Oral History Program Evart T. Bradley Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 29 July 2013 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Evart T. Bradley Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 29 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: Bradley, Evart, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 29 July 2013, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Evart T. Bradley 29 July 2013 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Evart Bradley. The interview was conducted on July 29, 2013, by Lorrie Rands. Evart discusses his experiences with 25th street. LR: It is July 29, 2013 at 2:00 in the afternoon and we are here at Wiseguys in Ogden with Mr. Buddy Bear Bradley doing an oral history interview about 25th Street and the canteen and his experiences. Thank you, Mr. Bradley, for being here and allowing us to interview you. Let’s start with the basic where and when you were born. EB: I was born in Salt Lake on June 23, 1927. LR: Talk a little bit about your family. EB: My grandmother came from England when she was two years old to Ogden and she was raised here in Ogden on 23rd street just off Wall Avenue. She went to school here through the eighth grade. There were no public high schools at that time, so she went through the eighth grade here and then she met my grandfather at the old Union Pacific Depot, the one that burned down in 1904. They were married and when they first got married he was on the D&RG railroad and he got a position up in Montecello, Nevada. That was a station where they fueled the old wood burner trains with the funnel. My grandfather’s job there was to fill the water tanks on the train and fill the wood burner and my grandmother ran the train over there and she ran the boarding house. The trains would meet there and one train would go on to Elko, Nevada and the other would go up to 1 Grace, Idaho and they’d meet there and then the engineers would trade positions and he’d fuel the trains up and put water on them. They had the old water spout from the big water tank and if there were any passengers, my grandmother fed them and they were there for about four years and then they came back to Ogden and lived here until 1911 and then they moved to Salt Lake. My mother was born here in Ogden and lived here through the sixth grade and then they moved to Salt Lake. My mother was born June 6, 1906. LR: How did your grandparents meet? EB: They met at the old depot. My grandmother lived on 23rd right off Wall Street and she was over at the lunch counter and he was an engineer on the D&RG railroad and they met there at the lunch counter. They started dating and they got married here in Ogden. LR: So you were born in Salt Lake. EB: I was born in Salt Lake. LR: Where did you go from Salt Lake? EB: Well, my mother died in 1933 when I was just six year old and I lived with my grandparents and grandma was Thomas Lever’s daughter. I lived with them and with housekeepers until I was eleven years old. My father remarried a woman with four children and she didn’t want anything to do with his kids, so until I got in a little bit of trouble when I was eleven years old—they wouldn’t take any of us. My grandmother said, “You either take him or I’ll put him in reform school.” They took me up to Idaho to live with them. I ran away from there when I was 14 years 2 old and went to California and lied about my age and got into the Navy yard as a shipfitter apprentice. When I turned 16, my record at the Navy yard said I was 18, and I used my records from the Navy yard to register for the draft when I was 16. I used my draft card to join the Navy without anybody’s permission. I had a hernia at the time so the Navy fixed the hernia and sent me back to the Navy yard, so I didn’t go through boot camp until 1945. When I first went overseas, we weren’t there very long and the carrier Randolph, I was on a repair ship. The carrier Randolph rolled over on us and we had to go back to the shipyards for repairs. They got bombed and they rolled over on us. I didn’t get to see much action in World War II. I got back just in time for the Armistice and then I went to China for about three years. We came through here in 1945 on a troop train going to boot camp. At that time they were transporting a lot more equipment and machinery all over the country and they had priority over the military personnel. We would sit at the siding until it went by so we were here in Ogden for three days and I’d go to the canteen there at the depot and I can remember some of it. The Red Cross used to bring us sandwiches and coffee and donuts to the train when we were on the train and they’d sell them to us. They had coffee for a nickel and donuts for a nickel and a sandwich for a dime. The Navy fed the Navy personnel sandwiches for our meal. We ate mostly sandwiches and war rations. I had a couple occasions to walk up 25th Street and one of the things I remember is that we decided