Oral History Program Edward Joseph Hancock Interviewed by Mack S. Taft circa 1960s Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Edward Joseph Hancock Interviewed by Mack S. Taft circa 1960s Copyright © 2016 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii 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 The Great Depression in Weber County, Utah, is an Oral History Project by Mack S. Taft for completion of his Master’s Thesis at Utah State University during the summer of 1969. The forty-five interviews address the Great Depression through the eyes of individuals in several different occupations including: Bankers, Laborers, Railroad Workers, Attorneys, Farmers, Educators, Businessmen, Community and Church Leaders, Housewives, Children and Physicians. All of these individuals lived in Weber County from 1929 to 1941. The interviews were based on what they remembered about the depression, how they felt about those events and how it affected their life then and now. ____________________________________ 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: Hancock, Edward Joseph, an oral history by Mack S. Taft, circa 1960s, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Edward Joseph Hancock. Mr. Hancock discusses working for the Southern Pacific Railroad during the Depression, building the LDS Fourth Ward meetinghouse with volunteer labor, and the building of the North Canyon Road and the El Monte Golf Course. He also talks about entertainment during the Depression. The interviewer is Mack Taft. MT: What were you doing during the years 1929-39? EH: I was working part time on the railroad, in 1929, three days a week, and the rest of the time, I was working up on North Ogden Canyon, driving a team, building the highway up there. I worked for Ogden City taking water pressure. That was a few days of the week, and that was the way we tried to make a living. MT: What railroad company were you with? EH: I was with the Southern Pacific. MT: Who were you working for up on the North Ogden Canyon? EH: I was working for the WPA. I used my dad’s team. MT: When were you married? EH: I was married June 10, 1935. MT: Did you have any children during the Depression years? EH: Yes, we had one, Madeline. MT: Do you remember anything about the cost of medical bills, or maternity fees, or anything along those lines? EH: I worked for the railroad; it cost me $1.50 a month. That’s what they took out of my check for medical. And then we tried to make a little more money. The time 2 after ‘33, I started a truck line out to the reservation, up to Vernal, hauling the fuel in and corn for their sheep, and hauling turkeys back out from Duchesne and that area, back to Utah Poultry. But that got rougher and rougher, and the Depression got tighter and tighter for the farmers out in the Vernal valley, and we just couldn’t make it any more. We were just – of course they had the first deal of the sheep, and when they sheared the sheep, we were supposed to get the money. And we didn’t. So that left us out again. But I picked up a job here and there in between the three days down at the railroad. MT: Where did you live at that time? EH: Well, at that time, I lived at my folks’ place until I got married – 2045 Jefferson. My dad was a contractor. He used to dig basements with teams and like that. And then the Depression came, and the contracting business quit. So my kid brother would work three days a week, and I’d work three days a week up there on the road. Between us and Dad, we’d go up where Snow Basin is now and haul out quaking aspen boughs and bring them down here for firewood because you couldn’t have any coal. You couldn’t afford to buy coal. And once in a while, the old Red Devil Coal Company would give us a job delivering coal with a team. That’s how we made our money to buy us enough coal to kind of keep going. MT: Did you have any contact with the rural area, the farming people? EH: Oh yes, we had where the Pineview Dam is now, we had 235 acres that we used to cut the hay off of, and that would feed the horses in the wintertime and that. MT: What would you say was your major problem through that time – securing food, clothing, shelter...? 3 EH: Well, our major problem was clothing. We generally had a couple of cows and raised a pig or something, and as far as the food and that was concerned, we were pretty well organized. In fact, Jim Martin used to say the Hancocks were the only ones who had butter on the table because we were the only ones with a cow. And they had the horses, and we had our meat and that, so the food problem wasn’t too much as far as that was concerned. But the potato prices were less. And we used to go out here to Farr West and we had to buy the little tiny potatoes they sorted out, you know. Then we had our own chickens and our eggs. MT: What about shoes, were they a problem then? EH: Yes, they were kind of a problem. My dad had an old shoe last, and he used to go down to the old Green Harness shop and buy big slabs of leather and cut it out to half-sole shoes. MT: Some people that I’ve talked to used to use old automobile tires for soles. Did you ever do that? EH: One fellow that lived less than a block from us did. His kids used to take these old Model T Ford tires and cut them off and nail them on. I’ve seen that done, but I’ve never worn them. MT: What about your cash needs at that time? EH: Your real cash need at that time was getting your light bill