Oral History Program George Williams Interviewed by Tami Lund 08 February 1971 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah George Williams Interviewed by Tami Lund 08 February 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 Kelley Evans, 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: Williams, George, an oral history by Tami Lund, 08 February 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 George Williams. The interview was conducted on February 9, 1971, by Tami Lund. Mr. Williams describes his experiences in the candy business during the Great Depression, as well as his opinion on the issue of Utah job employment. TL: This is Tami Lund interviewing Mr. George Williams of the Weber State College History department. What were the effects of the Depression years on your candy making business? GW: Strangely enough, these were years when we had the capacity to make a lot of candy. The trouble is that we couldn't get any money out of the candy, that is, no one had any money to buy it. And so, naturally, the production was cut down to 40%, possibly even 50%, at the worst times during the Depression. The low years were 1933 and 1934. Now there was one other aspect that was very interesting, we made a cheaper kind of candy. What candy people ate generally sold for about 12, 13 cents a pound— seems unbelievable in these days— and even very good box chocolates could be purchased at the retail level of five pounds for $2.00, sometimes even cheaper than this. During the early years of the Depression, Utah and the West were not affected by the Depression like New York and the eastern states were. There was a lag between when it came here and when it first made its appearance in the East. I can remember well, my father telling me because I was in the East at the time of the beginning of the Depression that 1930, 1931 were good years out here. But, when it did come, why of course, it affected everyone. One thing I remember, I think it illustrates how difficult it was to stay in business at the time, here we were an organization normally employing 150 people, and 1 yet, it was so hard to get sales, to sell anything. One of my first jobs was to go out in the delivery truck and to trade candy to some of the little grocery stores out in the small towns and the neighborhood, trade candy for cream or butter, ranch butter, honey, anything which the farmers turned in to them for groceries and we would take these products in place of money. And actually, in terms of quality candy, I suppose there was never a time when so much candy was made out of cream and butter, these kind of things that normally are associated with very expensive candy. Eventually our operation slowed down considerably. We tried to keep as many of our employees employed as possible by cutting down the size of the week, first down to a 5 day week, normally there had been 6 day weeks up until this time, then 4 days, then 3 days and sometimes in the summertime, their taking extended vacations, 3 weeks, 4 weeks without pay and yet we were able to hold most of our organization together. Then one of the very large candy factories in Utah filed for help from the Reconstruction Finance, and failed to meet their obligations and was closed up in bankruptcy. Of course, this affected all the others because before they took out bankruptcy, the competition was extremely bitter and we had to meet it. They were good days to have gone by. Can you think of any other particular things that you'd like to know about the Depression and our business in particular, Tami? TL: Did you find that you had to use, maybe, more inferior products to make your candy with? GW: No, I think superior products. It was like ice cream. I can remember when for a nickel, you could buy a huge ice cream cone filled with ice cream made out of cream. And, I think that actually the quality of production was better then. First, time wasn't a factor so 2 you could use labor the way they enjoyed being used. They took pride in their craftsmanship and there wasn't an attempt to make candy by mass production as much. Second, these very expensive products were so cheap and available you might as well use them. You see the big problem was to sell candy and collect the money for the sale, this was the problem. But, there was also the tendency for people to buy gumdrops which normally we sold for 10 cents a pound as against box chocolates which normally we sold for a dollar and a half a pound, there was this difference of course. TL: What were the effects of the Depression years on Utah in general, would you say? GW: Well, I'm sure that they were as disastrous as they were for the entire United States, except there was this difference: Utah, during the 1930's, had a much higher percentage of farmers than it does now. And likewise, Utah at that time was a state of people who lived very close to the soil, even if they weren't farmers, they grew many of their own vegetables, everyone had a vegetable garden. Many had cows, many had a few chickens, even within the city limits. And, so these people you see, had at least the food to survive with. Likewise out on the farms, the farmer couldn't sell his products so he let it be known particularly to people who were reasonably responsible, that if they'd come out and show care, they could pick the fruit out of his trees and they could dig the vegetables out of the ground and have them. I think in this way, the Depression was less cruel than it was, for instance, in a city like New York. I lived there for two years during the Depression and I saw the contrast, where no one knew who lived next to you, and there was this icy impersonalness. If a family was evicted, no one cared