to stay over one night because we knew our train wasn’t leaving and we went into an old hotel on the north side of the street, I 3 don’t remember the name of it, but the street was full of people and there were all kinds of things going on here. You wouldn’t believe the activity that was going on. We went up there and the only room that was available somebody had knocked the door off the room. We paid 25 cents apiece, my buddy and I, for a room with one of those old fashioned iron beds and we stayed there until about 1:00. There were a lot of things going on in the hotel so we decided we’d be better off on the train, so we left and went back to the train. LR: So your experience at the canteen, what do you remember? EB: I met some really nice people and we’d dance with the girls and for those that drank coffee, they had coffee, they had milk and soft drinks. I remember those and it was just a real nice experience. People treated you like you were a prince or a king. They just treated you beautifully. LR: And you were 16 or 17 at the time? EB: I was 17 when I went through here. The street was no place for a naïve 17 year-old I’ll tell you that. LR: I was going to ask, what were some of the things you saw? EB: There were girls there that would proposition you and gay guys would proposition you. The uniform just attracted all kinds of people. LR: So you were on your way to boot camp, but you were in uniform? EB: Yes we were. We were in uniform because the company I was in was being transferred from Idaho to boot camp in San Diego. 4 LR: That’s right. EB: I was in the Navy while working in the Terminal Island Naval Shipyard waiting until my hernia healed so I could go through boot camp. LR: You mentioned Thomas Lever. Would you talk about him for a minute? EB: As that copy I gave you will show, he was my great grandfather and a policeman here on 25th Street for years and he became the jailer. He was in charge of the police records. This is really an interesting story because I got it out of the old Ogden Standard. There were two newspapers there at that time, the Ogden Examiner and the Ogden Standard and they were rivals and they would get on each other. I just found this out recently doing some research on my grandfather, some of the things they went through, the two different papers. They were accusing each other of conspiracy and different things. Now they’re merged together. LR: What is the story from the newspaper? EB: This came out of the Standard that a reporter from the Examiner was trying to conspire to discredit the mayor. I can’t remember the name of the mayor, but they were trying to discredit him, so they tried to get Thomas Lever, my grandfather, to say that he had burned some of the records, which he hadn’t done. They had conned him into leaving and tried to make it look like he knew that they were burned. It’s quite a story. I just got into that last week. LR: Was it Glassman who was the mayor? That is fascinating. Didn’t Thomas Lever also have an experience on 25th Street? 5 EB: Yes. Three fellows robbed a butcher store and locked the butcher in the freezer and went up and were trying to rob the bar and somebody ran up and Thomas Lever was the jailer at that time and he went down there on the bicycle and tried to arrest him and then got into a shooting war. They weren’t 10 feet apart and neither one of them could hit each other. There’s a big story about that too. I think that was in the Examiner. He had several occasions here on this street with different things he got involved in as a policeman. One of the other things that was kind of funny was when he became the jailer, he went into jail to quiet a disturbance in the jail and one of the inmates pulled off his wooden leg and hit him over the head with it. The other jailers came in and rescued him. LR: I’m sure at the time it wasn’t humorous, but it is now. EB: It wasn’t humorous, but it’s humor. Comedy comes from history. LR: I agree. That leads into my next question. Why did you decide to become a comedian? EB: Why? Well, my nephew took me to a comedy show one night and I’ve always had a lot of fun with writing jokes and limericks, I’ve written quite a few of them and I got to thinking, “Well, that would be fun to do.” I went to an open mic and did it and got a lot of laughs and I got addicted to those laughs and I kept going back and I enjoyed it. I even started writing more jokes and I started remembering some of the funny things that happened in my life and I’d make jokes out of them. 6 Like, my grandfather and grandmother took my sister and I up to Yellowstone Park—and this is one of the first jokes I told, I didn’t mean to tell a joke, but I did. We were staying in a row of cabins there and my sister and I went out and there was a she bear and two cubs eating out of the garbage can there. We walked over to watch it and the mother bear started to run toward us and I ran into the first cabin I came to and there was a naked woman in there. I