Community Oral History Charlie Trentelman and Roberta Beverly Interviewed by Alyssa Kammerman 7 September 2023 RootsBridge LLC Mission Statement RootsBridge cultivates connection in communities and families through the transformative power of storytelling. Our mission is to compassionately record life histories, honor unique experiences and promote empathy through shared narratives. By encouraging individuals to step into another's shoes, we cultivate deeper bonds between storyteller and hearer. In the communities we serve, we foster a sense of unity and compassion. We are driven by our passion for providing a platform for marginalized voices to ensure that every story is heard and none are diminished. We believe in a community where everyone feels connected and finds a sense of belonging. Project Description The Union Station Centennial oral history project is a companion to the Museums at Union Station’s “Heart of Ogden” exhibit, which commemorates the 100-year anniversary of the opening of the current Union Station building on November 22, 1924. In honor of the centennial anniversary, Ogden City contracted with oral historian Alyssa Kammerman of RootsBridge LLC to collect fifteen oral histories from community members who shared memories associated with the Union Station in Ogden. The interviews encompass the 1930s to the present day, thus documenting the period when Union Station was actively functioning as a train station and its subsequent transformation into a museum and cultural center. Community members interviewed included former railroad employees, Union Station employees, residents of Ogden, city employees, and museum volunteers. The diverse range of interviewees reflects the diversity of Ogden and provides a comprehensive view of Union Station’s impact on the community as a cultural hub and a place of shared history. ~ Oral History Description ~ An oral history is the spoken account of historic events in one’s life from the unique and partial perspective of the narrator. It is a primary source and unique interpretation of one’s lived experience. Rights Management This work is the property of RootsBridge LLC and The Museums at Ogden Union Station. 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 / as long as credit is given to RootsBridge LLC and Ogden Union Station. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Trentelman, Charlie, and Roberta Beverly, an oral history by Alyssa Kammerman (RootsBridge LLC), 7 September 2023, Centennial Oral History Project, Museums at Union Station, Ogden, UT. Oral History Interview September 7, 2023 Interviewer: Alyssa Kammerman Interviewees: Charlie Trentelman and Roberta Beverly Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Charlie Trentelman and Roberta Beverly, conducted on September 7, 2023, for the 100 year anniversary of the Ogden Union Station. This interview was conducted at the Ogden Union Station by oral historian Alyssa Kammerman of RootsBridge LLC. During this interview, Trentelman and Beverly share their memories of the Union Station in its heyday as a train station as well as its evolution into a museum and community center. Trentelmen and Beverly share memories of working at the Museums at Union Station, and discuss the immense importance which Union Station has to the community of Ogden. AK: Today is September 7th, 2023, and I am here with Charlie Trentelman and Roberta Beverly, interviewing them for the Ogden Centennial Exhibit. My name is Alyssa Kammerman, and I'll be conducting the interview. So, Charlie, I wanted to start out with your background in the Ogden Standard Examiner. So it looks like you started with them in 1978, and I just wanted to know, was that the first newspaper that you started with? CT: Oh, no, that was like my... [counts] third newspaper, I think it was. Yes. I got fired from the first two and they were back east. One was in Binghamton, New York, and the other was in Elmira, New York. And I was working as a reporter and copy editor. Turns out you have to know how to spell to be a copy editor. Didn't work out so well, but I was a good reporter, I thought. And then I came out here after I got fired from the second one, and let's just say I'm a slow learner. And I applied for the job at the Standard, started here in May of 1978. And my first assignment there, after coming up and figuring out where the place was and where Ogden was, was to go cover 1 of 44 the Wedding of the Rails on May 10th up in Promontory Summit. And from there, it just went on. AK: Awesome, okay. So tell me a little bit about Ogden's involvement in that. Did they have any kind of involvement in the May 10th, 1978 reenactment? CT: Oh, no, not really. Which was kind of unfortunate because it was only later somebody figured out, "You know, Ogden had a big thing with the Transcontinental railroad, too." It was on March 8th, 1869, when the Transcontinental Railroad came into Ogden, and they had a big celebration and they had speeches and the big party, and it transformed this town. And so that's part of history that got kind of neglected with the May 10th thing, because, you know, that's been Brigham City and Box Elder County's deal forever, and Ogden just was kind of slow to jump on that bandwagon, I don't know why. AK: Interesting. I did not know about that, actually. That's fascinating. CT: Yeah, yeah. AK: So what are your memories of Ogden during the 1970s? I remember you saying that you would come down here a lot for stories, so tell me a little about that. CT: Well, in Ogden? Yeah, well, you know, I was living in Ogden. I was covering Box Elder County at the time, but I was living in Ogden, down on 27th and Washington in the Browning Apartments. And at the time, 25th Street was pretty much Skid Row, and it was just not a nice part of town. You just didn't go there. And Washington Boulevard, a lot of the shops along there were kind of empty and neglected, and in the process of being torn down; they were still in the process of tearing down buildings for what became the Ogden City Mall, and so there were a lot of vacant stores. I remember thinking at the time that I should take a camera and just walk along and shoot a picture of every building along there. RB: Good idea. 2 of 44 CT: I should have and didn't, unfortunately, because that would be invaluable now, because people would love that kind of thing [laughs]. Yeah, it was a kind of a seamy part of town. There were bars down on 25th Street that you did not want to go into. RB: Prostitution. CT: Yeah, prostitution up and down 25th Street. I like to tell people I used to drive along the street and the women on the curb would wave at me. I thought it was because I was good looking, but it turns out they had other motives [laughs]. AK: You mentioned bars you didn't want to go into? CT: No, actually, yeah. There was one up there, it was in the Helena Hotel, and it is where Alleged is now. But at the time it was the El Borracho, is that right? RB: Mm hmm. CT: That is a bar in which, I learned later, the police were afraid to go into. They had guns, and yet they were worried, they were afraid to go into them alone. You know, they always went into there in pairs. I remember one guy called, told me that he was a beer distributor, and he went in there to fill up the beer cooler, and there was a guy on the floor behind the beer cooler in the process of dying, bleeding to death, so [chuckles]. And this sort of thing happened on a fairly regular basis down there. And then across the street was Pancho's, which is where the Pie used to be, and that was the bar, in which I am told, anyway, I wasn't there at the time, that they found a dead guy on the sidewalk out front. And when they went inside the bar to ask if anybody there knew about it, absolutely everybody in the bar said they had been in the men's room at the time, so they didn't know. And you need to know the bar, the men's room at what was then the pie; it was the size of a phone booth, okay? So they weren't fooling anybody, but that sort of thing happened down on 25th Street on a very regular basis, unfortunately. 3 of 44 AK: So was there a predominant gang that a lot of that violence came from? CT: No, we didn't really have gangs at the time. RB: Just people drinking. Drunks. CT: People drunk, people drinking, just rough bars. There were several bars that were frequented by Hispanics in town, and there was then, as now, a lot of separation between them and the white parts of the community, and it was just a separate thing. And of course, a lot of the buildings on 25th Street were vacant or just, you know, like I said, it was a skid row. There was one building where a guy set up shop to take a dollar a day from people so they could store their backpacks, their bundle in the shop for the day. And, so, yeah. AK: You mentioned a little bit of segregation between Hispanic and whites. Were there certain places that were specifically white restaurants versus colored restaurants, that kind of thing? CT: Actually, there weren't really many restaurants on 25th Street at the time. There was the Star Noodle that was operating then. RB: That was Chinese or Japanese. CT: Yeah, that was a Chinese restaurant. And, that was it. Really, there weren't. There was Yuke's Cafe down here and that was where the Italian restaurant La Ferrovia is now. It's a nice restaurant. It's been there forever. And the name means 'the railing', 'rails' or 'iron rail' in Italian. But that is were Yuke's Cafe was. Yukio and his wife Mary were kind of a fixture on 25th Street. The restaurant was really... I'm sure the health department stayed away [laughs]. It was not the cleanest place in town. But Mary and Yuke were basically, Mary was called the 'Angel of 25th Street', if you ever heard of her. They were Chinese, I think they were? RB: They were Chinese. 