Oral History Program Ed Simone Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 14 October 2013 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Ed Simone Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 14 October 2013 Copyright © 2023 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. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town with terminals from nine rail systems. Business and commercial houses flourished as Ogden, with both east-west and northsouth rail lines, became a shipping and commerce hub. After World War II, the railroad business declined. Some government agencies and defense industry businesses continued to gravitate to Ogden after the war—including the Internal Revenue Regional Center, the Marquardt Corporation, Boeing Corporation, Volvo-White Truck Corporation, Morton-Thiokol, and several other smaller operations. However, the economy became more service oriented, with small businesses developing to appeal to the changing demographics, including the growing Hispanic population. ____________________________________ 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 This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Simone, Ed, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 14 October 2013, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Cindy & Ed Simone 14 October 2013 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Ed Simone. The interview was conducted on October 14, 2013, at the Kokomo Club in Ogden, Utah, by Lorrie Rands. Ed discusses his experience with 25th Street. Melissa Johnson, the video technician, and Cindy Simone are also present during this interview. LR: It is Monday, October 14, 2013. We are in the Kokomo Club here on 25th street, with Ed and Cindy Simone. We are here talking about 25th street and the Kokomo Club specifically, and their memories of the street. So, let’s just jump right in, were you born here in Ogden? ED: No, I was born in Denver, Colorado. We moved out here when I was about three years old. My uncle had a place up the street called the National, and my dad went in partners with him in there. A few years later, my dad moved up the street in the next block, and opened another bar up there. It was called the Palm. He was renting from a sporting goods store, part of their building. Anyway, he stayed there for about four or five years, then he bought the building next door because the sporting goods store wanted to use their own store. So they named that one Lee’s Tavern and that was probably, let’s see, probably 47, 48, something like that. They had that a number of years, my folks did. The Federal building was gonna come in and take that property up there, and the government work awful slow, anyway they got a bunch of appraisals and all kinds of stuff like that and then they had to fight the eminent domain, and the government doesn’t want to give them anything for the property and they fought them, and 1 finally got a fairly decent price out of the building. But it even took five years after that before the government came in and took the building. So in the meantime, I was working up in Montana, construction work, and the like. It was going from job to job and I called the folks to ask what was going on down here. There was an old guy by the name of Leavy Aaron that had this place here, but when I was a kid I used to run up and down this street all the time. I went to school just about three blocks from here, grade school. Then I would sell newspapers up and down the street when I got out of school. So I knew most of the bartenders and bar owners and a lot of the people down here. Anyway, I came back into town and Leavy, I came into talk to him, he was probably about 85 years old, and big thick glasses. He was telling me that he wants to get out of here. He said he’s got his kid working for him, and his kid had to be 50, and he said “the kid’s stealing me blind.” So I asked him, I said “well what do you want to get out of here?” He asked, “Well, are you interested in coming in?” I said, “Well, could be.” He said, “Well, take over my lease and I’ll walk.” CS: Honey, how many years ago was that? How old were you? ED: I was twenty. LR: So what year was that? ED: 1960? 1961. 