Oral History Program John Avalon Johnson Interviewed by Linnae Dugger 11 July 1980 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah John Avalon Johnson Interviewed by Linnae Dugger 11 July 1980 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. 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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Johnson, John Avalon, an oral history by Linnae Dugger, 11 July 1980, 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 John Avalon Johnson. The interview was conducted on July 11, 1980, by Linnae Dugger. Mr. Johnson discusses his personal history and life experiences. LD: This is Linnae Dugger. It's July 11, 1980, and I am with John Avalon Johnson. I am going to do his personal history. JJ: I was born January 26, 1912, in Meadow, Millard County, Utah. My folks was Harry A. Johnson. He was born in Minnesota and moved to Elsinore, Utah, about 1906. He married my mother, June 11, 1908, in the Manti Temple. My mother was born and raised in Meadow, Utah. LD: Did you have sisters? JJ: I had an older sister, Viola. She was born in Meadow. I was next, and I had a sister, Maurine. She was born in Meadow and Velma, she was born in Meadow. My sister Eda was born in Meadow, also. Loanda was born in Fillmore, Twila was born in Meadow and Dot and Reiva was born in Fillmore. I had eight sisters, whom I thought a lot of. LD: What was it like growing up with a lot of sisters? JJ: When I was a very small child, less than a year, I got pneumonia. Mother said they couldn't turn me over at all without me turning black as coal. Just as black as could be. The only way they could turn me was on a sheet, for a week or ten days. They thought several times I was dead. I did get better. I had my tonsils out when I was four years old 'cause I couldn't talk. They figured that would help, but it didn't seem to. When I had my fifth birthday, my fifth year, I started saying words, and I was able to start school when I 1 was six. I went to school in Meadow through the first and second grade. In the spring of 1919, we moved to Flowell on a farm that Dad had purchased. I attended the 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade in Flowell. Flowell at that time was called Crystal, but they got the mail route in Flowell and they found out that there was another Crystal in the State of Utah at that time and they wouldn't let us keep the name, on account the other place was getting mixed up with our mail. So they changed it to Flowell. We started trucking the kids to Fillmore when I was in the 6th grade. I finished elementary school in Fillmore. Then I went to high school for two years, then on account of the depression I had to quit. Dad had a big family and we just couldn't afford to hire anybody to help him with the farm work and I just got so I didn't want to go to school anymore. I recall there was a lot of young fellows my age living in Flowell at that time. We all had a saddle horse. It seemed like every Sunday afternoon we'd bunch up as a group and go to the crater and Warm Springs or White Mountain. At least we were on our horses all Sunday afternoon; until we got old enough to think we had to drive our cars, our folks’s cars. At that time there was no requirements for licenses, driver licenses, so as soon as we was big enough to look over the steering wheel, it seemed like we were driving. It seemed like the young kids was better drivers than the old folks. As far as I can remember there was never none of us had an accident until we got grown. One night we just got home from Sacrament meeting, we had it at night, in the evening. Our neighbor, Bench Utley, went up the road without any light on his car. We just got stopped and we heard a crash up the road. I jumped back in the car we had. There was Bench Utley, and his son, Bill, had run together cause neither one of them had lights, headlights on their cars. Bench got a few bumps and bruises, but Bill was laying on the hood of his Dad's car and he 2 was bleeding pretty heavy. I was alone. I asked Bench if he was hurt. He said, "I'm all right. Where is Bill?" I said, "Bill is laying on the radiator of your car, upon the hood of your car and he is bleeding pretty heavy." So Bench and I went back to where Bill was and asked him if he was hurt or could talk and he jumped up. He had blood all over his face and running down his shirt. He stopped and I got a hold of him and I said, "Let me take you home." He lived up the road a quarter of a mile. He was bleeding pretty heavy and he opened the door and was going to get right in. I said, "Boyd, wait just a minute until I get your dad in." So I had Bench in the car. So I opened the back door and told Boyd to just sit there with his head out so it would bleed out on the ground 'til we could get him home. His mother was quite a nervous woman and as soon as we stopped