4 of 44 CT: They were Chinese, yeah. And Mary and Yuke ran a cafe, but they took care of the homeless people in town. Homeless people came in hungry, they got fed, they weren't given a bill. That kind of thing. Mary would collect, hold their money for them and take care of their money for them and things like that. So Mary and Yuke were very much called the, you know, the Angels of 25th Street. When they finally closed the restaurant, they moved all their kitchen stuff over to the homeless shelter, which was Mother Teresa's shelter in an old school, over on about 28th and Grant, somewhere in there. And they ran that for a while, and they basically served the food, prepared the food there. And then after Mary died and they set up the homeless shelter over on Wall, just down the street from here. RB: Wall and about 34th Street. CT: Yukio prepared food for the Problems Anonymous Action Group. He had a little tiny restaurant, and pretty much all he did was fix food for those guys, and that was how they spent their final years. And they were very nice people, much honored by the homeless community and by services that served to those people because they saved a lot of lives. They were part of Lower 25th Street because, you know, there was no place else to go to get a meal. RB: May I talk about the Blacks? AK: Yeah, of course. RB: Not so long ago, I had a friend that, she's Black and her husband was also Black, and her name was Betty Morre. Willie Moore was her husband, and he was absolutely a delight. But anyway, she taught me that the south side of 25th Street was where the Blacks were. CT: The Black people, yes. RB: And there was a restaurant or bar down there called Porters and Waiters. And she was born and raised in Ogden, and I believe Willie was too. And you just wouldn't 5 of 44 know that they were people that lived in Ogden, Utah. But she went to Weber High School, and her husband was a barber, and he had a different philosophy on life, and that was: "I don't care what they say about me if they pay me." CT: Yeah, Willie had a barber shop on... When I came here, his barber shop was on 26th Street, opposite the fire station. The fire station used to be on 26th Street; where the municipal building and parking lot is now, that was the fire station then. And Willie's, there's a little tiny shop just across the street from there. And it was great because it was the cheapest haircut in town. And when you had two kids with hair that grew out 'bout an inch every day, you needed a cheap haircut, and so I took my boys there quite often. And Willie, he had at least two women that worked there with him, and they didn't do... They always had a booming business. I took some pictures in there. I wish I had taken a lot more of like the crowd, because you always had people stacked four and five deep in there, waiting for haircuts. And then he moved someplace else for a while. I forget. It was over on like 28th or 29th, and then he moved over into where Moore's Barbershop is now, on the corner of the Marion Hotel, which is no longer the Marion Hotel. RB: Things do change, but. CT: Yep, they change names all the time around here. But that is actually where his first barber shop was, back in the forties. And when he moved in there, I went and did a story, interviewed him about that and did a story on it, and he told me that yeah, it was an interesting shop because... He didn't lock the door because people would break in anyway, and sometimes he'd come in and he'd find transients in there giving each other haircuts [laughs]. He didn't care, you know? RB: No, he was a great guy. CT: Yeah, he was a great guy. And he talked about one time, he was in there giving haircuts, and Eleanor Roosevelt had been staying in the Ben Lomond Hotel. She 6 of 44 was coming through town and staying there, and she walked down and visited them, and visited him in his barber shop there. And she said, she told him, "Make sure and vote," and they said they would. She was a very pleasant lady, he said. Yeah, interesting guy. Interesting guy. He was part of the old part of this town. RB: Well, let me... If I may speculate, just because, I just put it together, so this is no background. Just, uh… He was invited to the Sons of the Utah Pioneers, to all their luncheons. CT: Oh, yeah? RB: Yes. And I got to thinking: there he was in a public place, more or less. Could he have been the bookie? [Laughs] CT: I don't know. [Laughs] That's an interesting speculation. RB: Everybody just seemed to know him, and so, for some reason, I mean, after all, he was absolutely the wrong color. CT: Well, but you know, he was a barbershop, and a barbershop was always a community place, you know, where people would gather and sit and talk and read the papers. And I mean, like when he had his barbershop down on 25th, I would go and sit in there, and I didn't need a haircut. I'd just go in and sit and talk with Willie, and watch the people come and go. And, again, it was a kind of small-town community thing I really loved about this town. And you can still do that. And it's interesting: his barbershop is on the north side of 25th Street because, yeah, blacks were not supposed... If a black person went into a restaurant on the north side of 25th Street, they could sit there till the cows came home. They would not be served. They would not be talked to. They would be made very clear, "No, you need to go over there." AK: This is 1970s, 1980s? CT: Oh, this is in the ‘40s and ‘50s. 7 of 44 RB: Yeah. AK: Okay. CT: Yeah, by the ‘70s, well, there weren't any... I guess in the late seventies, there weren't any restaurants on 25th Street. RB: No, it was a trip to.... CT: Except for Mary and Yuke's, on the west side of La Ferrovia, that is where Mary and Yuke's used to be. Just a little hole in the wall. AK: And you mentioned that Willie and Betty Moore didn't seem like the kind of people who would live in Ogden. What did you mean by that? RB: Well, she was born in Alabama or somewhere down south. And they came because of the, I assume, part of the railroad, and you know, there was employment. And they never fit in. They just never fit in. And I just thought Betty was just the greatest. She worked out at Hill Field for a number of years, and... But she still had the feeling that people disliked her because she was a black woman. Which, who was I to argue with that? I didn't know, so. CT: It's a completely different existence from what you and I are experiencing and still experience. RB: Yeah, that's right. CT: And you know, you hear people today say, "Well, they're not discriminated against," but they say they are, and you have to give them the credit of being intelligent people who know their life. And so, yeah, they are. And I have a good friend, Darnell Haney—I don't know if you've ever heard of him? He is about six foot seven and played professional football for a while, but he was on the football team in the late ‘60s, I think, or early ‘70s, up in Utah State University. And he was dating a white girl, and they could not go on a date together. When they went to a movie, 8 of 44 she had to go in first, find a seat, then he had to go in and sit somewhere else. And that was how, that was how they dated. And this was not that long ago. RB: The stories are terrible. CT: And I mean, Darnell and his wife were just the most charming couple. But he says when they moved into there, they bought a house in Washington Terrace, and he said when they moved in, all the other neighbors took one look and put their houses for sale. And my comment on that, in my column was, "Yes, he got a better class of neighbors out of it, too." You know? Because they're still, he's still there. His wife died a few years ago, but he's still there and still a charming guy. And just the nicest guy you'll ever really meet. RB: Yeah, there was some definite.... Oh, terrible prejudices, you know, just terrible. Not only for the blacks, but also the Hispanics and Mexican people. They worked their tails off, coming up here, you know, and make a living and make a go of it, so. CT: Well, you know, one thing you have to remember is back in the ‘20s and ‘30s... I know we're straying far afield here. [Regarding camera] It's a good thing you got lots of memory in that. Back in those days, the definition of who was a white person was not the same as it is now. If you were a southern European, for example: Italian, Greek, you were not white, you were not considered white. And so, you know, people working for the railroad: "Well, I've got three white guys, two Greeks and an Italian on my crew here." That's just how it was. And so we had Italian neighborhoods in this town as well, and they can talk to you about how they were discriminated against over west of... Well, it's this side of the viaduct, the 21st Street viaduct. There's that whole little area, and there, west of all, that is where the Italians were. RB: Oh, on the west end, West Ogden. 