Oral History Program Rae Harding Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 7 December 2016 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Rae Harding Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 7 December 2016 Copyright © 2018 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 World War II "All Out for Uncle Sam" oral history project contains interviews from veterans of the war, wives of soldiers, as well as individuals who were present during the war years. The interviews became the compelling background stories for the "All Out for Uncle Sam" exhibit. The project received funding from Utah Division of State History, Utah Humanities Council and Weber County RAMP. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Harding, Rae, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 7 December 2016, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Rae Harding 7 December 2016 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Rae Harding, conducted on December 7, 2016 in her home in Ogden, Utah, by Lorrie Rands. Rae discusses her life and her memories involving World War II. Michael Baliff, the video technician, is also present during this interview. LR: It is December 7, 2016, we are in the home of Rae Harding in Ogden Utah. We are talking about her life, and memories of growing up during World War Two for the World War Two project we are doing at Weber State University. My name is Lorrie Rands conducting the interview and Michael Baliff is with me. Just as a side note, today is the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day. It’s kind of been a little emotional today, and then I remembered what the date was. RH: Yeah it has, I watched the coverage last night on PBS; they had a really good story on it. LR: Just as a side note, we’ll get to that in a minute, but to start, when and where were you born? RH: I was born in Logan, Utah, on August 20, 1936. I just celebrated my 80th birthday. I don’t know if you celebrate an 80th but we had a family party. LR: I think you celebrate your 80th, why not? RH: Well I’ve lived that long, and didn’t die, and didn’t go to jail. LR: Something to be proud of. So, you spent the first few years of your life in Logan? RH: The first seven years. LR: Now, I know you were young when Pearl Harbor happened, but do you 2 remember the mood, the feelings associated with that day? RH: Yes. I have a brother who was ten years older than me, and he was of the age for draft. My grandfather told my Dad years ago, “None of the Dunn’s have ever been drafted, they’ve always volunteered.” There were five of his sons, I believe, that served in World War One. So, my brother volunteered, and he was in the Army Air Corps training as a turret gunner. There were about six boys in our neighborhood who were all killed in the war, and my brother felt very guilty that he had come back alive and all these boys, that were his good friends, had been killed. So, we were scared, we didn’t know what was going to happen. I remember that they would have us put our blinds down at night so no light would show during the night. That was a little bit scary to us children, because it was something so different. Logan didn’t have a whole lot going on militarily wise excepting for boys joining up or being drafted and being killed. It was after we moved to Ogden that we really did feel the effects. LR: Your parents, what were their names? RH: My dad was Leslie Smith Dunn, senior, and my mother was Annie Mitten Dunn. Dad had a business in Logan, he owned a feed store and service station. He lost the business during the war because, number one, taxes on small businesses were so high. Number two, there was a lot of money out on the books, and everybody was in a bad way war wise, because you couldn’t get things and people weren’t able to pay their bills, so he lost the business and we moved to Ogden. 3 LR: You said the taxes were high on small businesses. Do you know why? RH: Well, I think it was part of getting money for the war effort. I used to like to go to the feed store, I learned to cuss at the feed store, cause farmers cuss. We used to have a Christmas Eve Party at my Aunts house in Nibley, which is just South of Logan. Santa Claus always came and Santa had me on his lap one Christmas Eve, and he said, “Well Rae, have you been a good girl this year?” I said “Well, I haven’t sweared today?” LR: Well you did pretty good then. RH: Yep. LR: So when, when your parents moved to Ogden, he obviously moved for business reasons. What did he start doing? RH: Well his first job was as a night watchman for the Utah Oil Refining Company, and we lived below Wall on Rushton. In fact, the tracks went right by our house, and we would see the troop trains going by and all the soldiers and they’d wave at us little kids on the lawn. A side story, our mother always taught us to eat all of our food because the children in Europe were starving, and she didn’t say we should be thankful for our food, she just said we should eat it all. My sister one time, we were out on the grass watching the troop trains go by, and she had a sandwich and she threw it at the train thinking that would carry it to the children in Europe, because the soldiers were going to Europe. LR: That is a great story, I love that! RH: That’s the one you talked to, I believe. Ann, who lives in St. George. 4 LR: She’s younger than you? RH: Two years younger, so she would have been five at the time. LR: Yes, she, she asked us to call you instead. She didn’t think she could remember as much as you could. RH: Well, I’ve got a pretty good memory. LR: I would agree. You said it was fun watching the troop trains. Was there something on them that said “troop trains,” or you just knew? RH: Well they were just full of soldiers. You could see the soldiers through the windows and they’d have the windows open and they’d call out and we’d call back. LR: How long did you live there on Rushton? RH: Well we only were there about eight months and then my dad got a job as a brakeman on the Southern Pacific. He had a run to Carlen Nevada, and he’d be gone a day and a night and then home a day and a night. At that point we moved to Washington Terrace, which was wartime housing that had been built. There were about five wartime housing towns, you might say, around Ogden. There was one in Roy called Arsenal Villa, one in Layton called Sahara Village, and here in Ogden there was Harrisville Heights, no, what was it called, it’s over on about 38th and Jackson. I can’t remember what they called it, they’re still being lived in, and there was Washington Terrace, there was Harrisville Heights out in North Ogden; because we had the Naval Supply Depot, Hill Air Force Base, the Ogden Arsenal at Hill Air Force base where they packaged small arms to send 5 them over. Of course, Hill Air Force Base was big during the war effort. So, we were always told in school that Ogden would be a prime object for the enemy to try to bomb, because we had so many military installations. Little scary to kids. We used to have bomb raid drills where we would have to get down under