Oral History Program Eddy Shaw Interviewed by Brandt Shaw 12 June 2008 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Eddy Shaw Interviewed by Brandt Shaw 12 June 2008 Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. 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These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. 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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Shaw, Eddy, an oral history by Brandt Shaw, 12 June 2008, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: This is an oral history interview conducted by Brandt Shaw; the interviewee is his Grandfather Eddy L. Shaw. It is being held on 2008, in Eddy's home in Layton Utah. The interview concerns what it was like going up in Liberty, and some of the experiences that Eddy had in the small community. BS: When were you born? ES: August 11th 1935. BS: Where did you grow up at? ES: Liberty, right in the north end of Ogden Valley. BS: Who were your Parents? ES: Lawrence Edmond Shaw was my father and my mother was Elizabeth Marie Lindsey. BS: Where were they from? ES: They were both born and raised in Liberty. BS: Okay. One of the more interesting things about Liberty to me is, kinda that is where my family is from. Can you describe Liberty in the time you grew up, and what it was like, and what the people were like there? ES: Liberty was not a very big town, it was all farmers and everybody knew everybody else because it was a small community. When I went to school all six elementary class was in the same room with only one teacher, and I was the teacher's pet. The teacher through my elementary school grades was a Zella Chard who was actually a cousin to my father; my grandmother was a Chard. 1 BS: What was the geography like, of Liberty? What was the physical landscape of it? ES: Well a, it was just farming community, it was basically pretty flat, the north fork of the Ogden River ran down through it, and that is what they used in the their irrigation system to irrigate their farms, in the north end of the valley. When I was real young, we did not have any electrical power out at our house and I remember that Utah power and light came out and talked to my dad about putting a line through our property. He called it the River bottom which was a down were the North fork ran through my father’s farm. They told him if he would let them run a line through there they would run power to the house were we liver. But he had to cut a path through the trees for them to come through. I remember that they wanted the power so bad that he made the path about twice as wide as what was required. BS: Do you remember how wide that path was? ES: It was about forty feet. BS: Now you said that most of the families in Liberty were farmers. What kind of farming did they do? Did they do live stock? Did they Do agriculture? A combination? ES: Well on our farm we raised, we had pigs, chickens, cows, and horses. We raised alfalfa, barley and wheat, and we also every year had a contract with Del Monte, to raise peas. We would hull them into the into the pea-viner, which was in the middle of Liberty, they would start that operation at about two o' clock in the morning so they would have peas at the cannery for the canners to do during the day. Then they would stack the vines in a stack and then they would let the farmers come and pick them up through the wintertime and feed them back to their stock. 2 BS: Do you remember how many animals? You said you had chickens and pigs, where they for your family use only, or would you sell them down at the fairs and whatnot? ES: We milked cows, and sold the cream to Brown's creamery. With the chickens we just used for our own eggs use. We used the pigs for our own meat, and we would sell some at the stockyards, the cows and the pigs usually. We had about four or five horses most of the time. We had a team of workhorses; we done most of the work on the farm was done with a team of horses, we cut the hay and the peas, and every with the horses that pulled the cutters. BS: How many people were in your family, and can you tell us a little bit about everybody? ES: Well, I was the fourth of six boys and no girls and it was my job when I was a young boy to make sure that we had kneeling in the house to start the fire the next morning. We did all our cooking and heating with stoves in the house, our bathroom was outside. We has a storage place that we kept our potatoes and fruit and things like that, that we called the cellar, which was an underground room with a roof over it, it would not freeze in the winter and it would keep the fruit and potatoes and things so that we could use them through the winter. We didn't have any refrigeration at that time. BS: You were the fourth of six boys, what were some of the other boys’ responsibilities? You were in charge of the keening and stuff, what were some of the other things that the boys did to help at the family? ES: I do not remember them doing anything, (laughter). The older ones milk the cows, and fed and stocked the horses. I remember that. I remember when we used to go, when we got a little older, we would all go deer hunting together up on the mountain behind Ben 3 Lomond. The Sheepherder had a nice cabin up there, almost to the top of the mountain on the east side of Ben Lomond, there was a nice pond there for fresh water, and we would stay in there when we would go hunting. We would stay in that when we were deer hunting. It was very successful hunting. I remember one year we got, won the Kemars contest with the largest buck, that was entered into it. It happened that we were hunting the second day of the deer season. It was my older brother Clair, myself, and Burt Cook, who was a friend of Clair's, and we were hunting in this little canyon called Black Canyon, just north of Ben Lomond a little bit, and we were going up the canyon, and we spotted this deer laying under a pine tree up on the side of the mountain. My older brother Clair says well I'll go up and get around above it so it doesn't get away. He got up about half way up the side of the mountain towards it and the deer jumped up and started running, so we all started shooting at it. Down it went and Burt Cook