Oral History Program Mary Jenne Interviewed by Julianne Briscoe 9 November 2011 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Mary Jenne Interviewed by Julianne Briscoe 9 November 2011 Copyright © 2011 by Weber State University, Stewart Library 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 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 Special Collections 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: Mary Jenne, an oral history by Julianne Briscoe, 9 November 2011, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Earl & Mary Jenne on their wedding day November 18, 1948 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Mary Jenne. It was conducted in her home, by Julianne Briscoe, on November 9, 2011. In this interview, Mary discusses her recollections of World War II. JB: Can you tell me about your childhood? MJ: I was born and raised in Cleveland, Utah on May 28, 1925. My dad was a farmer and my mother took care of us children. She worked out on the farm too and liked to raise a garden. There were nine of us children. As we were growing up, we’d have to do our work there. We would herd the cows down the field and make sure they didn’t get in the grain or alfalfa. Usually, two of us would go down to the field, but when I was there alone I would sit on the side of the hill and play in the dirt, making a town and some buildings and roads. We usually had a horse we could ride on. We would stay down there until night, and then we would bring the cows back to the corral. When I was up at the house on the days I didn’t herd cows, those of us who were there would have to clean the house and help our mother in the garden and pull weeds and take care of the younger children. JB: How did World War II affect you and your family? MJ: Well, It took my brother, Voin. He was out of high school and was working on a ranch where there were horses. He loved horses. He was at Big Piney, Wyoming. That was where the ranch was. This one day my dad got this letter in the mail. It was for my brother and it said that he was being drafted into the service. We didn’t have a telephone at home so he went down to town and called my brother. The letter said he had to be in Salt Lake at a certain time. That only 1 gave him about two days. My brother drove that night from Wyoming and picked up my sister, Lavon and then they came on home. They got things all packed and ready, whatever they had to get. He went to Fort Douglas in Salt Lake. It was on the east side of town, near the University of Utah. That’s where he got his instructions. From there, he was sent to El Paso, Texas. In 1941, they went to Luzon and fought in the Manila Battle. JB: What branch did he serve in? MJ: He was in the cavalry. He loved horses and so he decided to go into the cavalry. JB: And that’s army? MJ: Yes, that’s in the army. JB: Was he killed? MJ: Yes. He died shortly after the Manila battle at Antipolo in October, 1944. He was fighting the Japanese and his plane was hit and went down. JB: Is there anything specific about that time you remember? MJ: Voin’s body was buried in the U.S. Cemetery on the Island of Luzon in the Philippines. Dad had the military ship his body home to the Cleveland Cemetery. When he was overseas I was working in Salt Lake. I was writing letters to him. He sent us some shells and he made each one of us girls, his sisters, a necklace and a bracelet of those shells. I loved those mainly because they came from him. JB: Did rationing effect you? What do you remember about rationing? MJ: Yes, it did. It didn’t affect us too much because we had the garden. My dad would take our ration coupons for coffee that we didn’t use. He didn’t drink coffee, so he would take those up to the coal mine where he was working and he traded them 2 for sugar. People would want the coffee and he’d get the sugar coupons, but it really didn’t affect us too much. Oh, gas – we had to have coupons for gas, too. My father used the gas coupons because he had to drive to work. JB: Were you involved any in the war effort? MJ: No, I wasn’t, but my sister, Lavon, was. She joined what they called the Waves and that was in the army. She was sent to New York for her training in 1944. The she went to San Diego where she worked at a telephone company until the war ended. JB: Was it difficult not to have all the young men around for all those years? MJ: It didn’t bother me. I was working in Salt Lake City. The service men were on the street all the time. My girlfriends and I attended a dance hall called Coconut Grove every Friday night. The service men came there. JB: Can you tell me a little about what your dad did during the war? MJ: My father wanted to join the army but they didn’t let him because he was a farmer. They needed farmers to grow food. He worked at the coal mine and worked on the farm. JB: Yes. Can you tell me about your husband Earl’s experiences in Japan and how he got in there? MJ: Well, he was in the service all time. I didn’t know him then. I didn’t know him until the war was over with. But he was in the service on a ship. He had a boat and he would take the service men from the big