Oral History Program William Winford Terry Interviewed by Richard W. Sadler 6 August 1981 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah William Winford Terry Interviewed by Richard W. Sadler Dean of the School of Social Sciences 6 August 1981 Copyright © 2012 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Weber State College Oral History Program was created in the early 1970s to “record and document, through personal reminiscences, the history, growth and development of Weber State College.” Through interviews with administrators, faculty and students, the program’s goal was to expand the documentary holdings on Weber State College and its predecessor entities. From 1970 to 1976, the program conducted some fifteen interviews, under the direction of, and generally conducted by Harold C. Bateman, an emeritus professor of history. In 1979, under the direction of archivist John Sillito, the program was reestablished and six interviews were conducted between 1979 and 1983. Additional interviews were conducted by members of the Weber State community. ____________________________________ 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: Terry, William Winford, an oral history by Richard W. Sadler, 6 August 1981, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. William Winford Terry 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with William Winford Terry (born 1905). Mr. Terry’s father, William Z. Terry, was a professor at Weber Stake Academy from 1895 to 1962. The interview was conducted on August 6, 1981 by Richard W. Sadler in order to gather Mr. Terry’s experiences as a student and child of a professor at Weber Academy, and his recollections of early Ogden. RS: Bill, tell me a little bit about your early life, where you were born, some of your early experiences. WT: I was born within two blocks of the old Weber Academy—which was the Paris Institution of Weber State College when it was on Jefferson Avenue between Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Street, there within two blocks of the Moench Building. The first recollection I have in life that can be dated chronologically was the coming of Haley's Comet. Now that's the way father used to pronounce it. I remember getting up early in the morning. One morning father awakened us children and we looked up over what we call Blonquist Hill, up there southeast of Coalville and we saw Haley's Comet. Of course it won't be back for eighty five years and that will be another few years. What will that be, in '95, something like that? But that's the earliest recollection I have up in Coalville. We moved there when I was just within a year of age. We lived there until 1913 and then father came back to teach at the Weber Academy, Weber Stake Academy it was called. We moved down into the community of Marriott, a couple miles west of Washington Boulevard, down Twelfth Street. There, of course, is really the days of my youth that I can recall even though there are a number of things up in 2 Coalville that I can still recall. Fishing trips are very vivid in my memory. By the way, in connection with that, fishing always started on the fifteenth of June except when it fell on a Sunday and then it would be on the fourteenth of June. That was the opening of fishing and I can recall having gone out with father on the opening day of fishing for at least three times. 1910 is the first recollection I have of that particular thing. RS: Now, where were you fishing? WT: Father liked to fish small creeks. He liked the Echo. We went up Echo Creek to Hiner's, which you could practically step across. My first fish was caught under a railroad bridge. They had these old Malley engines. You know the principle of the Mallory engine? That's where they reuse the steam from the first pistons to an auxiliary piston back of that and they had two drive shafts and these firemen, as they would go up the Echo grade there, two of them stripped to the waist and you could just see the sweat rolling down their backs, alternating shoveling coal. They just seemed to blow that right through the boiler and up the chimney and they were alternating because they were now getting up steam for the last final push up the Wasatch. I was fascinated of course as a youngster watching these men. Then there was a lag in the action so to speak and I picked up my pole to walk back over to camp and lo and behold I had one. It was quite a bit larger in my estimation that father claims later on in life. But anyway, to me it was quite a thrill. That was my first fish up there. Father used to like to fish up Chalk Creek. RS: Tell me about your father. 3 WT: My father was William Z. Terry who started teaching at the Weber Stake Academy in 1895 after having taught here one year. His first wages which he received from the Academy, some of it was in kind. Many of the students paid for their tuition in food stuffs from the farms. Those things were dished out to the teachers and also when the Academy—it was an LDS church system at the time—they sometimes did not have enough money to pay the teachers and they gave him a script for back wages which he tried to cash in when he went to Germany on a mission in 1896. Coming back from there he taught until 1906. The summer of 1906 he went up to Coalville and there taught at the Summit Stake Academy—also LDS. Father was a great fisherman, a great hunter and because of that I've kind of followed along those particular footsteps. He was a mathematician and was recognized nationally. He was taken back to Aberdeen, Maryland one time at the end of the First World War to help work out range tables for the French 75 millimeter cannon. The French wouldn't give us their range tables so we worked some out ourselves. Father was one of the first, he brought back a slide rule which they used at the proving grounds and used it in the old Weber Academy. Some of the professors at the University of Utah would not accept the credit from his students because this 'yahoo' up there in Ogden was teaching the slide rule. Now we recognize that the slide rule was nothing else but the forerunner of the computer systems that we have today. So we'll say that much for the Weber Academy. The children that were going in to the Weber State College were, in the state of Utah, through Dr. William C. Terry, the first ones to instigate that particular type of teaching in mathematics. 