Oral History Program Sarah Marion Parker Walker Interviewed by Renee Frame 19 May 1971 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Sarah Marion Parker Walker Interviewed by Renee Frame 19 May 1971 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. 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: Walker, Sarah Marion Parker, an oral history by Renee Frame, 19 May 1971, 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 Sarah Marion Parker Walker. The interview was conducted on May 19, 1971, by Renee Frame. Mrs. Walker describes her experiences while growing up in northern Utah and notes the advancements of technology and resources throughout the years. SW: My name is Sarah Marion Parker Walker, I was born on October 5, 1884 in Riverdale, Utah. I lived there until I was five and then moved on a homestead with my parents to Clinton and lived there until I moved to Salt Lake when I was twenty-seven. I remember going to Ogden when I was a little child with my parents. They went almost every week when the weather was permissible, to sometimes shop for things that they needed to keep their home and sometimes just to meet and visit with some of their friends, this being the only place they all congregated from all the little towns around. I remember going to Ogden with my parents was really quite an excursion from Riverdale to Ogden, even though it seems like just a few minutes away now by car. We went in a wagon and the children had to sit on a board behind the parents on the seat, and I remember how long and hot that trip could be in the summertime. We traveled to Ogden in a wagon when I was a child, but there were other forms of transportation then, most of them horse drawn, however, mules or even a few ox teams were still being used that I remember. There were buggies, and some they called White Tops, carts and different vehicles that were pulled by animals. Ogden itself had a street car when I first remember, but it was pulled by donkeys. Later they got an electric street car and I have had many rides on both the donkey car and the electric street cars in Ogden. After my family moved to Clinton we used to take the horse and wagon up to the depot and then 1 ride the train into Ogden, because it was so much faster and convenient for our family. The first streets I remember in Ogden were all just dirt when they were dry and mud when they were wet. They had sidewalks made of wood along the sides in front of the stores and different buildings. They had grocery stores and meat markets. The meat markets I will always remember for the way they handled the meat then, and when I look at these clean, shiny meat markets today I'm amazed. The meat used to hang right out on the sidewalk and you could buy whatever you wanted, you could even buy a bear steak, or deer or elk right out of the meat market. The grocery store we always did our shopping in had its usual big round potbellied stove in the middle of the store, and I suppose in the winter time the men all congregated around it to warm themselves. We children didn't get to go to Ogden too often in the winter time because the trip was too long. Almost everything in the store came in barrels; barrels of crackers, barrels of pickles, barrels of flour, barrels of rice, and you just bought it by the pound or however you wanted it. I should add, too, this grocery store that it isn't just a grocery store, you could buy almost anything you needed there. There was always some material by the yard, and a few pots and pans that you might need, a few nails or anything like that came right along in the same grocery store or hardware store, whichever you wanted to call it. There were two department stores in Ogden at that time, ZCMI’s and Wrights Brothers that I remember, and each one of these stores had its grocery and hardware and dry goods. Most anything you needed you could buy in these two stores. Some of the other business places I remember in Ogden. There was a Chinese laundry, and I was always fascinated to watch the man carry the huge baskets of laundry on their head and walk along the street on those strange little shoes they wore that had the 2 cleats on the bottom. I also remember the firehouse with the horses. We went there once so we could watch them go out on a fire drill. The horses seemed to be better trained even than the men. As soon as the alarm rang the horses knew exactly where to go and where to stand while they dropped the harnesses out of the top of the building onto them and buckled them up and away they went. There was a blacksmith shop that my father used to stop at to have some of his work done. I remember stopping with him a few times and seeing the blacksmith working at his forge, building his fire and watching the sparks fly. Of course Ogden had bars at that time, and they were used only by the men. There was the shoemaker, and I remember going as a child and having my feet measured for a new pair of shoes and then going back months later for the shoes. Somehow they always seemed to fit. It's amazing when you look back that they had foresight enough to always make the shoes a little bigger than the foot measured I guess. Then there was a harness maker and of course since all the vehicles were pulled by animals