came out as fast as I went in. I didn’t know which I was more scared of, the female bear or the bare female. For years I was in sales training people and a national sales manager for different companies and I’ve trained over 2,000 salespeople. I did a lot of it with humor. Humor is a very good teaching tool and it’s a good way to keep somebody’s attention. I had talked to audiences with as many as 2,000 people, so I wasn’t afraid of getting up on stage and performing. I enjoy it. It’s keeping me alive. LR: You mentioned that the last time we talked that it was one of the things that helped you cope with the experiences you’ve had, especially during the war. Do you find that to be true? EB: It does. It helps you cope with life and I’d been wanting to and I’ve been working with some kids, but I’ve wanted to put together a program for kids to teach them how to use humor to enrich their work experiences and educational experiences. That’s a good way to remember things too. I wrote limericks to remember for years. That’s how I’d remember people’s names. I’d take their name and make a limerick and I could remember it. Humor is a wonderful educational tool. 7 LR: When did you start performing here at Wiseguys? EB: I started on the open mic three years ago. It’ll be three years in November. I started when I was 83. MJ: How often do you perform? EB: I get on about two times a week and then I do senior citizen living centers. I also do it for the VA and the veteran’s hospital and the senior living centers. I’m here about two or three times a month and Trolley Square about twice a month. I just have fun with it. I don’t make a lot of money, but I enjoy it. LR: That’s what matters. Going to the VA hospital, does that also help you? EB: Oh yes. There was an arts festival and they had dancers and singers and musicians and poets and all kinds of different arts. I won the comedy drama portion of it. LR: That’s great. Part of me wants you to talk about some of your experiences. I know you weren’t in the Korean War very long, but at the same time if you’re not comfortable going there then you don’t have to go there. EB: There are some things that I remember that I am comfortable with talking about, but there are some things that I’m not comfortable with. LR: I know that’s part of the reason that you do comedy. EB: When I went to Korea, I was stationed in Green Cove Springs, Florida and we had five docks full of destroyer escorts in moth balls and we were keeping them for another war. I was there for three years in Green Cove Springs Florida. When 8 I left there I went to a receiving station in Charleston South Carolina. I was assigned to a destroyer, the U.S.S. Hobson. Well, there were two of us of the same rank and it only called for one so they asked which of us had the most experience and it was the other fellow so he got the choice. They were going on a world tour. On that tour, the wasp carrier rammed the Hobson and sunk it with 276 men lost. The guy that replaced me was one of them that was lost. Then I went aboard the USS Smally DD 565 and we went on a shake-down cruise down to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. On the way down there we hit a hurricane and we lost the steering from the bridge to the rudder in the storm. They’ve got a great big wheel above the rudder with six positions on it with spokes coming out. They had to send a command down from the bridge to say which way to turn and it took six men to turn that rudder. We had to stay on that and took shifts because it was a man’s jobs just to turn your part of the rudder. We kept the ship afloat and went down and got through our shakedown and went to Korea. I was only in Korea for four days when the ship got a direct hit and I got hurt. I was career Navy, I finished in the Navy but I got a medical retirement from my injuries. LR: Do you use some of those experiences with your comedy? EB: Oh yeah, I tell some of the funny things that happened in the Navy and some of them are a little risqué, and some of them not. I was in Shanghai, China for three years and in Shanghai on the Jason, the ship was the same, almost identical measurements of Noah’s Ark. We had 706 complement and most of them were Texans and Protestants and there were six Mormons on there and I was one of 9 the six. Our executive officer was a reserve officer and he was a Protestant minister in civilian life, so he got more people to his service and the Mormons went to our own service. He had more people in his service than the chaplain on the ship. The chaplain would do anything trying to get the guys to like him and that. He’d drink with them and tell dirty jokes with them and was just trying to be one of the guys. One night, we were coming back to the ship and he missed the officer’s boat and we were just pulling away from the dock and he came and made a dive for the ship and landed on my lap. He turned around and looked at me and said, “Bradley, you’d better be at my