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Show i Oral History Program Royal Lamb Interviewed by Cameron Jones 18 March 2015 ii Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Royal Lamb Interviewed by Cameron Jones 18 March 2015 Copyright © 2015 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 Ogden Union Stockyard was a key fixture in the largest livestock market west of Denver during its heyday from 1916 to 1971. The activities at the yard brought Ogden national attention as a livestock center; the rise of the livestock shows, auctions, etc. at the site spurred the local and regional livestock industry, physically shaping the development of the agricultural landscape both near and far. This project documents some of the stories of the stockyard workers and visitors. ____________________________________ 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: Lamb, Royal, an oral history by Cameron Jones, 18 March 2015, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Mary & Royal Lamb March 18, 2015 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Royal Lamb, conducted by Cameron Jones on March 18, 2015 in Morgan, Utah. Lamb discusses his knowledge and experiences with the historic Ogden Union Stockyards. Also present is Mary Lamb and Christine Jouffray, the videographer. CJ: Mr. Lamb, when we talked on the phone we discussed that your father was involved with the beef buying business with the stockyards? RL: It was actually my grandfather, Royal B. Woolley, who owned the ranch here in Mountain Green. He had about 350 acres. My father was married to a Woolley. So my mother and father and the rest of the family, we did everything on the ranch for my grandfather. We were actually paid by my grandfather so that’s why I kind of looked at it like “share croppers.” During that time, of course, we were in the cattle business and we were in a lot of different businesses here on the ranch. The ranch started out with 1500 chickens, then went to 80 head of milk cows, and then 150 head of purebred Herefords. Now what’s nice about that is that we settled down with just the purebred Herefords. Now they are registered which meant that every year we had to brand them, vaccinate them, ear mark them, castrate them, in the old rodeo style of roping them and throwing them down. So that’s what I grew up with. During that time my grandfather, Royal B. Woolley, lived in Ogden on Adams Avenue. He would drive up to the ranch every day to see what was going on here. He would know each of his cows by its earmark or sometimes we had 2 names for them. We actually raised and showed fat beef and raised steers. There was one cow, old number 100, and she was the meanest cow of the bunch. You would get her in the corral and she would chase everyone up over the fence. But she produced the best calves and so many of her calves ended up winning the grand champions throughout the year. We had to keep her around even though she was mean. My grandfather also leased fifty sections in the Rock House Valley, which is on the Arizona strip down towards the north rim of the Grand Canyon. I’m tying this in so you can see where some of the cattle were coming from that were going through the stockyards. Anyway, we ran cattle in Morgan, Randolph, Utah, and the Arizona strip. Then in the fall we would gather the Arizona strip cattle up and deliver them to the auction because there was just not enough grass down there to feed them. So, we would bring them up and fatten them here and then take them down to the Ogden Stockyards. My best memory of the Ogden Stockyards was probably in 1953. My grandfather had Herefords and they were renowned for being of very good quality. He said, “Royal, here’s what I’d like you to do. We have all these calves in the pen, and I’ll give each one of you your own calf.” (My brother and sister were included.) “You can each pick out your calves that you want to fatten up and you can raise them and show them.” We did this for many years. We had so many grand champions over the years I had to build a trophy case for my mother so we could hang all the trophies and ribbons up. 3 My grandfather would go to the stockyard auctions every week religiously. My first memories of that were when we would go down to visit my grandmother and grandfather, Royal B. Woolley and his wife Viola. When we would go there, Grandpa would never be at home because he would be down at the auction or he would be over at the Exchange Building. So he was either buying, selling, or monitoring what was going on as far as the beef market was concerned. My first recollection of the stockyards is when he would take me there. He was well-known by everyone there because he was buying either steers or buying bulls, and he didn’t want anybody to bid him up. So he would get one of the auctioneers helpers, the people that were scanning the audience for the auctioneer, he would get them and say, “If I raise my left eyebrow that’s a bid, or if I touch my ear that’s a bid.” He had all of these different techniques. I remember as a young man sitting beside him during these auctions and he would say, “Okay, Royal, I’ll tell you when to bid,” and he would tell me and I’d raise my hand. I remember that as though it was yesterday and I enjoyed sitting in the stands and watching the bulls and calves as they’d come through. That’s one of my best recollections. Every year he would give us a calf and we would have to pay for the feed and we would take them to all the stock shows. When we sold them, we were able to keep the money. My grandfather was very proud of his animals because they were good quality beef. We went to all of the state and county fairs in the state. We went as far as Phoenix and Denver, Colorado, to the show there also. In my scrapbook, I have by year which shows we went to, and whether we took 4 Grand Champion