Oral History Program Viva May Wilcox Interviewed by Alyssa Chaffee 10 July 2017 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Viva May Wilcox Interviewed by Alyssa Chaffee 10 July 2017 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: Wilcox, Viva May, an oral history by Alyssa Chaffee, 10 July 2017, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Viva May and Keith Engagement Photo 1945 Viva May Wilcox in wedding dress 1945 Viva May and Keith Wedding Day 17 July 1945 Viva May and Keith Wilcox on wedding day 17 July 1945 Viva May Wilcox 10 July 2017 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Viva May Wilcox, conducted on July 10, 2017 in her home, by Alyssa Chaffee. Viva May discusses her life and her memories involving World War II. Lorrie Rands, the video technician, and Rona Lee Maughn are also present during this interview. AC: Today is July 10, 2017. We are in the home of Viva May Wilcox speaking with her about her life and her experiences during World War II. My name’s Alyssa Chaffee. I’m here with Lorrie Rands and Rona Lee Maughn. So first I’d like to know, where and when were you born? VW: I was born May 5, 1922 in Colonia, Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. My parents were down there teaching students at the academy. When they heard that I was born on the fifth of May, the kids at the school came over and said to my parents, “Your daughter is already named. Her name is Viva May.” AC: You said your parents were teaching down there. Were they teaching English? VW: Well, they were teaching everything. My dad taught all the athletics and my mother taught piano and music and everything. AC: How long did you live in Mexico? VW: Well, about four years. AC: Do you have any memories of living down there? VW: No. I was too little to remember. AC: So, after when you turned four, where did you move from there? VW: To Ogden. AC: What did your parents do once you moved to Ogden? 2 VW: Well, my dad got tuberculosis and so he had to go to Fitzsimons General Hospital. He was there for a year and a half. LR: Is that the one in the Ogden area? WM: No, in Colorado. AC: Was your mother working during this time? VW: Yes. AC: What was she doing? VW: Well, she had to teach piano lessons and take care of us. So, she did everything she could to make a little money so that we could live. AC: What street were you living on in Ogden? VW: Well the first one was on Harrison and twenty-fifth. We just lived in a little apartment in that house. AC: So that was your first house you said? VW: Yes. AC: How long did you live in that house? VW: Well, we just rented a little tiny bit of that house for eight or nine months. AC: So you didn’t rent the whole house? VW: Oh no. We couldn’t. We didn’t have any money. AC: Who else lived in that house with you guys? Were there other boarders there? VW: Oh yes. LR: How many siblings did you have? VW: I had two. AC: So you had two sisters, is that correct? 3 VW: Yes. AC: Were you the oldest? VW: Yes. AC: How far apart were your sisters from you in years? VW: About a year and a half or something like that. AC: So pretty close in age. So tell me a little bit about what you remember being a child in Ogden. VW: Well, I remember one of the funniest things we did was, when I was about four and my mother was not looking, I went outside in the gutter. The water was coming down fast and I got as many angleworms as I could. Then I took them in the house and took a whole pan of butter and fried them. I thought I was going to make those for supper. My mother was not very happy with me, not because I fried the angleworms but because I used a pound of butter. AC: Did you have a lot of friends on that street growing up? VW: Well there were mostly boys in that first apartment. AC: Did you hang out with those boys at all? VW: No. AC: Where did you go for elementary school? VW: Well I first went to Lorin Farr and then I went to what they called Quincy School. It’s not the same place now as it was when I went. AC: What do you remember about Quincy School? VW: Well I remember that where we lived, we could hear them go like this with the bell to go around the school to say it was time to come and go in. My mother 4 would make me stay in and practice the piano until I heard that bell and then she’d let me go. I couldn’t go any earlier. AC: How long did you play the piano for? VW: Can’t remember when I didn’t. AC: All your life? VW: Yes. Well my mother was a piano teacher, so she made us practice, like I said, a half hour before breakfast and a half hour after breakfast or we couldn’t go to school. AC: Did you enjoy that? VW: It was just routine, so I didn’t think anything else about it. AC: Where did