Oral History Program Fern Van Orden Interviewed by Lorrie Rands and Melissa Francis 5 December 2016 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Fern Van Orden Interviewed by Lorrie Rands and Melissa Francis 5 December 2016 Copyright © 2018 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 The World War II "All Out for Uncle Sam" oral history project contains interviews from veterans of the war, wives of soldiers, as well as individuals who were present during the war years. The interviews became the compelling background stories for the "All Out for Uncle Sam" exhibit. The project received funding from Utah Division of State History, Utah Humanities Council and Weber County RAMP. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Van Orden, Fern, an oral history by Lorrie Rands and Melissa Francis, 5 December 2016, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Dale and Fern Van Orden 1942 Dale Van Orden 1942 Fern and Dale Van Orden 1944 Fern Van Orden Red Cross Grey Lady Front Row - 3rd From Left circa 1940s Fern Van Orden PTA President Japan circa 1940s Fern Van Orden 5 December 2016 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Fern Van Orden, conducted on December 5, 2016 in her home in Bountiful, Utah, by Lorrie Rands and Melissa Francis. Fern discusses her life and her memories involving World War II. LR: It is December 5, 2016. We are in the home of Fern Van Orden in Bountiful, Utah, talking about her life, and what it was like during World War Two. My name is Lorrie Rands conducting the interview and Melissa Francis is here with me as well. Thank you very much Fern, for your willingness to sit and talk with us, I appreciate it. Let’s go ahead and start with when and where you were born. FVO: I was born in Afton, Wyoming. LR: Where is that, Afton? FVO: Its Star Valley. LR: When were you born? FVO: May 25, 1925. But all my childhood years were spent in Smithfield. LR: Smithfield Utah? FVO: Yes, we moved there when I was in first grade. LR: Where is Smithfield? FVO: Seven miles north of Logan. LR: I know I should know that but I don’t. Do you know why your family moved to Smithfield? FVO: Yes. It was after the Depression. My father was a veterinarian, and prior to that he also had an agricultural degree as well as his doctorate. He had 2 been a County Agent at the time we had the Depression. Mother and dad lost a lot of money, so at that time, he decided to set up his veterinary practice, which he did in Smithfield. LR: Okay, so you would have been about six when we moved to Smithfield? FVO: Yes, that’s correct. I was six. LR: So that would have been about 1931. Do you have any memories of what it was like growing up during the Depression? FVO: No, because I was young enough that I didn’t realize this struggle. I do remember that my two sisters stayed out of college. I’m the fourth girl, and so I was really kind of protected from all that was going on in the world. They stayed out of college that one year while dad really got established, and then the next year they went on to Utah State. LR: Where did you go to school in Smithfield? FVO: The Summit School, Smithfield Junior High, and then North Cache High School, which at that time was in Richmond. LR: Where is Richmond? FVO: Five miles North of Smithfield. I’m going to take you to Cache Valley. LR: Yes, I do not know Cache Valley. I admit it. Were you bused to that high school then? FVO: Yes, and we also had the train. The urban train. LR: The Bamberger? 3 FVO: It wasn’t the Bamberger. Utah and Idaho, but it was similar to the Bamberger, so if we needed to stay late at school, we could catch the train home. LR: What are some of your favorite memories of going to school? FVO: Oh I loved school. I was a speech-English major. I had one teacher that I truly loved, she taught library science in grade school. By the time we were in High School, she had also advanced to High School and was our Speech-English teacher, and because I was involved in speech, she was my advisor for speech and the director of our three-act drama. So we were just really involved a lot with her. She also lived in Smithfield, and interestingly enough, she had a niece whose name was Fern also. Whenever she would come from Ogden to Smithfield to be with her aunt and her grandmother, then we girls were her friends. We spent a lot of time in this sweet teacher’s home. Through the years we were in school, she earned her doctorate in Southern California. I’m not sure which school, but by the time we were in college, she was in college teaching. So we just had this one teacher that we really loved all through school. MF: You said your father was a veterinarian. Tell us a little bit more about your parents and his practice. FVO: Mother was born in North Logan, and Dad was actually born out in West Jordan. His parents went to Grace, Idaho, to raise sheep. This was pioneer days, they were really pioneers in the area, and through the years, grandmother and grandfather had eleven children. School was scarce for 4 them there, and grandmother took the children to Logan so they could have an education. There were two children born after they came to Logan. Grandmother’s old home is on 4th North and 4th East in Logan, which many years later, my parents owned, which was fun. Anyway, mother went to Utah State, dad went to Utah State. He, with one of his friends, went to Ohio State for their veterinary degrees. After that he came back to Utah State, and got his degree from Utah State. It’s an odd way to do that. We’d do it the opposite way today, but that’s the way