age, where you went to School, some of the degrees you have obtained and the area you were raised in. WB: This is Walter Buss speaking. I was born in Provo, Utah. My Father was Fred Buss, who later became a Professor at Brigham Young University. I was two years old when we moved out of Provo on a small farm on the southern edge of Provo bench. The schooling I have had was in the Brigham Young elementary training School, secondary training school, a little bit of time at Englewood High school in California. My High School graduation was from Palo Alto High in California. My college training has been in many Schools. I was at San Jose State for three years, then Brigham Young University three and half years, then at University of Chicago for one summer, then at Stanford for 1 two years, went back to Stanford one more year, not taking any particular classes. I have also had classes with Indiana State in a field course, at the University of Utah; I had some National Science Foundation summer Conferences with Wayne State in Montana, in Wyoming and Idaho and with the American University in Washington D.C. in the Apalanchant region. I guess that’s all the Schooling. SR: Could you tell us just a little about what you did at Weber State when you first came? WB: I came to Weber State the year it become a State Institution, in the fall of 1933. I replaced Dr. John G. Lind, who was not able to teach part of the year because of ill health. I was only teaching a quarter at a time and then the next year he was able to come back, but they had a resignation of a Botany teacher and since I had vast amounts of Botany, this being my minor and almost my second major, they let me teach Botany for one year, this was in 1934 and 1935. In that period of time I have seen it grow from a School that was in the old Moench Building, on the lower Campus and as part of a WPA project they did add on some extra rooms on the western edge of the Building and a Gymnasium and in two or three houses in the perimeter there, one of which was where the Brigham Young University Center is now. We continued there for about four or five years, then I went back to Stanford in 1937 on a Scholarship and was there for two years. At that time they bought the area where the Ogden City School offices are and in that year they also constructed the main School offices, which was where the Vocational center was at that time, Automobile shops, drafting and so on. The Geology Department was housed first of all in the northwest corner of the basement of the Moench Building and then they moved to the southwest corner of the building and then upstairs onto the main floor just under the Auditorium and when they 2 bought the old School property on 25th Street and Adams Avenue we moved into wit at was called West Central or Bed Central, an old Building, the space of which is now occupied by lawn on the northeast corner of the intersection of 25th Street and Adams. That remained our home until we moved into Building four and about 1956 we moved up and then we moved into the present location in Science Hall and Science Lab Buildings about two years ago. Most of the time at Weber up until about 1958 or 1959 I was alone the only Teacher in Geology and Geography. In replacing while I was away was Harlow Childs who is now with the US Geological Survey in Denver or was and part of the time in the late Forties, we had Hubert Lambert who was the State Engineer and who© just recently passed away. It was during this period following World War two when we had such a tremendous heavy leads and it was that period of time when we initiated the long summer field trips which we call College on Wheels, one of which went around Western United States and two went to Mexico. Earlier in 1936 as a result of teaching Geography of Utah, I found that Students in try classes knew very little about Utah and this is why we imitated the Southeastern and Southern Utah trips to Zion and Bryce and elsewhere. They have been going since the spring of 1936, ranging all the way from small groups of 12 or 15 to groups of over 100 and as many as three Bus loads going down. Many of the Students I meet or individuals who participate in those trips, whose reactions are, they thoroughly enjoy themselves on the trips much more than they would have done in the class room. I don't know why participation has dropped, whether it is money problems because our transportation costs have gone up or whether it is getting involved because the School has become a four year School and they want to hold their jobs until they are Seniors, whereas formerly the Sophomore’s 3 knew they had to move and so they would give up their jobs, of course now there is more competition for jobs. During World War two we dropped down very markedly to only 200 Students and of course the Boy Girl ratio was of course very polygamous in that all the boys were in the service and the girls were all coming to School. I have seen the time when probably a class would have 25 Girls and on or two Boys or something of that sort. SR: Dr. Buss we would now like to find out just a little about what Zion National Park was like and how you first become acquainted with it. WB: Of course I had heard about Zion many years ago when I was a youngster living in Prove. Dad being a Geology Teacher, used to take us on field trips, first of all in horse and wagon and later in a car and I first saw Zion in the summer of 1922. At that time the roads was far from being super-highways and most of them not paved, in fact I think from our home in Provo as we went down the only pavement ended before we got to Nephi. We did not have much of a Highway system as we have today. Then after we went to California I learned they used College people for Bus drivers and other jobs in the Parks and so I wrote to the Utah and Grand Canyon and in the summer of 1927 I began to drive Bus for them, driving all that summer and again in 1928. In the fall of 1928 while I was going to School, I married Edna Taylor formerly of Ogden, Utah, whom I had known before I went to California and the summer of 1929 we went back to Zion area at first to drive but later on they made me an Auto Mechanic in the Cedar City shops and then in the Zion shops, so we spent our Honeymoon, if you can call it that, six months after we were married in Zion, living in the shadow of the Centennial and the