4 RS: Where did he have his education? WT: Father got most of his education from the old Brigham Young College. They had a Brigham Young College in Logan which was on first south and about third west. Later on after it ceased to be a two year college for the church, Logan High School took over that campus. Then he went to Utah State and the University of Utah. I'd have to look into my notes at home to tell you from whence he got his Doctorate. RS: You then had a good deal of association during your young life with the Weber Academy? WT: Yes. Should I tell about the elementary system then going into the high school? RS: Yes, and I'm interested also in one other thing and that is your association with some of the faculty members at the Academy not only as a student but as the child of a faculty member. WT: In the elementary schools in those days, of course, something unheard of in this time was that we were under a strict discipline. The punishments were quite interesting sometimes. Down at the Pioneer Village at Lagoon they have an old rock chapel from Coalville there. That was the old chapel and they built what they called the new Tabernacle which has since been raised. Then they turned this old rock chapel into a two room school house. Now that's where I went to school in kindergarten and part of the first grade. They had four grades, really four and a half for the students. They would put us over against the windows on the side of the building and the teacher would sit next to that big pot bellied stove which we'd keep feeding with coal because we were up in Coalville. As they would get 5 through reciting through the fourth grade then they would go over and sit near the windows and the third grade would move up next to the teacher. We'd just progress up next to the stove. These veterans in the fourth grade knew how to keep the teacher occupied with their group. Sometimes when we'd be over there next to the window we'd actually have to put on our coats to stay warm during the cold winter days. They built a new school in 1911 or 1912 on the bench southeast of town. I remember they had a fire drill. When they rang the fire gong she screamed, "Follow me," and out she went. There was another fellow my age by the name of Arthur Allen. Instead of following the teacher out, we went out the back window and dropped down onto the cement base over the coal bin. The teacher came back in screaming and hollering for William and Arthur. She finally looked out the window and saw us back there. After this short fire drill Arthur and I went back in and we sat down on the yard stick twelve times a piece. That was the type of thing—I have known teachers to use belts. Sometimes they didn't take a hold of the buckle when they were putting somebody in line. We had to obtain a certain amount of scholarship and then we would graduate from eighth grade. We had a regular graduating ceremony and all of the county schools would come into the old Tabernacle on twenty-second and Washington. There they would have the graduation and then we would go in to high school. There were the four years of high school we call freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior. RS: Where did you go to high school? 6 WT: I went to the old Weber Academy. That's where I started my high school days. Now let me tell you something about father, my older sister Delia, and my brother Ira. Coming out of Marriott, we lived two miles below Washington. In the old horse and buggy during the winter they would drive up to Washington and south to Twenty-Fourth Street, just below what was called Hudson Avenue in those days (which is now Kiesel,) on the north side of the street was the old Nelson Livery Stable. There they would leave our horse which was Billy in the first days and afterwards we had Bess. They would leave the horse and buggy there and Nelson would take care of it and feed it all day long. Father and Delia would walk up the twenty-fourth street hill to the school there, the Weber Academy on Jefferson Avenue. That they would do as they went to school. By the time I had entered high school, however, we moved from Marriott (just by the time I'd finished the eighth grade.) So I started school there without making the trip in like the rest of the family had. Going through, we had the regular type of curriculum that they have now except we had the religious instructions in the Book of Mormon and different religious things from the Bible and church history and so on. RS: Who do you remember as teachers at the Academy? WT: Goodness me. By the way they just had a....what was this place here in connection with Dr. Lind? I didn't come to that dedication. I remember him well. As we look out the windows to the east here I can see the old Provo terrace and the Bonneville terrace and I can see over here at Taylors Canyon and Waterfall Canyon. We went up there on geology trips and he was a grand old man. He was 7 really a hiker and he knew how to present his subject. He was interesting in the classroom. You would be sitting there and he would be giving what we thought was very important things and he says, "That is not important." He had kind of almost a whispering talking voice. We'd all be fascinated by the gentleman’s knowledge and the way he would impart it. Then he'd rap on his desk and say, "That is important! Get that in your notes!" So, Dr. Lind. Then we had a Chris Jensen who was in biology and physiology. He was a great fellow. I had him for church subjects also. There was Harvey Taylor and John Q. Blaylock in history. I might say for those who are listening that I will now say to Dr. Sadler, my interest in western history was really kindled by this John Q. Blaylock as we studied the book, The Economic Beginning of the Far West, I still have the book. It is a delightful thing and I still enjoy it. John. Q. Blaylock was a master in my estimation. They were good teachers. They knew their pupils. They were friendly. They were our friends. We looked up to our teachers as our friends and I feel that present day society does not give the students a chance to have that relationship to their teachers like they did in those days. Now let's get back to Taylor. He was in the history department and was interested in hiking. Many of you know perhaps, of the story of the putting of the flag pole up on Mount Ogden. By the way, it was called Observatory Peak until I was, I don't know how