2 LR: You said that you would sell newspapers on the street. Did you grow up on this street? ED: Well, the folks had a bar on here, so I’d get out of school and come down and sell papers, and then go home with them. Change of shift was 5 or 6 O’clock at night. That was an everyday occurrence. LR: What were some of the fun things you did growing up on this street? ED: Fun things? Well, gee, I don’t know. You know they always talked about tunnels under the street here, and I’ve been here all my life and I never have seen those tunnels. I know that in certain places had areas in their basements that had been bricked up or rocked up, covered in and stuff like that. I’m presuming that at one time or another there were tunnels. But I never did see them. But if there was a pigeon on top of any roof, I was there at one time or another. I’ve been on top of every building, but not on the new ones. So across the street was the Rose Room’s, and you’ve heard of the Rose Rooms? Well just further on, on Lincoln there, was a good friend of mine that I went to school with as kids, and that was his Aunt. LR: So was it Bill? ED: Bill. LR: Did you know Gary Young, Cosmo? ED: Oh yea. LR: I talked to Cosmo. 3 ED: He just lived across the street. I just saw him down to Karen’s the other day. LR: He was fun. ED: Yeah, he’s a good man. LR: Very good man. Anyway, I’m sorry I wanted to know if you, because I have a story about Cosmo and this bar. I was going to ask you about it when we further in. I’m getting ahead of myself. I apologize. Rose’s sister had two kids, two sons. Would you hang around with both of them or? ED: No, just mostly Bill. The other one was the younger son. Anyway, he kept telling me, well that’s my Aunt that has the Rose Room’s. He said, “Well come on and I’ll take you up there.” So we went up there and we’d stick around there for a while. When you walked in downstairs, you had to ring a buzzer, and then that door would open and you’d go up a flight of stairs and ring another one and somebody would look through a peep hole and look at you and then they’d push another button and you’d go in through a hallway corridor. They’d look at you again and they’d let you in to the living room. We’d go up there and she would give us money to get out of there to go to Walgreens to get a soda. She shouldn’t have started that because then we just kept going back. That was an interesting place. Of course you know her business, well I used to tell my wife that a... CS: He was a towel boy. ES: I was a towel boy. CS: And I believed him. I didn’t know where it was, I believed him. 4 ES: You know what a towel boy is? LR: I don’t know if I want to? CS: He had to count the towels. He had to count the towels to make sure the girls weren’t cheating the Madame. ES: Right, you know because they do their business, and they got to clean up, so they… CS: I believed him until a few years ago, matter of fact, then I realized that he was lying to me. LR: I’d have believed him too. You have this way of talking that just… CS: Yes, I know, he’s just very believable. LR: So, it didn’t seem dangerous growing up here on this street? ES: You know it didn’t seem dangerous to me at all, I mean, I’d seen a lot of stuff, troubles and fights and all kinds of different stuff, but it didn’t bother me at all. Although when I came in here, guys that I went to school with I had come down here and we came to this place and cleaned it up. But as far as them coming down and drinking and partying, they wouldn’t do it. The street was a little too rough for them, but I didn’t notice it being rough, I just... CS: You were raised on it. ES: Yea. LR: I think that’s what it was. I find it interesting, those that weren’t raised on this street, they were terrified to come down here, and those that were raised on the street, what’s the big deal? 5 ES: It’s no big deal. LR: So, I find that fascinating. In, did you go to Ogden High then? ES: No, I went to St. Joe. St. Joe’s high school, yea. LR: I have no idea where that is. ES: It’s right up by the mountains. CS: Right against the mountain. It’s a catholic school. He was a star at sports. He was in baseball and basketball and. LR: So you did it all? ES: Well yes, but it was a real small school. CS: And he was class president. LR: So, what year did you graduate then? ES: Oh hell, it was it was in 58 or something like that. LR: So in, three years after you graduate you acquired the bar. Did it seem strange to, I realize you grew with your parent’s bar, but did it seem, was that something that you wanted to do? ES: No, it’s not what I really wanted to do, I just thought well, in fact I thought that it was the folks, it was the idea that I’d come down here and open this up and get this going and then when the federal government moved them out of their place up there that they’d come down here and I’d just move on. But it took three or four years for the federal government to get their act together and start tearing the place down, so, in fact, I was in their place and the construction company that was tearing the buildings down was tearing out the back side of that, of our building there. I was telling my 6 dad, “It’s about time for us to get out of here.” But by then we had another building lined up over on Washington Boulevard which would be 27th and 