Oral History Program Gladys Taylor Interviewed by Marvin Hansen 7 September 1972 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Gladys Taylor Interviewed by Marvin Hansen 7 September 1972 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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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Taylor, Gladys, an oral history by Marvin Hansen, 7 September 1972, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Gladys Taylor. The interview was conducted on September 7, 1972, by Marvin Hansen in Taylor’s home in Ogden, Utah. Taylor discusses World War II and how it affected Ogden, and how Ogden grew. MH: Mrs. Taylor, I was wondering if you could tell me a little about your background and where you were born and raised and what school you graduated from? GT: I was born in Farr west, Utah. I have lived here most of my life. I graduated from Weber High School. I attended about 13 months of Henniger's business school in Salt Lake City. I lived in Ogden two years and moved back to Farr West and spent the rest of my life here. MH: Can you tell me what happened just before World War II, and during World War II and just after it? GT: I can remember when I was attending business college It was about 1939. It was about the time that the Germans were invading the Checks in Czechoslovakia. I don't know what other countries. I can't remember the other countries. This was rumors at this time that war was coming. The young fellows at the business college were talking about their careers, and yet they were afraid that they would have to go to war. I can remember that this was the big thing in Europe that Hitler was conquering all the little countries first. There would be one country then another would fall. These fellows were going into business, and they couldn't find their careers, so they would talk about it quite a bit. At this time it was a faraway thing. It wasn't in the United States at this time. They were afraid that it would come. I finished school, and then I worked for a while. Then my husband and I were married in 1940 in October. We were living in Ogden and I can remember that there were no televisions, but on the radio on Sunday afternoon I could hear them announcing 1 about Pearl Harbor. To me, Pearl Harbor was just a name and I had no idea where it was. I can remember, running outside because my husband was outside, and telling him that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. I can't remember how far along in the war that Germany was. I can remember that England and France was in War with them. MH: What was Ogden like at this time? Was Ogden very big? GT: To me it was a fair size city. I guess it has doubled its size since then. I don't know if this was when the defense plants were stir ting to grow in Ogden. There was a growth starting in the City and throughout the country. Up until this time we had just gone through a depression, and the country was trying to get on its feet. I guess this was when things started to boom a little bit, and jobs were becoming a little more plentiful. Before 1940 jobs had been real hard to get a hold of. I had taken business training and it was hard to get a job in business training, as a secretary. I would work for two or three months, and you would have to wait until you got something else. It all seemed real modern to me then. To tell you what the area was like is to say that it is a lot like it is now. We lived out in Farr West and. it was just a small farming community. That is one thing that- has changed. It was mostly farming then and now farming is going. This little community is becoming more residential. After War was declared, as a few months went by it had become hard to buy as you had always bought Silk stockings were out of the question. If you got a couple of pair a year you were doing well. I think this was where a lot of black marketing went on. Sugar was very hard to buy. You went on sugar stamps and you were allowed so much sugar a year. For people who had done their own canning’s it was hard for them to do. We had had to learn how to use-honey more which I had never learned how to do. We used this in cakes, 2 cookies, and canning, I think you were allowed two pair of shoes a year. To go into a store and buy material was something that you couldn't do. We could get material by sending back through catalogs. Bananas were pretty hard to get a hold of. Anything that was imported was hard to buy, gas was rationed. You didn't take any long trips. I don't think any of us were really hurt with it. This was a time that they made lead pennies instead of copper pennies. This was confusing because when you took out a penny it looked like a dime. MH: You talked about black marketing of silk stockings. GT: I don't know how they worked it. But if you knew a friend or somebody who knew somebody else, they would get you some stocking. Otherwise you didn't buy silk stockings, I can't remember going without anything that hurt us. I know that you just couldn't just walk' into a store and buy as many things as you wanted. Any household goods were pretty hard to get. MH: What was it like when the defense plant opened and when Hill Field opened? GT: Then Hill Field opened, this was something that we thought was here for the duration of the war, but it did bring a lot of jobs and a lot of growth to Ogden. When Second Street came in, it brought a lot more jobs. The prisoner of war camp was just a few miles away from us. There was nothing ever serious that ever happened. It was a little frightening to stop and think that just a few miles from us was where they have the c imp with the prisoners, I don't know if they were here for more than a year or not. You could see them around. I think that they went out and worked for the farmers. I don't know how this was arranged but they did use some of the prisoners in helping to do some of the farm work. I don't know who would be responsible to release then from camp and to come out and 3 help. They never helped my dad on his farm. There were people in the ward who used them. I think this was one thing that changed the country was the defense plants moving in and a lot of people who had farms and homes in these small communities, had to sell them. The government would condemn there places. The communities were just about cut in half. The government needed so much land so they lost their homes. The defense depot was the one that I can remember mostly. Hill Field to me was a place where there were a lot of jobs. Transportation was hard to come by. If you didn't have your own car, you didn't get around very well. You could use so much gas each month. I know we tried to buy a baby buggy for our baby, and we had to travel to Logan to buy a baby buggy. It was a different style than they had ever had before. It was made of cheaper materials. We needed a washing machine very badly. We looked all over Ogden, and Salt Lake. It was a used one. You couldn't buy new appliances of any Rind. We were glad to get the washing machine that we got. We had been married just a short time, and we didn't