old. That was the first thing I knew about it, because in the geologic survey around here they used to use that as one of the triangulation points when making their surveys. Then they changed to Mount Ogden. When they put that flag pole up there, Harvey Taylor was one of the great motivators on 8 the faculty for doing this particular project. It was put in four sections of pole and we had two horses that were going to carry those steel poles up to the peak. We brought them up to the bottom of Taylor's canyon in a wagon as I recall and we had two horses. Now one of the horses balked and it had the top two sections and it threw off the sections. Two of the fellows grabbed one of the sections and started to walk up to the peak. A fellow by the name of Gaylord Taylor who lived out in Harrisville -- by the way I see Gaylord every once in a while and we talk about this -- and I, ran the horse down and finally caught it. It was bucking and had that one top section with the ball on it. It finally threw it and broke the ball. We finally caught the horse and we took it over along the little stream there at the mouth of Taylor's Canyon, tied it up and then we started to hike up with the pole on our shoulders. The other two fellows had picked up the other one and gone off. We didn't catch any one of the group going up the peak until we got up on Malan Heights were you could look down over the valley. By that time we found out that the other fellows had had relays but I said to Gaylord, "How about it? How do you feel?" and he said, "I feel great. How about you?" and I said, "I feel great. Let's go on." We decided to take that the entire way to the top of the mountain and we did. We carried that top section to the top of the mountain for that particular dedication. When they put a plaque up to commemorate that hike in August of 1976, I was very much privileged to offer the dedicatory prayer and the placing of that plaque in commemoration of that particular jaunt up the mountain. 9 I don't know whether we ought to turn this off, Dick, when I tell you the next thing. When we went up to the peak we did not hike up. See I'm up in the seventies. You're going to be able to figure this out. We did not hike up; they took us up by jeep, up into the saddle south of the peak. That was kind of cheating wasn't it in comparison to what we did on the first time. So there was Harvey Taylor. There is Malcolm Watson, the basketball coach. He was a grand fellow. RS: Who was the principal of the Academy? WT: The principal of the Academy when I first came there was Thomas Biel, Henry Aldous Dixon and James L. Barker. Those were the principals of the Academy while I was going there. RS: What did you decide to study? What was your particular expertise? WT: Well, I don't know. I did not make up my mind until considerably later. While in high school, because of my interest in hunting and fishing and things like that, I felt that I would have liked to have been a forest ranger. But then the LDS church in the mid twenties, soon after the First World War, sent me over to France. There I stayed for thirty-three months and after coming back, I looked around and finally decided that maybe I could capitalize on my knowledge of the languages. I went to the University of Utah and got everything done but a dissertation and one course in philology or I would have had my doctorate in the languages. RS: Let me ask you a couple of questions about your mission first of all. Were you interviewed by a bishop and a stake president or did you just receive a letter in the mail? 10 WT: I received a letter in the mail in which they called in those days 'box B.' You got it from the presiding bishop’s office. You rip it open and dash in and tell your mother and then you run across the street to tell your friend. That's the sequence in which it happened to me. RS: You were in France for nearly three years. Which areas did you work in? WT: I was in Liege, Belgium most of my time. I started there in Liege, Belgium which is about as big as from here to North Ogden. I went out to visit the Fabrique Nationale a number of times where the Browning Arms were made. It's an industrial city, built upon the coal mines underneath there and they have iron mines right alongside it. So it's a very industrial place, Liege. Then I went down to Marseille, which is the largest seaport in France. It's a very beautiful, picturesque place in the Mede, the Le Provence southern part of France, and then went over to Toulouse for awhile near Bordeaux. Then back to Belgium where I completed most of my mission. RS: What would you guess was the average cost per month for you as a missionary? WT: I know exactly how much the mission cost me for the entire time I was on my mission: $1650.00 for transportation over there, living expenses and so on. I was able to live on $30 and sometimes father was very generous and sent me $35. RS: Did you travel the continent after you were through? WT: I was kind of gypped out of extensive travel on the continent afterwards. An uncle of mine was an FBI agent up in Idaho. He'd been killed by some gangsters and dumped in a barren sage brush area out of Burley. Father spent considerable money searching for him and father was sure that he knew. He had a hunch that 11 he knew about where Uncle Jack might have been. Father found him. So I had $160 and I traveled on $160 from Liege, Belgium up in to Switzerland and through Switzerland and down as far as the boot of Italy at Naples and spent several days in Rome, Venice, Florence, and saw the Leaning Tower of Pisa and back in to southern France and back in to Paris. I spent five or six days in Paris before catching the boat home. $160, and with that I also purchased a few souvenirs, such as some cameos. Oh, you got to buy cameos in Venice in those days, you know, carved cameos. I don't know whether the people would be interested in how I was able to do these things very inexpensively. While getting off of the train in Milan, a couple who were travelling together spoke French. We were speaking French to each other and up came a pan handler, a beggar and he spoke to us in French down there in Italy. We were dumbfounded. I said out of the clear blue sky, "We don't have any money; we're just down from Belgium.” Well that was true. We didn't let him know we were Americans. He said, "Excuse me, Belgium was hit so hard by the War. Excuse me