he jumped out of the car and ran for the house. I caught him before he got to the door. I said, "Don't go in the house like that, bloody like that, your mother will pass out." So he turned and just laid down on the lawn outside the house. I knocked on the door. His mother and sister came out, and I told them what had happened and that Boyd was bleeding pretty heavy, and she had better call the doctor. Of course we got water, hot water and rags, and washed him up, and finally got the bleeding stopped a little bit before the doctor got there. He lost an eye. A piece of glass went through and took out one eye and he was pretty well scarred up for the rest of his life. At this time he is still living in Job Town, Joseph, over by Richfield. When Dad bought the farm in Flowell, he moved the grainery over from Meadow. We lived in that for two or three years, then he moved a house from Meadow and lived in that for several years. Then he decided to build a home out of cinder rock. We had to get the rock in on the lava flow, which is about four miles from where we took the rocks. We had a fellow hired to help me. I and 3 him started to hauling the rocks for the house. He was here for not too long, then he decided he didn't want to work anymore, it was too hard. So that left the rock hauling to me. I would take a team and wagon down on the cinders and load up a nice load of rock and then we would haul them off the cinders, then we would go back on again and load on another load, whatever we figured we could get off with, then we would load all the rock that we unloaded off the wagon on the first trip on the top, then haul it in for night which would give us a pretty good load of rock for the day. Then we decided it was pretty slow that way so we hired another fellow to go with me. We hauled two loads off the cinders then went back and got a third and brought home for night by putting a few of the rock we already had off on the pile. We had a pretty good pile of rock left there off the cinders. Then Bruce Allen married my sister, Maurine. He had a pickup, so we got a trailer and put back of it and we hauled the rock that we had hauled off the cinders up on his pickup and trailer which helped a lot. While I was hauling the rock, getting the rock and hauling them home, Dad and Mother and the older girls was laying the rock up with mud; which made walls about thirty inches thick. He hired a carpenter to come and put in the windows and doors, and help with the carpenter work around the house. The house was finished in the spring of 1934. LD: How long did it take you to build it? JJ: It took us close to two years to build in on account we was doing the work ourselves. LD: Did Grandpa have all his family by then? JJ: I think so, but, I met Agnes, my wife. They moved here from McCormick, on a farm here in Flowell. She and my sister, Velma, got to be good friends. I started going with her and we decided to get married. We got married on the 7th of November, 1934. We lived in a 4 little house across the street from my folks. When our oldest baby was born, Mother said to come over there to have the baby because we was quarantined in with scarlet fever, and they wouldn't let us in the... well, I don't know what you call it ... anyway, where they had the babies— the nursery I guess. We had a woman by the name of Mrs. Day come down as the midwife. Dr. Evans was the doctor, he came down right to the house here and we got along just fine. We was married in the Manti Temple. From there we went to Salt Lake for, I guess you would call it a honeymoon 'cause we was up there for four or five days. We were with friends and relatives, and we enjoyed it very much. LD: Let's talk a little bit about the farm. How is it different now that it was then? JJ: Well, Dad bought the farm in 1917. He would come over and run it in the spring and summer--that summer and the next summer. When he bought it was only five acres all out of brush. There was one flowing well on the place and we moved over in 1919, in the spring. We had to do all our work with horses and it was very slow compared to nowadays. We only had the one well which flowed about 500 gallons a minute. As Dad developed the farm he drilled another well in 1923. That was also a good well. LD: You mean you had to clear the sagebrush off with horses? JJ: Yah! That gave us a pretty good water right and he got the eighty acres cleared. Then they let so many permits out to drill wells that it wasn't long 'til they were taking all the water. We could only water part of the farm. LD: How developed was Flowell by then? Were there a lot of families? JJ: Well, when we moved here in 1919, I would say there was six families. As the country developed there was more people that moved in and developed more ground. 