they did it then. Mom and dad started their married life right there in Logan. Then the older girls came, and they did some moving around, but by the time I was with them they was in Smithfield. MF: So was it just you and your three sisters? FVO: I had three older sisters, that’s correct. MF: No brothers? FVO: I have two younger brothers. LR: So four daughters, and two sons. FVO: Two sons, yes. Both of the boys went to Utah State, and both of them had their doctorates. The oldest of the two, earned his doctorate in Mesa, Arizona, there’s a school there, and then he earned his doctorate at BYU. My other brother, the youngest of the two’s doctorate is in biochemistry, and he actually got his doctorate at Cal State. We followed each other all around the country. MF: So you would have been in high school when World War Two broke out? 5 FVO: I was. By the way, my husband also is from Smithfield. We lived just a few blocks apart, but he’s a little bit older, and he was more a part of my sister’s crowd at that time. Anyway, in 1942, after Pearl Harbor, one of my older sisters and her husband lived in Washington D.C., and felt that I needed a little bit of experience away from Utah. They called up Mom and Dad and asked if I could come back and spend the summer with them, between my junior and senior years of High School and said, “We’re sure we’ll be able to find a job for her.” I did. I had a lovely job, and it was with Defense Plant Corporation, which was part of Reconstructive Finance Corporation. Our building was right by the park and that was by the White House. My sister was working, so we could have lunch together, sit there and look at the White House. It was a wonderful summer. My husband graduated from the Naval Academy at Annapolis that summer, and whenever they had leave, which was not very often from the Naval Academy, he would always call up my sister and brother because they were from his hometown. Teddy and Vince would always say come on out for Sunday dinner, and in the conversation when he called, my brother in law on Friday, Vince said, “By the way, did you know that Fern’s in town?” Of course he didn’t, but the next day he came up to work, and that’s when it all started. We had a wonderful summer. I was able to go to his graduation at the Naval Academy, and his first major duty was to a ship that was under construction. The ship wasn’t finished, so in the meantime he was sent to Cornell, where he was an instructor of what we 6 called ninety day wonders. The men that were professional men, they weren’t trained as military officers, but they needed some indoctrination into the Navy, so they would be sent to Cornell, and there were other places in the country, for ninety days of training. My husband was there as an instructor for about six months. By then we had seen each other during the summer. Cornell’s in Ithaca, and I went up there and saw him one week, and we met one weekend in New York, and he came down to Washington the weekend before I came home. So I came home to go back to school, after all I was only a senior in High School, and he came home on his graduation leave in June, but it was wartime, so he came home, and we dated all the time he was home. He went back to New York and was there for a short period, and by then his ship was ready for some of the officers to go to it. It was being built at Mare Island Navy Yard, near San Francisco, and so he stopped again at home in February, so we had that time together. He went to his ship, and they went on a shakedown cruise to Alaska, they were involved in the skirmishes in Alaska with the Japanese. Then they came back to San Francisco on the West Coast. The ship, after the shakedown cruise, needed a tweak, little things to make sure it was ready, then they went to the Pacific, I went to San Francisco, saw him in April, and on April the 18th we became engaged. Then he went on to sea. They were still doing some of this in Alaska, and he was back in July, and I saw him in 7 July, and then his ship went to sea and you’ve got the battles and his history from then on. I went back to school; we were engaged of course by then. He told me he’d never be able to tell me if they should be coming in to the states, you just didn’t talk about ship movements. I received a call in May of the next year, May of 1944, on a Friday night. He came in to Salt Lake on Monday, I picked him up at Hotel Utah, and we went back to Cache Valley and were married in the Logan temple on Wednesday. So it was a good thing I had my wedding dress. Receptions weren’t a big deal. We had a lovely wedding breakfast, and then we left. Because he’d been overseas, while the ship was being repaired, the men had leave. So we had a couple of weeks when we had our honeymoon in California. When he reported back to the ship, which is being repaired at Mare Island, and of course we didn’t have a car at that time, we were traveling from San Francisco to Mare Island and back by bus. One of the officers from the ship was on the same bus, and he said, “Dale, did you know you have orders waiting on the ship for you?” We were transferred to a new destroyer that was being built in Brooklyn. We had a month at home, had a wonderful week after, but then we traveled, and went to New York. We lived in New York for about six months while that ship was being put in to service. Once more, he went through the shakedown cruise seeing that everything was right. Dale was an Ensign when he graduated from the Academy. Their promotions came very rapidly, because they were trained, they knew how 8 to manage