for even asking you." All in French mind you—a beggar! Well, we then decided on a strategy in order to do these things. We would tell him we were just down from Belgium, true. Belgium was hit hard by the war. What's the best price you can give us? We did that. We went in bargaining some of these places for cameos or purses. We'd get them down as far as we could. Grant went in first which we discussed, he walked out on me and the fellow brought it down to the price I was offering. We did that time and time again. I paid 15 lira for a matched cameo that I brought back for my mother. An 12 American lady talking in dollars paid 85 lira for the same thing. So that gave us a little extra money to be able to travel just a little farther over there. And we did that with hotels. RS: How was your success as a missionary? How many people did the average missionary baptize? WT: I don’t know what the average was but I had, to my credit, thirteen. I liked to track. I liked to go up, knock on doors, and see the expression on people’s faces. I like people and I enjoyed it because of that. Of course we learned the language over there. I thought that oui was spelling with a ‘w’ and a couple of e’s when I went in to France. I changed my mind in a hurry however. RS: What happened when you came home? What kinds of experiences did you have then? WT: The experiences after I came home of course were that I didn’t find it too much of a traumatic experience as some of the fellows were claiming. It seemed like a natural transition going back into a life in the community. I wasn’t at all disturbed by it. Of course I had a girlfriend that I had written to all the time I was over there. I had dated her just once before I went over and we wrote. It wasn’t too long after I got back, about four months, and we went up to Logan. RS: What was her name? WT: Edna Brenchley from Wellsville, Utah. She was living here in town when I met her. 13 RS: Let me ask you one other question before your mission. Just prior to going you went through the temple for your endowments. Approximately how long did that take that first time through? WT: As I recall it took maybe four to five hours. RS: When you came home what did you decide to do about a profession? WT: I was going to go in with father. I should have said about father and his teaching that he actually taught here at Weber Stake Academy during his eighty-ninth year in 1961. He had a one hour class in the spring quarter and he passed away in the middle of October of that year. Now, for a period of time he did accounting and became a CPA as well as getting a doctorate in mathematics. I thought maybe I’d go into that particular business. We started in, and he started me out as a bookkeeper but lo and behold, the Depression hit us and the first thing that business people did was to lay off the bookkeepers and told them they weren’t making any money. That’s when I looked around and decided after talking it over with father to go down to the University of Utah. I worked myself through school without any help from the government. I want to put that in for young people that might be listening. I worked at a canning factory in the summer. I worked at the Union Building and I would park cars sometimes as many as seven hours in the evening for one dollar. I have a record now of every penny we made. Believe it or not you young people, my account book, my ledger now shows that for my first three years at the University of Utah, I did not have six hundred dollars a year which paid for tuition and everything. The last year we went for broke. We made over six hundred and fifty dollars in that particular summer and winter that I was 14 working. We lived on it and we enjoyed it. I’d hate to have to do it now, but it was a great experience. RS: In the years just before and just after your mission, what are your remembrances of Ogden? What did you do for recreation? What kinds of things did people do to have fun? WT: Well let me start back from my youth, may I? Let’s start down in Marriott. We had ball games and we used to make our own baseballs. We’d come into town and buy a little tiny rubber ball maybe half, three quarters of an inch in diameter and then we’d get a big bunch of string, and keep twisting and made quite a nice round ball. Then we’d make a cover on it with just some of this old black electrician tape. Then we’d go over by the river and we’d get a piece of a black willow tree and make ourselves a bat, and oh my goodness when you wouldn’t hit that solidly with that hard ball, that would sting. That’s what we had. We’d make bows and arrows out of things. We made a lot of our own fun. We used to play marbles. My brother, Ira, was one of the best marble players there was in our community. He had a fifty pound flower sack and it seemed to me that he had it about 1/3 full of marbles that other fellows had purchased and he had won. Now getting back to baseball, we used to have a baseball team in our elementary school. Our favorite rival was Slaterville. We would go down to Slaterville after school to play the ball game. After the ball game was over, no matter who won, there would always be a question, “Could we get out of town before being outnumbered by the fellows in Slaterville?” By the way, we had to purchase the ball for these league games between these two schools and I 15 happened to be swinging in the right direction when the ball game over the plate and it connected. I hit it way out there and it turned out to be a home run. As I went past first base, that was Bill Smoot there on first base, he was bigger than I. He stuck out his foot and I tripped and went sprawling on the ground. I got up and went over and touched second base, around to touch third base, then went out and touched home plate. Then I went out to first base. I didn’t go out there to talk about the weather or tell him how I liked the way he played. You can imagine what happened. We were the center of attention for quite some time. Bill and I, right to this day, we put our arms around each other when we meet and we talk about the good old days. When they’d come over to Marriott to play they were the ones who got the worst of, should we say, ‘extra-curricular activities’ after the ball game was over. We used to have a bakery man come out through Marriotsville by the name of Dellabow. He would have the bakery things and oft times our mothers would give