Oral History Program Don James East Ghislaine Black 27 April 2008 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Don James East Interviewed by Ghislaine Black 27 April 2008 Copyright © 2012 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii 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. Archival copies are placed in Special Collections. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description The Weber State College/University Student Projects have been created by students working with several different professors on the Weber State campus. The topics are varied and based on the student's interest or task for a specific assignment. These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ 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 All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: East, Don James, an oral history by Ghislaine Black, 27 April 2008, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Don James East. The interview was conducted on April 27, 2008, by Ghislaine Black, in West Weber, Utah. The interview concerns East’s “sense of place” of living on the railroad out at Lakeside. GB: State your name. DE: Don James East. GB: And where were you born? DE: West Weber. GB: How old were you when you went to live at Lakeside? DE: Let's see, I was six years old. GB: How many were in your family? DE: The whole family, there was six of us. I have three sisters. GB: What was it like growing up on the railroad? DE: Well, it was fun, I guess. We had a lot of fun. I remember when we had to go into town; we had to catch the train to come into town. GB: How often did you have to come into town? DE: Oh, not very often, I'd say probably mostly once a week. GB: Was it your father that worked out on the railroad? And what did he do? DE: He was a section foreman. GB: What exactly does a section foreman do? 1 DE: He had a crew that worked for him, and they took care of the tracks, changing ties, putting spikes in to hold the rails in place, replacing tracks; if there was a broken rail, they had to replace it. Check the switches along the line to see that they were working all right. And if they had a wreck on the tracks, they had to go and help take care of that, get that fixed. GB: What was school like out on the railroad? DE: School was a one-room house, with a pot-bellied stove in the middle of the room, and we had eight grades. We had the 1st to the 8th. There was around anywhere from two to four or five kids to a class. We had one teacher and he taught all of the kids. GB: How long did you live out there? DE: Till I was, well let's see, we moved back here in '37. If I remember right it was about six years. GB: Did your dad lose his job, is that why you moved back in or was there no need for them to be out there at Lakeside. DE: No, he quit on his own, the thing of it was he always wanted to have a farm. And his father-in-law gave him a chance to take over the farm, so he took over my granddad's farm and we moved in here. Besides that, we had to move into school. Too many of them had to move in to go to school, because they had finished the eighth grade. So because they had to move into Ogden or some places like that to go to school, to finish they're schooling. They pretty well had to close the school, there wasn't enough kids left and because in the families, the oldest one was getting out of school and the youngest had to move for the older one to go to school. 2 GB: What is your favorite memory about growing up on the railroad? DE: Oh, out there at Lakeside, I think the thing was that everyone liked to go hiking around over the mountains and out across the flats, the alkaline flats, swimming in the lake, in the old salt lake, and that was a lot of fun. And the old salt would crystallize on your skin and you would have to take a bath to wash the salt off. GB: Did you get into any mischief? DE: Oh, we were always into mischief it seemed like. Chasing them old pelicans that got covered with salt and couldn't fly so we would try and catch them, and wash them all off. And then there was lice on them, and the lice would get on you. And then we would go sometimes hunting rattlesnakes. And then there was one place out there, where the Indians would camp and things, we'd go out hunting arrowheads. We found some arrowheads. We would stand and when the sun would be shinning just right out amongst the old rabbit brush, we'd see the sun shining on the arrowheads or flint. Then you'd run over there and pick them up. The arrowheads would shine like the sun on a piece of glass, and then you could tell where they were. There were two or three caves we would go into, look around into them. Some of the caves had a hole, where you had to crawl in on, on your belly to get into them, then there would be a big old room, where you could stand up and walk around in. Those were the ones that the Indians lived in there on some of those islands. Where the lake had went and gone away from the islands so you could walk over to them, it was called the Strongknob islands; we did a lot of hiking around it. And that's where the arrowheads were, that we could find. And then in the winter time, the sheep herders would come out there with their sheep for the winter, and we would torment them by asking for rides on their horses and we would go 3 out to their camp. In fact I stayed with my one granddad out there at the sheep camp over the weekend sleeping in the old sheep camp. GB: Did your mom garden out there? DE: You couldn't garden out there at Lakeside because of the salt that was in the soil out there. Nothing would grow. Bought everything in town, and they shipped it out on the train, unload it and you had to go pick the groceries up from there. Or you could go to the store in town and then they would ship out your groceries on the train. Or they even, like fruit, they would order apples from the orchards, peaches would be shipped out to us, and then my mother would go and bottle the fruit, so we would have fruit for the winter. We had chickens, sometimes we would have a pig we would raise out and butcher for our meat, and then to preserve it we would put it in salt, to protect it so it wouldn't spoil. Then of course, I had a calf that my grandmother gave me, and when it got older we took it out there and had milk. We milked her and I sold milk to some of the other families around there. GB: How many families lived out there at Lakeside, was it a big community like West Weber? DE: No, there were two sections and most of the sections had around about four or five people that worked on the sections and the people’s families. And then there was the powerhouse, and there were three fellows that ran the powerhouse. We