because the family was not known. Whereas even in cities like Ogden and Salt Lake, they were small enough that people knew their neighbors and particularly since there were 3 relatives almost everywhere, you could rely on for some kind of help. It was a cruel depression. I've always felt that those who suffered the most from the Depression suffered psychologically the shame of having to go on relief, the shame of having to ask others to help them, and Americans were not used to this at the time. They were very proud. Actually, in terms of going without food, going without adequate clothing, enough to keep you warm, then I think Utah took care of its own quite well. Of course, the Church played a very important factor in this during the latter part of the Depression with its own relief program which took care of its own people. But of course it didn't take care of outsiders. But this simply meant existing. Now, you can look at the Depression in another way too. I think very often in reading about the Depression we imagine that everyone was perfectly miserable all during the period. But, actually people got used to having a very good time with a great deal less, without spending a lot of money. Sometimes I wonder if we didn't enjoy ourselves as much or more than we do now, where it becomes kind of necessary to spend a great deal to have a good time. I remember, for instance, our weekend’s large numbers of young men and women would gather up at Mirror Lake up in the high Uinta’s. We'd put together a few pennies and get a couple gallons of gas and a few cans of pork and beans and go up and someone would have a banjo and someone would have an accordion and we'd build a big fire and we'd have a marvelous time. It didn't cost us anything. This kind of entertainment is very uncommon now, but we managed and most people managed to live reasonably normally except for those who were unemployed and there was this psychological hurt. The people felt so strongly about having to rely on someone else, they weren't used to relief like so many Americans are now. I kind of hate to generalize more than this. I 4 haven't seen figures as to how many Utahns were employed, but I suspect very close to one out of every four. You have to realize now, that at this time most women didn't work, the husband was the bread winner. And in cases where husband and wife did work, very often the wives were laid off work. My father was on the school board and I remember well when the school board had to decide that where there was a husband and wife both working for the city schools, that one of them would have to give up his job, that they could only afford to have one person bringing in income. This caused much bitterness, of course, but it was an attempt to spread out what little there was for everyone. So far as the frustration, everyone knew something was wrong, but no one knew quite what it was. We had to, like everyone else, get a long ways from the Depression before we could look back at it and see what we should have done, how we could have done to have worked our way out of it a little faster than we did. TL: My mother tells me about how she used to put cardboard in her shoes every day because her shoes had holes in them. GW: Well, as late as, 1933, this was a common thing. People cutting up cardboard and putting it in the bottom of their shoes, sewing up shoes that had come unsewed. But, where everyone did this, then you see, no one paid any attention to it. In fact, I dare say, that there was less concern now about how you looked in public, young people, than there was then. TL: Probably. GW: But I think this is a healthy thing that's happened. But there was more sensitivity, I'm sure for girls there was more sensitivity than fellows. I wasn't married, and here again the ones who were married were the ones who suffered the most in the Depression. If 5 you had a job, why you lived on top of the world no matter how little you made. I graduated from college and went to work for my father. I made $75 a month and I could live very, very well on it. I'll always remember a vacation l took— California— I saw the Rose Bowl game, parade, stayed there for two weeks, drove down by myself so I was the only one paying for gas, played golf every day and the total trip cost me about $55. So, if you had a few dollars, you see, you could live extremely well, you could buy so much with the little you had. But, unfortunately one out of every four people was unemployed and for a while living on nothing, using up the reserve they had then finally working for the government, $40 a month was standard. If you had a family with $40 a month, you could just buy food, this was about the best you could do. TL: What changes, if any, did World War II bring on your business in Utah? GW: On the particular business I was in, those were the best years we ever had in terms of overall profit. And, this was simply because so many people moved to Utah. Defense industries had their real beginning then, Hill Field had started a few years before, but any sizeable operation awaited the war. And, the demand was so great that you could sell all the candy that you could make, if you could get the material to make it. This was our great problem and if you could get workers to work for you, this was our second great problem. We had to make every concession in the world to our employees, most of them fortunately, were very old or beyond the age where the government wanted to hire them, and so it was to their advantage to stay with our company and they did, but we had to make sure that they made a living comparable to what war workers would make. And, there were controls on wages, as you perhaps know. The government