service in the morning or I’m going to put you on report for assaulting an officer.” A lot of funny things happened. Another night, we had a cook on board that was an alcoholic, but a real nice guy. He was about ready to retire, but he was drinking too much and he was still just a first class petty officer and had been in the Navy almost 30 years. He came back one night and he had a shoebox in his hand. I was the officer of the deck’s messenger. We called him “cookie” and when cookie came back up, the officer of the deck said, “What have you got in that shoebox?” He said, “Oh, I just bought a new pair of shoes, it’s nothing.” I said, “I want to see what you’ve got in that shoe box.” He said, “no, it’s just a new pair of shoes, it’s nothing.” The OD said, “I’ve got to see them. Cookie, you’re about to get out of the service, I’ll tell you what, I’m going to turn my back and I want to hear two splashes and I want you to go to bed.” He turned his back and we heard the two splashes and I turned around just to see him go around the end of the bulk head barefooted. I got several jokes out of Cookie. 10 MJ: After you got out of the military, you said you were in sales and so forth, but what brought you back to Ogden? EB: Well, I didn’t come back to Ogden right after I got out. I came here in 1962, my company transferred me here and we had an office here on 25th and Washington. In fact, we were right across the street from the Hi-Fi shop. I was here for a year and lived out in Ron Clair. In fact, for a short time I was the home teacher for the Osmonds before they moved to California. I was here for a year, and a year ago I was living in Idaho and I wanted to come down and be with my kids so I moved to Salt Lake. Well, on my pension I couldn’t afford to live in Salt Lake so I moved back to Ogden where it was cheaper and the Wiseguys club is here. I’ve been here a year next month. Ogden has always been part of my family history and I’ve liked Ogden all my life. MJ: What company did you work for that transferred you here? EB: I retired from the National Federation of Independent Business. Before that I worked for Satellite America as a sales manager and before that I was a sales trainer for Niagara Therapy Manufacturing Corporation. I was in Sales after I got out of the service and moved all over the country. I’ve lived in 13 different states and raised my kids in 13 different states. I was married twice and my first wife had twin boys and I adopted them. She had some issues so I ended up with the twin boys and we had a little girl. I married a Mormon convert from Denmark and she had a little girl and I adopted her and we had five kids. Nine kids with one wife, it’s like polygamy without the benefits. 11 LR: You just can’t help it— EB: You see why I have fun with comedy? MJ: Do you remember any other businesses on 25th Street or the downtown area? EB: Well, the company I was with here was the Niagara Therapy Manufacturing Corporation. I was the sales manager for that business here. Right next door to us was a furniture company and now there’s a jewelry store with the same name. We were raised in a family at that time that stayed off 25th Street. LR: But your business was on 25th and Washington? EB: Yes, it was right on the corner there. MJ: I heard that there were a lot of stores on Washington that people did a lot of shopping in. Do you remember any of the department stores? EB: Washington was pretty much the downtown area at that time. That’s where you went to shop. They didn’t have all these malls they’ve got around here now. When I lived out in Ron Clair, there was a wind storm that blew the roof off the house I was in. I made up a joke about that. I said, “There was a wind storm that came through Ogden and improved the downtown by five million dollars. My wife and I lived in Idaho for quite a while, but we had family in Salt Lake. Whenever we’d go from Idaho to Salt Lake, we’d stop at Farr’s Ice Cream and have ice cream cones with the kids coming and going. LR: Why not? 12 EB: We’d stop at over here on—I think it’s on 22nd or 23rd—we’d stop there and get the kids and ice cream cone. They were only a nickel then and they were big ice cream cones. Now they’re $2.15 for a little ice cream cone. I’ll tell you a funny story about Ogden High School. The kids used to go and there used to be a cross walk there and the kids would get in line and the kids would go one at a time across and hold up traffic. They’d do it for meanness. A friend of mine was pretty handy mechanically and he put a water pressure tank in the front of his car with a fire hose on the front of it. The kids were doing that and he gave them a good squirt and they put him in jail. MJ: I think he was justified in hosing them down. EB: I though he was too and so did a lot of other people. I think you could find a story about that in the examiner if you went through the records. I kind of enjoy going through those records. You find out a lot of things about