our desk and we would have to put our hands like this behind our head, and cover our ears with our arms, and then put our head down between our knees. That was supposed to protect us, I guess, from the noise of the blast, and then from falling objects. LR: Right. RH: Little scary for a kid. LR: So, you would have been in what grade? RH: Third grade when we moved to Washington Terrace. LR: Was that something they would practice all the time? RH: Usually once a week. We’d have fire drills where we would all have to go outside. The bombing drills were the ones that I remember the most, because it was the scariest thought to me. LR: Did your teachers try to help you through that? RH: They were very calm. They told us that it was a precaution for our protection, and just to follow orders without questioning why, and we did. We had very big school classes in those days, forty-five students to a classroom with one teacher, but we learned, because there was discipline in the schools. To go to the principal's office was the biggest scare of all, and I don’t know that anybody ever went, but 6 we were good when she threatened us with that. One thing funny about school is we wrote on what they called scratch paper, and it was very poor grade paper. You could see slivers of wood in it, and if you made an error, and tried to erase, it would just disintegrate the paper because it didn’t have good tensile strength, I guess you’d call it. That’s what we used and it was furnished, we didn’t have to furnish anything for ourselves the way students do now. One thing they did at Washington Terrace every year, they would send a cardboard list home to our parents asking where they worked, and then they would subsidize the schools if the parents worked on base because no taxes were paid to the state on those wartime installations. So we would have to have our parents sign a piece of paper saying where they worked. Interesting side note. LR: The wartime installations didn’t pay taxes to the state? RH: I think they still don’t, because their supposedly non-income generating for the base, I mean they're owned by the government. One problem in Utah with taxes is so much of our land is owned by the Federal government, so the state doesn’t get tax money because there isn’t commerce on those lands. LR: As you’re living there in Washington Terrace, can you talk a little bit about what it was like learning to live with the ration system? RH: Oh, the ration stamps, that was a crazy system. Each family would get a book of stamps, according to how many children they had. Well mother had six children. You had to use them to get gasoline, to buy shoes, to buy certain food commodities like sugar. I believe there was five pounds a month allotted for each 7 person in the family. My mother always canned fruits and vegetables, and we didn’t drink coffee in the house, so she would trade her coffee ration stamps to neighbors for their sugar ration stamps, and then she could buy enough sugar to do the canning. Meat was very scarce, and the government had someone come up with olio margarine. When you bought it, it was white in a heavy plastic bag, and there was a little yellow button in the plastic bag that you could pop and then the color would go into the margarine and you would work it through that white stuff. It smelled so terrible, and it tasted bad, but that’s what we had to use. We got used to it. We couldn’t get meat, my mother used to cook eggplant as a meat substitute. I never did like it, it was slimy. One hard thing with the ration stamps- one time mother could not find the stamps. She always kept them on top of the fridge. We had a three-bedroom unit, and there was a nice furnace, and there was an icebox. The iceman would come around every week and you’d put your ice sign out, and he’d just walk in and put it in the freezer part of the fridge, and leave. Anyway, the stamps came up missing, so we had to go a whole month not being able to buy anything, which is hard with six kids. Years later they moved from Washington Terrace, and they moved the fridge out, and there in the cage in back of the fridge were those ration stamps. We could have sure used them. LR: I’ll bet. You talked a little bit before about the tokens that they would use. RH: Yes, the plastic tokens. They were different colors; there was grey, I believe it was the nickel token. That’s what you paid tax with was the tokens. The nickel 8 token was about that big and the dime token was about the size of what the actual coin is. Didn’t pay taxes with pennies, paid with tokens. LR: Was it hard to separate the tokens from the… RH: No, because the coins were heavy and the tokens were very light. You can imagine plastic, they would just kind of sift to the top of your pocket. I cannot remember when they stopped using the tokens. For a long time my mother kept them just as souvenirs, and then they went the way of most souvenirs. LR: Right. So, you had five siblings? RH: Four sisters and one brother. LR: Okay, and where do you fall in that? RH: I’m second to the last, so I didn’t’ have it as hard as the older ones did, as far as not being able to get things that I needed. There was a lot of hand-me-downs in our family. The aunts handed down to my sisters, and my sisters handed down to me. LR: What do you remember about your older siblings and what they were doing during the war? RH: Oh, they loved to sing. Three of them formed a trio, and they did like Andrew Sisters songs, and they entertained quite a bit. I remember when their boyfriends would go in the service; that was hard for them. They’d write to them all the time. The sister right next to me was crazy about Frank Sinatra. We had a big Firestone radio, stood about this tall, and where the speaker was, in front of that was a heavy fabric, like what you might do needlepoint on. My sis sat so close to 9 that radio when Sinatra was singing that she pushed that fabric right in out of the nails that were holding it. She’d say, “Oh Frankie.” She just loved him. At that time, there were a lot of wartime movies, patriotic movies, being shown. We would all go to those, and anything that the government could do to build patriotism they did. There were big signs all over town, “Uncle Sam Wants You,” with the Uncle Sam figure with the hat on and pointing. Then there were signs that said, “Loose Lips Sink Ships,” for people to be careful what they said because you didn’t know who the enemy was. After Pearl Harbor, I remember, and this was a terrible thing. A Japanese man was hanged down on 25th Street. The wartime fervor was very big, and I felt that was so unfortunate, and so sad, because he had nothing to do with it. But it was just one of those wartime things that happened. LR: Was it hard knowing your brother was overseas? RH: He didn’t ever go overseas. The war ended before he did. He was in training in Texas, and learning to be a turret gunner which is a very exposed position to be in on the airplane, and they also did some parachute training. I was only eight, I didn’t really realize the danger he was in. I have to tell you, when you’d