you go for middle school? VW: Madison. AC: You also went to Ogden High School for high school is that correct? VW: Yes. AC: Were you in that fancy new building? VW: Yes. AC: So, tell me about some of your memories in high school. VW: Well, we were just so happy to be over there. I always belonged to some group of girls. They acted and did what they should and I enjoyed being with them. Mother taught me to play the piano. In the fifth grade I started taking violin lessons from I. W. Ford. I played for the orchestra in the twelfth grade, then I didn’t do that anymore. My first orchestra recital was with J. Clair Anderson who also taught my mother the organ. I had twelve lessons. Now after graduation 5 from Ogden High School, in spring of 1940, I entered Weber to study in the field of education and music. My extracurricular activities where I belonged to La Dianeda which was a little social club. I later became President. I was a candidate for the girls association as a secretary and I headed all the fun dances and so on and so forth. LR: Can you talk a little bit about the depression? How your family survived? VW: Well during World War II, we had to get everything rationed. And if you had anything that wasn’t rationed you had to tell somebody in the government what you had and they would come in your house and see it. Then, you could have a little ration card to get what else you needed. We didn’t get very much because my mother canned all her fruit and you had to have a ration for that. My mother had so much stuff that we didn’t get very many rations. LR: So, that was during World War II, the rationing. It sounds like your mother made it possible for you to not have to worry so much about the rationing. VW: Well, sometimes yes and sometimes no. AC: So, tell me more about what you did as President of La Dianeda. VW: Well, when I was a Pledge we had to come to school in a little short skirt and go roller skating and I hated that. I thought that was awful. We had to go flirt with boys and I didn’t like them and we had to walk with them and I didn’t like them. AC: Why did you have to flirt with the boys? VW: Well, that was part of being a Pledge. If I wasn’t a Pledge then I could do what I wanted. 6 AC: So what do you remember of the day that World War II started? Where were you exactly when you heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor? VW: Well I was in stake conference when we heard about it and as we walked up 21st street, we heard more all the time. We just couldn’t believe it. It was just too hard to believe that anything like that would ever happen. Oh I remember that very well. It just broke our hearts. AC: You were a year into your college schooling, is that correct? VW: Yes. AC: So you were probably about nineteen? VW: Somewhere around there. AC: Did you help with any of the war efforts? VW: Oh, I used to make cookies for them. We had the Victory Garden. You had to plant everything that you could and that helped so that we didn’t have to go buy so many of the things. Oh, I’ll never forget that Victory Garden. It wasn’t in our yard. We had to go three blocks away to get there. AC: Was it a big community, Victory Garden? VW: Yes. LR: Where were you living at this time in 1941? VW: I was still at home at that point because I was at Weber. LR: Where was that located? VW: 2583 Fowler. AC: Do you remember what racism was like during World War II in Ogden? How the blacks were treated. 7 VW: Oh yes. They got sent to the back of the bus with all the rest of us in the front and if there wasn’t enough room then they’d have to stand in the back. They didn’t get to sit in the same places that we did, but that wasn’t very nice. LR: Were the blacks allowed to go in the movie theatres with you? VW: No. LR: Where could they go to watch a movie? VW: Well they could go to the Paramount and we’d go to the Orpheum and the Egyptian. LR: OK. So they were only allowed to go to the Paramount. VW: Yes. LR: Can you talk a little bit about meeting your husband? VW: I was coming home from town. We used to have to walk everywhere. You didn’t have a car. I was walking with the President’s daughter. Keith came by and he wanted to pick her up because he’d been dating her. I was there so I got in the car with them too. He never did call her back. He called me up that same night. WM: Are you talking about the President of Weber State, H. Aldous Dixon? VW: Yes. AC: How long did you two date? VW: About four years. I went to school at Utah State and he went to University of Utah, so we had to go back and forth like this. He had other girls. He had so many girls. In fact, when I started going with him, his mother called me Betty. He went with so many