ship that had to fight and they had them get in this little boat and he’d take them from the ship to the land. That was his job, driving the boat. 3 JB: Do you think the experiences of the war affected his later life? Did the war affect you? MJ: Not too much. It didn’t affect me too much. The war was over with by the time we were married, so it didn’t affect us that way. JB: Did you pay attention to the events of the world during that time? MJ: Yes, but I can’t remember much about what was going on. JB: But you did look at newspapers? MJ: Oh, yes. There would be service men in Salt Lake that went back and forth all the time. JB: Do you remember where you were during Pearl Harbor? MJ: I guess I was at home with my folks. JB: Did you read it in the newspaper or hear it on the radio? MJ: Probably the newspaper because we didn’t listen to the news on the radio during the daytime because my dad wasn’t there. He was out working, but everyone was up in the air at that time when they bombed Pearl Harbor. JB: Do you remember the war ending? What was your experience with that? MJ: I was just working in Salt Lake. People on the street were yelling and throwing their hats up in the air hollering “The war is over! The war is over!” JB: Were there any celebrations that happened in Utah that you remember? MJ: There probably was, but I don’t remember. JB: Is there anything else you’d like to say, any other stories? MJ: Not that I can think of. Only when Earl got home from the war he’d only been home for a couple of weeks and the bishop talked to him and asked if he’d like to 4 fulfill a mission. He said yes and got himself ready and came out to Minneapolis, that’s where I was at during that time. JB: How did you spend the years of the war? MJ: I was working in Salt Lake at the First National Bank for a year or so, then I quit and went over to Culligan Soft Water Service, I was there for a year or so then I went on a mission. JB: And what mission were you called to? MJ: North Central States, headquarters in Minneapolis, Minnesota. JB: Are there any stories you’d like to tell about your mission? MJ: We met this one lady who had lost her baby and she was quite upset about it. In her religion, when they die like that, they are dead and that’s it. We’d try to explain to her that she would be able to see her baby after the resurrection. Her mother was from Canada and she had talked to the missionaries there and they gave her a Book of Mormon, but she never read it so she didn’t know anything about that. They never asked us to come back so we never found out what happened to her. I was sent to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where I met Earl. Another thing I remember is that one of the members, Mrs. Juber, in the ward asked me and my companion if we could teach a primary class. We told her yes. Sister Juber got all the neighbor children together and ready for primary. Once a week, my companion and I would ride the little train out to her home and we taught from the Children’s Friend. We decided to have a project going. We had each child bring an 8” by 8” piece of material and had them write their name on it and then embroidered it. After it was finished, we asked the Relief Society sisters 5 to put a quilt together for us. The quilt was sent to our mission president who sent it overseas to those in need. We got a very nice letter from President Killpack thanking us for the quilt. We needed more blocks embroidered so we asked the Elders working there to embroider one with their names on a block to finish it up. It was very nice. It was a very good project teaching the children. JB: Since you lived in a rural community, were there a lot of people from Cleveland that served in the war, or did most of them stay home because they were farmers? MJ: A lot of them volunteered. I don’t know exactly how many there were, but I know there were quite a few. Cleveland was a small town with a population of about 500 or 600. The young boys were called to serve and some just volunteered and went down to the office and joined. JB: Did a lot of them take farming as a way to get out of the war? Or did you feel that they wanted to serve? MJ: I think most of them wanted to serve, but I wasn’t here at that time, so I don’t really know. JB: You were in Salt Lake? MJ: After I got out of high school, I went to Salt Lake. That is where Lavon, my sister, was at and I stayed with her for a while. I had some girlfriends up there so I moved in with them, but then she joined the Waves. That is part of the army that women joined. I don’t know how many from here went. JB: Can you tell me about working in the bank? Are there any stories about that? 6 MJ: I was on what they call a sortograph. I was to sort the checks that came in. There was a girl who was adding it all up. Half the checks went on one side, half on the other side of the sortograph. I had to sort it by the name of the bank, The checks were from A to M and N to Z . I put the checks behind the little metal slip. There were usually two of us on there, but it was down to where there was just me. I got so I was just as fast on that sortagraph as the