9 of 44 CT: Yeah. Over there. Oh, no, not in West Ogden. Not over there. On this side. North of here. RB: Oh, okay. CT: Marc DeCaria and his family and all those people were from that area, back then. So that was the Italian area, and you had Italian mafia. You ask about gangs, the Italian mafia was operating in Ogden, and the Black Hand and things like that. It was very interesting [laughs]. Lot of stuff went on in this town. RB: This is a great town. CT: Oh, this is. It's the most fun town. RB: Yes, it really is. In fact, the slogan that they came up with: "Ogden: still untamed." AK: So much diversity. Do you feel like a lot of that came from the railroad being in Ogden? CT: Oh, yes, definitely so. Now, before the railroad came to town in 1869, this was maybe more than one horse, but not more than two or three. It was a very small town. It sold supplies to people taking stuff to the mines up in Idaho and Montana. Just kind of a wide spot in the road, a waystation. And when the railroads got here in 1869—March 8th, 1869—it just transformed this place overnight. The population doubled and doubled again in months. Everything changed. RB: And the foreigners doubled as well. We had Chinese, Japanese... CT: Oh, yeah. And every different, every different ethnic group came to Ogden and set up camp as the railroad moved through and all the supplies and everything moved through. And then when this became the Junction City a couple of years later, you know, that, all of that settled here. I tell people, you know, the... All the prostitutes and the crazy gambling businesses that had followed the railroads out here. RB: Hell cities. 10 of 44 CT: Oh, yeah. All the sin cities had settled down right here on 25th Street. That's why they were here, because they had to go somewhere. And this was convenient, you know? AK: So I remember during the event that we had back in May, you mentioned, Charlie, that you would come down to the Union Station when you needed a newspaper story. Because you had three stories you had to pump out a week, and sometimes you needed fresh ideas. So tell me, why did you come to Union Station for those stories? CT: Because she talks a lot [pointing at Roberta] and because it's a community center. It really is. RB: It is, and that was our drive: to make people come to the station. CT: And so there was always, you know, the volunteers down here were old railroad guys. Those guys have got lots of stories. You know, when I was doing this, they still had a lot of the old railroaders, all those guys who had worked for the railroads in the ‘30s and ‘40s, and who had hung out in the bars and stuff on 25th Street. They were alive, they were here, they were very old, and old guys love to talk. RB: And they had... Oh, you know Norm. Remember Norm? CT: Oh, God, yes. Norm. RB: He had the greatest stories. My sister and I had the opportunity to give Norm a ride through the wine country in California, and he was a pure delight. CT: This is Norm Frost, right? Yeah. AK: So tell me, when the railroad stopped coming through Union Station, how soon after that did the community start to turn this into a community center and museums and all of that. Was that pretty soon after? CT: Well, it was kind of a dual thing because, when did the railroad turn the building over to Ogden? Murray Moler had a lot to do, but it was in the early ‘70s. 11 of 44 RB: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But they didn't own the building. CT: Yeah. RB: The land underneath the building belongs to Union Pacific. AK: Even now? RB: I'm not sure. CT: Even now. The city is buying it now, finally. It was a weird deal. The Union Pacific said, "You can have the building," and they gave them clear title to the building, but just the building, not the land under us. And they had a fifty-year lease. And because, you know, the railroads had gradually faded out. I mean, during the ‘40s and ‘50s, there were a lot of passenger trains, but even in the late fifties, I've got a couple of editorials in my collection where the railroads are petitioning the government to discontinue lines serving Ogden because they're just not making money. And the editorial... and I think it's in the late fifties, says, you know, "It's really hard to ask them to keep doing something that's losing me money." And because those goddamn cars are just everywhere and the interstates were coming through, and... RB: Yeah, and airplanes. CT: Yeah, and airplanes. And so, you know, the railroad just could not compete for passenger traffic. They just could not. And so when I started here in '78, the only train coming through was... Well, no, I think there were two trains a day coming through. There was Amtrak, and one was the Pioneer, and it went up from here up to Seattle. And the other was the... It goes to San Francisco. Help me with the name…The California Zephyr. Yeah, it went to Sacramento and it's still running today. It goes through Salt Lake City now. But it came through every day. In fact, my wife and I went to San Francisco on our honeymoon in June of 1980, and we took the train. 12 of 44 RB: Yeah, and that's still cool. CT: It’s still running today. It still goes through Salt Lake once a day, going each direction. And at the time, yeah, we caught the train. It was like nine or ten o'clock at night, and we caught it out here, and we went over the viaduct and straight out that way. And so, yeah, it all went all the way into San Francisco, didn't stop in Sacramento like it does now. And so, that's a fond memory. It was still nice because they still had waitstaff and linen on the table and real... RB: It's very, very formal. CT: Real dishes on the tables, and real silverware. And it was not like now, where they have plastic dishes and plasticware and stuff like that. And it was just really a nice, elegant experience. And when they heard it was our honeymoon, they gave us a meal for free. RB: That's nice. AK: So, Roberta, tell me about your involvement with the Union Station Foundation. So you were... were you one of the founders that started that foundation? RB: Oh, no, no, no. Not at all. I was a voice that went against the mayor's desires to do what he wanted to do. CT: Well, now, you were, you hired on when as the director here? RB: I think it was like, maybe 2012 or '11, maybe even before then, yeah. CT: Because, you know, the city took ownership of the station and ran it. And Bob Geyer was the director down here? RB: No, it was, the first one was Teddy. CT: Teddy, yeah. What's her last name? RB: Griffith. CT: Teddy Griffith, yeah. In fact, her picture's on the wall up there. 13 of 44 RB: She was the first director and she worked for the city, and she was responsible for those wonderful wall art that we have out there. The artists. CT: The murals, yes. RB: Yeah, the murals, thank you. The artist that did those murals also did work in Ellis Island, and so, you know, it's a real connection. CT: Yeah. The city took ownership of the Station in the early ‘70s, and that was a push led by Murray Moler, who was the executive editor of The Standard Examiner at the time. M-O-L-E-R. Because the railroad wanted to just abandon the station, and eventually, probably end up tearing it down. And Murray saw that it was an icon of the city. It was an architectural gem. And he and the other city fathers at the time—and there were quite a lot of them—worked very hard to get the railroad to donate the Station to the city, which the railroad eventually did. I think it was one of those 50-year leases for a dollar a year, or something like that. RB: Mmhm, it was very... CT: Well, it's kind of interesting because one of the levers they used was the idea that Brigham Young had given the railroad the land that the Station is on, with the proviso that there has to be a railroad station here, or the land goes back to Brigham Young. And I'm not entirely sure how much legal basis there is for that. RB: But it's a good story. CT: But it's a good story. There's so many good stories around here. It breaks your heart when you find out they're not true. But Brigham Young did twist a lot of arms to get this land collected. In fact, he cheated some people out of it, and they ended up suing and getting more money later on for their land. RB: Wait a minute [incredulously, hands on hips]. Brigham Young cheated? [laughing] CT: Well... Twisted arms. Yes, exactly [laughing]. I like to say, "Nobody else could have done what Brigham Young did." 14 of 44 RB: Nobody else, that's for sure. CT: But anyway, so they got the building donated, and, but the railroad still owns the land underneath, and with a 50 year lease. And I think that lease actually expires, this year or next year? RB: Yes, it's pretty squiggly. CT: Which is why the city was... For a while, they were trying to get a 99-year lease on it again. And they have eventually... that's why they're now buying the land, just to get rid of that whole idea. RB: Well, and Union Pacific was not really big on selling land. CT: Yeah. RB: They like to keep it and they still do. CT: Yeah, they still own all that out there (pointing to the railyard behind Union Station). But they are selling this (points to land beneath Union Station). They initially asked for a huge amount of money and the city managed to bargain them down a bit. I think it's like $5 million for just this campus here, you know, up to the fence there. And so that will solve that problem. But the city took it over and Teddy Griffith was the director, and then Bob Geyer was the director, and then Mayor Godfrey came along. RB: Let me tell you the story. It's a good one. CT: It was once true. RB: He had a meeting, you know, he held a city-wide meeting, had people to discuss what was going to happen, what we should do with Union Station and on and on and on. Like, you know, a politician could talk forever. And I was standing against the east wall, listening to him, and he was talking about building the gondola up to Snow Basin. And I was just against most everything he said, you know. And 15 of 44 somebody asked him, "Well, what will happen to the Station?" And he saw me and he looked at me. CT: Oh, yeah? RB: He said, "I don't know. Roberta Beverley will take over." I mean, I just went, "Oh, what?" Well, of