go to a movie, there was always a newsreel, and it would show what was going on with the war, and what the government was doing. They showed pictures of the ovens in Germany and them pulling the skeletons out of the ovens. They showed pictures of liberating the camps and what they found in there with men starved to death and big piles of bodies. Now 10 for a kid of eight, that really affected me. The thoughts of being burned in an oven just horrified me, because I knew a burn hurts. Another thing they did was to try to sell war bonds during the movies. They would have an intermission between the feature and the newsreel, and people would come out. First, they’d have a little short newsreel or film about bonds and what they do for the war effort, then people would come out in the audience and try to sell you bonds. Twenty-five dollar bonds. I think you only paid twelve and a half dollars for them, but at the time that was quite a bit of money. A lot of people bought bonds in the theaters. We children also were part of the war effort in that anytime we had a dime we were encouraged, and this was through the school, to buy a stamp. We had books to put them in, and when they were full we would trade them in for what they called victory bonds, and victory stamps. At that time also, the adults were encouraged to have victory gardens, and to just make a small plot of their land into a place where they could grow produce for their family, because everything else went to the war effort. LR: I know there’s not a lot of room in Washington Terrace. Were you ever able to have a victory garden? RH: Yes. We had a side lawn, and I don’t know how wide it was, probably from this corner of the fireplace over to the wall. They dug a portion of the grass out and planted tomatoes and potatoes and they might have put in some cabbage too, parsnips, that sort of thing, root vegetables that would grow good. 11 LR: Did you ever hear about, or was your family involved in any of the scrap metal drives. RH: Oh, Ann asked me if I had mentioned that we would save tinfoil. If we ever saw a pack of cigarettes or an empty package on the ground, we would pick it up and take the tinfoil out of it, and we’d make balls of tinfoil. We’d take empty cans that we had gotten peas or corn out of, then we’d wash it and we would stomp on it to make it small and save tin that way. I remember my cousin had a ball of tinfoil about that big and I don’t know, his parents must have taken it someplace. I don’t remember being with them when they delivered it, but we did save things like that. LR: You mentioned your mother worked… RH: She worked at the Ogden Arsenal. She would take guns that had been packed in Cosmoline, I guess that’s a petroleum product, and then she would have to clean them off so that they could be used again. At that time, there were a lot of prisoners of war at DDO. They called it Second Street, cause it was on Second Street, and she worked with Italian prisoners, and also German prisoners. In the PBS program they touched on that. The Italian prisoners, after the war was over in Italy, they could join a unit that was right on base. They would come in to the dances in town, they’d come to the movies, they could come in shopping, they could hire out to farmers in the area to help harvest crops, and work in the offices at Second Street. Mom got to be friends with one man, his name was Bernondo. I don’t know if it was his last name or his first, that’s all she ever called him. After 12 he was repatriated back, he sent her a letter asking her to send products to him. They had been warned down at work not to do that, because that’s a never-ending thing. Course, things were very scarce in Italy after the war. I remember seeing a picture of Mussolini hanging upside down, and the townspeople would kick at him and they’d spit on him and hit him. He died after being upside down for a while, and I think his wife was also hung like that. I remember seeing that in a Life Magazine, it’s an awful thing for kids to see. You never forget it. LR: So, you talked a little bit about some of the dances that they had. RH: Yes, they had a USO down at Union Station, and the city girls and the county girls would go out there and help serve coffee and things to the soldiers, and then they would have a disc jockey that would play music, mostly jitterbug, and they would dance with the soldiers. There were also dances at a really nice dance place called the White City, and that was up on 25th and Adams. It was a beautiful dance hall with a bandstand and where the big bands would come to play. The soldiers would go up there and dance with the girls, and it was fun to go because the soldiers were so excited to have somebody to dance with, and especially a pretty girl. I think there were some marriages out of it. In fact, one man, his name was Rigo, I don’t remember his last name, but he was a prisoner of war here. After he was repatriated he applied for a visa and came back, and he opened a restaurant called Rigo’s. It was on 28th and Washington and it was a very popular restaurant. LR: So, you mentioned the fifth column. 13 RH: Oh, yes, that was on both the Japanese and the German side. They also called them fellow travelers, people who believed in their philosophy but who lived in your town or your state. They would do what they could to sabotage the war effort, and that was also where the “loose lips sink ships” came in. They didn’t want people who worked in the wartime industries to be talking away from work about what they were building, what they were sending, and where they were sending it, because you didn’t know who the enemy was. The Japanese you would know because they looked Japanese, but the Germans you wouldn’t know. They looked like your neighbors. LR: You mentioned before that your cousin’s father helped hide a few Japanese farmers. RH: Oh yes, this was up in Pocatello, and it was my dad’s brother that was eighteen months older than him. They were very close, they even looked alike. He was head of the Selective Service up there, but he also hid Japanese so they wouldn’t have to go to internment camps. It was almost like an underground railroad, and of course the government didn’t know what he was doing or they wouldn’t have let him do it. He did save a lot of families, and he was held in very high esteem up in the Pocatello area because of that. LR: Okay. If I’m not mistaken, and this must have been after the war, but you would go to dances and it would upset your brother? RH: Yes. There was a man that was active in the LDS Church here in the area, and he was a dance director. He would gather a group of teenage girls to go out to 14 the NCO club at Hill Air Force Base to dance with the airmen. I was probably in the ninth grade at that time, and the airmen were under strict orders not to ask for phone numbers, or to ask the girls to go outside of the NCO club with them. We danced and had a ball. Had a really good time. They were lonesome, they were away from home, they just wanted to have some sanity for a while. My brother said, “Rae, those boys are ready