Oral History Program Nellie M. James Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 25 June 2013 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Nellie M. James Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 25 June 2013 Copyright © 2014 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 Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial houses flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. After World War II, the railroad business declined. Some government agencies and businesses related to the defense industry continued to gravitate to Ogden after the war—including the Internal Revenue Regional Center, the Marquardt Corporation, Boeing Corporation, Volvo-White Truck Corporation, Morton-Thiokol, and several other smaller operations. However, the economy became more service oriented, with small businesses developing that appealed to changing demographics, including the growing Hispanic population. ____________________________________ 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: James, Nellie, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 25 June 2013, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Nellie M. James June 25, 2013 Nellie M. James ca. 1943 Nellie’s mother, Mrs. Paul Hodgsen, A driver for the Red Cross ca. 1943 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Nellie James. The interview was conducted on June 25, 2013, by Lorrie Rands. James discusses her memories of World War II, specifically the Ogden Canteen and her mother’s involvement. LR: Today is June 25, 2013 and we are in the home of Nellie James where we are asking questions about her memories of World War II, specifically the Ogden canteen and her mother’s involvement, and her memories of life during the war. Nellie, thank you for letting me come here. Tell me a little bit about where you were born and growing up. NJ: I was born in Salt Lake City. I have a brother three years younger than I am and a sister two years older. We were children in Salt Lake—children of the depression, actually—but that’s another story. When I was in the seventh grade, we moved to Ogden. My dad was an architect and he had the opportunity to work with his older brother, Leslie Hodgson, who was the architect of Ogden High School. We moved up to Ogden so that my dad could work with him. Ogden High School was done when we got here, but my father did some work when the city-county building was done. The firm did a tremendous amount of work on housing during the war. They were trying to design homes that could be constructed in a hurry because Ogden had become a very busy place. A lot of people came here because of our war industries and housing was important. After the war they had the option of buying them if they wanted to and could then remodel it. Part of 1 Washington Terrace is where some of that housing was built during the war. A lot of people have since added on and put brick facings on the homes and changed windows and everything. That was what my dad was doing during the war. LR: Where did you live in Ogden during the war? EJ: We lived on Van Buren Avenue between 26th and 27th Street within walking distance of Central Junior High and that’s where I went. LR: Okay. When did your mother join the motor corps? EJ: Our whole family was in Salt Lake, she had a whole bunch of sisters and when we moved to Ogden I think she was very lonely. The distance between Ogden and Salt Lake is nothing now, but back then it was travel. I think she thought she’d just get herself busy. At first, she started with PTA in the schools and when the war came she volunteered and became a captain in the Red Cross Motor Corps and that’s where she fulfilled most of her duties. LR: You mentioned the experience you had with your mother the one time you went with her. Would you share that? EJ: Oh yes. I was only a teenager and as part of my mom’s duties, she had to pick up the donuts and take them down to the train station. When the trains would come in they’d feed the troops. One day, I went with her and I don’t know if they were short of help, or if I asked to go or if she wanted me to go just for fun, but we stopped at Topper Bakery and got the donuts, then went down to the station and got everything ready. At that time, you had to go out the back door at the station, down the steps, along the tunnel and back up the stairs to the numbered 2 train tracks. Ogden rail yard was a very busy place. There were a lot of tracks and a lot of business went on there. We got everything ready and you could hear all these servicemen coming up the steps in a rush to the canteen. Then we’d serve the coffee and donuts as fast as we could and then when they were done back they’d go. The troop trains were curtained and I don’t think the boys knew for sure where they were and maybe they didn’t want it known that it was a troop train and where they were heading for security reasons. That was my one adventure. I never did go again. The boys were cute. There’s a certain charm about some guys in a uniform. I was naturally kind of shy and I was so embarrassed. They all flirted and I didn’t know what to say or how to act. It was funny looking back on it now. LR: I can imagine. Did you watch the work in the canteen or did you participate that time? EJ: I helped. It seemed like I was serving and then washing cups as fast as I could to serve as many as I could. Sometimes, I’m sure that the layovers were longer, but this seemed to be a short one, the guys were in a hurry and they’d grab a donut and a cup of coffee and off they’d go. LR: Were they glass cups or paper cups? EJ: They were like what they’d have in a restaurant, so we’d have to serve and wash and serve again. The world of plastics was not in existence at that time and I don’t even know if they had paper cups. 3 LR: So your mother would take the donuts from the bakery. Are there other responsibilities she had in the motor corps? EJ: Yes. I have two interesting stories that I have to tell you. The trucks were convertible so that in the back they could actually fit four stretchers to accommodate patients. Some of my mom’s duties were