girls named Betty, so I was Betty for a long time to her. AC: What was your wedding date? 8 VW: 17th of July in 1945. That anniversary is coming up pretty quick. AC: Did he fight in the war at all? VW: Well he was supposed to and then the war ended. So he went up and down the east coast just kind of clearing it out. AC: So he was in the Navy? VW: Yes. LR: Where was he stationed? RM: Wasn’t he stationed somewhere on the East Coast? VW: Yes. LR: So he was state-side. RM: He was. He had gotten orders and he was supposed to go to the Pacific but the war ended. LR: Where did you two get married? VW: In the Logan temple. LR: Would you write letters to him? VW: There’s thousands of them. LR: You wrote often, almost every day, it looks like. VW: Why not? Can’t go out. AC: Were you a teacher when you got married? VW: Yes. AC: You taught in Ogden city in elementary school? Is that correct? VW: Yes. AC: What grades did you teach during your teaching career? 9 VW: I first taught kindergarten. Then I taught first, second, third and fourth grades. Then I taught music in the seventh grade. Then I taught the orchestra. I’ll have to tell you a funny story. In the fourth or fifth grade, one of my students wasn’t singing. He’d sing off key. I got so mad at him. So I went down, took him into the hall and I shook him. I said, “Don’t you dare ever do that again.” Then I sent him back to class from there. If I did that today, I’d have gotten fired from the school. But anyway, when I came back from leave of home, he was out waiting for me and he brought me a great big bouquet of flowers. LR: What was the feeling like in class during World War II? Were the kids scared a lot? VW: Well, I don’t think they were scared any more than they were before. They were just natural kids. LR: So it didn’t seem to affect them as much as the adults. VW: I don’t think so, because it affected the adults a lot more. LR: As a teacher, were you able to keep your own feelings in check as you were teaching? VW: Well you’d try to. AC: Did people talk about the war a lot during those days? VW: Oh yes. All the time. AC: Did you ever get sick of talking about the war? VW: Well, what else was there to talk about? No. AC: Which grade did you like teaching the most? VW: I think first grade because they wouldn’t talk back and they were always so nice. 10 AC: I heard that there’s a cute story about your husband buying you shoes off-ration. Would you tell me that story? VW: Well, he wanted to buy me something for my birthday. So he went in and bought a hat and a coat and a pair of shoes. Then he told the clerk to wrap them up and get them ready to mail, and they did. So when he went to pay for it, they told him how much money it was and he was supposed to pay one ration stamp for the shoes and he didn’t have one. How he ever got by with that, I can’t tell you. But anyway, I got the shoes and he got to send them. AC: So were clothes even rationed back then as well, or material? VW: Material was, yes. AC: So did you have to make your own clothes a lot during the war? VW: Yes. RM: During the war, I know you could buy clothing to a certain extent. Shoes. VW: But we didn’t have any money. LR: Would you ever do the paint-on nylons or did you just go without? VW: Well they didn’t have nylons for a long time. I went with this one boy before I went with my others and on our date he hit another car. It broke my arm. His mother then brought me the first pair of nylons I ever had. AC: During the war did you have to stop buying nylons after a while? They just weren’t around to be had? VW: Well it was quite a while before we could buy them but when we could then it was wonderful. 11 LR: So you mentioned that boy you went out with during in the war. Was that hard, losing a lot of your classmates? VW: Oh yes. There was a photo of somebody in the paper every day, as one of our friends that got killed. Yes. RM: During the war they had a special kind of socks that you could buy and everybody wore them because that’s what you had. The kind of socks that you could buy during the war, you told me they were not very pretty. VW: No, they weren’t. Kind of like the long socks that you see in the movie. No they weren’t pretty at all. AC: So I have one last question for you before we let you go. How do you feel that World War II affected the rest of your life or affected you as a person? VW: Oh all you wanted to do was forget it. Yes. Well it was hard and I hope you don’t ever have to do it like I had to do it because it was very difficult. Every night you’d see somebody’s picture in the paper and they were killed and that’s not fun. AC: Well thank you. I really appreciate you letting us come and visit with you today.