put a ceiling on wages. We had to allow them to work overtime doing odd jobs, painting, 6 construction work, renovating the factory. We did a great deal of improving the physical plant during that time. There were great difficulties in getting adequate material. This is why the demand for candy was so great. Sugar, of course, was rationed, and this meant that you bought any kind of sweetener you could to make up for the lack of sugar. We could buy sweetened condensed milk. We made a lot of caramel out of sweetened milk primarily. What was made and sold was unbelievable. We concentrated again on making candy that would bring our dollar sales up - box chocolates, because the demand was so high you could make only one kind of candy almost, to satisfy and get your dollar sales. We brought all our salesmen in and for four full years of the war they worked in the plant making candy. We simply allocated the candy we made out to the various customers that they had. It was all done on a basis determined by how much they had purchased from us previously. One of the very difficult things was that all of our customers thought we were giving other customers more than we were giving them and they were unhappy with how much candy they got. But, whenever you would want to, you could completely clean out the factory of every bit of material that you had and all the candy that you had produced from it; we tried to make it stretch. Notwithstanding this, because we had no sales costs, because we could concentrate on high priced candies, our overhead went down and our profits went up. But it was a very profitable period for all candy businesses in America and yet with the taxes the way they were, and of course, they should have been, the government got a very sizeable part of the profit that we made. Excess profits, anything beyond normal profit, was taxed away during the war. And, I think everyone agrees this was correct. No one should be placed in a position where they made more than usual profit during the war. All Americans were 7 suffering from the war. I was here during the better part of the war years. I was here during the earliest of the years and got back right after the war was over and for two and a half years after the war we were still rationed on sugar and so war time operation was very much the same as it had been before, shortages everywhere and good years profit wise. TL: How come there was such a shortage of sugar during the war? I've heard that before. GW: Well there were rumors that they used a lot of sugar for explosives, but this I doubt. So much of our sugar came from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Philippine Islands, Hawaii that when a scarcity of ships occurred, you simply couldn't bring the sugar into your country the way you had before. And, I think this was a major reason for the shortage. I don't know, you see, there was a terrible shortage of sugar in World War I too, the same kind of thing happened. There was no government attempt to ration sugar at that time and so there was a lot of profiteering. People would become millionaires over night by putting in a whole warehouse full of sugar waiting till the price jumped up. They wouldn't allow this to happen during World War II and that was a much more rational way of handling things. There wasn't only a shortage on sugar there was a shortage of many other products too, charcoal. So much of the effort of all Americans was geared to the war effort that candy being a luxury really, was one of the things that you simply felt had to be given up if something had to be, it was one of things you did for the war effort. We were very fortunate during the war aside from all the difficulties of just staying in business. It was difficult to work with employees, it was very, very difficult to get the material to work with, and difficult to satisfy customers. But, you could stand those difficulties if you made a profit. The difference was, in the Depression you could take 8 your pick of the finest people in the world to work for you as employees, they couldn't get jobs. You got all the material you wanted in the world and you could satisfy every customer to the utmost, but you couldn't make a profit. And so, the Depression, I would say, was much more difficult. TL: Could you explain some of the differences of teaching history in Utah compared with teaching history in Montana? GW: Well, basically there aren't as many differences as one might imagine. The type of school I'm teaching in now and taught in up there are somewhat the same. I find that the average student is the same. I think there is always a tendency for us to read differences into different places a little more than there actually are. When I first went up there, I could see a lot of differences from Utah, now when I think back, they weren't so different. I was teaching in a much smaller town than Ogden and in this respect I think there was a difference. The students came from a more agricultural area than the Ogden area. Almost all our students came off the farms, wheat farms, cattle ranches, and they all took it for granted that they had to work real hard to make a living, they were used to this. They were willing to work very hard in school. I think maybe their effort was a little greater than many of the students I've seen at Weber. On the other hand, they were less sophisticated, living farther away from city life, from the mainstream of American society. They had traveled less, they had seen fewer people from other parts of the world than the average Utahn. And, I think that they were more ingrown than we are down here, although there is a tendency for our culture here to be rather ingrown, like there is in