course, I had been involved at the time. CT: You were involved with the Union Station Foundation at the time, yeah. RB: Yeah. I just couldn't believe [laughs]. CT: Well, the Foundation at that time—and I really wasn't familiar with it—it was just a fundraising thing, right? RB: Yes, that's correct. We were in the business of asking for money, and of course, a lot of things got done here because of the grants and the - particularly, to mention the families - the Eccles family and the Brownings just are unbelievable with their generosity. CT: This is the whole Browning family, including Leon Jones and his wife Judith, have just been beyond invaluable. Beyond invaluable. Well, and basically, yeah, the city and Mayor Godfrey... And Mayor Godfrey liked to talk about how much the city was having to subsidize the station. And I've learned that when a politician says, "Well, we have to subsidize what everybody likes to think of as a public asset," that means he's trying to think of a way to get rid of it, because... I mean, the police department doesn't make a nickel; every dime we put into it is 'subsidy'. The mayor's office doesn't make a nickel for this town, yet they don't seem to mind paying money for that. And the parks don't make a nickel for this town, and yet we support those. And he just felt that, and I've never talked to him about it, I don't particularly want to, but I suspect he wouldn't have been unhappy if this place had been bulldozed... RB: Oh, I don't think he would have. 16 of 44 CT: …and put in a Wal-Mart or something down here. And, but he got such opposition from people like Roberta and other... RB: And the, and the Browning Foundation... CT: ...and the Browning Family Foundation, which represents a lot of money, and politicians respect money. RB: ...and Eccles Foundation. CT: And the Eccles. So they basically said, "Okay, you can run the Station," and so they turned the whole thing over to the Foundation, and the Foundation was responsible for everything. But the city retained ownership of everything, and the city agreed to do some major capital work on things. But that was all. The Foundation had to keep the doors open, had to come up with the money to pay the electric and gas bills. RB: $10,000 a month for the electric. CT: Yeah. I think the utilities alone are like $150,000 a year. RB: Oh, yeah, it's incredible. When I became more involved with the Foundation and... It was also Jack McDonald was involved, somebody I worked with at the Forest Service... The Foundation as a whole, and Leon Jones in particular, said, "Bring people to the Station." And that is exactly what we concentrated on. We had parties and weddings and funerals and, you know, we had everything down there. And quinceañeras for the Hispanics and just wonderful things. You know, that whole thing [gestures with arm]. CT: They basically turned it into a venue, is what they did, and very successfully. RB: Yes it was. We were actually... Although we could not, I can't say honestly that we were liquid or that we were actually doing that, but we were certainly able to take care of keeping this place alive. And that was what we wanted to do. CT: Kept the doors open, which was the critical thing. There was a lot of deferred maintenance. Oh, Lord. I mean, chunks of the building falling off. Look around on 17 of 44 the wainscoting, on the outside and stuff like that. And that kind of major thing that, you know, costs a lot of money, and the city was unwilling to put a lot into it. Getting them to pay for that kind of thing was like pulling teeth. But the Foundation, like I said, it had all it could do just to pay this lady's salary [pointing at Roberta] and the event coordinators salaries, and... you know, had to have had what, half a dozen people working on the staff here, at most? RB: Yeah. We had people booking parties, etc. We had Tracy Errhig who was an absolute miracle worker. CT: Yeah. RB: She was the manager, the accountant, and all the money, financial management. CT: And a lot of volunteers. RB: Oh, and the volunteers were incredible. CT: They had 30, 40, old railroaders here. RB: Yeah. It's where I learned... And this is the truth, and I'm sure it's the truth of many places, but it's where I learned: You should never think people are just volunteering because they're bored. They aren't. They have a purpose, and boy, they fulfilled it here. CT: Yeah, they see the value, and they want to preserve that value because it means a lot to them. You know, that's why I volunteer in the archives up at Weber State, because there's something of value there I'm working to preserve, and I don't get paid for that. I don't want to get paid for that, you know? RB: No, no. CT: And it's the same thing with the vol... You know, I volunteered down here for six years while I was on the Foundation, and, you know, every minute of that was just wonderful, you know? RB: Yeah, we had good times. 18 of 44 CT: We did, yeah. RB: It was pretty awesome, and I was... I had many bad days about the city and the, the, the front of the station of them and the fountain. CT: People keep running into the fountain. What is wrong with those people? AK: With their cars? CT: Yeah, with their cars. RB: Yeah, they took out a really pretty wall. I was so unhappy. I called Bob over [laughing]. He hated that wall. CT: Do you know that story? AK: No. CT: I'd covered that for the paper at the time. It was the most heartbreaking thing. RB: Yeah. CT: If you look at the top of the stairs, you're going halfway up, there's this big picture of a train coming down. It's a Big Boy, coming down a curve, okay? There's a big turbine engine out there and the brick people out at the what's-it-called out there, they have a bricklaying program. They made a brick sculpture. It's a big giant wall. It was about [gestures with wall above head] that high and about 12 feet long, of that image of that train coming around. And they set it up right there in front of the Station, on the inside of the courtyard, you know, where all the plants and stuff are now, so it was away from the sidewalk back there. And we had a big ceremony and they opened it up, and, you know, everybody was happy to see this lovely work of art here. RB: Not everybody was happy. CT: No, everybody was. RB: [Laughing] CT: That night, a drunk on 25th Street plowed right into it. 19 of 44 RB: Tore up. Just demolished himself and the... CT: I mean, not even 24 hours old [laughing]. And so, yeah, you know, I've got a news clip of that. And it was like, "Oh, Jesus. This is why we can't have nice things." But people’d run into there. That's why there are those bollards there now, because a couple of times, every summer, somebody would come through the bushes and hit that fountain. And it's like, "Don't you see the train station here, for God's sake?" RB: Yeah, I don't know. CT: "Big as life and twice as natural," as we like to say. RB: One of the board members of the Foundation, and most all of us in the Foundation, we wanted the city and the state and whatever to bury Wall Avenue and open up the space. CT: Yeah. RB: And I still want that. CT: That's still on the wish list. AK: To bury Wall Avenue, just right out in front of the Station? CT: Yeah. Basically to take Wall Avenue underground, starting about 22nd Street and just go down and under and then up again over on 27th Street. RB: Twin Falls, Idaho did it. It's a great idea. CT: When you talk to the economic development people, they will tell you that's on the wish list - that and getting ownership of all that land out there. They would love to just move the railroad way out west and they could still have Frontrunner come through here. But the rest of it, just... because then they can develop all that, you know, and they could open up the tunnels under the tracks again. They're still there. RB: Yeah, they are. CT: Full of dirt, but they're still here. If you walk along down that way, there's a metal cover over a fenced-in area. That's the entrance. 20 of 44 RB: And in the gallery at the Station, that whole way it's designed is because of the underground stuff. CT Because this all used to be outdoors here (pointing at the gallery he’s sitting in). When the city took over the Station, they built this to give it more display space. And you had the Gem Museum here for a while. RB: Oh, yeah. CT: No, that was in the other room. RB: That was, yeah. And they left, and now they're kicking the wildlife rescue people out. CT: Oh, well, that's, that's a whole another story. AK: So going back a little bit, when Mayor Godfrey basically turned the Station over to the Foundation, about where was that on the timeline? Do you remember what year that was? CT: That was... RB: Let's see. I would say... CT: Early 2000s. RB: Yeah, it was early 2000s, ‘cause I was working. CT: 2002, 2003, in that vicinity, I think. AK: Okay. And that seems like that was the turning point for the city giving the control of the museums and the event space over to the Foundation. Is that correct? RB: Yeah. CT: Yes, they did a couple of things. They also did that with the Marshall White Center. They turned that over to another nonprofit to run for a while. The name escapes me again. I'm sorry, I got a 74 year old brain that just doesn't work as well as it used to. RB: It's incredible. It really is. They're there, but... 21 of 44 CT: It shows up about 10 minutes later, usually [laughing]. But yeah, he basically, he wanted to... I mean, they had this idea to build a velodrome downtown here somewhere, a bicycle racing track, and they were going to build that tramway from here all the way up to the top of Mount Ogden. RB: Yeah. Boy, was I ever