or what the situation was. I think the highpoint of my recollection of the Coliseum was the year my grandfather showed what they call a pen-of-five (five steers to be judged as one). They would be judged against the Maddox and the Jensen Brothers and some of the early beef raisers at that time. I remember vividly the year that my grandfather won Grand Champion with them. He was just so proud. He was very proud of his work of breeding quality stock. Whenever they had the show at the Coliseum, and I can’t remember what time of year it was, I know it was fairly mild weather because of things we used to do outside. My grandfather would buy the Grand Champion bull each year so that he could keep his herd right up to the very top. He bought one bull in particular, and brought it here to the ranch and put it out with the cows. He didn’t have a name for it, but he quickly found out that it wasn’t doing its job, so it was promptly named “Liberace.” I can’t remember how we got rid of him, but we knew he just liked other bulls, that’s the best way to put it. So that’s just one of the bulls that came from the auction. Now you don’t know their temperament when you buy them. You know, you don’t know whether they like girls or boys, so that was kind of funny. He bought another bull down there and it turned out to be the meanest bull we ever had. It was so mean that there wasn’t a fence on the place that would hold him. He’d come up to a gate and he would just lift the gate off the hinges and take right off. We finally sold him to the monks over at the monastery in Huntsville and it turned out to be one of their better bulls that they’d ever have. It just didn’t like fences; it didn’t like to be penned in. 5 At the Ogden stock show, I remember walking into the coliseum entry way, where they had all of the stalls set up. We had a 4-H Club we called the T-Bone Club. The T-Bone club was a 4-H Club that consisted of our friends here locally. We had Roy and Jerry Morgan and their boys, who lived in Morgan, and then of course my dad and grandfather, and all of us kids were members of the T-Bone Club. When we went to a stock show we were feared because we would take all of the Grand Champions and Reserve Champions, and showmanship trophies. So they didn’t like to see the T-Bone Club come in because we came away with all the awards. That was because of the good breeding practices attributed to my father and grandfather making sure that they got the best bulls and did what was right. Now they would take the cattle off of the range down in House Rock Valley and run them through the auction. I was only involved in the working standpoint and that was getting them loaded and unloaded. I didn’t see much of what was going on, but my grandfather also had 1,300 acres up in Randolph that he leased and ran cattle on up there. My grandfather was very well known at the auction arena by the people that were buying and selling. That’s why he liked to always hide. You know one of these [rubbing his ear or eyebrow] or rubbing his hair or whatever he decided to do. CJ: It’s a very shrewd business practice. RL: Well, yes. I remember as kids, we must have been nine or ten years old, you know, at that age we just didn’t mind very well, but we’d play around during the auction. The auctioneer would say, “You know if you don’t want to bid, don’t raise 6 your hand.” Of course we were playing around up in the auction and I think the auctioneer kind of got mad at us because we were doing the old, you know one of these numbers [raises hand]. Pretty soon, and I don’t know whether it was one or several of the animals that came through, but he sold them to us and then he told the guy to come up and collect the money from us. We’re going, “No, no, no we didn’t bid on it!” So that was a fond memory of what took place there at the auction. I remember during a stock show that there wasn’t an auditorium, but there was a loft where they had bunk beds, and during the show that’s where we’d stay. We’d roll our sleeping beds out and stay up there and tend to the animals, making sure they were fed and watered and there was clean straw. As the T-Bone Club, we were very proud of the way we conducted ourselves at a trade show. Everybody else would just put the straw in and clean things up. We would take our steers in and wash them, just make sure they were clean, and that everything was cleaned up, but one of the tricks that we did is we squared the straw so that as they were standing on the straw it was flat. So it was very appealing when people came. We would stay while our parents, of course, would come home and take care of the chores and we were all on our own for many years. We traveled from here to Delta, Cedar City, Kamas, the Ogden Stock Show, and to the State Fair. That was always good because we got out of school. I remember my mom and dad always had to go up to the teachers and say, “Look, you know our boys are going to be out of school for a week and it’s the best education that they could 7 ever get.” I was going through some of my scrapbooks to look at my grades and I’m not so sure it helped my grades any. However, it did help us become self-dependent and learn how to take care of money because we’d have a small token of money at that time, a dollar or two, and we’d go over to the exchange at the stockyards to the café over there. We’d go over and have breakfast in the morning. It was great to sit around with those old timers. The old timers sitting there smoking their cigars and telling stories. We were associated with “big guys.” I remember there was an old wooden viaduct from the Coliseum over to the exchange building that we walked across which allowed you to look down into the stockyards themselves. At that particular time there wouldn’t be a lot of animals there, because, for some reason, during the show they just didn’t have