Oral History Program Thomas Bergman Interviewed by N. Nicholas 08 March 1971 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Thomas Bergman Interviewed by N. Nicholas 08 March 1971 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: Bergman, Thomas, an oral history by N. Nicholas, 08 March 1971, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral interview with Tom Bergman. The interview was conducted on March 8, 1971, by N. Nicholas. Bergman discusses his life in Utah and his role in the church. NN: What's your name? TB: My name is Tom Bergman and I live at the old Porterville Church in Porterville, Utah. That is about four miles south of Morgan in Weber Canyon. NN: This is what we want to talk to you about. What caused you to come to Utah? Why did you decide you'd like to live in Utah? TB: Well, my wife and I were living in Detroit, Michigan. I was working for General Motors as a supervisor in a machine shop where we built the G.M.C. engine. We were the host of a couple of missionaries from your state of Utah. My wife and I were both Methodists and of course our families were Methodists for many generations on both sides, but we decided we would like, after listening to the two missionaries from Utah, to join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. After being in the church for two or three years, we were curious about the home state of the Church. I was out here for an M.I.A. conference (I believe it was in 1966). One of the people I had met in Michigan had since moved to Utah and had gone to work for Job Corps. We got to talking and he asked me what I was doing and I asked him what he was doing. He said, "Say, how would you like to come to Utah." I said, "Yes, I'd like to," so he hired me to come out and teach at a machine shop. As you must realize, Utah doesn't pay the money that Michigan does, 1 but we saw an opportunity to do a couple of things that we wanted to do so we took the job and that's why we are here. NN: Where did you first get your idea to move up in your part of the country of Morgan? TB: Oh, well when we first moved here we moved to Farmington and we bought the first hotel in Davis County, the one that was first built. It was built about 113 years ago and it was in real bad shape. It was run down and there were some renters in it that were just moving out. The second story was not used at all and the birds were flying through it. We were attracted to old things so we purchased it and restored it to the original shape that it had been in. It was a real nice home, but it was here in this valley. My wife and I are used to a little more water than what you find over in this valley and so we looked around. We were working out here in Clearfield and we couldn't get too far away but we'd driven up in Uintah Valley and it's a lot greener up in Morgan than it is on this side of the mountains. After we restored the home in Farmington, we decided to sell it and were looking around for something else to restore. Up in Morgan Valley we ran across this old church. It had been abandoned since 1945, it was in pretty bad shape but it was greener over there and that's what made us decide to move in the other valley. The church had abandoned the building just after the Second World War. They decided there wasn't enough activity in it. The membership had become very inactive after the war and it got to where there were few members meeting in the church. I guess the people were poor at that time. I don't know. I don't know what the area was. From what I hear I guess the people didn't have a lot of money after the Second World War and they couldn't keep the building up. It cost a lot of money to heat it and they got some cracks in the plaster in the ceiling and so they were going to have to re-do part of the ceiling. At 2 that time the school district had decided to consolidate. There had been a lot of little schools spread out in all these little communities so they built one big school in Morgan. Then the children were bussed or taken into this larger school and it left a lot of small schools vacant. There was one in Porterville they'd used and since they thought it would cost them a lot of money to restore the church or repair it, they thought they would just buy the school building and move into that because it was in good shape. They abandoned the church and sold it to Bud Kilborn for $500 - the church and four acres. Well, he bought it and was going to use it for storage or a barn of something of this nature, but because of community sentiment for this building they wouldn't let him use it for anything like that. So all it did was sit vacant, for every time he wanted to put a cow in it they'd start talking and saying nasty things so all he did was store a few things in it. It sat since 1945 until two years ago in 1969, so it sat quite a number of years vacant. In this number of years, part of the shingles on one side wore out from the sun and let the water in. Pigeons moved in, then owls, bats, hornets and flies, skunks and whatever happened to be walking by there. When we came across it, it was sitting in this condition with all kinds of machinery and stuff stored in it - oats, records and whatever accumulated over the last thirty years. A lot of people stored things there. They'd just come along to store things there, then they'd move away or die and leave everything in there. NN: Just left everything there and moved out? TB: There was a lot of old coal stoves. NN: Could you utilize a lot of the cook stoves and things? 3 TB: Yes, all items. Now, when we bought it we had just sold our house in Farmington and we made a little money on it, because of the restoration of that home. Going back a little further, my wife and I had restored two or three other homes, two in Michigan. We had been doing this as a side business. We would make a little money on them and get a little ahead. To start seven years ago, my wife and I decided that we wanted to get out of debt. I was an engineer at G.M. at that time. We had a big colonial two story home, new car, a boat and all the other things that go along with that type of life. We weren't paying off more than were making, but we were paying out what we were making. We were making a good salary, but we were paying it out. NN: Everyone's problem these days. TB: We were living quite high. We decided we wanted to get out of debt and that's when we started buying homes and restoring them. When we sold the home in Farmington, we had enough money then to buy and restore the church so we'd have a home paid for. With this in mind, we bought the church from Bud Kilburn. We paid $2,000 for it and one acre of ground. The river fronts one side of the property. First thing we had to do was roof it. Did you have another question? NN: When you started to rebuild the church, where did you get the material? When you said you roofed it, did you use new material? TB: Oh, yes, on the roofing. Well, what we did when we bought the church, we knew how much money we had - $15,000. We said we'd take half of the $15,000 and spend it on restoration. It isn't too much money when you are working on a building with 6,000 square feet with four stories. We allowed so much for each item, like the plumbing, there was no electricity, no windows, no roof and the doors were knocked off the front. 4 We decided all the things we had to renew and then allowed so much money for each item. We divided the $7,000 in these categories. We had done it to our other homes so we knew approximately what to do it for. We knew we would have to do most of the labor ourselves because the labor is the most expensive part. We used the artifacts that were left inside. We found a way to use them as decorations, such as the cook stoves were used as decorations in the kitchen. Someone brought in some cafeteria benches, the type that are leather with a table in between. We used those in one of the dining rooms. NN: How about the old pews. TB: We had something like twenty-five of them left. Some of these weren't restorable but we took the ones that were restorable and cut them down to eighteen inches wide for chairs. Others we cut down to four feet for Deacons benches and we left two original lengths to go along the back walls. I have been schooled in metal work as a tradesman in my profession as an engineer so I work with metal a lot. We got a lot of those steel rimmed tires like off the old Model T's, the spoke rims. We used those and made lamps out of them and chandeliers. I got a lot of ideas for the metal work from the books of the Days of Knights of King Arthur's time ** This is not on the tape ** There was a movement in Coalville, Utah to save the old Tabernacle at Coalville, Utah from being torn down to make room for a new Tabernacle. There was a vote taken of the church members. Not on whether to save the Tabernacle, but if the people wanted to pay for two Tabernacles or one. The people voted for one Tabernacle, so Tom Bergman went to Coalville and talked to Stake President Brown 5 into giving him the steeple off the old Tabernacle, which President Brown did. Mr. Bergman removed the steeple and is in the process of building an 8 sided platform of top of the Porterville church on which the place the Coalville steeple. The platform will have 8 stained glass windows and spotlight shining on the steeple. While in Coalville, Mr. Bergman was told that all of the people wanting to save the Tabernacle was contacted by phone the night before the vote. That if they wanted to save the Tabernacle not to go to church the next day in protest. This affected the vote. 6