against all that. CT: Yeah. You know, I mean, there is development and there's development, but you don't just throw out everything you've got and start over. RB: A beautiful mountain,. CT: Which, he's not the first one to wanna do that. RB: I'm sure, I'm sure. CT: I still remember, I was... when I came here in '78, there was an empty space on 25th Street. You have Wall Avenue here, you have the Senate and the Congress building, those little old buildings on the corner. Okay, and that's going up, that's where the coffee shop is. And after that, you've got new construction now. But it was just all vacant space then, all the way up to... Lincoln? RB: Yeah. CT: Yeah. I can never keep them straight. And what they had done is, back in the mid-seventies, they had gotten some money, some redevelopment money to tear down all the old buildings that were there, the idea being to tear down the old buildings and put in new, nice, shiny new buildings, and redeveloped 25th Street. And I still remember, but they never have found enough money to put in new ones, those in the vacant lot. I remember, I went on a junket with a member of the Chamber of Commerce. We were going to San Diego to visit the USS Ogden, which was a naval ship. And so this would have been about 1982, thereabouts. And I remember talking to this guy on the airplane and talking about this vacant lot on 25th Street, and he said, "Yeah, we'd like to get money to tear down the rest of 22 of 44 those buildings down there." And I'm like, "Oh, why? They're beautiful. They're historic." And fortunately, they never got enough money. And Mayor Caldwell likes to talk about how "Ogden City was rich when it mattered," that's when they built those buildings, and that "It was poorer when it mattered," because they couldn't afford to tear 'em down, because every place where they've torn down those historic buildings, they've regretted it, because historic renovation now is a booming business. And of course, one of the things it does, which, getting back to what you're talking to us about, is it maintains the community's heritage. It tells the people why they're there. RB: It's our story. CT: Yeah, it's our story. This is us. And you just don't tear all that out and put in a Wal-Mart, and then tell people that that's still Ogden. It wouldn't be. It just would not be. RB: Yeah, it was scary there for a while. CT: Yeah, it was. It was scary. It was like with the Egyptian Theater, came within 24 hours of a wrecking ball. Literally, the wrecking ball was scheduled the next day. AK: That was like the 1980s time period as well? CT: Yeah. RB: The gondola going up, scarring the mountains. And the people just got so upset about what was going on, and particularly these plans for destroying this place. They just said, "Uh-uh". And so that's really how it worked. It was great. CT: It is still. You know, we've seen that in a couple of places, Ogden High School. You familiar with the story on Ogden High? Yeah. They wanted to tear that down. And people said, "Are you out of your minds? No. It's not going to happen." And they made sure it didn't happen. 23 of 44 RB: Yeah. As I read somewhere, at one time, because of the railroad, because of the guns, Browning Firearms, and a number of other things that went on here, Weber County was one of the richest, wealthiest counties, particularly in the West. And so that afforded a lot of this golden [unintelligible]. CT: [Coughing makes audio unintelligible for 3 seconds] …It was compared to Chicago, it really was AK: Okay. That's interesting. So I want to ask a little more about the Foundation. How did the Foundation work with the city? Was there any kind of interplay there, or did the city just completely wash its hands and say, "Here, Foundation?" RB: No, we had meetings with the city. CT: Yeah. They did put some money into it. RB: Oh, that's right. CT: They helped. RB: And I should say that they agreed for a five-year period, I believe it was, that $50,000 a year would go just to stabilize the Station. And we, the Foundation, we were... Our mission was to make the museums more museum-y, and make the Browning Theater more beautiful, you know, and all those things that we wanted to do. And of course, those all... And we wanted to restore the fountain [laughs]. CT: She's still a work in progress, yeah. RB: So anyway, yes, the Foundation was responsible. We wrote grant application after grant, and we had some success because of the Browning name and because of the Eccles and because of the Dumke, Mr. Dumke, who is married to a Browning, I think, up in Sun Valley. CT: I don't know. RB: I think so. 24 of 44 AK: So tell me about some of those museum efforts to make this into more of an official museum. RB: Yes. Yeah, we wanted it to be... We wanted it to be a community center, and the artifacts that we have up in the Browning Museum, firearms, are just absolutely incredible. CT: Unique, yeah. AK: How did you find those artifacts and bring them to the museums? RB: The Browning family, Val Browning, donated all of... They had a museum out at the... What's that place out there? CT: Out at the old armory, which is where you got to get your driver's license now. RB: And Mr. Browning brought all of the guns, plus there's a lot of them in the basement. CT: Yeah, big enough to fit a whole army plus their guns in the basement of this place. RB: There are vaults downstairs in the basement. One vault is packed with guns. Shotguns and, you know. No, nothing military, just. CT: Well, it was the Brownings’ dedication to preserving the Union Station. RB: It really was. It was. Yeah, it was. I really believe it was Judy and Leon. CT: Yeah. RB: They were right here. In fact, the gallery at the Station was done completely by the Browning family. AK: So what about the car and the railroad museums? When did those come in? RB: The car museum were... The cars were owned by the other Browning brother, Matt Browning, and they were part of the estate. They came in here as well. And that was a natural for the railroad museum, you know? CT: Yeah. RB: Where else would you put them? 25 of 44 CT: Yeah, Matthew Browning... Wasn't Matthew Santa for one of their kids? RB: Yeah. No, Santa for no, Matthew wasn’t Santa. But they– CT: They had a car collection that this is a mere ghost of, okay? And they kept it in where Youth Impact is now, because Youth Impact is in what used to be an old car dealership and garage building. And they had a bunch of cars, I don't know how many, in there, and they would rotate them down here for display. And when the family decided to finally sell that collection, they just told the city, "Well, those ones that are in Union Station..." RB: “You can keep those.” CT: Oh, it's just like, "Oh, my God," you know, because they're just... Those are such gems and such amazing cars. And so, yeah, that's how we ended up with the car museum. And then one other– RB: Well, I think I would like to say that in my memory, the people that were most responsible for the railroad museum were Teddy Griffith and Bob Geyer. Bob was a gun man and a train man. And he's still around, by the way, so. CT: I think he lives in St. George now, doesn't he? RB: Back and forth. CT: Back and forth? RB: Cause I'm assuming they're up there. CT: Yeah, we need to get you Bob Geyer up here. RB: Yeah, he did a heck of a job. CT: He did. Yeah. Bob willed this place into being. He was one of the people that I would come down and talk to when I was looking for stories because there was always something going on. You know, he always had projects underway and things like that. 26 of 44 RB: Yeah, he was. And he did that. He redesigned the entire floor of the museum, where the railroad museum is, where the Browning Museum is. And the gallery was put in later, and the Browning cars are in the Browning Theater. AK: With the railroad museum, were the artifacts from the community? Like did people donate them, or did you have to go out and find those artifacts there? RB: There were some donations... Some we couldn't get rid of [laughing]. CT: Yeah, I know a lot of that stuff was here when I came here, so I don't know how that was acquired. RB: Yeah, well, the 833, the big steam locomotive on the far end down there, it was in Salt Lake City, and I think it was Bob that just had little fits and hurricanes and [grabs with hands, makes popping noise]. And finally they gave up and they brought that thing, they hauled that locomotive down here on vehicles on the interstate. It was amazing. CT: It was amazing. I covered that. It was so crazy because, yeah, it'd been on display in Salt Lake City for years and years and years. When I was a little kid in Salt Lake City, back in the fifties, we'd see that thing in the park down there, and they finally donated it up here. But yeah, moving that was a job. Yeah, it was funny because they talked about how they were slowly, they were going to drive that thing up the interstate, and we had plans to follow it along with cameras and the newspapers and stuff. And when they got that thing out on the truck, and they got that out there, the driver just says, "Hey, this is going pretty good." Pedal to the metal, vroom. RB: They cleared away all of that overpass... CT: Yeah, giant steam engine going along. And then they came out here, up 31st Street, viaduct and over, and turned it around there and down Wall, and then brought it in here, and it was an amazing thing. Yeah, geez, just... RB: And its Sister—I assume Sister. 