for things that you’re not ready for, and I don’t want you doing it again.” I said, “It was so much fun,” and he said, “Listen to me Rae, they’re ready for things you’re not ready for.” I wasn’t really sure what he was getting at, but I was a good girl and I wouldn’t have anyway, whatever it was. But yes, he was upset, he didn’t want that. He wanted his sisters to be protected. LR: That makes sense. You talked about bubblegum. RH: Fleers Double Bubble Gum, it was a favorite bubblegum of all the kids, and of course we loved bubblegum. It was the bane of the teachers, but Fleers made the best bubbles, and it came in a little hard package about like that, and the gum was wrapped in a little cartoon strip. It was always the same characters in the cartoon strips so you were anxious to see what it was. Anyway, during the war we could not get it. I don’t know what bubblegum had to do with the war effort, haven’t a clue, but we couldn’t get it. Towards the end of the war I remember the bakery at Washington Terrace store, they advertised that if you bought a loaf of their bread, you could have, for a penny, a stick of bubblegum. My mother baked bread every week and was a wonderful baker, but I begged and begged, “Oh Mom please, its Fleers, its Fleers!” She finally gave me a quarter to go and buy a 15 loaf of bread. I must have chewed that gum until it was grey. It had no elasticity in it, no taste in it, but it was Fleers! I was the envy of all the neighborhood. In fact, one time I dropped it on the road outside of our house, and there was a lot of gravel and tar, asphalt, I guess. I took that in and I washed it and washed it and tried to pick the little pieces of gravel out of it, and then I would try to chew it. Every now and again, and I get chills just thinking about it, I’d chomp down on a piece of that gravel and send shockwaves through my body. Finally I threw it away, but it was hard to that because it was Fleers! LR: You hadn’t had it for a long time? RH: No! and we didn’t know when we would get it again either! So that was the bane of my existence, not being able to get Fleers. LR: It's funny, the things that… RH: Yes, something silly like bubblegum. I guess there was some ingredient in it that was used for wartime effort, whether it was sending stuff to the soldiers overseas, I don’t know. But I know that we couldn’t get it. LR: So, your mother ended up making a lot of the clothes that you guys had? RH: Oh yes. When she’d buy flour, it would come in hundred pound bags, and it was in really nice cotton fabric that would have flowers on it. After she emptied the sack of flour she’d wash the fabric and make us skirts out of it. She would buy flannel. We weren’t rich enough to have pajamas, you had to be rich to have pajamas. We would sleep in our petticoats and they were made of flannel. Mother would make almost everything that we wore, and a lot of it was out of the 16 flour sack fabric. I even learned how to make my own skirts out of it when I was in the ninth grade. They still had the fabric that would come with the flour sacks, and I would make myself skirts. LR: What would you guys do for entertainment during war? RH: You know what, dad would take us down on 25th street, which was lined with bars on both sides of the street. The South side of the street was the black side, we didn’t go over there. But the north side was the white side, and we would park in front of one of the more popular taverns, I remember it was Kay’s Tavern. We’d lock all the doors and then watch the drunks; that was our entertainment. I’ve since found out that was the entertainment of a lot of people, to watch them. One that really stood out in my mind, two women came out of the bar and they were fighting. Their boyfriends or husbands were with them, but anyway, they ended up on the ground and one was straddling the other and pounding her head against the pavement holding onto her hair. Well, somebody had called the police and they rolled up, but prior to this, one of the men saw that his girlfriend’s skirt had hiked up so he reached down and pulled it down so she could stay ladylike while she was fighting. The police came and when the men saw them they hurried and picked their girls up and took them back in the tavern. We laughed so much about them wanting the girls to stay ladylike. LR: Well that’s important. You can fight, but you have to do it ladylike. RH: He didn’t want anyone else seeing his girls knees, for Heaven’s sake! LR: It's funny how times change. 17 RH: That was our entertainment. Once in a while an MGM musical would come to the theater and I loved those. You could get in for I think a dime, ride the bus for a nickel, and get popcorn for a dime. Popcorn and a drink. So, mother would give me a quarter and I would go down and see the movie. I would stay for a couple of showings, you could do that in those days. More than once, mother came and got me out of the theater and home. LR: At least she knew where you were. RH: Well that’s true, she did! We went to California quite often. My dad being on the railroad, we could get passes to go. We had Aunts in the bay area, and there were always a lot of soldiers on the train. So, for teenage girls that was kind of fun to flirt with the soldiers. I remember that when we were in Nevada going through the Sierras, and it would be night time, they’d always pull down the blackout shades so that if any enemy planes were coming over they wouldn’t see that there was a train there. We even had to pull our shades at home down at night, and they called them blackout shades. They had air wardens, in Logan and in Ogden, to make sure people knew what to do and would do it if there should be an air raid. So, the war was brought close to us by the presence of all the service men in town, the prisoners of war, the air raid curtains, the rationing, the air raid drills, that sort of thing. I’m sure it was even worse in the Bay Area, being so close to Hawaii after the raid there. I remember, and I was so angry. We went to Hawaii, my husband and I did, and we went out on a tour around the bay. We went by the Arizona, and by 18 the Utah, and there were a lot of Japanese tourists on the ship and they had a PA system going, telling at each point we were at what was happening. Those Japanese tourists were laughing and laughing, and I just fumed about that. How would they have felt if we had gone to Hiroshima or Nagasaki and laughed? Maybe they didn’t understand what was going on the PA system, but I felt like they should have been more sensitive. LR: I can understand that. RH: My uncle Sam that helped the Japanese, his son was a tank commander in the South Pacific, and he was blown out of his tank. A grenade was thrown into his tank, and the men that were in it were blown out of it. Of course, they tried to play dead, but the Japanese soldiers would come by and either bayonet them in the stomach or they would bash their head in with the butt of their rifles. Well, he lucked out, he wasn’t bayoneted, but he did have the side of his face bashed in. He had to have extensive plastic surgery to rebuild his