said I got it. But when we got it down and skinned it out the bullet that killed it was still in it. It had went through its heart and it had stopped under the skin before it went out. It was a thirty caliber bullet, and me and my brother were both shooting thirty caliber rifles, and Burt Cook was shooting a two- seventy, which is a smaller boar, and it was a thirty caliber that killed it. He would never admit that. (Laughter) That particular deer had a thirty-seven inch spread on it, twenty three points. BS: That's huge, that thing is massive. Um, what were some of the other families like up in liberty? Was your family a pretty average family? Were you above average in material goods? Or below average? Or was everybody just about the same? ES: Well we didn't have much. I remember my other saying that the only money she got to buy anything with was eight dollars amount, that we got from selling the cream at 4 Brown's Creamery. My dad started working at Hill Air Force Base in 1942 on the fire department, and he started out at $ 1250 a year, we thought that was great money, at that time. He would go to work for three days, and then he would be home for three days, so we kinda had to take care of the farm stuff while he was gone. BS: So he would go down to Hill Air Force Base, and leave your family in Liberty, and then come back for three days and repeat the process all over again? ES: Yes. Then in a, 1948 we moved, my dad bought a house in South Ogden, because it was closer to Hill Air Force Base. We moved to down at thirty-sixth and Jefferson, in South Ogden in 1948. I remember that first winter they were saying what a record amount of snow they got in Ogden, but it just seemed normal for us, because we been used to living in Liberty and they got a lot more snow up there in the winter time. We would still go back up and stay in the summer time, and run the farm in the summer time even though we had the place in South Ogden. Even when I was an older teenager I all my summers up in Liberty on the farm. I used to go, like to go fishing up there, there was real good fishing in up in some of the little streams up in Broad Mouth, and Derfy, and North Fork, it was good fishing. I fished with worms most of the time. BS: What's one of your first memories about Liberty? Or something that you kinda hold dear about growing up in Liberty that you think was pretty special to you? ES: Well something that I still think about just about every day is when my Grandfather had an accident. My older brother Don was cutting some hay for him, meadow hay, and he did not want the whole field cut, he wanted to leave a piece that he didn't want cut at all. So he got on the back of the tractor that had a power mower on the back, and he was showing him were to drive, and cut the hay. His left pant leg cuff of his Levis got caught 5 in the power take off of the tractor that turned the mower and it twisted him down into the machine and took off all of his cloths, and busted his left leg and took his foot right off between his knee and his ankle. I was at the house at the time, and Don yelled out "Ed bring me a knife", just as loud and clear I can remember, and so I took a knife and ran over to the field that was about three or four hundred yards away. And I remember getting there he had my grandfather out at the time, laying on the ground, and the only thing he had left on was his shirt cuff, he had been wearing a long sleeve shirt, and they were still buttoned, but they were tore off right behind the cuff, and his other shoe was still on. He had him laying on the ground putting pressure on the thigh inside the artery to keep it from bleeding. So I was fourteen years old at the time, so I put all my weight on that artery in his leg, and my brother Don had to run back up to the house and get the car and come up a pick him up so we could take him to the hospital. I remember that the car was about out of gas, and we had him in the back seat, and I was still holding the pressure on that artery in his thigh, we stopped at Wilber's blacksmith shop in Eden, and put a little gas in it, and Mr. Wilber could see what was going on, he never even took any money or anything, hurry and get to the hospital. BS: Were the gas pump the type of gas pump were you had to fill it up into the glass Bowl? ES: Not at that time, they were electric at that time. But my grandfather had one up in Liberty that was a Conoco station that had a little glass container that you would pump up as many gallons you wanted into it, and then it would just flow out with gravity flow. Anyway he got down to the hospital and my grandfather was seventy-five years old at the time, and when we pulled in there a couple of the tenants just figgered well this is the end of him. But there was one young man, I remember, that got everybody going 6 and they hurried and got a blood transfusion going to him, and got him so that he was still breathing, and my dad and my uncle came right after that and gave him a blessing, they were both Bishops at the time when this happened. He seemed to be stabilized. I remember going back up to the hospital the next night to visit with him, and he was talking and seemed to be getting along okay. He told me, he says right where you're standing, I was standing by the side of his bed, he says my mother and dad came here last night to take me home. I told them I was not ready to go. I thought about that the rest of my life just about every day, about that time. Within a few weeks he had an artificial leg put on, they ended up having to take the leg off up off between the knee and his thigh. And he had a an old Skid, that was a platform with runners on it that he would hook his work horse up to, to pull his tools around. He still irrigated, fixed fence, he had about eighty acres of ranching up there were he ran cattle, he done more cattle then anything, within six week he put a saddle on the horse and a harness, and he could get on and ride the horse and pull his tools around. I remember he had a 1950 Chevrolet car and it had a standard transmission, and he couldn't get the clutch to go down with his artificial leg on the left side. And everybody tried talking him in to buying a automatic transmission. But he