have a lot of things, we had to wait a long time before new articles were so that we could buy them. I can remember that prices are a lot lower than they are now. I can remember buying lamb chops that were 15 cents apiece for a good size lamb chop. MH: You said when Second Street was moving in, people had to sell their homes. How did people feel about that? GT: They were very upset about it. A lot of people lost their health because of this. People had lived there 30 or 40 years. They had figured on spending their entire life here. The government came in and told them that they were buying the places. Most of these people were farmers who had spent all of their life farming. Most of them went to Idaho or 4 Oregon. This was home to people, who had spent 50, 60, and I bet some of the people who were leaving were in there seventies. It was hard for them to start all over. They still wanted to farm. They didn't want to go into Second Street to work. They were farmers, and they didn't want to do anything else. Jobs were really easy to find at this time. I wasn't working. I had a small baby by this time. A lot of women went to work that had never had went to work before. They did the kind of labor that women had never been used to doing before. I think that when women started working many jobs this was the time when this started during the war. We had to do things that men had always done before. The men were drafted, and the women had to learn to do the work. At this time wages were good. They couldn't buy everything that they wanted, but I do know that the: e was a lot of spending going on. MH: You said that women went to work. What kind of jobs did they do? GT: There was secretary work. As the war progressed, there was the Bushnell hospital up in Brigham. There was work there for the women. They worked at Hill Field. They worked on airplanes. They worked on machinery that women had never done before. They had learned all kinds of labor in this way. They worked at Second Street. I don't know all that was going on at Second Street. I do know that there was a lot of clothing shipped overseas to the soldiers. I remember one time that there were a lot of coats that came in to Second Street, and that they had fur collars on them. They had been originally assigned to Alaska or to one of the country’s that would be real cold. They needed them to go to another country, and they needed them within another week 'to be sent out. The government didn't know just what to do, but they knew that the LDS Church could help them. They went to the Relief 5 Society's in Ogden and they called a group of us in. So we went In to Second Street and worked a couple of days cutting the fur collars off the coats. This was just free gratis work. The government was a little amazed that they could assemble so many women in a hurry to do this kind of work, so that the coats could be delivered to a warmer climate. It sounds like it was a simple job, but it wasn't. We had to leave the coat in good condition, and be decent for the men wherever it was going. There were at least 100 women working on them at the time. I could remember if my husband would be called In the draft. This was always a big worry to all the women as the war progressed. This was a small community. I can't remember if we had three hundred people living here or not. There were three boys that were killed during the war that was from this community. One was killed here in the United States in one of the camps. The other two were killed overseas. I can remember them having memorial services for these three boys. MH: How did the relatives feel about these three boys being killed? GT: The boy that was killed in the United States, his parents were very upset, but I don't think that they were bitter about it. One family was bitter. Their son had been killed in a fox hole in the Pacific Islands. They were bitter about it, and they were upset. It was just hard for them to understand why they should send a boy over and lose his life. We all felt bad about it, but we knew it was something that had to be done. We were thankful that they weren't fighting in this country, that the battle was being carried on across the seas and not here. That was one thing on radio that you would spend time listening to the news reports. For a long time things were going bad for the United States It seemed like a long time before things started to sound like that they were going more our way. I can 6 remember one thing that my brother had lived in Salt Lake and was working for a lime company, and he didn't have a very good job, and then he moved to Richland, Washington, and he wouldn't tell us anything about his job. He was visiting here one time. I bad read in the paper that the Germans were learning how to smash the atom. To me this was something that couldn't be done, because in my high school chemistry class they said it couldn't be done. I had mentioned this to my brother, and from the remarks that he made, he said after the war he would tell us something about this. He was one of the first ones that were working with the nuclear fission in Richland, Washington. I don't think that the atomic bomb was made up there, but he did have something to do with that. He never would tell us too much about that. The work that a lot of people were doing was a lot of secrecy. They couldn't tell it, and they wouldn't tell it. When they were told to go into jobs and types of jobs, there was a lot of secrecy about it. They had to prove that they were citizens of this country and they were good ones. My brother did do work on Atomic energy of some kind. MH: Were there many Japanese people around? GT: There always had been a family living in this community. We did feel bad toward them. The Japanese were people that were at war with us. They were there to kill us. I didn't have good feelings towards them. I know that my parents didn't, and maybe this rubbed off on to me. I can remember that they had Kays Noodle Parlor. He had quite a bad time. He almost had to prove that he was a good citizen. The people were quite bitter toward him. I didn't know a whole lot of Japanese people and you couldn't tell one from another. So I thought that they were just all alike. I think that they brought a lot of the Japanese citizens from California into Utah. I could say that we had bad feelings toward the 7 Japanese, but we did toward the Italians and Germans as we. We couldn't pick them out as easily as we could the Japanese people. I think it has taken a few generations to ease the feelings that we had for these people. MH: You talked about one particular family that you didn't feel too well towards. GT: They had lived here in the community and then they moved later. I don't know if they moved during the war or just at what time. We just didn't feel friendly toward any Japanese families. It was a wrong way to feel, but because of the way the Japanese government had treated our government and because they were sneakier, we figured that this would be the way all Japanese governments would be. MH: I want to thank you for what you said here tonight. 8