with Bushnell Hospital in Brigham City. One time, she was called up there and was to transfer a patient from Bushnell down to the veteran’s hospital in Salt Lake City. On the way down, this soldier passed away. My mom got to the veteran’s hospital and they wouldn’t accept him because he was deceased. I can’t remember the eventual outcome, it must have been solved somehow or another whether my mom had to bring him back to Bushnell or the veteran’s hospital eventually accepted him. This was upsetting to my poor mom, here she was driving down to Salt Lake with a man who passed away and she gets to the hospital and they wouldn’t take him. Another time, this was in December when we would get those terrible fogs like we do now, there was a serious train wreck way out in West Ogden. Two passenger trains crashed. There were some people killed and a lot of people injured. My mom was on call 24 hours a day and was called into service. She spent the whole night ferrying injured patients from the train wreck up to the hospital. Those are two outstanding things I can remember. Otherwise, it was probably just routine duties that she did. LR: Was she gone a lot? Since she was on call all of the time. 4 EJ: There were times when it seemed like she’d be gone a whole day or an evening and other times days would go by and she wouldn’t be called in at all. She wasn’t the only one, I‘m sure there were other ladies and they all took their turns. LR: What was your father doing at this time? EJ: He was working in my uncle’s office and designing all the housing as fast as they could to get them built. LR: How did the war affect being a student at Ogden High? EJ: Just for fun I got out my yearbooks. I was curious about this to bring back some memories. Actually, high school was not too much different for us because we were juniors and seniors in 1943 and 1944. We still had our regular activities and our regular athletics, but we did some special things. We had a paper drive and we gathered up over 140 tons of paper. If you were involved or volunteered for this kind of work you’d be excused from classes. Sometimes we’d get excused and borrow someone’s truck and spend the whole day. It was advertised and we were going around picking up books, magazines and newspapers from people’s porches. That’s what we ended up with. The home economics class made cupcakes for the canteen. Our gym teacher gave us instruction is basic first aid training and there were over 600 girls that received their first aid certificates at the same time. We received that training in Helen Casey’s gym class. We made up boxes to give to the soldiers at Bushnell for Christmas. That was another thing I found in my yearbook. There was a shortage of people to work in the canneries. We had a lot 5 of canneries in Ogden at the time and they had a shortage of workers, so if you volunteered you’d be excused from high school class to go down and work in the canneries. I can remember doing that when they canned string beans. That was an adventure. One more interesting thing with the paper drive, there was a shortage of paper during the war, but I can’t figure out why. In our yearbooks both years, instead of having individual pictures, we had to have group pictures of about 30-50 students at a time. We were either outside or downstairs in the gym and they’d take the picture from the top. We just had pictures of groups of us students. When you think about it, we were probably lucky even to have a yearbook. They had to cut the cost and make do with what was available. LR: You mentioned earlier about war bonds and showed me the picture in your yearbook. EJ: Yes. After school we set up a table outside the library and students would come by and buy just stamps and they’d fill a booklet and when the booklet was full they’d get a war bond. After maturity, they’d be ready to be cashed in and as I remember correctly, I think they were worth 25 dollars. We set a goal, I think it was 10,000 dollars and in half a year they had 7,000 dollars in sales. They did a pretty good job. LR: The other thing was the metal drive. EJ: Yes. One of my classmates, Rosemary Cotrell, we had a scrap metal drive and she collected such a huge amount and I don’t know whether it was a contest of because of the amount, but she got to go back and christen one of the warships 6 that was being built. I guess you christen it with a name, I don’t remember the details, but her picture was in the yearbook doing that. LR: Okay. We talked about your high school experience. Now, what are some of your memories of Ogden during the war? EJ: It was a very busy time. A lot of people had moved in and there was quite a demand for housing. A lot of people worked in the war industry. We called it the Defense Depot Ogden, or DDO. My sister worked there and I did for one summer at the end of the war. A lot of people worked there. It was the beginning of having stores open later. Usually, stores downtown would open at 10 a.m. and close at 6 p.m., but during the war they started staying open until 9 on Monday nights to give people a chance to shop when they couldn’t otherwise. I worked at a little ladies dress shop during my high school years and I usually worked on Monday nights and then on Saturdays. You had a hard time finding some kinds of clothing. Leather was scarce. I remember one summer I had a pair of summer sandals and the tops were white canvas and I swear the soles must have been made out of pressed cardboard. I’d keep them clean by washing them with white shoe polish and they didn’t last very long. Some things you couldn’t find in the right sizes. There was a big shortage of household appliances and things like that. I remember during the depression people used to say you couldn’t buy things because you couldn’t afford them. Well, during the war, you couldn’t buy things because you couldn’t find them. They just were not available. You took care of your appliances and everything that you had to make them last. 7 LR: Do you remember it being busy with all the extra people? Did it seem like shopping during the holidays was crazy? EJ: It was very busy. It was