girl that was adding them up. I quite enjoyed it, but then I got to thinking I wanted to do something else besides just that, so I went looking for another job and I got one at Culligan Soft Water Service. I liked that better. I did everything there. I did all the typing, paying the bills when people would come in. I would type up the route for the men to take out the soft water tanks that would be exchanged for the customer’s soft water tanks. Then when conference came around my dad came up and brought the bishop, he had a car full of men that he brought up for conference with him. My dad brought the bishop up to my house. The bishop wanted to talk to me, so I went out and sat in the car with him and he asked me to go on a mission. I left on the train in June 1946. JB: Tell me a little about your parents. MJ: My mother was born in Castlegate, Utah. My dad was born in Juda, Wisconsin. My dad’s mother was a school teacher and she married Charles Gilson. When my dad was two or three years old, his father died, I don’t know what from. My grandma was writing to a man. She got his name from a newspaper and they were writing back and forth. After they wrote together for so long, he had invited her out there, so she decided to come out and visit with him. He met her over in 7 Price on the bus, and he brought her over to Cleveland. She was about ready to go back home because back in Wisconsin the grass is green and everything stayed green all the time. Out here there was sage brush and no grass, no nothing, just a desert. She was kind of disappointed in that, but they finally settled down and got married. They slept out there on the farm in a dugout. He built out them house later. He took care of the farm. I don’t know how old he was when he died, I never met him myself. He taught my dad how to work, so after he died my dad took over the farm. My grandmother lived over there on the farm for the rest of her life, I could remember her – she had her own bedroom there in the house. I can remember Halloween time, we would dress up. The girls never went into town for anything. They didn’t have trick-or-treating then like they do now. My brother went into town with the boys, but us smaller children would dress up and go around to my grandmother’s bedroom window. Of course, she acted like we scared her to death. My grandmother liked to eat mustard, the flowers that grow on the mustard plant. It grows wild in the fields. My grandmother would go down in the field and pull the weeds out of the grain and whatever weeds were. The people from Cleveland said my dad had the cleanest field out of anybody in town because my grandmother would pull the weeds. JB: So you moved up to Ogden after your mission? MJ: Yes. Earl could get the GI Bill to pay for his school, so he decided to go back to school. Earl was working at the Mosquito Abatement in Ogden. He went two years at Weber State. That is as far as he could go because Weber State was only a two year college at the time. From there he enrolled at the University of 8 Utah in Salt Lake. There was housing on the campus. We lived there until the summer. He had to work so he could help pay the bills. We moved back to Ogden where he could work at the Mosquito Abatement, then in September we moved back to the University housing. They kept the apartment for us. Another family lived there during the summer. We had two children, Forest and Stan before going to Salt Lake. I was expecting another child, it was a girl, LaRue, she was born during that week. Earl asked the teacher if he could take the test later. The teacher said he could, so he was with me at the hospital. She was born in March of 1952. We moved back to Ogden that May and Earl got a job working for the school. He went to the zoo and talked to the man in charge about the animals that died. The school has specimans to work on in the zoology classes. The school had to buy them. Earl thought he could save the school money if he could get the dead animals and skin and clean them himself. The man in charge liked the idea. The zoo also likes to have some specimens. Earl could clean some for the zoo and the university. Earl liked taking care of the animals. He learned the names of all the bones of the animals he worked with. Another child came along in October of 1953. It was a girl, Tina and Earl finished the school year. The GI bill ran out so we got an apartment in Ogden. Earl would stay with his brother’s family during the week while going to school, then come home Friday and back Sunday night to be ready for school. Another child was on the way in September 1955. When I went into labor, Earl was at the Mosquito Abatement working. We had to call him so he could get me to the hospital. We made it just in time! JB: And then he was a professor of zoology at Weber State. 9 MJ: He was never a doctor, but he was called doctor all the time at Weber State but he wasn’t one. JB: He probably was okay with that! MJ: Yes! JB: Is there anything else you’d like to add about your experiences in World War II? MJ: No. I think that is it. JB: Thank you. I appreciate you letting me sit down and talk to you. 10