Oral History Program Max Reeves Interviewed by Mack S. Taft circa 1960s Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Max Reeves 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: Reeves, Max, 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 Max Reeves. Most of the discussion concerns CCC camps and CCC projects in the Weber County area. Mention made of farming conditions and irrigation in Missouri and Utah. Interviewer is Mack Taft. MR: In 1929, I lived in Cache County, Missouri. MT: When did you come to Utah? MR: In 1940. MT: You came, and what brought you out to Utah? MR: I came in CCC camps. MT: What were the conditions back in Missouri at the time you left there? MR: We had went through a very dry farming condition, where very little rainfall fell, and crops were real poor, and people were poor at the time. They were starting to get a little better fix, but the farm people that had no outside income were still hurting from the Depression and the drought. MT: What kind of farm were you raised on back there? MR: At this particular time, we had a 440 acre farm. It was possibly – oh, twenty percent pasture, and the rest farmland. MT: What kind of crops did you grow there? MR: Corn, wheat, oats and barley. 2 MT: Now, when you came out west, where did you come to first? MR: I came to Milford, Utah. MT: What type of work did you do there? MR: At Milford the CC boys built water reservoirs on the grazing sections, as near the corners of sections as possible, to serve two sections at a time. They built rickrack bands, and built ditches to bring the water into these reservoirs, small stock reservoirs. MT: When did you come to Weber County? MR: About – I would imagine June in 1940. MT: What projects did you work on here, then? MR: We landed in Hooper, and we were the first CC camp to occupy the Hooper camp. They had a small detachment in there building the camp before we came, but we worked on the bird refuge mostly, in the Hooper area. MT: Did you say 1940? MR: Yes. MT: I had an idea it was earlier than that. Okay. What other CCC projects were there around the area here that you were acquainted with? MR: There was a group of boys up near Pineview that were working up there. I don’t know of any other right near. I didn’t get acquainted with other groups. 3 MT: Were you acquainted with the project on Bountiful Peak and what they did down there? MR: No, I didn’t get down in that area. I just was in the Hooper bird refuge area, and soon after we came to Hooper, I got a rating and started cooking in the kitchen. I didn’t work out on the projects after that. MT: Let’s see. When did you say you went to Milford? MR: Oh, I think it was about January in 1940. MT: I see. Okay – now, by that time the Depression had kind of eased off a bit all over, hadn’t it. MR: Yes. But one of the requirements to get into the CCs was that your family had to be of low income. This was necessary to qualify you. MT: You mentioned when one of the girls interviewed you on tape, something about a robbery from your kitchen or something. I thought that was tremendously interesting. Would you recount that for us? MR: While we were in Hooper, the entire payroll for the camp was stolen. Now, when you’re in the CCC camp, if you’re equivalent of private in the army, first step we’ll say there, your parents got twenty-two dollars a month, and I believe you got eight. Now, the payroll that was taken from the CC camp at Hooper was the payroll that was sent to the boys; the part that went to your family went directly to them, and the boy in camp never seen this money. Now, as you became rated and you got experience and you sometimes gained more money in your part of 4 the pay, which could go up as high as fifteen, eighteen dollars that some of the boys got. This was the money that was robbed. It was taken while people were eating, and it was discovered while the people were still in the mess hall eating. So they were held in the dining area and then the others that weren’t in the dining area were naturally the ones suspicioned for this robbery. At the time, I was cooking, and it was my day off. I worked every other day, and so I had a hard time explaining my whereabouts. They brought in some people from the FBI who were – I’m sure had handled things like this many times, and they questioned us until a couple of us discussed it later, and we wasn’t sure whether we’d taken the money or not, we didn’t know, after they got through. They had us completely confused. They’d ask us – one of them would ask a leading question, and then the other two would jump in and maybe ask you the same question worded a little different, where one answer would answer all questions asked, but to a young fellow this was confusing. MT: Did they ever solve the problem? MR: If they ever found who took this money, I never did hear about it. MT: What conditions did you find in Hooper at the time you came out here? How did they compare with what – the situation back home and so forth? Or can you compare those? MR: Yes, I can compare those real easily. Before I came to Utah, the area I lived in had several years of real small amount of rainfall. Farmers hadn’t grown anything, and they were all in trouble. They were just kind of starting to get over 5 this, just a wee bit. Like I stated before, the ones that were depending entirely on their farm for their income were definitely having problems. They even had their automobiles jacked up on stovewood and the tires hanging on the sides of the barns, and they went to town in their wagons for groceries and things, and didn’t license their automobiles. When I came to Utah, I found people generally working, and