very different than it was in the years before. Then, everything was situated downtown, we had no malls or anything like that. The stores just lined the streets on both sides for three or four blocks. For Christmas shopping you’d just start at one end of the town and go through every store, then cross the street and come back on the other side. There were all kinds of stores. They had furniture stores, clothing stores, and even a grocery store. Everything seemed to be downtown. LR: What was downtown? EJ: The store I worked at was called the Nadine. There was also Montgomery Ward’s, Kress’, Woolworth’s, Tribe’s Furniture, and one of the favorite places for everyone was Keely’s Café. They had the best fish and chips in the world. Even now, I’ve never tasted anything as good as that. There was another place called Doko’s that had candy. There were about four movie theaters all downtown such as the Egyptian, which has been remodeled, another called the Orpheum, and another called the Paramount. I can’t remember the others. If you wanted to shop you just went downtown and everything was there. LR: You mentioned that you worked at the DDO for a summer. Do you remember what you did? 8 EJ: Yes. It was a supply depot for materials during the war and what I did was type up transfer orders from a warehouse. A certain amount would need to be shipped somewhere and we had to type all these orders. LR: How did the rationing affect everyday life? EJ: I think it was more inconvenience than a problem. My mom did a tremendous amount of canning. Some foods were rationed and you had to be careful about your meat, gasoline, coffee and a lot of other things. We would save up our sugar stamps so that we could get enough sugar for my mom to do her canning. Evidently, fruit was not rationed at that time because it was convenient and cheap. My mom canned everything. There was a summer job that some kids had. In fact, I did that a couple of times during the summer. We’d get on the buses and ride out to North Ogden and pick cherries. We’d get paid a few cents for a bucket. A lot of kids did that because there were no professional croppers like there are now and they had to have the crops harvested. I think I earned enough money to buy material to make myself a summer dress and that was it. LR: After the war, did your mom stop being in the motor corps or did she continue doing that? EJ: No. I think she continued in some of her other charities that she worked for, like community chest and some other things, but I don’t remember her staying with the motor corps. Maybe it even was disbanded at the end of the war. It could have been. 9 LR: Was it easy to go back to normal life after the war or did they continue to change? EJ: Gradually I think. It was difficult when so many of the servicemen came back. I went away to college in 1944 and then the summer of 1945 was when I worked at DDO. My first year at college there were hardly any men on campus. It was basically a women’s college. The next year, they postponed the start of school for several weeks to try and put up huts and whatever they could to make housing for the male students because there was such a huge rush of them coming back to college. That was one thing that did change after the war. LR: Where did you go to college? EJ: Washington State University. LR: What was your life like after the war? What did you do besides college? EJ: I came home and worked for a while and then got married. Most girls my age did. It wasn’t the thing then to move away from home and have a career. Some girls did, but not very many. LR: Are there any other memories of the war years that you’d like to share? EJ: You asked on my question sheet about memories of 25th Street. It’s funny because to us that was a strictly off limits area. You just did not go on 25th Street, even in the daytime. One activity we did in high school as crazy kids was get a car load of us and drive down and find a parking place on 25th Street at night. We’d try to find one close to a bar or something and roll up the windows, lock the doors, scrunch down in our seats and watch. Tons of soldiers would go 10 up and down the street and the MP’s were patrolling constantly. It must have been fascinating for us or something. Once in a while we’d see some guy coming drunk out of a bar and pass out on the sidewalk or something like that. This was one of our adventures as high school kids. One restaurant that was quite famous called Ross and Jack’s was just below Washington Boulevard on 25th Street. Some of the kids in my high school class have kept the menus, but I don’t have one. The most famous thing on the menu was a burger spud. I never went into Ross and Jack’s, this is just what kids told me about it. They didn’t have booths; they just had a long counter with stools. You’d go in there, sit at the stool, give your order and then eat as fast as you could so someone else could take their turn at the counter. The burger spud was a whole pile of mashed potatoes, a ground beef patty smothered in gravy and a roll or slice of bread on the side for 25 cents. That was their main lunch that they would serve. Anyone walking around 25th Street would dash into Ross and Jack’s for their burger spud. LR: You mentioned that you weren’t supposed to go to 25th Street. Why is that? EJ: It had a reputation. In fact, it was quite famous as we understood later. Soldiers would pass the word and it had bars on both sides. It was directly east of Union Station and that’s why it was so available to the soldiers for layovers. There were houses of prostitution, tons of bars and a few eating places. It was called, “two-bit street.” Soldiers would come here curious because they’d heard about it and wanted to walk up and down the street and see what was there. LR: Is there anything else that you’d like to share? 11 EJ: I can’t think of anything. LR: Nellie, I appreciate your time and sharing your memories and I hope that you’ve been able to talk about the things that you wanted as well. EJ: Yes. It has been fun to take a trip down memory lane like that and think about things I haven’t for a long time. 12