they had to have harnesses and collars and straps, and buckles and beds, and all this sort of thing was purchased at the harness maker. They had a cooper, the man who made the wooden wheels, the round part of the wooden wheels that they put the iron tire on. He also built barrels, and everybody had barrels out where my parents homesteaded. We had to carry our water in barrels, the drinking water, the water that ran out there was too full of alkali to use so there was plenty of use for barrels at that time. When I was about six years old the men in our Ward decided to get together and arrange for a building for a school. It was the first one they had had in our area. The building was a one roomed adobe house with one window and a few desks. The blackboard was up so high I could only reach the chalk- tray. They didn't even have 3 an eraser, the teacher used an old woolen hood to erase the board. The teacher was a man named David Pinkney Davis and he had a long gray beard. There were about fifteen students ranging in age from early twenties down to another girl and myself who were six and in the first reader. A few years later, after more families came into our area, a ward was formed and a building was built that was used for both school and church and all other community meetings. School was only held when they could raise enough money to pay a teacher. They always got the teacher to come and board with one family and that took care of that family’s portion of the teachers’ wages, and then the other families whose children attended the school made up the money that the teacher was paid. Later on when they began taking regular taxes from everyone, then we held school at regular times. The school was only graded by readers and I was never sure what grade I was in until they gave me a certificate that said, "Promoted to the eighth grade." When my parents went to Ogden to shop, they usually took a grist of wheat to the mill to have it ground into flour. They would drop it off at the mill on their way into Ogden and then pick it up on the way home, ground into flour and cereal or whatever we were going to have. The oats were rolled and we used those for cereal, the flour was fixed and the corn meal was prepared at the mill. Some of the items that were purchased on the trips to Ogden were coal oil for the lamps, sugar, baking soda, material for making cloths, for most everything we had we made ourselves. My mother used to get a bolt of unbleached material in the springtime and it had to be bleached before you could make sheets, pillowcases, or underclothes. She would wet this material and lay it out over the bushes and lit it sun bleach and then wet it again until it was the right shade of white to suit her. Then she would bring it in and wash it and iron 4 it, and then proceed to make the things that we needed. When I was about sixteen, I started working my summers in the canning factory, canning tomatoes. All of the chores in the factory were done by hand and most of the pealing and packing was done by girls. I remember the cans had to be put through water to see that they were properly soddered and sealed, and that there were no leaks in them. The labels were put on by hand, the cans rolled down a shoot and you picked up a label and the glue and put the label on the can. These factories put out what we thought was an enormous amount of can goods each season, but now it wouldn't even make a little spot to the side of the cans now produced. I remember only one doctor being in Ogden when I was growing up and people didn't call him unless it was almost a last resort. Everyone tried to take care of their own sick and cuts and wounds and that sort of thing you never even thought of calling the doctor for. I remember hearing about the first operation, it was performed in the man's kitchen, they took his appendix out and he lived. Everyone was just amazed, they had never heard of such a thing before, that anyone could live through such an operation as that. Of course people had to know a little bit about how to take care of things, because transportation was so slow that if you didn't know how to stop bleeding when somebody was cut or some kind of an accident happened, a person could easily bleed to death while somebody rode for the doctor. I remember there was an undertaker in our neighborhood, I don't know if he was in Clinton or Ogden or just were, I imagine he was in Ogden. Whenever anyone died they never took them away from home they just fixed them and laid them in bed and waited until the day of the funeral, usually the next day. I remember with one of our family, a young girl died and all of the women in the family came and seized cloths for her to be buried in. They didn't have florists then 5 for flowers for funerals only if flowers were in season did you have flowers at funerals. When I was about ten one of my very best girlfriends died in the winter time, and my mother had a geranium plant in the kitchen window and she let me cut the flower to take to the funeral. To get the winter coal my father always went up to Coalville. They went up Weber Canyon around to Coalville. It was really quite an excursion for my dad and the boys in the family. They packed food and always got to do a