every part of the country where one class of people predominate. Again, I hate to generalize because I suspect after being here for four 9 years word gets out what kind of a teacher I am and I get a particular kind of student and I can talk about that class of student. And, I find a surprising number of them do a very good job if you give them something to respond to, like they did in Montana. The school up there was strictly a dormitory school, 1500 students in a little town of 10,000. They all lived on campus, many of them so far away they couldn't go home on weekends. There was much more student life up there because there was nothing else to do. There was nothing in town and the students had to make their own entertainment. Dances for instance; the most common thing in the world would be to go to a dance at the student union on Friday or Saturday night and see all the 1700 students, see 900 or a thousand of them there having a good time in the only way they could have a good time. I haven't participated in the social life here like I did up there as a chaperone because this is a much larger school. But, I think the very nature of the student body here; living off campus, living at home, working, many of them being married, tends to prevent this kind of activity. Not nearly as many students up there were married as there are here. And there were practically no jobs available for girls. For fellows, the best jobs available were going down and scrubbing out a bar after it closed at three or four o'clock in the morning. And so, they lived on campus and it tended to make for a much more unified student body, and tended to make for a much closer relationship between faculty and students. It was very, very common after a lecture, because our lectures were held in the same building where our offices were, to have four, five, six students follow you into the office and you'd continue talking about what you were talking about in class, or have some kind of a bull session and I thought there were great advantages to this. On the other hand, there are advantages to having students who have been out in the 10 world, who have jobs, who have responsibilities, who get away from the academic life a little bit too. I think there are tremendous advantages here also. So, there are compensations both ways. I would hate to say that the students there or the students here did a better job. In neither case did they represent perhaps the best students in the state. In Montana almost all of the very good students left the state and went elsewhere for their education. Minnesota, Wisconsin, Washington were full of Montana students who could afford to go and who were academically inclined. And likewise, I think it's quite well known that most students in Utah, if they can afford it, prefer to go to a larger university somewhere where, at least they think they're going to get a better education. I'm not sure they do, but at least they think they're getting a better education. The competition is tougher, let's put it that way. I gained a lot of respect for the students in the school up there and much respect for the students down here. It was friendlier up there, I think, only because everyone comes from smaller communities. And, I think if we went into small Utah communities we'd find more friendliness than we do in a city the size of Ogden. It's hard to be friendly when you live as close to as many people as we do here. And, there, where your next door neighbor is several miles away, people just naturally become very, very friendly. Traditionally, they're this way, I think all farm people are. I'd hate to say most other people were by their nature more friendly. In terms of prejudices to break down, I wouldn't say they were any greater here than there. Always where there's a dominant culture, there is a general tendency to accept that culture without question. And, I find this existed up there. The culture there was predominantly Lutheran, and it could get just as ingrown as the L.D.S. culture sometimes appears here. Where you're judged by their standards pretty much, no one 11 questions the standards. And, although it was not a Lutheran school like Weber is not an L.D.S. school, never the less, most of the teachers were Lutheran, most of the people who attended were Lutheran and I found about the same kind of prejudice. TL: Do you like teaching at a smaller college like that or one like Weber? Weber is not large, but I guess in comparison with that one it's quite large. GW: Well, Weber is a pretty good size, Tami. Nine thousand students is a lot of students. Frankly, it's turned out almost the same. I have had so many students who have taken four, five, six, seven classes from me that I've seen a certain group of students at Weber almost as often as I saw the group up there. You knew everyone up there. Over four years you got acquainted with everyone on campus, which had in some ways a disadvantage. There was a minimum amount of privacy up there. I used to have to sneak into my office at 7:00 in the morning. By 7:30 there were students waiting to talk to me. Many times they were just homesick, bored, wanted something to do, and here you see, we have just the opposite of this. Sometimes we sit in our offices and wait, and wait, and wait, for some student who feels the need to come in and talk to us, and seldom they do because they're too busy, or we're too far away from where we teach classes. And, then too, I think the overall growth at Weber has been so rapid, this has made for a certain amount of difficulty. I spend half my time walking between classes. I think this is kind of a waste. It's real nice to be able to walk out of your office and into a classroom