Mountain of the sun. We went down again in the summer of 1930. Zion had become a 4 National Park in about 1923, it had earlier been kind of a National Monument, the Mormon Pioneers knew about it. The story is told they took President Young up the canyon the road was so rough and rocky and he was so shaken up and when he found out the names of the people who were living there he said, "If they live up in there that’s not Zion," and so for many years the area was known as Not Zion. Years after it became Zion National Park they created Zion National Monument to include the great West Canyon and the Kaleb Canyons of the northwest corner and a few years ago this became a part of the Park itself. Bryce was first called the Utah National Monument and then later it became Bryce Canyon when it was created a National Park in 1928. This was in the summer of 1928 while I was still driving, then the roads was somewhat primitive, the tunnel was not built until 1929 and the earlier roads was out across what they called the Short Creek cut off which took off at Rockville and went up a 22% Dugway out across the flats and come into Pipe Springs and into Fredonia on the way to the North rim of the Grand Canyon. The normal cycle was to leave Cedar City at 8:30 in the morning the Guests were to arrive by train, we would load them onto the buses together with their baggage, drive t© Zion for lunch and in the afternoon we would take them up the Narrows to the Narrows tour. Next morning we would start out about 8 o'clock and go out across the dusty old two track through the sage brush that lead out through the Short Creek area into Pipe Springs and onto Fredonia and stop for lunch in Kanab where the Utah Parks Company had lunch facilities and then during the afternoon drive on out to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. We would stay there one day and the fourth day we would drive back to Bryce, stopping in Kanab for lunch and on the fifth day we would leave Bryce about 1 o'clock and go into Cedar City in time for 5 the people to catch the train out about 8 o'clock that night. They were very enjoyable experiences those two summers of driving. I made many friends all across the country, some of which are still in close cc tact with me, even though it has been more than 40 years since that has taken p It was a very enjoyable summer occupation and to top it off again after I have been going down with my own trips, I was given the privilege of being a Ranger Naturalist for the Park Service beginning the summer of 1940 and running through to the closing down of most travel in 1942 following the outbreak of World War two. So we have had some very fine experiences in that area, both as an Individual and an entire family. SR: Dr. Buss, could you give us a few experiences you had while you were driving the Buses and tell what the people were like and where they were from and what they thought of the Parks. WB: Oh I had many experiences I guess, most of them had to do with the fun of my name. The people would get in the Bub and they would tell their names and then I would say Buss, They would say, "What do you mean Buss, we are in a Bus I also had some humorous experiences because at that time we would drive into the Checking Station and we had to give our names and the number of our vehicle, the Utah Parks number and number of passengers. I would drive up and say, "Buss, 33, 10 passengers,” Yes I can see you’re in a bus, what’s your name, "Its Buss", I know but what’s your name. I also had several experiences in terms of people. I had a load that the ether Bus drivers referred to as the League of Nations load. There were 3 people from England, 3 from Australia, a woman from Boston, some from Germany in that load of 12 people. Inasmuch as many of these roads were not surface roads, we fought rain storms, very 6 common to put on chains and have to drive on in, if it was raining we would have to stop and put the side curtains on the open Buses, these long open Buses that had four seats in a row. By the way, the Bus Drivers were known as Gear Jammers, this is Park savage terminology for Bus Drivers and we were the Gear Jammers. In those days we didn’t have rubber gears and we didn't have automatic transmission, in fact the Bus I drove for two years didn’t even have a self-starter or electric headlights on it. SR: Dr. Buss what did the people think of the parks in Southern Utah. WB: You asked about the people. Most of the people enjoyed Bryce more than they did Zion. The way I felt about it, Bryce was something because of the nature of the small monuments out in it and even the Canyon is relatively large in diameter. The pinnacles are relatively short and of course it’s rather shallow, only about 500 to 1000 feet in the area which you view and many of the pinnacles are very close, so people enjoyed it because of its utter fantasy. Zion in the middle of the summer is very warm and so people didn’t enjoy it quite as much as they should. Our Buses used to have a center section that would roll back so people could ride along and look up and this added immeasurably to the enjoyment of Zion. People who ride in their modern cars don't get to see only about 10% of what the average person should see in Zion. Zion grows on a person and many people came back summer after summer who seemed to like Zion best. The Grand Canyon is too large for anyone to grasp, just sitting on the rim of Angel Point, or going out the Point Imperial or to Cape Royal or other areas. These of you who are familiar with that area today know that the Cape Royal area is an all paved road. In the days I was driving out there we had to watch out that we could get the Bus between the trees, there was just two tracks out through the forest. We would frequently see 7 numerous Deer out in there, occasionally some flocks of wild turkeys and so e I think probably the most interesting experience I had in the entire period of time was the first year I drove. We had a series of middle of September rains and so much of the country is sand down there and bridges in many cases were just legs that had been driven into the sand of the creek bottom and then mere legs laid across the top of them and brush pilled on it to provide the bridge. Many of those bridges had gone out. We started out from Zion one day, two Busloads of us, we went up this hill which is 22% which means