paid. MT: What about taxes and that type of thing? EH: Well, taxes and that. But my dad was in the contracting business, and he generally picked up just a little to help pay the taxes and that. 4 MT: Now, would that be a somewhat general thing for the people at the railroad to work only half a week? EH: Well, most of them, some of them, had real seniority, and they got to work the six days. But when I first started down there, I was working for ten cents an hour and worked ten hours. I was an apprentice, and then it finally got up to 35 cents an hour. And then the Depression hit us. I would have been twenty-two, there when I started. MT: During the Depression years, what would have been your wages? EH: Well, during the Depression years, I averaged about six hours a week, and then the railroads were all going broke so they took fifty cents out of all our paychecks to try to keep them running. They were supposed to pay us that back, but we never did get that back either. MT: Are you still working for the railroad now? EH: No, I left in 1952. MT: And how much were you earning when you left the railroad? EH: I earned about $150 a month. MT: What other things do you remember about the Depression years that happened to yourself or your neighbors, or others around you that would give an indication of the times? EH: You know, in times of Depression, the contracting business got so poor that my dad, he kind of oversaw some of the WPA projects. In fact he built the El Monte Golf Course. He supervised that for the WPA when they built that golf course up there at the mouth of Ogden Canyon. 5 MT: Were you acquainted with anyone in the CC Camp? EH: Yes, I had two brothers in the CC Camp. MT: Where did they work? EH: One of them worked up to Farragut, Idaho, and then they put him down in the North Salt Lake area. And Ray worked over here in Cache Valley for a while. MT: What type of jobs were they on? EH: They were cleaning up the timber and so on. MT: What’s your evaluation of those programs as you look back on them now? EH: I think that the CC Camp was a wonderful thing. It was supervised right, and the boys went out and done eight hours work, and they had a good recreation program at night. I think they give them $3 a week, and we had to furnish their clothes. They never furnished their clothes, and it was a good thing. Another thing they did, the forest was full of deadwood, and they went through Yellowstone and up through there, and cleaned up that deadwood and it sure helped forest fires. That was one of the main projects that they had, and then building fire trails down where they could get to these fires and stuff. MT: What about the WPA? How would you evaluate that? EH: Well, I think it made some guys lazy. Now, you take a lot of guys, they just wouldn’t even try to do anything. They’d just loaf going back and forth and that kind of thing. You just had to kind of ride them a little bit to get anything out of them. My dad did. I wasn’t the supervisor. One man who was the timekeeper, and I always said that the lazy guys got the best jobs, and he got one, but he was a pretty good guy. But the WPA was something to keep the family going 6 with. You never got any cash for it. You got all those stamps to go to the store and get beans and salt bacon and that kind of stuff. And that’s all we got out of it. I think that today, the difference between the WPA days and today, the cost of living is so high, and the wages are so high. But when you come right down to it, the value of the dollar makes it not any different than it was during the Depression days because your dollar was a whole dollar. Today your dollar’s not a whole dollar. MT: What special things do you feel carried through from the Depression like habits or attitudes? EH: Well, during the Depression days, you didn’t develop many habits. You didn’t have money to buy cigarettes, you didn’t have money to buy beer, you didn’t have money to buy any of that stuff. You just had to learn to get along without it. If you had fifteen cents to go some Saturday night to go get yourself a soda, and take your girl to a dance, and that.... but you tell your kids that today... We used to go down to Lagoon on a dollar. Thirty-five cents on the old Bamberger, and then when we got the old Model T Ford, six of us, three couples would go down there, and put a couple of gallons of gas in. And then we’d go home. And about that time, we’d stop at Ross and Jack’s and get us a hamburger and a drink for fifteen cents. But these kids don’t believe that you used to be able to do that. But I can see why they can’t believe it. MT: Do you think that there was any significant difference between people who worked on the railroad and how they were able to get along, and other people who worked elsewhere? 