27 of 44 CT: The 844? RB: The 844 would, was... Union Pacific was using that for a tourist highlight. They actually ran that train and so that net was, it was. CT: It was still running. I think they still run it. RB: Yeah, it still is, apparently. CT: Yeah, it's still operating. In fact, the U.P. would come - if they needed a part they couldn't get anywhere else - come steal it off of this one, cause this thing's dead. But it's... They're just such amazing things. I mean, you talk about the legacy and the spirit of this place. You know, if you come down here when one of those engines is here... RB: Oh, those steam... CT: It's a religious experience. RB: Oh, my Gosh. CT: It really is. RB: Really is. CT: Because they never really shut them off, okay? They keep steam up pretty much all the time. So you're sitting next to this monster, this giant pile of steel, and it's breathing. You can feel it breathing in. You can feel the ground shaking when it's doing its thing. And I still remember, I was down here one time when the 844 was here, and a friend of mine stood in front of that thing and he pointed up to it, and he says, "Charlie, this is why we won World War Two. Because we could build things like this." RB: That’s very possible. CT: And, you know, when you think about the complexity and the slides... RB: Oh, you know, I do. I look at that, in like the big boy. CT: Yeah, the big boy. 28 of 44 RB: There was... How in the world did, you know, and all that engineering? CT: ...Did they get that thing going? Yeah, how'd they get that thing to work? To imagine that engine, and I like to tell people, I said, "Imagine that thing out there moving down the track at 100 miles an hour," because it could. And that's like, just unbelievable, and yet they did. RB: Oh, and they were magnificent. When I was a little girl, I lived in Green River, Wyoming. CT: Oh, man. You saw 'em all come through, didn't you? RB: Yeah. CT: Oh, man. AK: So, Charlie, when did you start volunteering with the Foundation? CT: Foundation? In 2013. It was right after I retired from the Standard Examiner. I had actually been talking to this lady here [points at Roberta], and I wanted to work in the archives upstairs here, because I'm just fascinated by the history and preserving history and things like that. And so she said, "Well, we'll get you an office out here and find you a desk and..." RB: “Give you work to do.” CT: And she did, and she gave me work to do, and I just had a fun time down here. And then right after I started down here, then she put me on the Foundation Board. And I ended up as the recorder for six years, which was also a lot of fun, and which meant I had to go to all the meetings, but, you know, what are you going to do? But it gave me a really good inside look at how this place was being run by the Foundation, and the struggles that Roberta and other people had to do to keep this place... RB: Viable. 29 of 44 CT: Just to keep the doors open was a constant struggle. Now, I know... I remember when one of the nonprofits that has space here, Nurture the Creative Mind, not to say anything against that guy, he's doing a great job, but they hadn't paid their rent for a while. And the thinking was, "Well, you know, it's a nonprofit, too, and it's a city-run place. Cut the guy some slack." And we're like, "No, we need the money." And we finally had to tell the guy, "Look, you need to pay the rent or.." RB: “Leave.” CT: "...Leave." And because, we are a nonprofit, but that doesn't make us a charitable thing. We can't just give people money. We don't have any to give people. RB: No. CT: We're spending it all on this place. Those lights are sucking up dollars, you know. And so... RB: You know, when you write a grant... CT: One of the things I grew to appreciate as nonprofits is how desperately they need money. RB: Yeah. When you're out there looking, and you look online—what we would have done without the computer and the Internet, I don't know. I hate to think—but I would look for foundations around the country to see what their goals were. And we got some pretty reasonable donations from people around the country because of what this place represents. AK: So I know that the Foundation was also in charge of preservation for the archives and such. Was there any kind of museum training that you went through? Or how did you find the knowledge base to archive and preserve the museum collections? What did that look like? CT: Oh, that's a good question. I never had any formal training. I really didn't. And Lee, his training was as a biologist or something like that. 30 of 44 RB: He was a teacher of biology. CT: Yeah, he taught biology and so he had a very good orderly mind for things and for cataloging things. And I think he brought that expertise with him to set up and help run the archives upstairs. We did work very closely with Weber State's Special Collections people up there, and took a lot of hints from them on how to do things. But mostly it was a learn-as-you-go kind of thing. The goal is mostly just to keep things from being thrown away. That's one thing I have come to appreciate about museums in general. This is, the biggest trick is just to get people to not throw stuff away. Give it to us, at least let us put it on a box, in a box on the shelf, okay? Whether it's cataloged correctly or not, who knows? But at least it's there. At least it's preserved. It gave me a lot of appreciation. Occasionally you'll hear about how the Vatican Museum or the Louvre in Paris has discovered some long-lost work by Michelangelo or something. RB: Yeah, no kidding. CT: And it's just because it's sitting there on the shelf and nobody knows it. RB: Nobody knew what it was. CT: And because recording systems change over the years, I know after I left, after the city took over, they did a lot of work going through the archives up here and figuring out who owned what, because stuff just came in and ownership really was not done correctly, because we didn't know. And so a lot of that had to be straightened out, and... RB: And the Foundation also put in quite a bit of money to... They were restoring the railcar out there. And that was, that was somewhat difficult to... Everybody wanted things to work. 31 of 44 CT: Yeah, there was a lot of stuff that was just done on kind of a handshake basis, which was unfortunate because, you know, like ownership of the steam engine out there in the shop, and I don't even know where that is these days. RB: Is it gone? CT: The bulk of it is still over there. But what's inside the Trainman’s Building over there? I haven't been in there in years. RB: I went in there one time with Jack McDonald because he was doing the inventories. The Foundation owned a lot of that equipment that they were using to restore that locomotive. And they were kind of off to themselves. CT: Yeah, well, they are an A-Class Railroad. What was it called? They had a separate little foundation over there that was doing that work. And... See, this is one of those handshake things: That car was brought up here with kind of a verbal understanding that it would be kept in the railroad museum and restored by these guys, but they never had a formal written agreement with the city to occupy that building or to do the work. RB: And they did not pay rent. CT: Yeah, they weren't paying rent, too. They were just there. And they had kind of a verbal handshake agreement with the city council at the time, and if you go back to try and find a record of this anywhere, it just doesn't exist. And so the real problem was, who owns that? RB: The State of Utah? CT: Yeah, the State of Utah owns it, I think. But, you know, those guys would say, "Well, they gave it to us." "Well, do you have a piece of paper that says that?" "No, it was a handshake deal." "Well, guess what?" And those guys were doing a lot of restoration work, and they built that tender, which is an amazing thing. And I hope that's still in there, because the one that came with the engine would just rust, 32 of 44 nothing left. But the engine itself, they had hopes of actually getting it running again, which I don't think was ever going to happen. RB: It was a narrow gauge. CT: Yeah. I mean, run where? You know, we don't have the rail. RB: They'd have to lay tracks for it. CT: Yeah, but they were doing a lot of work taking it apart, but they weren't labeling anything, and I kept telling these guys, I said, "You know, you can't just be taking these things apart, and then remembering that this is over there, because you're not going to be here forever," you know? And so it kind of went downhill from there, and the city ended up running into liability issues with that junk because, you know, they had tourists coming in looking at it like, you know? RB: And they had no insurance. They would not insure their work area. It was a bit of a problem. You know, it was like having a bad neighbor. CT: Well, it was an informal thing and they meant well, but that was as far as... [inaudible] RB: Yeah, they wanted to. They were doing a heck of a job there. CT: So, you know, that was kind of a sore point. Yeah. AK: And I know you have quite a collection of manuscripts and photographs and such. Was that donated from the community? CT: Yeah, I think a lot of that was donated by the community over the years, wasn't it? RB: I do believe so. The history of Ogden in the old days, you know, and Lee Witten was a full-time volunteer. He categorized all that much for what Charlie's doing up there. CT: Right, yeah, because they just got piles and piles of old historical books up there. RB: Oh, there were just tons of reference material and books and... Oh, it just... CT: Yeah. Huge. It was great fun. I would come up here and just go in there at random and pull a box off the shelf or something and look inside of it. Find the most 33 of 44 amazing things. Oh, one