next door and not waste a lot of time this way. But I think Weber still has many characteristics of the small school which it was so very recently. I kind of hope it doesn't lose these characteristics. I think there are advantages and disadvantages both ways. It's good to have a group of students, many of whom have been out in the world 12 somewhere, traveled around, seen something else, and I'm speaking here of both L.D.S. and non-L.D.S. Many L.D.S. missionaries supposedly come back very, very biased and prejudiced, but I've found an amazing number of them who were open, who had seen things that were different than they’d ever seen before and were very responsive to, at least being critical, not necessarily throwing away their values, but being critical of their values which I think we all should be. Utah is sort of on the main line in America. Many people here have traveled considerably but there are parts of the world where travel has been very restricted. In Montana, they used to think about Glacier National Park as almost being the end of the world, you see. TL: What is your opinion on job discrimination in Utah? Would you say it's the result of the Mormon influence in Utah or some other factor? GW: Well, first I think you assume, the way you asked the question that there is job discrimination, and here I first have to talk from my own experiences and then acknowledge some of the things that I hear. In terms of my own experiences, my experience in business was such that I don't believe that there was ever job discrimination. My father was very devout L.D.S. and I don't think it ever occurred to him whether he was hiring L.D.S. or Christian, for that matter, or Catholic, or Protestant. In fact if there was any preference, he showed it perhaps for Roman Catholic girls of Italian descent, because we happened to have a couple of them who were such excellent workers. And, he did what most of us do, he generalized and said: all Italian, Roman Catholic girls are excellent workers, and hired a larger number of them. But, I just do not believe that he ever even thought of discrimination in this respect. Nor in hiring when he was on the school board, and I know he fought a long and hard battle 13 there, at a time when the Ogden City School Board was divided, half L.D.S., half Mason. The friction between the two was very deep and poor Roman Catholic and Jewish people had no say whatsoever in the education system here. These were days when large numbers of railroad people were in Ogden, the percentage of non-L.D.S. was perhaps, I would presume, higher than even now. And so, I grew up being unaware of joining religion and such things as jobs. However, I've talked to a lot of people, very responsible people, who I have every reason in the world to consider as giving valid reports, who claim that they have seen or have participated in job discrimination. And I would presume that there has been this. I've been told at one time that this was very much a fact here at Weber State, but certainly it has not been a case with me. I made no bones about the fact that I was not very orthodox when they hired me here and they still hired me. And, there's been no discrimination that I can see against me since I've been back here at Weber, I'm sure this was not always the case. Weber was a church school for a long time and the entire administration and faculty for so long were all L.D.S. I suppose the transition from a church to a state college is a very difficult thing. But, I won't discount the fact that there is discrimination here. I think it exists almost everywhere. I know in some areas of the East, if you are Roman Catholic and you apply for a job and they know you're Roman Catholic, even with large companies, you have a better chance. I know there's some Roman Catholic companies which refuse to hire Protestants. Boston, and New England, is notorious this way. Job discrimination is something that goes on everywhere. People are biased and I think we have our usual number of biased people in this community as elsewhere. But, again, I have to speak from my own experience and it hasn't been used against me nor have I ever 14 consciously used it in my experience in business. Let me just point this out: here in our own department there are now more non-L.D.S. than L.D.S., and much of this was conscious. Realizing that we were ingrown as we were bound to have been, we have set out to bring in people from the outside. And, sometimes, I'm afraid, we passed up people who have been equally good or better because they were L.D.S. We actually discriminated against L.D.S. because we were told that we should bring in other cultures, broaden out. I don't mean to infer that we didn't bring good people, but one of the reasons that Weber has been able to hire as many good, people with doctors degrees, at the price Weber's been able to pay, has been because many young Mormons with PhD's are willing to come back to this community to work for less, than someone with equal ability would work for who was non-L.D.S. And, I don't think in a case like this that we can ignore the fact. I think we should look at the individual and not hire because of church. Sometimes there's a tendency to discriminate in the other direction, you see, where there's this attempt we have. Word came down to us, hire anyone but L.D.S. because we have too many L.D.S. here in the college. Now, what other departments have done about this, I don't know, but I know our department has very consciously tried to bring in people from outside cultures and very successfully we've been able to do that. TL: Well our tape's just about out, so I'd like to thank you very much for letting me talk to you this afternoon. 15