didn't, he took that Chevy down to the Blacksmith shop down in Eden, and had him put a lever on the left side of the steering wheel, like the shifter on the right side, with a rod down to the clutch, so he could use the hand clutch to run it, and that is how re ran it, with the hand clutch. BS: So for parts of the car ride he was riding without any hands on the wheel. ES: Some of the time. But he ended up, he was seventy-five at the time, he ended up being ninety-six when he died. So he wasn't ready to go. 7 BS: So he wasn't ready to go. What about an experience that you had up in Liberty that you think that most boys your age at the time would have had? You talked about fishing and hunting with others, what type of recreational activities do you think that you and the other boys would have shared in common? ES: Oh, I know that at Liberty school they had a sidewalk that ran around the outside of it, and everybody would roller skate, when the weather was permitting. They always had a recess, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. I remember Wednesday was the day that we would go to primary. Everybody in the school would go to primary after school. They didn't hold it on Sunday, and the buses would actually wait and take us home after primary, on primary day. But uh, one other thing that happened, it was in the winter time, we used to go up and cut our own Christmas trees. Me and my next older brother Dean were on skis, there was quite a bit of snow, we were around checking out the trees, and there was this one little hill down that we skied down, and Dean headed the hill and he, and his ski turned on him, and he twisted and broke his leg right when he was skiing. And uh, so I had to go back to the house and get help to get him back down to the hospital. I still remember that experience. BS: Sounds like, sounds like it is a miracle that any of you Shaw boys made it out Liberty alive. ES: Yeah we had a lot of activities. I remember I used to have, we had a 1929 model A Ford that went all through the family, and uh, I traded a gun for it, and my older brothers had traded different things for that car. When I was about fifteen sixteen I used to like to go fishing in the summer time over the cash valley road, and there was a stream over there called Derfy, and it was really good fishing, nobody ever hardly ever got over there. The 8 road that went in there was just a little cattle trail that the sheepherders used and that was about the only one that ever went in there. It was a good fishing stream. BS: I remember you telling a couple times about being up on the mountainside herding sheep. Or am I miss remembering things? ES: Well my older brother Clair ended up with the sheep herd, and a he would take them out into Plain City for the winter most time, and that is where they would feed them and pasture them late in the fall and early spring. He usually haled them with a big truck, but this one year he decided that he was just going to drive them over north Ogden pass. And so we uh, I told I'd help him, so we were driving them up the road over North Ogden pass, and uh, got up there almost to the top, and low and behold laying there in the middle of the road there was a pistol just laying that somebody had lost and I picked it up, and I remember taking that pistol home. Another thing that when he got up to the top of the pass it took him about two months to get on over (laughter) he let the sheep wat up there for a while. BS: Just um, I do not think we covered it, you said that you had six brothers, and no sisters. ES: Five Brothers. BS: Or uh, five brothers, there are six of you all-together. What are all their names? ES: Bob, Robert, is the youngest, Charlie is the second, then me, Dean is next, then Don, and Clair. BS: So all six of the Shaw Boys, what do you think some of the struggles had raising you boys up in Liberty might have been? 9 ES: Well, I know that uh, all of us getting to school and home was kinda a struggle some times, because uh, the high school boys had to go to Weber High School which was clear down on twelve and Washington, at the time, that is where I went to school also. Sometimes in the winter it was bad time to get up and down that canyon, and get everybody back and forth. And I remember that my brothers all played sports at Weber High School, and Don got the outstanding Athlete of the senior class when he was a senior at Weber High School. He married Margo Marriott who was the vice president when I was a freshman at Weber High School BS: How, Liberty is about eight miles away from the city Ogden, from the canyon to canyon, how would most of the families get up and down through the canyon? Did most of them have cars? I remember reading about an electric train that used to make it up? How did your family get up and down out of Ogden into Liberty? ES: Well I heard my mother talk about the train that came up about where the damn is now, and they would go down and get on the train and ride back and forth from Ogden on the train. But uh, they would go and do their shopping once a week in Ogden that was about the only time they ever went was about once a week. Back down to do their shopping. But the train never did operate that I remember it was all before my time. But they did have a passenger train that went up into the Valley years ago. BS: Who are some of the friends that you remember spending the most time up in Liberty, and what kind of activities did you participate in? When you talk about them make sure to say their full name, first and last name. ES: Well uh, the once that were in my class was Clifford Homes, Richard Creamer, Connie Southwick, and Karma Ward. That was the ones that was in my class at Liberty. There 10 was six classes in that one room school, but there was one year that never had any kids that age, so there was only ever five different classes. I remember when I was eight years old, when I was old enough to get baptized a member of the church, there was uh, my uncle Rulon Shaw, baptized me in the spring creek, which is a real cold creek that is full of fish, and that were I was baptized, right below a reservoir where the water would come out, and it washed a big deep hole, and that's where we were baptized. 11