a lot of animals. It was a lot of fun to walk around the top of the pens, which had 2 X 6 planks and you could walk grid wise through all the corrals. It was quite a feat, you know, and the Coliseum was big, because we were small and it was a lot of fun. We got several Grand Champions within our club there at the Ogden Stock Show. The very first Grand Champion that I ever got from the herd here was in Cedar City. I remember we took it to auction and they paid a dollar and twenty five cents a pound, and that was a lot of money back then for a young man to have. The steer weighs 1150 pounds. That of course went into an education fund and into feeding the next year’s steers. It was the result of buying and selling good bulls that we got through the auction at the Coliseum or 8 independently. We were always in competition with Maddox which still has a very high, good reputation. If you’ve ever eaten there, you know they’ve got good beef. It has been many years, I mean we’re talking around 1953 to 1955, right around there. CJ: Out of curiosity, did you ever go down when it was the skating rink instead of the Coliseum? RL: Once, and I wouldn’t have remembered it had you not said that, I think I took a group of Boy Scouts. I have never been to a rodeo there. I kind of got out of the beef business when I got smart enough. You know what they say, “If you had two millions dollars, what would you do?” and the person said, “I’d buy a farm and farm it until the money was gone and then go back to work.” We ran 350 acres here in the Mountain Green area, and we farmed everything from the highway to the river, and from the exchange up here down to where the church is, and that entire bottom ground over to the river. I remember that ground across the river was nothing more than willows, and growing up, my father had a team of horses, so I used to ride the horses and hang onto the hames. You’re probably too young to know what those are, but that’s where you run the reins through and they have balls on them. You can grab hold of them and ride them. I remember my dad taking the horses and working over across the tracks all day, pulling stumps out and reclaiming the ground. Now, if you look over there you’ll see a lot of farm ground. That was a direct result of Royal B. Woolley buying this place and my father actually running it for him. 9 My father trucked an awful lot of cattle down to the auction in Ogden. We would bring some of them up from the House Rock Valley, some from Randolph and some from Morgan. My grandfather was in charge of when to sell them, making all those types of decisions. So, I was kind of the “grunt laborer.” We had horses that we brought up from the House Rock Valley that had never seen running water before. You couldn’t get them to go across the ditch. They were terrified, and the cows were the same way because they’d never seen running water. Now out there the cows would have to walk about five miles out to get feed and then come back to get water at the piped springs, and then do that the next day because where the water was there wasn’t any feed, and where there was feed, no water. There was only one spring on the mountainside in Kane, in the House Rock Valley, and they brought it out with a pipe as far as they could to big watering troughs for the cows, but those cows were pretty spooky. They’d never seen a human being before and that was quite the deal. When you’d let them out of the truck here you never knew what direction they were going to go. So some of the stuff we ran through the auction because they would do well in a corral. But some of them, I don’t know how people would keep them in the corrals, because they were kind of rowdy. CJ: They seem pretty wild. You mentioned the House Rock Valley a few times. I’m not exactly sure where that is located, just geographically. RL: Geographically, if you go out through Kanab, go up on the Kaibab Forest as if you’re going to the north rim of the Grand Canyon there’s what they call Jacob’s Lake. Jacob’s Lake is the turning point where you’ll go down into House Rock 10 Valley. If you were to continue on, you would cross the Navajo Bridge and go across the Grand Canyon and then you can go back into Phoenix, that area. It’s flat, desolate, and the bunkhouse that we had there was nine miles of dirt road from the main highway, and no electricity, and I had some real experiences there. I was gathering those wild cattle down there, and the Grand Canyon, of course, was at the north rim where all the tourists go to look down off this big ridge where you can see all along the Grand Canyon. However, when you’re down on ground level and you look out across the House Rock Valley, it’s as flat as the eye can see. I was gathering cattle one day and riding along and all of a sudden, I’m going, “Whoa!” It just like [gestures – straight down drop off] and there it was. I couldn’t see it because the Grand Canyon was here [down below] and all I could see was the other side of it over there. It was quite an experience. CJ: Wow. RL: Cowboy life is not bad, and taking care of cattle is not bad either. I remember having to go out and feed when it was thirty-five degrees below zero here in the Morgan valley when I was growing up, and we haven’t seen that in the past few years. The cattle have to be fed twice a day, and that’s 150 head of cattle. Being purebred Herefords means everyone was registered, had an ear mark and a tattoo that identified them. So every year we had to register the sire of the calves and it was quite a process. Those were the good old days, and I’m glad I don’t have to do that anymore. 