face, and I always thought he was such a hero for what he had gone through. Here his dad was helping the Japanese up there, and he was being mistreated by them. LR: Right, it’s kind of irony there. RH: Yes, it really was. We used to hear terrible things about the Japanese soldiers, how they practiced their bayoneting on babies when they would go into a village. I don’t know how much was true, folklore gets started, but that’s what we used to hear. Then there was this song that a band leader named Spike Jones, he did parodies on music, and he was good. We saw him one time. But there was one 19 song that he wrote and it was “Sieg Heil, pfft, Heil, pfft, right in Der Fuehrer's Face. Yes we are a superman, don’t you see we’re supermen? Then Sieg Heil, pfft.” Anything for derision, of course, we picked up on it real fast. LR: Do you have any questions? MB: I know you mentioned that for entertainment you’d go down to 25th street and watch the drunks. What else did you do for fun, aside from that? RH: Well, the Church had things going on for us, and then in our little community of Washington Terrace we had a junior canteen and a teen canteen. Myself and three other guys, there was one on saxophone, one on bass, and one on guitar, we formed a combo and we used to play for those dances when I was only in the seventh grade. That was pretty fun. So there was that entertainment, and the community would have movies for us there in the community building, and of course the projector always broke down, always. I don’t know if you ever watched the program M*A*S*H, but it always shows them having movies in camp and the projector always breaking down, well that’s just what it did for us too. We were kind of ragamuffin kids up there. People in Washington Terrace came from all over the country to work in the war effort, so we had just about every religion imaginable there. The LDS Church started with just a branch and I could remember, as just a little girl, when ladies would go around and knock on the doors of the houses up there and ask if there was LDS children in the home. If there were, they told us to meet up at the grocery store at a certain time, and then they’d divide us into age groups and 20 take us to people’s houses and started primary that way. They went from not even a branch, to two stakes up there, with probably fourteen wards. At one time, they told us in school that Washington Terrace was the fifth largest city, as far as population, in Utah. The houses were so close together, they were long barracks type houses. There were three bedrooms on one end, and one bedroom on the other end. Or there were houses that stood alone. They were in a horseshoe shape, they called them courts, and the roads were called Victory Road, Army Way, Marine Drive, Navy Way; and it was courts, A, B, C, and D within each road. When they were doing the horseshoe, there’d be one area where they only had room for a two-bedroom unit. They didn’t have a furnace in them, they just had a stove that sat in the front room. One thing I forgot to mention about Washington Terrace, we had cement bathtubs, and they were always cold, no matter how much hot water you put in them. We also had cement wash basins in the bathrooms. In the kitchen, we had a double sink, and one was a deep one, and one was just a regular depth. My mother had a wringer washer, and on wash day she’d pull that washer over to the sink, and she would have two washing tubs and then she’d have the deep tub that she would rinse in, and then she would wring the clothes into the short tub and take them out on the lines and hang them. There weren’t driers in those days. In the winter time my dad strung lines in the long hallway, and that’s where everything was hung. And you’d fight sheets and towels to get to your bedroom. Then the residents voted to make Washington Terrace into a town, to 21 separate the houses, and move them onto foundations and remodel them. At that point my Dad decided to move into Ogden, and he bought a house over on 22nd street, just below Harrison, and lived there until 1958. We were able to buy into a unit in Washington Terrace, my husband and I, when we were first married. For three hundred dollars we could buy the unit, and then it would be remodeled, and we could choose the colors and whatever we wanted and the style house, and how big, and then just move in for that three hundred dollars. We were on thirty year loans, and I think our payment was like sixty dollars a month. We made seventy cents an hour, so we would have to save for the payment out of two checks. You think that that tiny of a payment you’d be able to make, but you didn’t make a lot of money then either. MB: So, kind of following up, you said that people from everywhere were coming in to Washington Terrace, was there any conflict between all those diverse people? RH: You know, there really wasn’t. There was one court, and I’m ashamed to say, it was designated as Negro Court. It was on Army Way, and it was G court, and all the Negroes lived there. There weren’t a whole lot of them, but that’s where they were segregated to. Of course, in the classroom, we were just in the classes with them. Someone who ended up being a dear friend of my husband and I, his family came from Minnesota. His Dad got a job at the base as a carpenter, and they moved from a farm house that didn’t have indoor plumbing into this little two-bedroom house that had running water and a bathroom inside. It had a wood or a coal stove to keep warm, but his mother thought she had died and gone to 22 heaven, coming to that. It was nothing but a sand hill when they decided to make it into housing. We had cactus out there, red ant hills everywhere you looked, and we would play out between the courts. There would be out courts, and then another court over here, and there would be quite a bit of space in between them, so the kids would go out there and they’d play pick up and knock up and lay down, with the bat and ball. We just kind of made our own games. We played a lot of hide and seek, and no bears are out tonight. RH: We kind of made our own fun that way. We had to. We also had the teen canteen or junior canteen, depending on your age, the activities that the churches put on, and of course there were Boy Scout troops in all of the churches. Boys that were just Protestant, they formed their own Protestant boy scout, and there was probably competition between them and the LDS kids. I think there was probably some strife, but I don’t think it ever got to the point of physical things, between the non-LDS and the LDS kids. The LDS did kind of keep to themselves, they were a little bit cliquey, and parents worried about their daughters dating these non-LDS kids and marrying them or whatever. In fact, my friend, he’s since converted, but he said, “Our scout troop hated the Mormon scout troops.” I said, “Why?” “Well because they were Mormons and we hated Mormons.” “Well why?” “I don’t know, we just did!” MB: So, you talked about the canteens, how were those set up, like who set them up? RH: Well we had a recreation leader named Barbara