little fishing along the way. They went to the Great Salt Lake for salt for the cattle and for curing the meat and the hay, they used a little salt in the hay stacks to keep the hay from mildewing, and I suppose our table salt came from the same place, I'm really not sure. Our only socials were at Christmas time and when somebody got married. At Christmas time we always had community parties that included every member of the family from the grandpa down to the tiny baby. The dances usually lasted all night, the young people would stay and bribe the fiddler to play one more song, one more song and he would go on and on and they would dance all night. Weddings were always a big feast and a dance that lasted most of the night. Other than that we had few social gatherings aside from church, when I was growing up. In the winter time my family always put up ice off the Weber River. We had an ice house, and the ice was hauled in and packed in sawdust and lasted us most of the summer through to keep things that had to be kept on ice, like butter and milk or things like that in the hot weather. All the food had to be prepared in the home, you didn't run out and buy a package of anything, all the bread was baked, all the butter was churned, all the meat was butchered and prepared at home, all the fruit was either dried or canned, and each meal was a real process to prepare. We had coal oil lamps to light our home at night and every day the chimney of the lamp had to be washed and 6 the wik trimed to give the most light the next night. If we ran out of coal oil between trips to town, we used a light that was called a "bitch", it was a piece of rag in a bowl of tallow and it really smoked and smelled bad, I guess that was where the name came from. We didn't have too many store bought toys when I was a child. I remember one doll I had, that the hair and face was painted on and I thought that it was really kind of a dough head because she never closed her eyes at night. Most of our play and fun were things that we invented ourselves, like riding horses and playing games outside, such as Hide and Seek, going looking for flowers and rocks around the area, we used to find a lot of arrow heads. The Indians used to come through that country and camp and then come begging at the different homes through there in the fall and in the spring. They came every year and they'd beg for fruit and one Indian man came to the door with his hands held out and wanted my mother to fill them full of syrup or molasses. It seemed rather strange to us kids at the time to see someone with his hands full of molasses walking along licking it out, but that's what he wanted, so she filled his hands and he went away happy. One fall when the Indians came through they stopped by and asked if they could have some apples that were down. My mother said there were no apples down she had just been in the orchard and picked them all up, but the Indian lady insisted that she go out to see, so she went along and when they got there the Indian lady reached up and took hold of the limbs of the tree and shock all of the apples down and then she said, "See plenty apples down." In the winter time we used a sleigh to go into the depot to catch the train into Ogden, and to go visiting around the community. Sometimes they would just take a bunch of us for a sleigh ride for something different and fun to do. When I was small my dad would take me on the horse to school and after I got older we 7 rode our own horses. After I graduated from the eighth grade I went to Salt Lake to school, to the LDS College, and took what they called a Normal Course to be a kindergarten teacher. I remember my dad taking me to Salt Lake in the wagon and he spent the night there, and I remember how alone I felt. We had found a place for me to board, I was to do cleaning and babysitting and cooking for my room and board while I went to school. I lived with several different families in Salt Lake while I attended school for two years. After I had been to school for two years and been home for the summer, the superintendent of the school district were my parents lived asked me if I wanted to take the teachers test, because they had an opening in the school that I could have without going to school anymore. I went into Farmington and took the test and then took the job of teaching, the first year in my own community. The first month I taught school I received thirty dollars and after that I got a raise that was really pleasing to me in those times, I got thirty-five dollars a month. I taught in the Clinton Schools for six years and during that time I attended summer school, one summer at the University of Utah, and two summers at the University in Logan, Utah. After teaching six years in my own community and having some of my own brothers and sisters in my class, I decided it was time for a change so transferred to the Jordon District outside of Salt Lake City. I have been back to Ogden from time to time over the years, and I have watched it grow and change. Where Hill Air Force Base is now used to be our favorite place for riding horses and digging Sego Lily bulbs. It has really changed and filled in, but I can still find some of my old land marks every time I go up there. 8