11 CJ: I imagine. Well, I think that’s everything I can think of. Do you have anything you want to ask? ChJ: I do. I was wondering how old you were when you were spending the night during the livestock shows. RL: I was about eleven or twelve years old. There were about four or five of us in a group. We were sleeping there, and, of course, we had no adult supervision, and we had heard all these stories about 25th Street. So we boogied on across the viaduct and walked down 25th Street. Back in those days you didn’t fear for your life, because we didn’t know any better. But back in the fifties it was still a pretty rough area. ChJ: That’s pretty young. How old were you when you were bidding with your grandfather? RL: I was probably five or six. He spent many years there and was very well-known there at the auction. If you mention R. B. Woolley to the old-timers, they would know who he is. ChJ: How many years did you participate in the stock shows? RL: Oh, up until about 1960, so about seven years. I had many opportunities to have Grand Champions. I was just reading an article in one of the scrapbooks we have here and it was quite touching. My grandfather was very proud of his cattle, and he was very proud of his grandsons and his granddaughters. My mother and dad went to the Morgan County News to put in an article concerning my winning of the Grand Champion in Cedar City which was a big thing. That was the very first Grand Champion that we’d had as a club. Once the judging was completed and I 12 had the Grand Champion, the rest of the club came over and helped groom the Grand Champion. It was a team effort and it’s very interesting. They wrote an editorial in the Morgan County News saying that my parents should be very proud of our accomplishments, but more proud of what the boys learned in the process. Being in the cattle business teaches you a lot of respect. You know, there’s nothing better than an old cowboy. ChJ: You’re a cattleman, but were there any cattlewomen? RL: Not that I remember. Now my sister showed cattle for about two years, but I don’t remember any cattlewomen. ChJ: Do you remember women at all working in the stockyards? RL: No. I do remember a good waitress over at the exchange who used to take care of us when we boys would come in. Now, you have to remember, we were heavy tippers at 10 or 15 cents, but she always took care of us. ChJ: So you had breakfast at the exchange building? Did you go get your burgers there, too? RL: Oh yes. That was the only place to eat and it was the best. We couldn’t get them over on 25th Street. All we’d do there is walk the street and get back. We figured once we got back into the building we were safe. That’s a heck of a memory to have. It’s because of what went on there in the Coliseum that gave us that opportunity. Now we lived through it, so that was a good deal. That was a good deal. We never did pick a fight with any of the drunks over there. We let them alone. ChJ: Just checking it out. 13 RL: Yeah. I remember one thing, one little story. I remember the first steer that I ever raised. His name was Tuffy, and I remember leading him through the auction. I led him around the ring and then once the gavel came down I remember the gate opening up and I remember to this day how I felt when I had to take the halter off of him and slap him on his butt and send him on his way. You get real attached to those steers. You spend a lot of time with them. You teach them how to lead and you teach them tricks. They become very familiar with you and very calm to be around and the kids could come up and do anything they wanted to them. So once you slapped him on the butt, knowing that probably somebody’s going to be eating him shortly, it was pretty tough. Just the first one, from then on it was a matter of how big of a check I was going to get. ChJ: That’s a question I have to ask. When you were older and later when you were in the auction hall, could you sort of estimate the weight of the cattle when they came up? RL: Yes, now I didn’t have to do that, but you get a real feel for what steers weigh just by looking at them. My grandfather could of course, that was no problem. That was a very good question because when you groom a steer for show you fluff its hair up, you camouflage the weak spots, and you accentuate the good spots. So it’s maybe a bit more difficult there, but still someone that’s been around cattle, they can pretty well tell you the age and the weight. I’ll show you some pictures. They’re not going to be relevant to the Coliseum because the only pictures I have there is of a steer. You can’t see the 14 background but I could tell you that’s where it is but you wouldn’t know the difference. Back in those days when you got the Grand Champion they came out with a full flower wreath and hung it on the steer. That was a pretty big deal. We were heavily involved with 4-H, and mom and dad got as many people here in the valley engaged in the 4-H club as they could. I remember my mother forced us to take a cooking class. Of course, I’ve forgotten everything I know, that’s why I got married. I’ve got a lovely wife that takes care of me. I wish that I had more specifics on the Coliseum, but I have good, fond memories of that Coliseum. I remember washing a lot of steers there in the washroom. You’d lead them in, get the old soap out and lather them up. Make sure the white was white, the brown was brown. When you’d curl them, you’d scrape the water off of them and you’d zigzag your curls, crinkle them in there. Then after it dried it was just like a hair permanent, just comb it up and it’s curly. You’d take the tail and you’d rat it just like women who rat their hair, you’d fluff the tail up. Why? Because you’d cover the weak spots of the animal and fill in the back. You just wanted to make sure the white was white. With Herefords you had a red and a white. It was never a red and a yellow or anything like that. It was red and white so we scrubbed them up pretty good. CJ: We probably better wrap it up. Thank you so much for sharing these stories. It’s been amazing. RL: You’re welcome. |