us an egg or two to go get a donut and things like that. The first job I can ever remember having had out in Marriott was thinning beets for five cents an acre. Of course thinning beets, the modern generation, they do not know what that means. We had a hoe that had a blade of about eight inches wide, with the handle being about fifteen inches long, so you could stoop over and block, what we call block – in other words, pull out beets so we’d leave beets about ten to twelve inches apart. Then with the left hand which is down near the ground because you’re bending over, if there was a double or a triple beet you would then thin them out to a single beet. Then you would go down the rows, and I say 16 for the benefit of those listening and for some of the old timers, the last year I thinned beets I did it for six dollars an acre and I averaged six dollars and thirty five cents a day in nine hours of work to thin beets. So those are the things we did. RS: Let me ask you a question about the first beets you thinned for a nickel an acre. How much could you do in a day then as a boy? WT: I can’t recall. I was only about eight years of age at the time. I cannot recall but I can take you down and show you where it was. RS: But an acre was a pretty good day’s work then? WT: By the way, an acre is more than most people – most people usually did not thin over half an acre a day. People who might not know how large an acre is, in the Ogden city blocks, there are ten acres to a block. If a person can block off an acre of that they are stooping a long way. I figured it out one time but I was never good in mathematics. That’s the reason I taught languages. RS: What was your next job that you remember? WT: Well, it was in connection with the farmer and hoeing tomatoes and beets and things like that. By the way, I hoed beets and tomatoes for a fellow named John Marriott, maybe some of you might have heard the name of J. Willard Marriott? He lived within about a mile of where we did there on the farm. Bill was just an ordinary fellow like the rest of us, went to school out there in Marriott, went to school at the old Weber Stake Academy and the old Weber Academy before he went east, and made his money out of selling root beer for a nickel a mug to start out with. 17 In the winters we used to trap for muskrats. They had a regular fellow from one of these hide places down on Wall Avenue who would come up through there and buy the muskrat hides. Usually we’d get about twenty-five cents a hide. I remember one hide I got fifty cents for and we thought that was really something. During the summer for part of our amusement we would…let’s say this, we all milked cows over there. We’d go ‘rooting tooting’ out on what we’d call milking parlors where they’d take the cows and they set the jerseys with the milking machines. We used to have to have a good grip to be able to milk those Holstein cows. Three or four of us boys would get a cup or two of cream. What is skim milk? You used to have pans maybe fourteen inches in diameter, three inches thick and they’d put the whole milk in there and the cream would come to the top and they’d skim off the cream. That would give you the skim milk. That’s how they used to get it in those days. This cream off the top was really thick. Excuse me, my mouth is watering. Then we’d get a teaspoon full of sugar and maybe a little bit of vanilla. Then we’d go up to Farr’s ice place on twenty-first and Grant and get a big block of ice for fifteen cents. It seemed like they almost filled the whole end of that buck board. We’d have some wet gunny sacks and keep those over the block of ice. Then we’d go over in the grove, south of the Southern Pacific Railroad in Marriott and we’d get some rock salt from the folks. Once in awhile we had an extra egg or two when we bought some donuts and we made this homemade ice cream and donuts and we were really living high. It was delightful. We think about those things. 18 Another item in that connection was the movies. Of course this was long before the movies were old enough to talk. I can remember the movies here in Ogden when they were still hand cranked. They did not have electric motors on the projection machines and the projectionist would be cranking with his right arm until his arm would become tired. You could always tell when he changed to his other arm because there would be just a slight pause and then it would quicken the acceleration of the film through there and everybody would speed up their walking. Then they would have subtitles in which they would tell what the person had spoken in the film. RS: Which movie houses did you go to and how much did it cost? TW: I’ll get to that in just a second. By the way, when I went to France, getting back to over there in Belgium and France, they would have the subtitles in French and sometimes we would be translating for a new missionary who didn’t understand the language. In French it wouldn’t make any sense. It wasn’t laughable. I remember one time I was translating for three new fellows who had just come in and didn’t know any French and when I translated they started to laugh. Then I had to stop and listen to what I had said then I realized there was really something funny. Everybody in the movie house was looking at the Americans wondering what on earth had happened. Okay, now let’s get back. We had a grand sum total of twenty-five cents. We walked two miles to the street car line. It cost five cents to take the street car from Twelfth Street into Twenty-Fourth Street. By the way, I’m doing some research on this and I’m going to print up something on the old nickelodeons. I’ll 19 just mention momentarily the old Oracle and the Lyceum and the Rex and the Ogden Theater and the Cozy. Now the Cozy was my favorite. They had the good old westerns with William S. Hart and Yakima Canutt and a number of those fellows like that. They used to have sixteen episodes. In other words, you had to go back sixteen weeks to have continuity through it. To start out it was five cents to get in to the movie house. Well I’d spent five cents to come in, five cents to get in the movies, so that gave me ten cents to get a pretty good bag of candy. The sweet tooth of a young lad in his early teens would get the best of him. I would spend that other nickel and then have to walk all the way back to Twelfth Street because I ate just a little more popcorn