Oral History Program Dorothy Harbertson Interviewed by Deborah Finn 23 May 1997 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Dorothy Harbertson Interviewed by Deborah Finn 23 May 1997 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: Harbertson, Dorothy, an oral history by Deborah Finn, 23 May 1997, 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 Dorothy Harbertson. The interview was conducted on May 23, 1997, by Deborah Finn, in Harbertson’s home. Harbertson discusses her personal history and experiences with the World Wars and the Depression while living in Utah. As Dorothy requested to have no tape recorder, the following interview occurred with notes taken in shorthand and long hand. As Dorothy has been a friend for about three years, I have also relied on my memory of our conversations to fill in gaps that weren't clear from the interview. DH: My life was more interesting than many, because I've lived through three wars. WWI, WWII, and the Korean Conflict (interestingly, she didn't mention Vietnam). When I was five years old, there was a picture taken with my sister, father and I. We were celebrating the Armistice. It was years later when I realized what the Kaiser being "hung in effigy" meant, but it was a big celebration, and I remember it well. This was in Price, Utah; a small mining town where I grew up until the 7th grade. I was the daughter of German immigrants on both sides. My Father and Grandmother would speak German, but my Mother wasn't as fluent in the language, so she discouraged the German language in their home. I should have been raised with the language, I could easily have been bilingual. My maiden name was Stoltz, and as such, there were times when we took some harassment because of the two wars with Germany. One time, someone stuck a German newspaper in my father's lunch bucket. He was furious. In Price, the 1 Stoltz' lived near our Mother's cousins, and it seemed the immigrants stuck close to their own. There was Italian town, Fin town, and each nationality clustered in their own neighborhood. DF: What happened to bring your family from Price to Salt Lake? DH: My father was in a mining accident, and was sent to Salt Lake City for medical treatment. They failed to discover a broken hip during that period of time, so he returned to Salt Lake seven weeks later to have the hip set, but he had pain and walked with a limp the rest of his life. He quit working as a coal miner, and began working as a finish carpenter. My parents moved to Millcreek when I was in the 7th grade. We had two acres where we raised chickens and had a big garden. This is how we were able to survive the depression. Still we had a wonderful family and enjoyed each other through the growing years. DF: There have been a number of tragedies you've had to overcome in your life. Your father's injury in the coal mines was the first. Your first husband left you a widow at 50 years of age with two sons, ages 15 and 20 to finish raising. The subsequent death of your second husband. How did you manage to get through these times? DH: My Dad always said, "If we all pull together, we'll lick this thing." My Mother had a more matter of fact saying, "We'll just make the best of it". Mother also quoted the story of the frog in the buttermilk, who kept paddling until he made butter. After the butter was churned, he could finally leap out of the bucket from one of the bits of butter. My sister sang, and I played the piano, so we always had music and my brothers and sisters danced together. Because of the Depression, I never married until I was 29 years old. My first job paid nothing—actually $4.00 a week, which only paid the bus fare and 15 2 cents for soda at lunch. I was in high school and was willing to work in an attorney's office just for the experience. I got a lot of fun out of being German, when I worked at the State Capital in the driver's license division. I used to tease with some of the people, that no matter which way the war (WWII) went, I would have it made, because I was German on both sides. What the German's did to the Jews was uncivilized. Of course, we read about it in the Reader's Digest, but we could hardly believe it was as bad as reported. Then again, historically, Jews have been slaughtered over and over again. It just seems like they can't get along with anybody. Even in Germany the Jews themselves, couldn't believe what was being said about the atrocities.—it was unthinkable. I went to work for Utah Oil in the late '30s, where I worked until I got married. Of course, a woman couldn't keep working after she was married. It was understood, if not the law, that women would quit their jobs so that men could have them. My brothers and sisters and I (two brothers and two sisters) all worked and were able to bring money in and help Mother and Dad. There had been no chance for me to go to college. Women were paid too little. My brother was in the Field Artillery with Gen. Patton. So after the war, he got a GI loan to go to Los Angeles to Dental school. He had a wonderful practice all his life. My other brother was Missing in Action (MIA) in the Pacific during WWII. Later when I went to Hawaii, I kept looking for his name all over the "Punch Bowl" war memorial. Here were all these Japanese people in Hawaii, and I couldn't keep from thinking, that if not for them, I wouldn't be here looking for my brother's name. Of course, the Japanese were victims of the war too. But people were very patriotic then. When the war started, everybody united overnight it seemed like. We were just getting out of the depression, and I could finally afford to get married. People 3 frowned at me for having children during the war. They thought we were having babies just to keep our husbands out of the war, and that we were not patriotic. Many people though I should have joined the WAC or the WAVEs. Both Chick (my first husband) and I had some savings when we got married. We were never without a savings account, because we knew how quickly everything could change. To go from the Depression, where