7 EH: Yes, there was a lot of difference. At that time, if you walked into a store and said that you worked for the railroad, they’d practically give you the store because they figured that you would get your money. If you told them that you were out of a job and worked for the WPA, there was a lot of difference. The railroad, if you had a railroad job in those early days, you had it made. All you had to do was tell people that you worked for the railroad and that was it. There was a lot of difference in what the railroad was then and what it is today, too. MT: What advice would you have for young people today in the event that something like this could occur again? EH: Well, I’ve tried to tell them, a lot of the young people today, that it worries me. Well, if we went right into a slump like we did from 1927 on up, these young people wouldn’t be able to get everything that they want. I don’t know what they’re going to do. Because we weren’t able to get that stuff then because the wages were low and everything else. But you take the young people today, they buy a new house and a new automobile, and everything else. Well, if we went into a slump, it would be just like it was with a lot of these farmers who came in and during the Depression and that. All the tractors started coming out and everything else, and all the farmers, two thirds of them, lost their farms on account of that deal. The banks took them over and everything else. If you don’t have 200 acres of ground, you can’t afford to farm any more. MT: Do you think of anything else that happened to you that you can remember that would depict the times? EH: There were a lot of things. In 1926, four of us boys got us an old automobile. For 8 $125 we toured the United States. We took $125 a piece, and we left the first of December and got back the day before Christmas. We went into Canada, clear up to Portland, Maine, and down into Miami, Florida. But you can’t do that nowadays. When we got back, we had $5 a piece. But we took a tent, and they had these tourist spots where you stayed out, and there were a lot of things... The kids now have to have a lot more money to go on than we did. Of course we bought our own groceries and did our own cooking, and we had a boy go on a mission to the Eastern States Mission that we told we’d be back to see. He thought we were crazy, but we went. MT: What did you do for entertainment during the Depression years? EH: Well, the biggest part of it was pinochle, cribbage, and that kind of stuff. I’ve seen the time in my home when there’d be three pinochle games going in the wintertime. We’d cut the old quaking aspen wood up to keep the old big belly stove to keep the house warm, and we used to go out and pick some apples, and that was your dessert. She’d make us some cookies and something like that, and we had the cows. Some nights she’d make a big kettle of hot chocolate, and every kid in the neighborhood would come to our house. It was practically the hangout for the neighborhood. You make your own entertainment. Once in a while we’d go to the dance down in the Berthana, down with the old Reeves Orchestra down at the Berthana. MT: What orchestras played in the Berthana and White City? EH: Only Reeves was the one that played at the Berthana. I can’t remember the name of the man that had the orchestra at the White City. Sometimes the big 9 bands would come in, like Dorsey and Harry James, and when they would come in, we would all try to get to go because it was only 35 cents. Just one more comment. When the machinery first started to come in, I tried to get him to go out of the horse business and buy trucks. He said, “No way, you’ll never see the day that anything will ever take the place of horses.” And if he was living today, he’d sure be surprised at what he could see. We had a great opportunity at the time of the Depression at the old Fourth Ward. We built that during the time of the Depression, and we worked out teams in the daytime and took them home and give them a drink of water and a little grain and let them rest about an hour and a half. Then we’d go over there and dig the basement for that Fourth Ward. We hauled all the gravel, and we took in all the gravel from the old gravel pit up east of the cemetery there and loaded the gravel at night, and all that over there to pour that cement. When we got done, why we had quite a record there. We had a rough time to get the money to keep the thing a’going, but we kept it a’going. We started out in 1929, the time of the Depression. We tore the old meetinghouse down and cleaned those old bricks up, hauled them down there, and we built the gymnasium first so we’d have a place to play basketball. And the Harlem Globetrotters played their first basketball game in our gymnasium, in the Fourth Ward gymnasium up there when they came to town. But that was there. We put in lots of time, and my dad, he had $500, and that’s all he had. He gave that to them besides $2,500 in labor. Of course that included all us kids. Every time I go look at the old home, up there on Jefferson Avenue, I 10 can see the remembrance of it all. But that’s the thing that can be done in the time of Depression if you make your mind up to it. But I’m thrilled, we’re thrilled when we go over there. Of course we’ve lost Bishop Saunders now, but he was a wonderful man. He gave up everything he had. He lost his home, he lost three or four big buildings when the bank closed on him, and just stayed there building that building. Us guys would go up there at night and pack the bricks up and mix the mortar so that the bricklayers could lay the brick the next day. Then we’d go there. But I think now, the way they build the churches these days, they contract them out, and the people don’t have to build them because they don’t appreciate it. So many of them now, they haven’t got the time to put in to do it. We used to try to go out and get us a deer or something like that in the wintertime. We had our own beef, too, but we just liked to go deer hunting and things like that. We’d buy one box of 30-30 shells and split them between the three of us.