and candy than I should have done. It didn’t seem like drudgery at all. We were willing to do that. Then they had the old Alhambra on the west side of Kiesel Avenue. It was named Hudson Avenue in those days. They later called the Alhambra the Paramount. It was a real theater there. I remember seeing Helen Keller on the stage there. They let us out of school at the old Weber Academy to go down and see Helen Keller on the stage. We used to go down there quite often and then later on after we moved to town I got into the habit of going down there for wrestling. It was the old Greco-roman wrestling. They really had to grunt and groan. This was a matter of real power wrestling. RS: What was Twenty-Fifth Street like? WT: I did not venture down Twenty-Fifth Street very much in my day. My folks had told me that it was an undesirable place and I had enough good sense to believe my parents and I’m glad I did. Now in connection with coming into town for 20 celebrations: we used to come in and see the circus parades. They’d always have a circus parade when the circus would come to town—the old Barnum and Bailey or other circuses. They would have a parade down Washington Boulevard and the people would line up, and then they would decide whether they were going to the circus or not. They had them in different places. The first place I can recall was down on what is Wall Avenue. Wall Avenue didn’t come through here until I guess thirty years afterwards. Down where the Fife Ready Mix Concrete is, and it straddled where Wall Avenue now is. That’s where the first circus I can recall was in life. By the way, if you ever talk to John Price he’ll tell you about how they had motorcycle racing in that old race track down in that particular place. RS: Did you ever go swimming at the hot springs when you were young? WT: Yes. Shall we continue on with the idea of coming to town and then we’ll go out to the hot springs? On Armistice Day for the First World War, my older brother Ira and I were walking down Twelfth Street from our place, going down another mile and over in a field not too far from where Bill Marriott was born and raised to top beets. We heard the whistles in town. We were walking down there before daylight so we could be there when we could see a beet in the ground. We’d start to hand top the beet where you had to hook onto the end of the knife and you’d pull the beet out of the ground, which had been loosened by a certain type of plow. Then you would top them by hand. We heard some whistles in town and they were just ‘toot-tooting’ and we wondered what the matter was. Did the whistle get stuck at the roundhouse? Because you used to always have whistles 21 at six o’clock in the morning, seven o’clock in the morning, seven-thirty and eight o’clock. Different places like the railroad or factories would let people know what time in the morning it was because that’s when their shift to start to work was and they were alerted. A lone engine came out along the southbound tracks and that’s only about a block and half south of where we were walking down there, just a tooting and tooting. We thought maybe that there’s some engineer who’d gotten drunk or something like that and he’d run away with an engine. Then we heard coming down Twelfth Street, just about where the Defense Depot Ogden is now (we used to call it Butters Lane), a fellow coming down with a motorcycle. He’d loosened his muffler so it was making a lot of noise. He would turn off the key and then turn it on and then it would pop, explode and he was hollering something there. As he came closer to us, we could hear him holler even above the roar of that motorcycle, “The War is over! They have signed an armistice!” Well he came down past us; I think he may be felt he was a Paul Revere of sorts as he came down there. He had a bunch of newspapers in his arms but I don’t believe he stopped to sell any of those newspapers. So Ira and I went over to John Millers and we got all the cash he had in the house and that was less than a dollar. We went up home and father gave us a little over a dollar and we walked all the way in to town for that celebration for the first armistice. It was quite the celebration that they had here in town. I could talk about that particular thing for a long time. 22 Now, the old hot springs. I have got something on the Ogden Hot Springs Railroad and Health Resort Company. They had the railroad that went out there pulled by a dummy to start out with, and it used to have an elegant hotel and dances, and a very fine place to swim. Lorin Farr, who was the first mayor of Ogden, passed away out there at the hot springs. He arrived in Ogden the Twelfth of January in 1850, and he passed away out at hot springs on the Twelfth of January, 1909, fifty-nine years to the day after he arrived in Ogden. He was standing on one of the cat walks out there. He did not drown. He had a heart attack and didn’t even go into the water. But we used to go out there and swim quite a bit. There’s another swimming place where we used to go a little more than hot springs and that was the bottom of Ogden Canyon and that was called the Sanitarium. We used to take the street car up there to the Sanitarium. It cost a nickel to ride the street car up there. If you wanted to go all the way through the canyon to Huntsville they doubled the price on you. Oh by the way, let’s get back to those movies. I can remember when they raised the price from five cents to ten cents for a movie. I’m telling you. We thought that was highway robbery. That was just terrible. They took another sack of candy away from us because lots of times we only had twenty-five cents to come to town to spend. Maybe I should tell about when you date a girl too in those early days. RS: Another question before that and that is, did you ever ride the street car up to Huntsville? 