the ships and so forth. Anyway, after his ship was ready to go back to sea, and it was a training ship and it went to Norfolk for six weeks wherein they trained crews for other destroyers to get them ready. So we had six weeks in Norfolk, then their ship went out and through the Panama Canal. They had a little bit of tweaking that needed to be done. In the meantime, I had gone home to Utah, took my first airplane ride as far as Chicago, and then I didn’t even have a ticket to get on to Utah. The only thing I could get was on a train, and they didn’t even have a seat for me. When I got on they found a seat for me, and then I went on to Utah. So I had some pretty good traveling, I learned to travel, this little girl who had grown up in Smithfield. Anyway, they had to come back in to Mare Island for a week for some tweaking of the ship, and I was fortunately home in Utah and was able to go down. So we had a wonderful week at the Del Coronado Hotel. MF: It’s a beautiful hotel. FVO: It wasn’t hard to take. But then he left, and then it wasn’t too long until I received a letter from him. It said, “Please contact the ship Doctor’s wife, and just make sure she is alright and everything’s well,” because all the wives were scattered all over the country. So I did, and the reason for this was that his first ship had been sunk and he had gotten the word that there were about eighty percent of the men on the ship that were lost. Fortunately, the Doctor was not one that we lost, but we did lose some 9 very dear friends that he had served with for a year. So that’s World War Two. LR: If you don’t mind I had a couple of questions. FVO: I’ve talked and talked and we just talked about me, I thought you were going to talk about my husband. MF: We want to talk about both. LR: But believe it or not, we don’t have a lot about those who stayed home, so hearing your stories is fabulous for us. So I was wondering what your first thoughts were when you heard about Pearl Harbor? FVO: It was Sunday. I had been in church. We were in a new ward, Smithfield had its fourth ward, and we were meeting in the junior high. Then I came up through town, which is a block up and a block over, and stopped at the Post Office. We had mailboxes we could go in the post office and get the mail, and take it on home. One of Dale’s friends, who was about a year older than Dale, stopped. Of course Dale was at the naval academy by then. This friend stopped me, and this was before Dale and I were dating at all, and he said, “They bombed Pearl Harbor.” I just couldn’t believe it. To think they would bomb our country. Of course we didn’t get the news as fast, but as time went on we did. It changed our lives really; Still had some High School to finish at that time, and it changed our lives. I was dating a High School fellow, and I worked after school and on Saturdays in a grocery store. We had blue stamps for food commodities like meat, and butter. Families were issued ration stamps and they could 10 only buy as much as they had stamps for. I remember we had canned goods, because we were a farming community. Red stamps were gasoline for cars, and we were only allowed five gallons a week. Because dad was a veterinarian they gave him extra, so he could take care of the cattle. But, yes, it changed. They didn’t want us to have our junior prom, the teachers just felt we shouldn’t spend the gas, and so I’m sorry to say, the rascals of us, leaders of our class, we had a dance. It was a private dance in Richmond at a lovely dance hall, and our parents approved, and we had a lovely dance. As the fellows left for war, things changed. Dating was out. Some of our class went to the B-12 program, where later they became dentists and things like that. Their schooling was accelerated, some went right in the service after we graduated from high school. I can remember one of the brilliant boys in our class was one of the first ones that was killed. At that time he was in the Army and was in Europe, and he was killed. I can remember people that we lost. There was another fellow in our ward that was a year older, and he lived on my way home from school, and quite often we would walk home together, and he was killed. The first one that was killed from Cache valley I had actually dated. He was older than I was, but I had done a little fun dating, summers and so forth, and we had gone to dances in Logan. He was learning to be an airplane pilot, and as he was training his plane went down in Texas. That was the summer I was in Washington D.C., because I heard it after I came 11 home. You lost friends, and I think even today, I think all that those men could have contributed that were lost. MF: It must have been difficult in a small community as well. FVO: Because you’re a close community. We were even close with Logan, and by the time we were in college, we were dating Logan people and so forth. LR: Out of curiosity, were you ever involved in any scrap metal drives? FVO: Scrap metal… aluminum. Because mother had aluminum pots and pans that we sent. LR: Okay. How would they advertise for that? FVO: It was organized through our mayor and city council, and these people that were active. We had a town newspaper that was printed once a week the Smithfield Sentinel. Logan had a daily Herald Journal. LR: Okay. That one was just a curiosity. FVO: Sentinel Senator Logan Herald Journal is still a paper today. LR: It is. I do know that! When you were working in DC at the Defense Plant Corporation, what were your duties? FVO: I was a file clerk. I was on the bottom of the totem pole, but I did type, and I typed well. MF: I was just going to ask a little bit more about the company. What did they do? FVO: In Washington D.C.? Well, it was the government, defense plant, I think it was contracts that were let out to private companies for things that were done. I filed, I wasn’t reading. 