there was so little money, to the war with food stamps, gas rations. There were no pots and pans to buy. You just had to scavenge for whatever you could get. I was lucky there, because my first husband's father, gave Chick and his brother a duplex to live in that had five acres. We lived there in Millcreek for twelve years, then we moved up on 36th street, because we wanted the boys to be close to the schools. We rented out the duplex for another seven years when we moved to Ogden. After my husband died, I sold our part of the duplex to the other brother. We were able to survive because we knew how to "make do with things". The waste you see now is staggering. So by making do, and "just keeping on paddling", we got by. This is part of the philosophy that Mrs. Harbertson has lived by throughout her life. I paid off my house with Chick's insurance money. So I had security. DF: Didn't you work during your marriage? DH: No. I didn't go back to work until Chick died. I think raising children now is much harder than when women stayed at home and didn't have to work outside the house. I was 50 years old (in 1963) when I went to work for First Security Bank. My sons were 15 and 20 years old, and I had decided that I wouldn't do anything more to upset my son's lives until they were graduated from college. It was real important to Chick and I that the kids got the education that we never did. The boys worked nights to make their way through 4 college. All of us working together made it. I helped out with their insurance. That was my greatest worry after Chick died. See, the men who worked at the bank could get insurance that covered their whole families. I had to buy separate insurance to cover my boys. Working was much easier when I was younger, and I was glad I had the chance to work and have my own money. Going back to work at 50, most of the people were younger. But I met influential people. It was interesting to see what was going on in the city. I worked there thirteen years before I retired. One of the greatest things that had happened before this time, I had met a couple at a party with my husband, Chick. The wife of this couple, Jenn, has turned out to be my longest lasting friendship. Jenn's husband was in a welding accident that left him burned and in the hospital at the same time my husband was in the hospital. So I would leave Chick and go up to see how Jenn was doing with her husband. As it turned out, her husband died within a week of Chick's death. So at 50 years old, we were quite a threat to other couples, so we just paired up. It was good to have at least one friend who knew how you felt. To this day, Jenn calls several times a day. She's going to leave all her money to a niece of hers in Minnesota. I tell her she ought to go out and get acquainted with them. That's where I'm lucky. I have my kids to go visit. I go one son's home, then the other. It breaks up the monotony. I always have something to look forward to. My oldest son, Roger, has a master's degree and is the Asst. Dir. of Environmental Protection in Denver. Brent and one of his friends were the top two graduates in psychology at Weber until their graduation. He now is a supervisor with IRS out in Fresno, California. Dorothy hopes Brent will move back to the Denver area where his brother lives after his retirement. I dated Ray, my second husband, ten years (1969 - 1979) before we got married. He 5 would come in to town then go off to Washington back and forth. I dated a lot of other fellows, but had decided I wasn't going to marry anyone until my boys were through with college. Ray had a heart attack, and had no place to go home from the hospital to. I let him come home to my house, and took care of him. We lived that way several years until we finally got married. When I married Ray, I had to pay back a couple thousand dollars in retirement, because the government penalizes you for having assets. My home was counted against his income. It was very unfair. I nursed Ray back to health; we both ate a low-fat diet, cut out on salt, exercised every day. After 13 years, he started to get sick, and finally died after one year of pancreatic cancer. As he lay dying the last few months, I wondered why we had made his heart so strong, so he had to lay there and suffer longer. I was eight years older and figured we could live about the same time, but he didn't make it. {My observation}: Dorothy spends most of her time in a fairly routine way these days. She spends some time each day on a twister machine while she makes her bed. She goes for a walk most every day and goes to her basement to play the piano. She spends a couple of weeks in California each Christmas to be with her grandchildren there. She goes to her son's in Denver several times a year. They farm llamas and have 20 acres that she likes to wander around the grounds there. Dorothy has also taken up water color painting. She cherishes the time with her brother and sisters, who had come in to visit last week. She reports she is the only one that doesn't have a maid coming in of her two sisters and brother, but she's glad she's able to keep her own house. She enjoys plays, operas, musicals, and symphonies. Although she is hesitant to drive, 6 because the traffic is so heavy now days; she will still venture out to have her hair cut or permed. Altogether, it doesn't seem a bad life, though it must get lonely at times. Having one good friend like Jenn makes a big difference. Dorothy has been a victim of laws that privilege men in ways that punish women. (Reference the insurance issue with her children and the penalty from social security on her second marriage.) Along with that, the threat of an attractive woman makes it difficult to maintain the friendships she had when she was married. Other women don't care to have a lone woman to dinner, etc. These are issues that society needs to pay more attention to. We could all end up alone at some point in time. Finding gainful things to occupy one's time is the challenge that Dorothy has achieved in a superb fashion. 7