it rises 22 feet vertically for each 100 feet that goes along which is almost one foot in U feet in about 3 inches of mud. I had chains on the rear wheels but I just didn't have enough power in that old Bus to pull up through that mud on a sustained climb, it was all it could do to pull it up when it was dry, so I would pull it until the engine would almost die and then I would have to give the engine a chance to cool a lit bit and then go on up the hill. The other Bus was a few minutes behind me. We went on out across it and there was a bridge that was part way out in the flats and a little farther on a creek was running about U feet deep in water with a little bit of a water fall and a rapid right off the side of the road and we had to cross it, there was no bridge in it at all. There had never been a bridge in that particular one, so we sat there for four hours waiting for that flood to go down , it would g© down six inches and then rain again and come back up. Fortunately the other Bus had brought some lunch, we hadn't taken any because we anticipated stopping in Kanab, and they shared it with us. In the meantime one of the bridges behind us went out, but fortunately that particular gully over which that bridge was only about 3 feet deep and 3 or 4 feet wide and just after it crossed the road it broke up into several gullies that were not very deep. While with two of us with shovels 8 and it hadn’t rained hard enough where we were to actually wet the ground thoroughly so we would have begged ourselves down, so with a little judious cutting of hills so we wouldn’t high center even on those old Buses that carried 36" tires, the wheels themselves were 24" wheels and we had to fix it so we wouldn’t high center and get around that bridge and then went back down this 3 or 4 inches of mud on this 22% hill, my passengers walked down the hill, when we got back down to where we could get to a telephone, they ordered us back to Cedar City. The next morning we went up ever Cedar Mountain through about 2 or 3 inches of snow, at an elevation of almost about 10,000 feet and were headed out to Grand Canyon, we get down in the Canyon by Kanab and the bridges had one out in that Canyon. The County had a team of horses to pull and had scraped it full of sand but they still needed the team of horse to pull us through. We finally got into Kanab about 5 o'clock at night and made the run for Grand Canyon. I remember the Bus I was driving didn't even have electric headlights; it had gas headlights which were common in that day. I would drive until I couldn’t see the road when I would get under the trees and I finally lit the headlights that were about the same illumination you get out of a new two cell flashlight battery, a little broader but not any brighter, and we arrived at Grand Canyon about 9 o'clock that night after about a 13 hour day on the road. Coming back from that some of my Passengers told me, "You don't know it but you have a hole in the seat of your pants." We got up into Kanab and here was a truck bogged down in the sand so we got up on top to help unload the telephone poles it was carrying, that was at the time they were building the North Ridge Lodge at Angel Point, and here I was perched upon top of these telephone poles with a hole in the seat of my pants. In over the years as a family and considerably with the 9 Students, a great deal of traveling to various areas. Shortly after World War II was over we initiated a southeastern trip where we would take people to Arches and Dead Horse Point, eventually we included Natural Bridges and Mesa Verde in the trip. I recall one trip, it was probably the Pioneer Bus trip between Blanding and Natural Bridges, there is one road down in what they call Comb Ridge where they had built a road for Uranium trucks to get up and down in the Uranium boom, this would be about 1955 and we went around so the Students that was standing in the front of the Bus could look down over the edge of the Cliff, fortunately the wheels were back a few feet so they didn’t go over the edge of the cliff as we went around the Horse Shoe bend. It was these sorts of things that made a lot of interesting experiences. In addition to that in order to help benefit my teaching and so on I have attended Mancolis Foundation trips and Field Conferences and so on in Michigan and also in the American University in Washington. Mrs. Buss and I had a chance to go to Samoa while we had a Daughter over there, so we spent two weeks in Samoa looking at Coral Reefs and Volcanic Islands and things of that sort. We have been up in the Canadian Rockies with some of these types of trips and of course into the Grand Canyon into Mexico into Southern Arizona, California and the East a couple of times to help gather material, even though much of it was personal, yet we still utilized the material in aiding my teaching. I spent U weeks up at Devils Lake Wisconsin and the University of Chicago field classes one summer so I had the chance to see the Continental Glacier, later on I saw the same thing when I had the summer conference with Michigan Tect at Holten, Michigan, which is on the south shore of Lake Superior. All of these have been very interesting and helpful. If you want other information I have four Children, 15 Grandchildren scattered all the way from Salt Lake 10 City and Provo to Georgia. One Son teaches at the University of Northern Colorado at Greeley and one Son is on the Brigham Young Academic Faculty. I feel that even though none of them are following Geology or Geography, we still have a close tie with the Universities of this portion of State. This represents the 40th year I have been at Weber and has been most rewarding. SR: Dr. Buss If you only have a couple more years at Weber, could you tell us what you are going to do after that. WB: I only have one more year after this one that is all I'm supposed to teach. I don’t knew I have a let of activities planned, probably will devote quite a bit of time to traveling. I recently purchased a used Airstream Trailer so that we have our home away from home. We do plan to do some Genealogy Research, my people are all from the East and we have two or three block lines we cannot get information on. I enjoy doing work with my hands, we have some work to do on our house and then there is always reading you never get done while you’re teaching School. 11