Cardon, she lived out in Ogden, 23 but she was hired by the city as a recreation director. She would put on the canteens, and they had a kitchen there, and we could buy a hot dog, and there was a soft drink machine, and we could buy a soft drink. Then they either had records or our little combo that played. She was there for the dances, and made sure that things were kept in order. I’m sure she wondered what she had gotten herself into with this ragtag bunch of kids at the Terrace. We had one teacher at our school that everybody loved and the boys especially loved her. Her name was Joan Farr, and she was related to the Farrs that are so prominent here. In fact, her brother, I think, was Dexter Farr, that owned Farr’s Jewelry. But she came and taught school up there and she was a darling, beautiful lady. My friend that I’ve talked about, he had such a crush on her it was just terrible, and he wasn’t the only one. Here she was from a very prominent family up there teaching Terrace kids. The mayor of Ogden at the time, his name was Harmon Perry, you’ve probably heard about him, the Cowboy Mayor. He, at one time, called Washington Terrace the “slums of Ogden.” We were up in arms over that, we didn’t figure we were in slums. I mean, my parents planted grass outside the house and put a carpet down in the house, instead of linoleum. We thought we were pretty good people. We didn’t have a lot, but we weren’t slummy and we didn’t live like we were in slums, but that was his attitude towards us. MB: What did you do with that little group that you played with at the canteen? RH: Well, we went through high school together, Washington Terrace had its own 24 grade school and junior high school. In 1951, South Junior High was built over here on Madison and there wasn’t a road through the golf course at that point. Before they got buses for us, we had to walk from our home at the Terrace down to 40th street, then walk up 40th to Madison, and then go over on Madison to 43rd and go up to the school because that was the roads, and that was how we had to get there. It was just sunflower fields, no homes there at that time, but that’s where we went. I went there just one year, and then we went out to Weber High, which was out on 12th and Washington, where Shopko is. LR: You’d go all the way out to Weber High? RH: We had buses, it’s because we were county. Ogden High took in all the city kids, and Weber High took in all the county kids- Roy, Uintah, South Ogden, Washington Terrace, Plain City- all those towns out there in the country went to Weber High. There was lot of competition between Weber High and Ogden High. They called us farmers and we called them snobs. They had a trophy, a Little Brown Jug, and there were fights at those games, actual fist fights. Then in 1954, it was the first graduating class at Ben Lomond, and the Little Brown Jug didn’t mean that much. There was the Iron Horse game between Ben Lomond and Ogden High, and Ogden and Weber still had a Little Brown Jug game, but there were no more fights. Ogden High kids would come down and burn a big “O” on the lawn, or else they would throw manure in the school. Weber High kids would go up and burn a big “W” in their lawn, silly stuff, but that was how it was. Then they built Fremont, they built Roy High, they built Bonneville High, and they tore 25 down Weber High and built a new school out in Pleasant View. We had a seminary building down on 12th, we had a football field with bleachers, it was a full set up. It was consolidated- that was the first time I had really heard that word, Consolidated schools. Does that kind of answer your question? MB: Yeah, it does. RH: I went on to accompany choirs, and trios and quartets at Weber High. One of the fellows that was on bass went on to become a music teacher out in Roy. We all kind of followed the music scene in whatever capacity we were in. MB: You said there were newsreels at the movies, was that the main way you got your news, or were there other sources? RH: Well we had newspapers and we had radio. But by the time we got the newsreels at the show it was quite a ways away. It was Pathé News and it’d play, “Dadadaduum dadum dadum dadum dadum,” as they were showing the opening of the news. There would be a narrator, and he would just talk about what the leaders of the world were doing. My Dad was a staunch Republican, and the fact that Roosevelt was in his fourth term, which was almost a dictatorship, kind of ground on him. I gotta tell you, in the early days of the LDS Church in Utah, the LDS people almost voted as a bloc in national elections and in local elections. That’s a normal thing to happen, I think, when you’re isolated like that. But in order to get statehood they had to get a division of the parties, the Republican and Democratic Parties. So the bishop would usually go down the street and he’d 26 say, “This side of the street is Republicans and this side are Democrats,” and that happened in almost every community in the early days of the Church so that they could get statehood. Some reverted over, but some stayed very staunch. My Dad’s side of the street was Republicans when he lived in Logan, during the early years, and so they were always staunch Republicans, and if anybody, Heaven Forbid, should cross over and become a card-carrying Democrat, “Oh my gosh, how can you do that?!” We liked the newsreels, and as a kid, I liked them. I was always interested in what was going on in the world. We had wonderful radio programs for the kids to listen to. There was “Let’s Pretend,” “Grand Central Station,” and “The Shadow,” and a lot of those programs were on Saturday morning, when the kids programs were on. Everybody was glued to the radio because that’s where they got their outside news faster than the newspaper. Which, in Logan, I think, came out once a week or something like that, twice a week, I don’t remember. LR: You talked a little bit about the transportation. So you walked to school… RH: Until they got buses for us. LR: When did you start using buses? RH: Well, it was probably at least a month into the school year, because we walked for quite a while over to school, and that was a pretty good hike. LR: So even with the rationing on gas, they found a way to bus you guys to school? RH: Well see, by this time, when I was in the ninth grade and it was 1951. So that war had ended yes. We didn’t do a lot of traveling by car when the rationing was on. 27 We had to make sure we had enough gas to get Dad to work. The way they would let him know that he was supposed to go to work is they allowed us to have a phone, otherwise the railroad had to send a cab up and tell him what time he had to be to work. Oh, and I didn’t talk about party lines. We had about a fourteen person party line when we first got our phone. Our ring was four short rings, some people had one long, one short, some people had two long, some people had two short. Ours was one long, one short ring. A lot of the neighbors felt free to give our number out to people to get in touch with them. I made many trips running to the neighbors getting them up to