the irrigation here, crops were growing, and I think a lot better. MT: The drought along with the Depression, it was probably a combination of the two which made it so terrible back there, then. MR: I’m sure this hurt people. Now, we’ve had several years there, from about 1930 to about 1940, about ten years there when we grew very little from our farm. I can remember wheat growing thirteen bushels to the acre, and tests was so bad on it that you had trouble finding anybody that would even buy this, what you did get. Corn crops, I recall raising oh, 160 acres of corn, which was our main money crop, and just putting some cattle in it to graze it off. There wasn’t enough there to even try to pick or anything. You couldn’t do anything with it. The only crop that we did raise – if we planted oats early, we would get a little bit of oats. But this wasn’t really a bumper crop, it was just sort of a half a crop of oats. That was the only crops we were getting in this time. MT: ‘Course, you were depending totally on rainfall, and not on irrigation back there, weren’t you. MR: This is true, this is true. 6 MT: Because it was dry here too, but the irrigation did pull it through. How were you received in the community when you came in? MR: Oh, I believe we were received pretty well. The CC boys had a law that pretty well – self-government that pretty well took care of their problems. If a boy went out and got hisself in trouble, well, when he came back to camp, he was in just about the worst place he could go, because there was a couple of hundred other boys there that didn’t want to have someone looking down on them because of someone else’s foolishness. If this happened, why, the guy that did it certainly suffered among his own fellow men in camp. I think at first, people were a little leery of the CC boys in the area, but I believe as time went on, they learned to live with us, and I believe we got along pretty well with the people in Hooper and Roy area. MT: How many around the area here are you acquainted with that came in and married girls from here and stayed? Are there quite a number, or what’s the situation? MR: Oh, I believe there’s about eight or ten in the area that was in camp with me. Mason from Hooper; and a boy from Riverdale; fellow by the name of James Crook that lives in Clearfield; Stick McCracken that lives in Roy; fellow by the name of Keester, I don’t know just for sure where he lives now, he did live in the Ogden area; and a Montereg boy that was killed in the war, that married a Hooper girl. A Turner boy that’s still around the area somewhere, that I know of. 7 MT: Well, that’s real interesting. Is there anything else, now, that you remember about the Depression? ‘Course my major study is on Weber County and what happened here, but I’m not averse to talking about other areas, because I need some comparison anyway. Anything else you think of that might be interesting? MR: I could tell you the effects of it on my father’s family. My father, when I was born in Missouri, was quite active in the livestock industry. He had a small stock ranch in the town of Butler, Missouri, and he bought and sold cattle, lambs, and hogs. He was quite prosperous in this business, and I believe at the time I was born or shortly after he was running a 2,200 acre ranch in Bates County, which is - at that time I believe they figured 6/10ths of an acre would pasture a cow. So it’s pretty good farming country, and a lot of this was agriculture as well as the livestock end of this thing. I recall him going to Kansas City, which was the market he sold his stuff from that he purchased, with a whole trainload of stock that he owned everything that was in front of him on the train, several times when I was a young boy. Then the Depression came along, and the drought, and customers that he had for a long time had trouble feeding their stock, and he decided he’d try to see what he could salvage in the pork industry, so he went around and paid people – contracted hogs – he paid people for their weaner pigs, so they could go out and buy feed to feed them out, and at the time the price of hogs just kept getting lower and lower and lower, and finally when the thing was over with, why he had a lot of hogs, but they weren’t worth anything, and he got very little of his money back. At the same time, he bought futures, and this went real bad, right along 8 with the other reverses. By the time I was in the sixth grade, why, my father had been reduced down to where he only had a small downpayment in this 440 acre farm. So he’d pretty well lost everything he had, which was a considerable amount. I can recall he used to carry a letter from the bank, which said that his check was good for any amount he wanted to write on it, and I can recall when we finally started on this farm to try to farm it, his check wasn’t good for a very large amount. This farm was kind of a worn-out piece of land, and it was fenced and cross-fenced with hedge, which is – we used for post in that country, the way we use cedar posts here. So we cut these hedge fences off of there, and sold stove-wood, and sold the posts, and then we had to of course buy wire, and use part of the posts to replace the hedge we was tearing out. It shaded the ground for probably forty feet on each side of it, and kept crops from growing. By cutting this, why, we gained some ground. But this was one of the things we did to earn a living during this period of time. MT: Well, I sure appreciate your help, Max, and I may have some questions later on just to kind of fill in. If I do, I’ll just call you on the phone and chat with you. Thanks a million. MR: You’re welcome.