Oral History Program Verna Egbert Interviewed by Alicia Eyestone 23 February 1998 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Verna Egbert Interviewed by Alicia Eyestone 23 February 1998 Copyright © 2012 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. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. Archival copies are placed in University Archives. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description The Weber State College/University Student Projects have been created by students working with several different professors on the Weber State campus. The topics are varied and based on the student's interest or task for a specific assignment. 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. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Egbert, Verna, an oral history by Alicia Eyestone, 23 February 1998, 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 Verna Egbert. The interview was conducted on February 23, 1998, by Alicia Eyestone, in the interviewee’s home. Egbert discusses her life experiences in the Ogden area. AE: This is Alicia Eyestone. I am in the home of Verna Egbert. It is the twenty-third of February. And we're conducting an interview to find out about her life and her experiences in the Ogden area. I am at her home, it is in Ogden. First, I want to ask you where you were born and what the date was? VE: I was born July 2, 1926, in Idaho Falls—Ammon actually. But the city comes out to Ammon now; it was just a little farming community then. AE: That's true, I've been there. VE: Oh yeah, that's good. AE: Will you tell me about your family, growing up? VE: My family growing up? We were in the very development of the farm. I mean, my parents were born in Utah and moved out to Ammon. I spent my days on the farm, riding the dairy horse, picking potatoes. The school always let us out, we were all in school. My one friend and I made a fun thing out of it. We'd pick the potatoes then after we would rake the leaves and burn the vines. And took care of gathering the eggs and feeding the many animals. We had beautiful horses, the work horses were to wide for me to ride. And let's see what else I did. Things were fun, we played with the little 1 chickens and often feed the pigs, and sometimes there would be a stray little lamb and we'd get to feed with a bottle. But, eh and go to school. In those days we'd be riding VE: Yeah, for the whole entire year, that's all we got off. And besides that we couldn't go out, except for Saturday night, so I got to spend the night at home about once a month so that was kind of a treat. But we had fun, some good experiences AE: It sounds like a segregated group, if you could only be out till seven. Did you have very many friendships outside of those? VE: No, not very many. We had to live right in the nursing home, so most of our friends were right there. Except we did go to the Saturday night dances that were, you know, just a few blocks away. That was fun every Saturday night if we weren't working or something. We had a lot of friends and we met a lot of good people. It was an experience. AE: Looking back how do you feel about the friendships you created. VE: We all drift in different directions when you’re gone. My very best roommate just passed away this last year. We sort of figured we had the same guardian angel. She always knew what was going on in my life, even after we got married. She was living in Indiana, and we didn't get together as often as we should. You kind of get, move on to different things all the time, but we kept in touch. But I only remember in our nursing group, school only seven graduated. In our introduction our teacher said, "Okay, I only expect a third of you to graduate." That's what graduated, just a third of us, in my class. It was interesting. AE: Did you go to work immediately after nursing school? 2 VE: I worked in that hospital just for a couple of months. And just sort of circulated around the hospital. Then, I'm one of those kinds I don't like staying in one place all the time. And I didn't like just exactly bedside nursing all the time, I like to get out, so I went to Boise and worked with polio patients. After Boise, I decided I wanted to go back to BYU. So I went back to BYU, I was just going to go to school and take some psych classes and that, just in the nursing I didn't get dancing classes and theater classes, what else did I like, just to on in nursing classes. Then I got down there, then the first thing to school in a sleigh and there would be snow drifts high on both sides. And a little sleigh. AE: What was your school like, what did your day consist of? VE: Let's see, we had eight grades, in the first elementary, we didn't have junior high. And we'd just go to school and we'd have our regular classes. I don't know just classes. One year the school burned down and we had to move over to the church to have our classes. And but it was, I went back there few years ago, it’s really small now. But it wasn't very big then. How many in the classes? Maybe twenty or so, see how long it's been… oh, 1934. What else? AE: How about High School? VE: Oh high school, we had fun in high school, you know we had the ball games. What else did we do? We just had a lot of fun. After High school it was during the war, I graduated in forty- four. I always wanted to be a nurse. At the last I decided I didn't I didn't want to be a nurse. Then they had these nurse cadets come, the government did and they would pay our way to go to nursing school. And give us fifteen dollars a month besides. And so I joined the nurse cadets. That's where I did my training. We spent most of our 3 time up in Idaho Falls, but the psychiatry we in unintelligible University, and we went to Denver to do pediatrics. I graduated in ‘47, but we had to work, we had to work a lot of the nurses had gone into the service, so we had to do a lot of practical work. We'd work our eight hours plus, go to class. We'd work nights. So we'd get off at ten and go to a class. But it was fun; I had a lot of fun experiences. It was a beautiful setting up in Idaho Falls, got to watch the temple being built. It was a fun place and I did graduate. My roommate, my favorite roommate, I had all those years. We had a lot of fun together, we were just the same. She lived in Missoula. During our two week vacation—that's all we got was two weeks—they said, "Hey we need someone to be a dorm nurse, would you like to live in this dorm?" So I said, "Okay, I'll do that." Pretty soon the health center called up and said, "Hey we need somebody over at the health center would you like to work part-time over here?" So I said "Okay I'll do that." Laughter So I worked at the health center and at the dorm. I just had people get the mumps or something and I'd have to take care of them in the dorm. I had a friend that I knew from the health center and she said, "What are doing this summer?" And I said, "I don't know." And she said a fun place to go was down to Bryce Canyon. I applied and luckily I got in, to go down to Bryce Canyon for three months. So I stayed down there and took care of guest and visitors that came through there. We had a lot of patients that had fractures and heart attacks. I had to do quite a bit of stuff down there. So after that I went down to BYU again. So I thought I'd just go back to my classes, and the Bishop kept coming and saying, "Why don't you go on a mission?" And said, “I'm happy. I just got out of nurses’ training and I'm making some money and you know all this worldly stuff.” And he said "Well I'd still like you to come and talk to Elder Peterson." So I went back 4 up to Idaho to be interviewed with a bunch of people, I mean young missionaries who were going out—one was my sister, she wanted to go. So I was the last one to be interviewed. And I went on the interview and when I came out they were all waiting and said, “What did you tell him?” I said, "About what?" They said, “When he asked you about going on a mission. What did you tell him about why you wanted to go?” I said, “He didn't ask me if I wanted to go. He just signed the paper and I got my call.” In the meantime, when I was working down at the Y, he kept after me all the time. There was an old man that came along one day and he was supposed to be selling plastic aprons. He knocked at the door and I had him come, but he didn't sell plastic, he just sat there with my roommates and me. We talked about the world and how the world only thought of material things, they don't think about the spiritual things, just like he was talking to me. Come on there's all my excuses shot you know. And so when he left my roommates all said, "Oh Verna, you better go on your mission." And that's when I went up there and got that interview and he didn't ask me, he just sent me out. I went to Texas, Louisiana. In the remainder of the interview, she talks about her experiences as a young missionary in Texas and Louisiana. She returned to BYU and was immediately set up on a date with her husband, William Egbert. He went to medical school and she supported them by working as a nurse until after her third child was born. Verna felt the key to the closeness she feels to her five children, is just spending time with them. Verna with her husband has been to China and Albania on humanitarian missions with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. She was involved in training the nurses in the hospital of these countries. They also served as missionaries on Temple Square in Salt Lake City. Again her skills as a nurse 5 were used as she assisted her husband in overseeing the health care of the other missionaries. They are still busy with serving in the community, with church and especially enjoying their grandchildren. 6