had a little store, it was also the mail post office and we would go and drop the mail off there. The person who was running that little post office, they would sort our mail out and put it into little boxes and it had a door on it that you had to open up to get the mail out. So they had candy you could by. And they had punchboards where you could go and pay for 4 punches and see if you won a box of chocolates or something from it. So it was not a very big room. Living quarters were in the back where the people lived. And there were a couple of families that lived out there, and their husbands were brakemen on the railroad, so they would keep the train, go forward to California and then come back, and stay there until their crew went out again. We had two quarries there that they would blast the rock to put it out along the railroad tracks. And then there was the old trussel that went across the lake. So there at the middle of the lake they called it Midlake, there were families that lived right there on the trussels. They had gangs that would come and work on the trussel and they also had B & B gangs that would come and go wherever they had a large thing to do, like on the lane rail, building bridges. They would bring these gangs in to do the major jobs. Whenever they had that, they would have three or five cars where people slept, and then they would have the cook shack, where they would cook the meals for the men for their breakfast and their meal at night. There were times we had a lot of people around there. Of course it was fun to come and watch the train come in and watch them unload the sheep off of the cars and then they would go out into the desert and up in the hills during the winter. Then in the spring they would bring them in and load them up and bring them back into different places like Ogden, Tremonton, Morgan and some of them places they would bring them in, it was fun to watch them. I enjoyed watching them especially when they had a goat that would lead the sheep up into the boxcars; I mean the sheep cars. It would go up ahead and the sheep would follow them up in there, and then they would work themselves around in the car and then they would slip back out of the car and they shut the door on the sheep. Some of the sheepherders had dogs that would go and help load the sheep. 5 When they were loading the sheep and they were pushing them up into the car and if the sheep wouldn't go up in, the dog would jump on the back of the sheep. And to get them moving the dogs would bite the sheep on their ears and they would bark and then the sheep would go into the cars. It was interesting to watch and I enjoyed it. No matter how old or young you were the kids all played together; there was only about a dozen or so. Whenever you had a birthday party, everyone was invited to a birthday party. There was an old cook shack. And when they were putting in the line across the lake, they had gangs using the cook shack. So after the line was finished, and they didn't need the cook shack anymore, the families would get together on a Saturday night and they would have dances. There would be different people who worked out there in the gangs and the sections and they would play the violin or the banjo, mostly it was the stringed instruments, and they would play for the dances. And one time we built a little stage there at one end of the cook shack and the school would put on plays, we would put on a couple of plays during the school year. It was fun. We would go there and roller skate, we had the clamp on skates; we didn't have the shoe skates. We would clamp them on our own shoes and go skating around in the old cook shack. GB: Did you ever go ice-skating on the lake? DE: You can't ice skate on the lake, it doesn't freeze, and it is too salty. We would also go and take wire and make our names, but we had to wrap the wire with string because if you didn't the salt when it collected and crystallized on the wire, it would turn brownishyellow because of the rust. The salt would make the wire rust. We made houses out of the window screens and door screens, and we would make little houses, and they would all crystallize, and it was pretty. 6 GB: And this was on the lake? DE: Yeah, you go and dangle it into the salt, fasten it onto a pole and hang it into the lake, that way the salt water would crystallize and you would have salt corroded all over things. We made different kinds of things. A lot of them brought them into Ogden and sold them. GB: Could you use the salt off the lake, or do you have to process it first? DE: It has to be processed; you had your places, like Morton Salt, produced salt from the lake. And there was an outfit from Lakeside, about two miles out to it, was an old oil well, they tried to drill for oil, but they never found any. We used to hike out to that place every once and a while. Around Easter the families would get together and hike out to someplace and have a picnic. It was fun growing up out there. I remember one time my sisters and I, our birthdays only about a week apart, and so my mother and her sister, her sister lived at Midlake, and she came over to Lakeside, and they planned a hobo birthday party for us. And everybody got together and then they divided us into groups and we had to go around to the different homes and beg for food, we had a list of things we had to get from different people. I remember the group I was in we had to go and get a lice or louse bathtub, and if we couldn't get these things we had to make up an excuse for the reason we couldn't. And when we got back and we were giving out what we had from the list and the reason we couldn't get different ones. And one of the girls that was older; she told the reason we couldn't get the bathtub is because the flea was in there taking a bath. Ahead of it, mother and her sister went to the different families and gave them like marshmallows and hot dogs and buns and we had to beg for them from different families. Some of the families tell you would have to sweep the floors or do 7 something like that. My mother's sister was with us this time, and we had dressed up like hobos, old clothes, big old holes in the clothes, my aunt she said ok, she would sweep the floor. And so when she went got close to the rug, she picked up the corner of the rug and chucked the dirt under the rug and the women when she saw that, she got a kick out of that she just bout fell over backwards and laughing at my aunt for sweeping dirt under the rug, there wasn't any dirt because the people were pretty clean and that. And our homes were built out of railroad ties. The ties were the piece of wood that the rail was nailed to. The ties were made out of pine and cedar. 8