5 LD: Do you remember who was here ... what families? JJ: Well, our neighbor to the west of us was Charlie Robinson. He had a large family also. Most of his kids was just the same size as our family and we got well acquainted with them. They were our friends. In 1920, Dell Bushinell moved over. He bought his farm the same time as Dad did. But he didn't move here until the spring of 1920, with his family. But I have seen the country grow, the Ward, community here grow pretty rapidly after that. They didn't have a Ward so we were a Branch of the Fillmore Second Ward until 1923, when they organized a Ward down here. They put Dell Bushinell in as the Presiding Elder. A short time after that they give us a bishopric which was Lawrence Horn. He was our first Bishop. He was only Bishop for about six months and he moved back to Salt Lake and Orweld Robison was put in as Bishop. Dad was put in as Ward Clerk when the Ward was first organized. He was Ward Clerk for fifteen years under four Bishops. There has been an awful lot of people move in and move out in those early years on account of the water was a going pretty fast, 'cause they would drill more wells and that would take the water from the other wells. LD: When did the wells stop flowing? JJ: I bought forty acres just across the street from my folks in 1936, off of F. Verl Stott of Meadow. It only had a little water on it, but it wasn't long until they started pumping their wells. That gave us more water. LD: What kind of crops did you raise? JJ: We raised hay and grain mostly. The folks had six to twelve milk cows, a few pigs and chickens, that's about all we had to live on. We would milk the cows and separate the 6 cream from the milk and sell the cream. We done that for a few years, then they started a creamery up in Fillmore and they would send a pickup around to get the cans of milk up every morning, and they would make cheese out of our milk; or butter. LD: Did you have to separate the milk by hand? JJ: We had to separate the milk by a hand crank separator which was quite a little job. Then we fed the skim milk to the pigs and calves. We shipped the cream to Salt Lake in cans. After Agnes and I got married we had Rayma and Harry. When Harry was eight months old he got pneumonia and died. I went out on a trap line with my brother-in-law, Walt Brinkerhoff, out in Nevada one fall. I got 265 coyote, 18 cats, 2 or 3 badgers. The winter set in pretty early that fall and froze our traps in so we had to quit. I came back here to Flowell and in 1938, my sister, Velma, and her husband was running a service station in Fillmore. They wanted to go on a truck as a truck driver and they talked us into going up and running the service station for the Premium Oil Company out of Salt Lake. We ran that for four years. Then they started rationing gasoline and made it so it was pretty hard. So I gave up the service station and started working for Willard Hanson, an attorney from Salt Lake, on a farm in Flowell. I worked a couple of months and decided to buy Dad out. But in the meantime, Mother passed away in March of 1941. Dad remarried and he wasn't satisfied on the farm any longer so he came and wanted to know if I wanted the farm. We talked it over and decided we would take it on a rental basis. Dad had part of the crops in that spring. By fall he wanted to sell it. He had a chance to buy a house in Salt Lake so, but he had remarried. So I went up and talked to the banker and he said, "Sure!" LD: How much did you have to pay for the farm? 7 JJ: I'll loan you the money and pay your dad off. He owed the bank $3400 and I took the debt over. He owed the Federal Land Bank about $3400, but the Federal Land Bank he had twenty years to pay that off. I borrowed the money from the bank and paid Dad off, and Agnes and I moved back to the farm. We lived in the house that we hauled the rock for. Then we had our third child which was a boy, Merrill A. Johnson. Then in a couple of years we had a baby girl which was named Janna, and in a couple of years we had a boy, we named him Phyl, and our last child was a girl and we named her Linnae. LD: What kind of Church jobs have you held? JJ: Well, I was the scoutmaster for several years—before I got married and after I was married. Just a lot of things. Oh, I've been the Counselor in the Mutual several times. When we moved to Fillmore I was the Second Counselor to Adrian Davies in the Second Ward in Fillmore for one year while he was up there. I've been the President of the M.I.A. for three or four different times. I was the Elder's President for three or four different times. I was the Elder's President for four years. I have been a home and a ward teacher ever since I was ordained a teacher, which is about fifty—sixty years ago-seventy years ago—no, sixty years ago. (It wouldn't be that long either.) Oh, and I was the Ward Clerk for 12% years when Melville Tomkinson was the Bishop, which was a very enjoyable