the city and the places and people and get a lot of jokes out of there too. LR: Going back to the canteen and Red Cross. You mentioned that the Red Cross would bring you food on the train and they’d charge you for it. That didn’t come from the canteen though, right? EB: No. That was the Red Cross. The canteen didn’t charge us anything. That was donated by the citizens of Ogden. To be fair, if a guy didn’t have any money and he couldn’t borrow any from his buddies, they would give him a cup of coffee. MJ: I have just a couple more questions. You said that you got here in 1962 when your company transferred you. How long did you stay in Ogden after that? 13 EB: I was here just a little over a year. Then I got transferred to another office. I was with Niagara for 12 years and they transferred me all over the country. I was their national sales trainer and then became their national sales manager. I lived in Meadville, Pennsylvania, Denver, Los Angeles, Salt Lake, Ogden, and Twin Falls. I lived in Idaho Falls, started in Twin Falls and went to Idaho Falls. MJ: The only other question that I have is why did you decide to go into the Navy when you were so young? EB: I had two uncles that joined the Navy. When I lived with my grandmother and grandfather my two uncles were like older brothers to me. They were still home and they wanted to join the Navy. One joined the Navy in 1935 and the other joined in 1927. One uncle, Verlan, was killed in the Battle of Coral Sea. The other one—now this was interesting, when I was in China on the Jason, the Jason was coming back to the United States and I was career Navy so they were taking all the reserves back, they weren’t taking career people with certain ranks were kept there because they didn’t have the ranks to fill it in. The ship that relieved us, I went back to relieve the guy that had the same job that I did, and it was with my uncle Roy. Uncle Roy had the same job on that ship that I had so we pulled some liberties together there and then when I came back and reenlisted, he was at the same receiving station in Long Beach taking his retirement and we met again there. Roy and I had a lot of experiences together and he was born here in Ogden. He never did marry. I don’t know why because he had a good sense of humor. I’ll tell you a funny story. Whenever Uncle Roy would drink, after he got 14 discharged from the Navy, he lived with my grandmother and I was over visiting one time and he would get ornerier than heck when he was sober and when he was drinking he was the nicest guy in the world. It was just the opposite of what you’d expect. He was in the kitchen arguing with my grandmother and she said, “Roy, here’s two dollars, go get drunk so I can stand you.” There was nineteen of us living in my grandmother’s house and it was a little two bedroom house on 1054 W. 3rd South and I always thought it was a mansion, but it was a gingerbread house and it had these alcoves and there was just a bed in each alcove and that was, the older kids rooms. The bed just fit in there and they had to crawl over the bed to get in there. There was an orange box for their dresser in the rooms. The boys all slept in the big red barn. We were just two blocks from downtown Salt Lake and every house had an outhouse and some had electricity and some didn’t. It was kind of a ghetto where most of the railroad workers and most Spanish and black lived in that area. That’s where I grew up. I was a mean little son of a gun. Losing my mother and with housekeepers and one aunt that just loved to beat on me with a razor strap. She was 16 and I was 8 and so I turned out to be a little stinker. I had one German teacher that didn’t help a bit. When she said, “Evart” it would come out like “Hefart.” MJ: That wouldn’t help too much, would it? EB: It didn’t help a bit. Kids started saying “Hefart, Hefart,” and I’d start chasing them and beating them. I do a whole routine on boxing because they took me over to Boys Club in Salt Lake and enrolled me in the boxing program and wrestling 15 program over there. I boxed until I was 31 years old. I boxed in the Navy and in the University of Idaho and got boxed everywhere. LR: I heard about boxing in the Navy, it was something else. EB: I do a whole routine on boxing. LR: We appreciate you sharing with us. EB: Last week when I got off the stage here I told a couple of sex jokes and I was sitting back here and the MC says, “He’s a World War II veteran and he likes hugs.” One of the jokes I told here one night was, “I’m a World War II veteran and I think you young ladies owe it to yourselves to hug the old veterans for their service. I’m willing to take those hugs on their behalf.” That was the routine. She came up afterwards last week and she gave me a hug and kissed me on both cheeks and she said, “Are you a sex pervert?” I said, “Why? Are you looking for one?” That’s what you get for interviewing a comedian. LR: That’s okay. That’s fantastic. Thank you very much. 16