23 WT: Oh many a time—more than once. By the way, I have hiked up over the top of Mount Ogden down into Wheeler’s Basin and have fished in Wheeler’s Basin. Let me tell you about walking up. We would put a fish line and some fish hooks in our pocket, cut a willow off a red birch and catch some grasshoppers for bait. We’d fish, then walk down to the old Pineview Dam and then catch the street car back down to home. We’d do that from daylight to daylight. RS: What kind of fish were they that you caught? WT: They were cutthroat. They were small but delicious. They were natives. Going in the street car up to Huntsville, it entered the canyon on the north side of the canyon, went right across where that first bridge is now, across the river then back across where you can see the pipeline for the Ogden culinary system. Then it ran up the north side to the Hermitage. By the way, the Hermitage was a beautiful family park where they would take their families up and have a picnic and just enjoy being with the family. It didn’t have the resort type of thing, but it was just a family park there at the Hermitage. They had the sightseeing cars going to Huntsville in which they would have the seats back to back in the center so you could look out and see the beautiful rock formations. There are some beautiful geological formations as you go up through there. It crossed the river to the south side of the Hermitage, it crossed to the north side just below the present Pineview Dam and then up past North Fork and into town. You have the crossroads at the northwest corner of present Huntsville Park. There’s a store over there. It’s just kitty-corner and that’s where the street car was. In those days it acted as a freight line as well as a passenger line and they would haul down 24 milk from the valley in ten gallon milk cans. They would come down Canyon Road to Washington, south to Twenty-Fourth Street, down Twenty-Fourth Street and in front of Utah Idaho Central and the Bamberger Electric Depot which is now a paint company just across from the Hilton Hotel, and they would unload there. There was a creamery on twenty-third and Wall Avenue and they would meet there with an old horse and wagon, and haul these ten gallon milk cans over to the creamery. That’s the way they hauled the milk in those days. Instead of those big tanks like they do at the present time. RS: You’ve mentioned a very interesting society in Ogden and we’ve talked just a bit about Twenty-Fifth Street. Was there kind of a split town? Some people who didn’t associate with others? WT: At the time I was not aware of it, but take this, I do not think that we were polarized, not as polarized as we are now. We had Negros who lived out on Canyon Road, two families there, and they were just the grandest people. You would get your shoes shined for a nickel and later on, a dime. We young teenagers would like to go down to the Depot. Some Greeks used to have a shoe shine parlor. We preferred going down there to the fellows, these red caps, the union people, they were such jovial fellows. Those railroaders, what they call black people now, that Negro is nothing else but the old Latin word which means black in the first place so we didn’t think anything about it. They were Negros, we knew that and they knew it. We were just friendly. We’d go down there and we liked it and we talked to those fellows and they were just grand people. The porters and waiters on the railroads were high class people. We liked them and 25 we got along just great in those days. I’m sorry to say that we have been polarized by some hell raisers, excuse the French. But we liked them. We liked the Greeks and the Mexicans and other peoples here. We got along together. We would go to the picture shows right along side of each other. RS: Let me ask you about Catholic families in Ogden—people who went to St. Joseph’s Church. Were they pretty well integrated into the community? WT: Oh yes. In fact, one of those families at the time I became a scout in Ogden, Utah – the first year they had scouting, in 1919 – we had one of those fellows who was a neighbor of ours. He went to troop 16 there in the twelfth ward and we got along just fine together. One of my best friends in the early days, his father was the minister of the Baptist church. We got along very well together. RS: Did you go to Lagoon as a young man—or Saltair? WT: Oh, my goodness, Saltair only once. By the way, I have worked out something on these old railroads and I’m going to tie it in with part of this pamphlet that will eventually be published. Got to put in a plug there for some of the research I’ve been doing, you know? A fellow by the name of Bamberger built a railroad from Salt Lake to Ogden and he called it the Salt Lake Ogden Railroad. It was a steam line in the first place. It came into Washington Avenue at 3121 Washington Boulevard where later they had the Lyon Coal Company and there’s still a spur runs up to Washington Avenue from that old railroad. Then they electrified it and brought it into town and the first depot was where the El Borracho is on Twenty- Fifth Street and Lincoln. El Borracho, by the way, some of you Spanish students 26 should look it up and see what that means. You understand what it means, El Borracho? It simply means ‘the drunkard.’ But anyway, let’s go on. We used to catch the Bamberger Electric. Then Simon Bamberger changed the name from the Salt Lake Ogden Railroad to the Bamberger Electric when he electrified it. Then he had an interesting concept. Why not build a resort to rival Saltair halfway between Salt Lake and Ogden and attract people from Salt Lake and people from Ogden to his resort which he called Lagoon. You buy your ticket to Lagoon from Ogden and you get in to the amusement park free as one of the endorsements. We went down there many a time. I can recall as many as three good size passenger cars hooked up together taking these excursion people. They’d run them every half an hour on the Fourth of July and the Twenty- Fourth of July. They always opened Lagoon religiously on Declaration Day and they would close it down on Labor Day. They didn’t start early or keep going later. RS: What kinds of things did you do at Lagoon? WT: They had the fun house, they had the barrel roll, they had the scenic railway, we used to call it. Then they had the shoot to shoots and swimming and dancing. Oh by the way, we used to enjoy getting out there on that lake—I hadn’t thought about that for quite some time—in a row boat and row around on that. We thought that was quite a lot of fun. It was enjoyable. Then they had a launch that would take people around there. Just to be on the water and it was cool there and it was a relaxing thing. It was not a matter of let’s go in here and get it over with. When you’re rowing a boat you’re relaxed. When you’re going around on 27 that little launch, you’re relaxed. They had a Merry-Go-Round and a Ferris Wheel and things like that. RS: Did