12 MF: Just putting it away, I like it. FVO: Defense Plant Corporation, so they were involved in Defense Plants that were building things. MF: When you were back in Utah, after you had married your husband, were you working? FVO: I went to Utah State and then I did go to work, and I worked for a year. I worked at a photography studio. MF: Which photographer? FVO: Benny Dean. MF: What about your siblings? What did they do during the war? FVO: My oldest sister’s husband was a farmer, so he was deferred, and he was older anyway. My second sister, Tennie and Vince in Washington D.C., he went in as one of the ninety day wonders, and he served in Casablanca, he was with blimps. You know what blimps are, lighter than air, they had a base in Casablanca, and he served there. The war in Europe ended, and they were brought home. We saw him, and then he headed for the Pacific, and I can’t remember where. Anyway, the war ended when he was stationed in the Pacific, but his work was not onboard ship, it was on base all the time. So my sister Tennie was doing the same thing I was, coming back home, mother and dad were in Logan by that time. Dad was called in the temple presidency the year that I was married, and so he married us. MF: That’s special. 13 FVO: Just lovely. Mother and dad have moved from Smithfield back to Logan, and so Tennie and I rented a home right next to mother’s and dad’s, and as our husbands came and went, we’d stay with mother and dad, on and off depending on whose husband was home. So actually I was at home when our first child was born and that was three years after we were married. LR: When you were in New York with your husband, when they were building his new ship, did you work there? FVO: I did. LR: What did you do there? FVO: I worked at Macy’s. MF: That’s nice. FVO: Well, not at first. There were things to do, but then he’d have to go out with the ship and I would have to be there alone, so I worked for Macy’s, not for a long time, but I worked for Macy’s. It was fun. How many people get to work at Macy’s! They kept me busy in church, which was kind of nice. They called me to the Stake MIA Board, and I had plenty of time to do all the running and chasing that we needed to do for activities, because we tried to keep activities going for our servicemen when they came in. So I just had fun. That’s terrible to say. We lived at 12th West 71st Street, which is just off of Central park, so I had fun. Our church at that time actually met at Steinway Hall, and so for our church meetings we had all these beautiful grand pianos. We had LDS students that were studying at 14 Juilliard, and we had so many of them that they had to rotate who played for our church meetings. Imagine that, huh? FVO: You’re not going to print all I’m saying. You’re supposed to be talking about my husband, not me. MF: Well your husband, how often was he able to write home to you? FVO: Oh he wrote almost every night. One time I got six weeks’ worth of letters. LR: Wow you had a lot of reading. FVO: That’s alright it was worth it. MF: I bet it was. FVO: How I loved it. LR: How often did he get your letters? FVO: I really don’t know, I know it was very sporadic. LR: Would you write him about the same amount of time? FVO: I wrote him every day, you bet. It was kind of our time together. MF: So you said you had your first child three years after you were married, when did your husband come home? FVO: Actually, at that time, that was his first shore duty assignment. He was assigned to Oregon State, to the NROTC program, and so we lived in Corvallis Oregon for two and a half years. Then he went back to sea, and at that time, he was home ported in Long Beach, and so I lived in Long Beach, and then his next ship was homeported in San Diego, so I moved from Long Beach to San Diego. Our first son was born in 1947, and our second son was born in 1952 in San Diego. We were there two years, and 15 it was at that time that they had the first nuclear tests at Bikini and Eniwetok, that he was very much involved in, and received radiation and that’s what eventually took his life. But anyway, our first daughter was born as he was transferred from that ship to Annapolis, and he taught at the naval academy for two years. LR: It sounds like he was a career navy man there. FVO: He was a career navy man. He was in twenty-three years. From Annapolis, he was transferred to a ship that was homeported in Sasebo Japan, which is a thousand miles South of Tokyo, and because he was home ported there, the family was able to go. So our three children spent two years in Japan, in their younger years. From there he was ordered to Augusta, Maine, where he was commanding officer at the Reserve Navy and Marine Training Center, both at Bangor and at Augusta. I served as a Red Cross Grey Lady while the family was in Japan and Maine. I also served as PTA President in Japan. So we had two years of home duty there. Then from there, he was transferred to Great Lakes, and that was at the time of the Vietnam War, and they had thousands of recruits. They had 32,000 recruits that were at Great Lakes that were being trained, and he was operations officer for recruit training command at that time. That was our last navy tour. We loved the area and we had settled in