time I was digging and I found a box, and it had rolls of photographic film. I mean, I'm talking about something this wide and a roll that thick [shows with hands]. And I collect cameras and I do a lot of photography, so I knew what that was. What it is, is a negative from a panoramic camera, okay? This is a camera that used a negative that wide and that long [holds up arms]. And what it did is it rolled the negative this way [points one direction] while the camera was panning that way [points other direction]. And so it took one of these big, wide panoramic pictures that you see in museums and places like that. And it was a picture of downtown Ogden. And there were like four or five of these panoramic negatives in there of the theater over on Washington Boulevard, and just... God, you know, amazing things. And they're just sitting there in this box. RB: Waiting for somebody with a brain. CT: Yeah, waiting for somebody to see what it is. RB: Wonder, "Ooh, what's this?" CT: There's a couple of boxes of, if you... Well, if you look and you see these big, huge pictures of like a giant parade coming up 25th Street and turning and going that way, the negative for that is up there. One of those is a glass plate negative. It's like this big. And somebody was standing over on the Ben Lomond Hotel taking that picture. RB: That's when the mayor was shooting into the air for the parade. CT: Oh, you're thinking of... No, that wasn't the mayor. You're thinking of a different parade. I'm talking about 1896, okay. RB: Oh. CT: And, because actually what it is, is... I finally figured it out. It is a picture of the first parade on the 4th of July after statehood in Utah. And so it was taken like in July of 1897. Just amazing pictures. Yeah, the negatives for all these are right upstairs, up 34 of 44 here. And, you know, they're just there. Just because that's a critical thing with an archive or a museum, is you just keep stuff from being thrown away. That's the big thing because, you know, I like to tell people, "You know, if you get a," people came into Ogden and, you know they walked out of the front door, waiting for their next train, and they took one look up 25th Street and they saw Ben Lomond over there, and they're all like, "Ma, give me the Kodak. This is pretty good," click. You know? And so there are thousands of those pictures that got taken, but where are they? Well, they're in photo albums all over the country, that somebody looks at and says, "What's this? Old place in Ogden." RB: "Get rid of it." CT: So they all get thrown away. RB: Oh, dear. CT: So we eventually end up having those. Throw them my way. And you see this all the time. I was just working on it today. I mean, when I was talking to Sarah Langsdon at Weber State, she actually was telling me they did not have a good picture of Farr's Ice Cream until just recently, because nobody had given them one. RB: And Farr's got hit with some vandalism, I think. CT: Did they? I don't know. Anyway, ask another question. I told you, your big problem is getting me to shut up. AK: No, this is great, actually. This is very helpful, so thank you so much. I've learned so much. And actually, we are getting close on our time. So just have a, just the last couple of questions. CT: I'm not paying by the hour. So, you know, we're retired. RB: Yeah. CT: We're going to lunch afterwards. 35 of 44 AK: Oh, perfect. So in the museum's upcoming exhibit, one of the things that they talk about is how, “Ogden starts here.” And one thing that they say is that Union Station's future was Ogden's future. Why do you feel like that was true for preserving the Union Station, even after the trains left? Why is it so important for Ogden to have this station preserved? CT: Well, the entire economy of Weber County flowed through this station at one point in time. And... RB: It was very productive. There was a lot of money. CT: Everything came through here. And you don't just throw that away. I mean, you don't throw history away, it tells you who you are. You know, Ogden is a very... Cal Grondahl was the cartoonist at the Standard Examiner, and he drew a picture once of the different types of people around. Salt Lake City was an urban professional, and Park City was a yuppie, and Provo was a couple of returned-missionary-type people, and Ogden was a guy with a biker T-shirt holdin' a beer. And that's the kind of town this is. RB: That's what it is. CT: This is a blue-collar town, and it cannot forget those roots. It really can't. And Union Station is not just a reminder of that, it's an embodiment of that, because this is a railroad town. This always, always was, and always will be. And if that were to just disappear, this town wouldn't know who it was. It'd just be a suburb of Salt Lake City. RB: Oh, yes, and that would... Oh my God, what a horror that would be. CT: And, because Ogden has such a unique history. You know, culturally, it is so different from the rest of the state. 36 of 44 AK: I guess this is a little repetitive, but how do we see the legacy of Ogden's railroad town in the Ogden of today? Are there shadows of the old railroad that are still alive in Ogden City? CT: Sure. Well, I mean, you've got all the retirees of the railroad that still live around here, and you've got the Union Station itself as a focus of the town. Like I said, it's mostly the history and heritage at this stage of the game. But it still kind of lives because, you know, we're a defense industry still; The town has a focus on defense industries because of the railroads. You know, the city fathers in Ogden and Weber County, mostly Ogden at the time, they could see in the thirties and forties, business was already declining in the railroads, and they knew they had to bring in other things. And so when the military went sniffing around for some place to build an Air Force base, Weber County bought the land and gave it to them, free. When they were looking for some place to build a defense distribution center, they said, "Hey, we've got railroads and we've got land," and they bought the land and gave it to them. Okay, I mean, they went out of their way to keep bringing those things in, and so even though they don't use the railroads as much as they used to, they still do a lot of stuff on the railroad. RB: Oh, yeah, they still do. CT: That is why those things are here. And, you know, Ogden still is very much a railroad hub. I like to tell people, "Don't worry if there's a nuclear war, because the giant bull's eye on Ogden. Trust me on this one, you don't have a thing to worry about." RB: Oh, that's good, that's good. CT: Yeah, isn't that nice to know? Like Ed Abbey says, "When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about." RB Right. 37 of 44 CT: So this is still very much a railroad hub. It's not a passenger rail hub anymore, although now that we have Frontrunner coming through again, and I know they would love to extend rail going north to Brigham City, and eventually, why not to Idaho again? RB: And why not one of those super trains? CT: Exactly, yeah. Well, they are talking about building one from Los Angeles to Vegas. And to me, the next jump is from Vegas to Salt Lake. We used to have the Desert Wind that went from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles, through Vegas. And if you've ever driven from here to Vegas, just put a link between all the cars, 'cause it's bumper to bumper now. And just call it a train and be done with it, you know? I honestly don't understand why some smart person hasn't done that, unless it's just a problem of getting the rail space, because they do have to compete with the U.P. I know their Frontrunner has to compete with the U.P. now. And so, yeah, that was one of the fun things I did, was when—I told you you'd have trouble shutting me up—when they brought in Frontrunner, when they started that, [to Roberta] was it you that arranged for all your volunteers to ride it down to Salt Lake City? So they could critique it, you know, all the rails are pretty good along here. RB: And they were knowledgeable. I mean, they knew what they were, but it was a lot. CT: They knew when the rails had been laid properly and when they hadn't been. We took them all to lunch at Hooters. RB: Lots of wonderful... CT: They were just wonderful guys, they really were. RB: Yeah, just really... CT: Yeah. [To Alyssa] I wish you were doing this 20 years ago. RB: Yeah, me too. 38 of 44 CT: When those guys were here, oh, my God. Now you get old farts like us, you know? But I'm glad you're doing this, because, you know, I like to tell people, "You just cannot preserve enough of the history." And a lot of the people that are around now, their history is going to get lost if they aren't talking about it. Like I had my friend Larry Carr, I sat down with him. I was going through negatives up at Weber State, and he was a photographer for the Standard Examiner in the ‘50s. And I found some negatives that he had shot, so I sat down with him for an hour and a half talking about this one, talking about that one, and recorded all that. You should come talk to Larry. AK: What's his name again? CT: Larry Carr. C-A-R-R. Yeah, he's 85. Don't wait too long. AK: Okay. RB: Down on 25th Street, there is a restaurant that had been there for a long time. It was Star Noodle. And, I mean, it was... Even when 25th Street wasn't a great place, people went to the Star Noodle. And somebody came in, and I have no idea who they were, and they wanted to do something on the street and redo it and make it more modern. And they took the Star Dragon down, and they dragged it out to somewhere in West Ogden, and it sat in a field. CT: Sat in a