you ever go to any of the other lake resorts? Syracuse? WT: The Syracuse Resort was not running at the time. They had a railroad go out of Ogden to the Syracuse Resort at one time. Were you aware of that? It had phased out before I came on the picture. I went out to Saltair once. One thing I can remember is the fact that you could not sink in the water. We were all crusted with salt water when we got out of swimming because we didn’t properly take a shower in fresh water. There was a dance hall but we didn’t dance. Then they had the old scenic railway. Outside of that I can’t remember anything else. RS: Was there a Rollercoaster at either Lagoon or Saltair? WT: Oh, that’s what we called the scenic railway. Yeah, the Rollercoaster. Excuse me for using these archaic languages and terms. RS: Tell me about the first automobiles you were associated with and the first one you owned. WT: I was in Coalville when they drove the first automobile into Coalville. Just came up the road which is east of the Echo Reservoir at the present time. Just as you come into town you pass the old Summit Stake Academy. There’s a hill that came down towards Chalk Creek. They used to have an old boardwalk that was maybe three or four hundred yards long to take people across Chalk Creek. I can’t remember whether it was Bullock or who it was that came into town with the first automobile. I remember him coming over that hill and driving into town. It 28 was almost like you were going to the circus parade to watch the automobile come in to town. We did not own an automobile in our family until I was in high school. Father got a job in the summers to supplement his wages at the old Weber Academy. He became a sanitation inspector for canning companies. He went up to Perry and Willard to some of those canning companies. He first rented an old Buick. I remember he drove that old Buick and I thought my goodness that father of mine is quite the smart fellow. I didn’t know that he could drive a car and he came up home – we were living there on Brinker and Twenty-Sixth Street – and he drove up there and he asked me if I wanted to go out to Willard and Perry with him on his inspection tour. That was my first ride in an automobile. The first automobile that father purchased was an old 1917 Model T Ford Touring. It had the old running boards. It was the old isinglass side curtains that you put up during inclement weather. No heaters in them at all. We took a trip down to Zions and Bryce and the Grand Canyon in the summer of 19—I cannot recall whether it was 1922 or 1921—but it runs in my mind that it was 1921. Believe it or not, we made it all the way to Nephi the first day. South of there was dirt roads, no road signs at all. I can still remember the sign as we came into Nephi where we spent the first night. We put up a tent over there by the church, they had a lawn. It was a sign that says speed limit 15 miles an hour. And then true to graffiti times, the school boys had in crayon below that ‘Ford’s do your damndest.’ The next day we wanted to make it as far as Cedar City where we had some folks but we did not make it. We missed it by about thirty miles. The 29 next day we went into Toquerville and visited our family there and went in to Zions. Then we came back out of Zions and had to go by way of Pipe Springs to go up on the Kaibab Forest to go to the north end of the Grand Canyon. For those who are not aware of it, they did not have gear shifts with Model T Fords. They had three foot pedals. The left one was your clutch pedal and your right one was your brake and the middle one was—you push the clutch pedal half way in and then push the middle one in with your other foot and that would be halfway in to put it into neutral. Push the middle one in more and that would reverse you. Well, going up the Kaibab Forest we had to use the low gear quite a bit and we practically wore it out getting up on the north rim of the Grand Canyon. Then coming down you’d use the clutch also as kind of a brake. The brake gave out on us and father used the reverse very gently and we made it back down as far as Fredonia, and we had to take the housing off of the motor and the thing—I guess it was sixteen inches wide. I remember lying underneath there I became a mechanic on that hot sand of the Fredonia desert in the month of June. I took that off with a certain type of a wrench and father had some bands that he riveted onto the brake bands. We soaked them up in oil and put them back together again and came on home. Well you did that with your cars in those days. That reminds me. I’ve got to tell you about this fishing trip. When we went over to Bear Lake in about 1915, as much as I can recall, we left Marriott and we drove all the way to Beaver the first day in the old buckboard. My brother Ira and my brother Lewis and I were going over to Bear Lake. My mother was from Bear Lake, she was a Nebeker. We made it all the way to Beaver the first day. The 30 second day we made it just north of the Hardware Ranch and the head of Blacksmith Fork. Now, in the first day we broke camp and the wagon wheel got lodged against a rock and our old horse Billy kind of lunged into it and it split that single tree end to end. I remember my heart did sink. There was our trip to Bear Lake. But father went inside the buckboard, got out some bailing wire, a pair of pliers and just wired that thing together and away we went. It held together the rest of the trip. We made it into Bear Lake late in the afternoon of the third day. On the way back we took three days coming back. We stopped in South Fork and with our big long ten foot cane poles, we caught a good mess of fish to bring back down. So that was the first long trip that I can remember. The other first long trip was that automobile trip down to the Grand Canyon, but the first long trip by horse and buggy was the one in which we went over to Bear Lake. RS: What kind of fish did you catch in Bear Lake? WT: Fishing was not good in Bear Lake as it is now. We caught chub over there in the Bear Lake with these big poles and we put eight or ten fly hooks on there and we’d throw it out there. Dragging it in we’d catch four, five or six chubs at a time—six and eight inches long. We were staying at my Uncle John’s place and he had a big bunch of pigs. We practically filled the wash tub full of these chub for him to feed to his pigs. And that’s what happened.