our house to the phone, because they didn’t have a wartime reason for needing them. Anyway, you’d pick up the phone and you’d hear people talking and then somebody’d say “Get off the phone! Get off the phone,” because they could hear when the phone picked up. You got to hear some pretty juicy things sometimes. LR: When did they stop using those party lines? RH: I think that by 1952 when we moved into Ogden they still had them in Washington Terrace, but in Ogden we didn’t have one. Wait, we did for a year, and then things started loosening up as you got further away from the war. But of course, we went really quick into the Korean War, or police action, that’s what the government called it. Not a war, because people were tired of war. Some of those men were gone for three or four years, they were in there for the duration. The war lasted a long time. My brother-in-law was in the Army of Occupation in Germany, and he met 28 this girl, as a lot of servicemen did, and they had three little boys without benefit of marriage over there. When he came home I’m ashamed to say that he was not very honorable. He was just going to leave her and the children there. But his mother said, “No, you’re not going to do that,” and she came up with the money to send for them and they came and then finally he married her and then they had two little girls. They lived in Willard in the old family home that had been built, probably in 1868 or something like that. But she was a war bride and we used to see a lot of movies about war brides that were coming. One thing I remember when I was just a child and watching the newsreels. The French girls who were girlfriends of Germans, they would sit them down in the public square and shave all their hair off. I remember thinking how terrible to have your hair all cut off like that, and they’d go away with a bald head. One thing that stuck in my mind was one girl, while they were shaving her head, a piece of hair, or lock, the wind blew it down in her eyes, and I remember seeing her push it back. I don’t know why that stuck with me, but just before they cut it all off she was pushing it out of her eyes. That was horrific to a young girl to see that, almost as bad as seeing the bodies being pulled out of the ovens. LR: How did you meet your husband? RH: Blind date. He was from Brigham City, I was from Ogden and a friend of mine was going with his best buddy and I don’t even know how they met. Anyway, there was something going on, and she asked me if I would like to meet a guy from Brigham City. I said, “Sure,” and I was in tenth grade then. She brought him 29 and introduced him and we went together from then on. We ended up going steady and then on my seventeenth birthday I got my diamond, and I was married a week after my eighteenth birthday. I was gonna show the world I was old enough, I knew enough, I was smart enough! By the time I was thirty I had five kids. I had four boys in four years. We ended up with six children. I found out after I had been going with Ralph for a while, and his mother found out my last name that it was Dunn, she had a very good friend whose name was Jean Dunn. She and her husband, after she was married, they palled around with my in-laws. Well come to find out, my great-great-grandpa and his great-great-grandma were brother and sister. So, fourth cousins, which is far enough away, they didn’t worry about fourth cousins. LR: That’s interesting. So, what year did you get married? RH: August 20, 1954. We were married sixty-two years. LR: Was he drafted into the police conflict? RH: No, he tried to enlist in the Navy. He got down to Fort Douglas and they did his physical, and found he had a curvature of the spine. Just a slight one, but enough to make him 4F, but he did try. So, we didn’t have to worry about him being gone like that. After we had four little kids, he had worked aerospace because there was a lot of aerospace around: Thiokol, Hercules, and Boeing. He got a job at Thiokol, and he worked there for, I think four or five years, and then there was a layoff because they lost their contract, and that’s just the way aerospace is. He said, “You got to get a job, I’m going to go to college. I’m going 30 to take my retirement and go to college.” So I got a job at the Boeing Company, and ended up staying for thirty years. Which was a good thing because my husband, he got his degree in manufacturing engineering from Weber, and about every four years the contract was up and then they would have to go someplace else who had a new contract and that’s just the way aerospace is. They couldn’t transfer their time like they can now, they couldn’t transfer their time towards retirement. So with me working thirty years steady, and I ended up in management at Boeing, then my retirement was actually what kept us after we retired. Then when we got our social security, it was pretty evenly divided on what we each contributed. LR: What was your husband’s name? RH: Ralph. R A L P H. LR: I know we talked about him, but I never got a chance to meet him. RH: I know! He passed away on October 21st in St. George... and it was crazy what he died from. He got pneumonia but he didn’t die from the pneumonia. Five years ago he had a disease called Guillain-Barre syndrome, and he was paralyzed from the shoulders down. Through gamma globulin shots and physical therapy, he regained his strength enough he could leave the nursing home and, but we didn’t know at the time that it had severely weakened his lungs and chest muscles. So when he got the pneumonia he couldn’t expel carbon dioxide from his body, and that’s what he died from, carbon dioxide overloading his body. Who would have thought? It was kind of a freak thing because they had the 31 pneumonia under control, he could have lived if he had been willing to wear a bi-pap for twelve hours a day every day for the rest of his life, but it was miserable for him. It blew forty pounds of oxygen into his lungs, and then sucked out carbon dioxide. It wore a big sore on his nose from only wearing it twice because it had to very tight. So he said, “I can’t do it.” I said, “You don’t have to. I’ll be fine, the kids will take care of me; I’ll be fine.” So he slipped away and it was very peaceful. Couldn’t ask for a better way to go. I either want that or to be twinkled. I don’t know which. Twinkling would be fine too. LR: Do you have any other questions? MB: Yes, what did you do with Boeing? RH: I started out there as what they called a Flexowriter operator. It was like a typewriter, only you pushed really hard because it punched tape, which then you fed through an IBM machine, and then it spit out engineering cards; the kind of engineering cards we had to provide to the engineers to build the minuteman missile. The minuteman missile one, two, and three we worked on. After Ralph graduated college we moved to California for a while, and then Conasion co. wanted to transfer him to Minnesota. We didn’t want to go there, so we came back and I got my job back at Boeing, only by this time I was an industrial engineer planner. I helped build the schedules for getting the materials in to build the missile, when they had to be in parts or stages, the big motors. We had what we called missile assembly buildings on base, and that’s where we assembled the missile. 