job. I liked it very much. I was also a manager of the Flowell Potato Growers for close to fifteen years. It got so we couldn't get any help, so I went down to the Indian Reservation, down around the gap, Gonalea, down in Arizona, and gathered up a couple of truckloads of Indians one year. Then the next year they wanted to come back so I just sent a truck down and they would come in and pick the potatoes up. I also went to Pocatello, Idaho, and worked as a mail pilot on the railroad for about three 8 months in 1942. When I was a young fellow we had a few sheep. We would run them on the mountain with another herd in the summertime, then they would take them out in the desert in the wintertime. Then we would have to bring them home to lamb them, and of course it was up to me to herd the sheep during the lambing, so we would go up just west of Fillmore in the sagebrush. We had a camp wagon and there was Dell Businell's little flock and my Dad's little herd and Avan's. (He was my cousin, Avan Bushinell.) We would go up there and lamb the sheep out for six weeks or so in the spring. But while they was out on the desert once in a while, I would go out where the big herd was and have dinner with the herder, which I enjoyed very much. He always had sourdough biscuits and mutton, and they dipped water out of Squedik Springs into a five gallon milk can. You would go to take a drink of water and look down in the can and there would be half a dozen sheep manure floating around on the bottom of the can in the water, but the water was still good when we was thirsty. That reminds me of a little short saying. It goes, "I'd like to be a sheep herder and breathe the mountain air, with mutton tallow in my teeth and sheep shit in my hair." We would, after we got the sheep herd all lambed out, we would have to cut off their tails and dock them before we would put them back in the herd. Along the first part of June they could go back on the mountain. It was quite an experience to live on a farm. I also worked in service stations off and on for different people. Then I went to work down to Meadow at the Big M Service Station for Arnold Ashurst. I worked there about two years and he asked me if I wanted to buy it so I went up to the bank and made arrangements to get enough money to make him a down payment. Then I signed a contract with him for the rest of it. I ran it for 8 years. During those 8 years we had a pretty good little business. Then in 1977, the price started going 9 up and up, people started staying home, wasn't traveling like they were the year before. A couple of fellows from Salt Lake came along and asked me if I would sell it to them and I said, yes. So we made the deal and I left the service station in Meadow on the 15th of January, 1978. But while I was there I started making quilt tops. In the last two years I was there I made about 164 tops. I would bring them home and my wife, Agnes, would help and we would tie them and quilt some of them. Then I would take them back over to the station. We sold quite a few through the station. We gave all of our kids’ one for Christmas and all of our grandkids here two or three years ago. We've been a giving quilts ever since. After I got home here, during the wintertime, last year I made about 25 more tops. All together I have made better than 200 quilt tops, and we figured the other day that had gave most all the kids--between them and their kids or grandchildren— we had given them all one or two quilts apiece. But we still have 25. I am now going on sixty-nine and I and my darling wife, Agnes, we love each other dearly. I think a lot of all my children, and grandchildren. We have 3 great-grandchildren. LD: How many grandchildren do you have? JJ: We have 21 grandchildren and 3 great-grandchildren. Today is July 16, 1980. Linnae wanted me to tell about how hard the depression was. It hit in '28 to '34. We had a thousand pound steer. I drove it to Fillmore on my horse and brought back $30.00, which meant we sold it for 3 cents a pound. In the year about '65-'70, Agnes and I decided to raise baby calves. I made a rack for the truck, pickup, a double- decker, and we would go down and get 30 calves, day-old calves, and bring them up and feed milk for a few days and then switch them over onto milk replacer. Then in two weeks I would leave her home and I would pick up somebody else to go with me. I would go down and get 10 another load. We made six trips, three trips in the spring and three trips in the fall. It was too hot to cross the desert in the summertime and it was too cold here on the farm in the wintertime. I would sell some of the calves when I would get them here. Then, what we didn't sell or what didn't die (which was sometimes--we had a pretty heavy loss) we would raise them up. At one time we had 150 head of Holstein heifers, which was sure a colorful herd. 11