Libertyville, IL. By then our oldest son was in eighth grade, our two next children, were in grade school, and then our little girl was born seven years later 16 while we were in Libertyville. So he retired there, and we bought our home. We liked it. We loved the schools, the children loved it. It was time to let them have some roots, and Dale became associated with Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company as a design and development engineer. They had a hose plant that they make all the, six hundred different kinds of hoses, can you believe it? Brake hoses for a train, we’d be traveling across the country on vacation and he’d be putting gas in the car, and he’d look at the gas hoses to see if it was one he designed. So, we loved our time in Libertyville, and then we sent one son to Utah State, a son and a daughter to BYU, and our youngest little girl was graduating from 8th Grade. And we decided it was time, if we were ever going to see our children, the oldest one was married, you know, they married people from the West, and so we decided to move to Salt Lake. So that was where our home was. LR: Where at in Salt Lake did you live? FVO: Very near Foothill Village. We were there, I was in that home for 25 years, but then I sold it after Dale passed away, and I was there about five years after Dale passed away. And it got to be a little bit too much. We were on a sloped double driveway, winter shoveling. I was working at the temple and needed to be there at 730, at that time, so anyway, I sold that home and lived downtown, where I could walk to the temple. LR: That’s what my parents do. FVO: Rough duty, huh? 17 LR: Yeah. What was it like, always, every two years, moving? FVO: Do you know, when the time came, we picked up our bags and we went, we got to our new duty station and went to church the first Sunday we were there, and we were home. So, we are, I don’t know if you are both LDS or not, I’m talking about the Church, I don’t mean to do that. It was home. We had a family wherever we went. Very small branches. Maine was a very small branch. Annapolis, pretty small. When Dale was there as a midshipman his first year, there was not even a branch of the church, and by the second year there were a few, but when we were stationed there we had about seven LDS midshipmen. So they loved having an LDS family there LR: That’s kind of nice, though that you had something you could always rely on, to. It’s nice that you could have something that you could always rely on to be there. FVO: Really, it would have been much more difficult had it not been for church. And not only that, it was good for us to be able to open our home to our LDS Servicemen. While we were in Japan, we’d have, one time, excuse me… Dale was serving on the mission District Council, it was like a high council for a district, and it served all of Southern Japan. And once, we went to Tokyo so he could go to one meeting with the mission president. We had telephone, free telephone service, and so we could call anyone that was in the service, in the base, so that’s why we were able to do our church work. Well we had three months when we had no other LDS 18 families, and there was a nonsectarian service in the morning, and while they held that, we would hold Sunday school in our home. We had the non-sectarian chapel in the afternoon that we could hold LDS service. The non-sectarian chapel was a huge Quonset hut, but it had red carpet, it had lovely pews, it had an organ. So we just went ahead. If it was just our family, we held a regular sacrament meeting, but after three months we got concerned about the children not having other LDS children. So we were going to commute to the nearest branch, three hours by train each way, and the very next Sunday, ships came in, and we had twenty-one servicemen with us, and never again were we alone. Those servicemen just about ate up our children! They were so happy to have an LDS family in the area that they felt they could come to, and be a little bit at home. So we just opened our home to them, when they were ashore they could come to us. MF: I had one last question. I know that Dale couldn’t tell you about ship movements, but how much was he able to tell you about any of his experiences when he wrote to you? FVO: Absolutely none. After the war, he didn’t want to talk about them. It was really quite a few years until I could gradually, and finally one Sunday, I set a tape recorder out, and said let’s just talk. So that’s what you’ll find in his journal. It’s from questions that I asked him at that time. MF: Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you would like to talk about? 19 FVO: I had no idea you were going to ask me all these questions! LR: Well I have one last question I would love to ask as well. How do you think World War Two changed your life? FVO: I would have grown up in Smithfield. Dale and I might have married, but Dale may not have gone to the naval academy if there had not been a war. He may have had another career in another way. I think we would have gotten together, that just worked out, but his Dad was a pharmacist, his brother was a professor of biochemistry, he would have done something in one of those fields. His major was mathematics when he taught at the naval academy. When he taught at Oregon State he taught Naval Science, so he probably would have been a teacher. There are teachers on his side of the family, and one of his brothers was a professor at Utah State. MF: I think that covers a lot of the questions I had. LR: Me to. I’m good. Thank you Fern.