field for a while, yeah. RB: Yeah. And people, if you will pardon the expression, were pissed [laughs]. And now it's back. And that was actually in movies. CT: Yeah, yeah, it was. AK: Well, that actually goes along with the next question I had for you, which is: how do you feel like Ogden's community has shaped the Union Station? You talk about how the Union Station has shaped the community. What about the other way around? CT: Well, there's been a very strong movement to preserve it. 39 of 44 RB: Yeah, people are, not all, of course, but I'd say a majority of people want this station to stay here. They don't want it to be closed up. There's a station in Little Rock, Arkansas, and it's a pretty one. But you can't go inside of it because it's all into offices, you know? You can't do a thing. CT: Yeah, things get repurposed like that. I mean, at least the building gets preserved. RB: Well, yeah, the building's still there. CT: But this has been... Well, you know, the vision of people like Murray Moler, at the time, this is back in the early ‘70s, was that this would be a community center. And it has always remained in that, and I'm very happy to see that, because less people come in and see why it should be saved, because they can see it on a daily basis. One of the things I talked with Roberta about is she would come in here before the place opens in the morning, and sit out there, in the lobby, and listen to the ghosts. And they're there, you can see 'em up there. RB: Well, you just need to come down in the morning, and look up at one of those big murals. Think of the DNA that's up there. Think of the thousands of people that have come and gone and left a little bit of themselves in that lobby. Sat on those benches. It's just wonderful. AK: You would hear ghosts? RB: Oh, well... CT: I don't believe in ghosts, but there are things I cannot explain. RB: Yeah, that's a few things. That's correct. I came into the station one morning, and it was when Bob was still here with us, but his secretary and Bob were not there. And the Myra Powell Gallery runs across from the Station, and my offices were down in the south end. And so I went up the stairs and through the gallery, and I smelled perfume. And it wasn't me. That's the closest I came. It was a very nice fragrance. And when I got to Bob's office, Linda was not there yet, so there was no females 40 of 44 around. Tracy Ehrrig, who worked here for years, she just loved the whole notion of the ghosts, and we had ghost parties from September through November. CT: Made a lot of money on ghost tours, yeah. RB: Yeah, people would tour. And then, of course, there are people that believe that there are ghosts that make sure that there are. AK: Well, last question, just to wrap all of this up: how can we, as a community, continue to honor the heritage and preserve the heritage of the Union Station? CT: Well, it involves money, unfortunately. RB: It also involves education. It involves getting young people into... you know, I know guns are out and some people don't want to go into the firearm museum, but it was a reality, you know. One of the things I wanted to add to the train museum was something about physics. And I was talking to a guy down at the mall where they've got that model railroad, and he said, "You know what, trains that are on a very, very regular basis, they erode the rail. And the U.P. goes in and they have to re-condition those rails. They start to bend, turn." And he said—just wonderful! He said, "Think what those wheels must be doing to that rail." He also said that they lay a tie and put spikes in it, and they lay another tie, and you know... And the only thing that kept the tie straight where it belonged was some ballast in between the ties. CT: Oh, the rocks. Yeah. RB: Yeah, yeah. I said, "Oh, that can't be so hard." CT: You'd like to hope there's more to it than that, wouldn't you? RB: So, yeah, I think, I think it's a real challenge to get people here and understand the mechanics, the engineering, the mathematical side, as well as the historic side. CT: Yeah, well, you know, and one of the things that I've been telling people for years is that Ogden has a tendency to be a little bit ashamed of its history. I ran into this when I was working for the paper. They said, "Oh, did you have to bring up that 41 of 44 lynching again?" "Oh, yes, I do." Because if you look at some of the history books that they've made in the past, like when the Statehood Centennial and things like that, and they came up with a bunch of history books about Ogden and about Weber Canyon, and they talk about this banker, and this businessman and this, and you go through that, and it's boring. I'm sorry, but it's boring. And I said, "You know, Ogden was a Wild West town. You know, in the ‘20s they had to bring in federal troops to bring order to Ogden because the police couldn't handle it. Okay? They had that kind of labor unrest, they had riots, they had terror threats. They had the most amazing stuff around here. I mean, they had prostitution up and down the street and it was wide open. I keep telling people, "There were no tunnels to hide the crime because they didn't need to." Every cop on the beat was paid off. They were. And, you know, the Chief Browning was in league with the prostitutes running the whorehouses in town. And that's a great tourist draw. RB: Especially now. CT: I mean, I keep telling people, “Go to Virginia City, Nevada. Look around, go to Park City and look around.” And the history is fun. RB: Pretend like it's over, that it's not happening anymore. CT: And, you know, that's a great tourist thing. And so, I mean, if you use your history as a draw instead of being ashamed of it, then you preserve the history. You find the money it takes to do that, because, you know, historic preservation is not cheap. And then the whole thing builds on itself and it just keeps going. Like Brigham City has kept that reenactment going for years and years and years. They have a lot of fun with it, and it draws people out there every year for the whole thing on May 10th. And they should be doing the same thing down here more, a lot more than they do. You know, I keep telling them they need to... I don't know if they want to reenact the lynching or not. Poor George Segal. 42 of 44 RB: Oh, no [laughing]. CT: Don't you know George? RB: No. CT: Haven't you heard about him? RB: Mm-mm. CT: Oh, okay. About 1884, this was before statehood, there was a person of the Japanese persuasion who was working in a restaurant on 24th Street, and he got into a wage dispute with the owner of the restaurant, and settled it with a pistol. And so, you know, he shot her, and she wasn't dead yet, but things weren't looking good, and George Segal ran out of the restaurant, ran down along what is now Kiesel Avenue, and ran right into the arms of a couple of police officers, who stopped this person who was running because, you know, he was obviously up to something if he was Japanese and running. And so they arrested him and they found out that he had shot this lady over in the restaurant. They put him in the jail, which was then at 25th and Washington. And that night, a deputation of Ogden's finest citizens broke into the jail, took Mr. Segal out, and hung him from the fire bell tower outside the jail. And if you look for the Standard Examiner story about that, you will not find it, but the Telegram did run that story. RB: And it's political, the things that haven't been allowed to be revealed. It's because people think it's shameful. CT: But nobody ever was tried for that. They claim they don't know who it was. And I mean, at that time, Ogden had a population of about 15,000. Everybody knows everybody in that town of 15,000, I'm sorry. Everybody knew. RB: Especially with the church, too. 43 of 44 CT: And then the lady who got shot, she died a couple of days later, so, yeah, Mr. Segal died before she died. But yeah, that was just me. I keep saying we need to have George Segal Days around here, but they won't do it [laughing]. RB: Yeah, you know, and we should enjoy our diversity more. We are diverse. We have Chinese people that came out, and there's Italian and Greek. Hispanic, of course, and black, from the Civil War, when they came out looking for jobs. And the area's just wonderful. CT: Well, yeah, the whole Porters and Waiters Club because, after the Civil War, a lot of black people got jobs as porters and waiters because the Pullman Company hired them, because... Mr. Pullman hired former slaves because they were used to being abused, and so they would work those horrendous hours and for poor wages, but it was better wages. A lot of black people used the Pullman Railroad Car Company as a step-up into the middle class. But they got tired of being abused, and actually it was the beginning of a labor movement. They actually started labor unions, you know, with the Pullman Car Company, so. And that is why we have a lot of black people in town today. So that's a history and a legacy. You cannot, you know, it's just there. People ask "Why are they...?" Because that's what... they're here because of their job. They came here for that. RB: I worked for the Forest Service prior to the Station, and, you know, the Forest Service had their own planes. And this region that I was in encompassed the Bridger-Teton National Forest, Jackson Hole, and we would fly around and do these things, and it was just absolutely amazing, how all of this coalesced with what was going on in this part of the world, the civilization that was developing here. AK: That's cool. Well, thank you both so much for the amazing interview. I really appreciate it. 44 of 44