32 Then they were loaded on trains and they were shipped to the different missile wings, the first one was in Cheyenne, the second one was in North Dakota, third one was Ellis Air Force Base, fourth one was Sedalia, Missouri, the fifth was Whiteman Air force base up in Great Falls, and the sixth one I can’t remember where it was. But anyway, then they were armed out there once they were in place, so we never did have to worry about a nuclear warheads being at our place. They were armed on site. From there, there was an opening in personnel, and I’m kind of a people person, you probably don’t know that. I transferred into personnel, and became a personnel rep, and then just worked my way up into management. I was a manager for five years before I retired, and the best part about that is that meant more money for retirement because they would take an average salary from the highest five of the last ten years, and then they would multiply that by your years of service. That’s how they came up with the formula. I really enjoyed Boeing, they had wonderful perk programs, and we didn’t have to pay for our health or dental insurance, for us or our children. No premiums we had to pay. They insured me for two and a half times my annual salary in life insurance, I didn’t have to pay for that. My husband worked there for eleven years. We had openings for safety engineers and he had been a safety engineer at Hercules, and then had a layoff, so Boeing hired him and he worked there to. LR: That would have been nice, both of your working at the same place. RH: Yes, but we were in different areas, so each of us had to drive, but what was nice 33 is that we lived in Washington Terrace, and my facility was in Riverdale up on the hill by the America First Credit Union building. We rented space from them. Took me seven minutes to get to work. His first duty was out on Hill Air Force Base, and so he drove there. So that was my Boeing career. Made a lot of trips to Seattle for meetings because I had to know how to do retirements, deaths, salaries, and just everything that would be in a human resources, as they called it at the time. I liked personnel better. Made it sound like we were commodities, or “industrial relations,” that was one of the names they had for us to. That doesn’t mean anything. MB: When you worked at Boeing, as a manager, you lived in Washington Terrace. How had Washington Terrace changed from when you were… RH: Oh my goodness, it was a beautiful community. All the houses were bricked or had siding on them, and had color to them, trees had grown up, it was beautiful. We had a little business district, we had the grocery store and drugstore, but we also had dentist’s office up there, and one fellow built this long building and then he divided it into offices. We had a barbershop, we had a credit union, we had service stations up there, and it had grown into a nice little community. A lot of the houses were moved off when they decided to redo them because they gave them yards and they gave them property with it, so there wasn’t room for as many houses. People moved them off and remodeled them themselves. The LDS Church had grown to two stakes by that time, and I was involved in the Stake, in all the different organizations, and so I saw the growth there quite a bit. 34 It was a nice community, I hated to move from it. My husband and I, when we moved back from California, bought another house out there that had been remodeled just a block from the first one. We were in that house forty-two years when he decided that he couldn’t do stairs anymore. He had to have a hip and knee replacements and so he wanted to get a patio house, so we ended up here. We had only been in this house for a month when he came down with Guillain-Barre. I said, “You can’t do that to me- move me from all my friends and a home I loved to a new place and then you’re sick and you’re not with me, that’s not nice!” So I had to get his power of attorney to do all the final paperwork on buying this place and selling our other place. That was quite interesting, I never had to be quite that involved before. But you know what? When I think about it, it helped me, the independence I had to develop at that time, it helped me for now, because I haven’t had any help with all the legal and all the name changes and all that I’m having to do now. If a spouse of one of our employees died, there were certain benefits they got, and I would do all the paperwork for the people. So I knew what I had to do when my husband passed, and nobody told me I had to go to the title companies and take his name off the titles, but that just kind of seemed like that was something I should do, and so I did it. I’ve had to make executive decisions. LR: I’m going to ask a final question, I’m curious how you think your time, and your experiences during World War Two, shaped your life. RH: I learned to do without a lot of things, it gave me a view of not just my community, 35 but the world, even at that young age, seeing the newsreels. I’m very patriotic. When a flag comes by in a parade I chill all over and I’m almost in tears over it. I love my country. And I’ve been very involved politically. I was an election judge for several years, and I just think it’s given me more of a world view but also made me love my country more. My Dad, so many times would say, when we’d want to do something, “It isn’t necessary,” and it wasn’t, but we wanted to do it anyway. There wasn’t the money often, but he was born in 1900, so he went through some privations, having a big family and living through the Depression. That was scary. They had a big vegetable garden in Logan, and his brother in Pocatello was a potato farmer, and he always made sure we had potatoes. Many times we only had mashed potatoes and stewed tomatoes for dinner. Our mother would scrounge up a dime and send me down to the grocery store when I was four or five for a can of peas. We’d have creamed peas over toast. You just learned to do without a lot, but we were a very close family. A lot of it through music. I’m glad I’ve had the experiences I’ve had. I’m sorry that so many people suffered, and I felt so bad for the children in Europe that were starving that my mother talked about all the time. I wish she had just said be thankful you have food, because the children in Europe are staring, because I could never figure out why cleaning my plate helped the children in Europe. That was beyond me. LR: The logic of a child. RH: Or illogic. LR: Well thank you very much for your time, for allowing us to talk to you and record 36 it. RH: I’m so happy that I’ve had this opportunity to remember so many things because when you remember one thing it brings up something else, and these things had been long forgotten. But, it’s been a privilege to talk to you. LR: Well thank you, it’s been a privilege to be here with you. MB: Yes thank you.