28th and so we pushed the bar over and put it on some rollers and rolled it the front door and put it on a flat bed and took it over to the other place. CS: Sue’s Lounge. LR: Ok, that’s Sue’s Lounge. ES: Then we called that one Sue’s Lounge. We took the back bar, which was a pretty back bar it was a lot of glass, a lot of mirrors and it was made there at the bar. But we took up the coolers and the booths and the stools, everything over there and opened up that one and then by then I had been here what, three or four years, and they decided well, “We’ll just stay up here and you can stay down there.” LR: So your parents ran Sue’s Lounge, and you stayed here and did this. How long did your parents stay there at Sue’s Lounge? ES: About eighteen years. LR: Oh wow. CS: He was running it, he was doing the work for them and checking out shift changes and he’d go down there at 4:30 and check their shift change and then he’d come here at 5. Then he would check out their bar at closing time, then he’d come here at closing and check out here. LR: So they owned it, but you ran it? ES: Yeah. LR: In essence. 7 ES: Well there for a long, long time and so my dad started getting sick and finally passed away and then I just run it for my mom. As far as any of the assets or anything it was all hers. Then I had two sisters working up there. LR: Truly a family business. ES: Yeah. CS: It was, but his mother owned it. His parents owned it. They just worked for them. And Eddie didn’t get any pay for doing that at all. LR: I’m not an Ogden native, how long did it stay open, Sue’s Lounge, or is it still open? ES: No, it’s not open now. It, it stayed, well, we had it for about eighteen and it got to a point where I was trying to work this one and take care of that one and then I went into a, the bail bonding business and then I started doing some building and there just wasn’t enough time in the day. So consequently, I canceled out the short term and the one that wasn’t making as much as it should. CS: But he closed it for your mother. ES: Yeah. I sold Sue’s Lounge. I had the two sisters that were working there and I asked them if they wanted to take it and I’d just help them you know, and they didn’t want to so I just sold it and gave the proceeds to my mother and I think that guy had it for about ten, twelve years, something like that, and then it’s closed now though. CS: But you didn’t own that building, you just owned the business. 8 LR: So, when you acquired this place, I love the story of how you acquired it by the way, when you acquired it, what was it like? ES: You mean the street, the customers. LR: I mean, how would you describe it, was it a club, was it a bar? ES: You know, it was, in those days, the street was, it was a skid row. The street, 25th was a skid row. CS: Was it called the Kokomo? ES: Yea, it was called the Kokomo. CS: How long had it been called the Kokomo? ES: I think it had been called the Kokomo probably five, six years before I got it. Before that it was called the Pioneer. CS: And [inaudible] owned it right? ES: Yes. LR: So, you said the street was like, in those days it was a skid row, ES: Yea, you know, there was, the railroad was in and so you get a lot of guys traveling in and out of the freight trains, Ogden was, 25th street was easy access to food, easy access to lodging and easy access to liquor. There were a couple of liquor stores on the street plus all the bars. I think when I came down here there was thirty-eight bars in two blocks. LR: So what was the average customer like back then? ES: Just a honkey tonk. CS: Or a service person. ES: Well yea, well, 9 CS: Military. ES: Only if there was a war was going on or something like that, then the service guys would come through, but it was just a lot of just working class people and a lot of down and outers, a lot of down and outers. LR: I was reading an article that said there was a bandstand at one time? ES: In here? LR: Yes, about right where we’re sitting. ES: A couple of them, two or three of them. LR: And then, one day you were just done. ES: Oh yes, well, yea, I’d run bands in here for kind about ten years or better and then I just got so sick of the live music. It seemed like I was spinning my wheels, you know, I’d get pretty good takes, but I was making money for the distributer and by the time I paid my extra help and pay for the bands I wasn’t making anything. CS: Yea, but also when you had bands, you have a lot of problems. A lot of fights, so that was one of the reasons. ES: Yea, it got to a point there for a while I didn’t know when I left the house that day, I wondered who I’d get in a fight with that night. CS: It was an every night deal, fights every night. ES: You said kind of a LR: So one day you were just done with it all? ES: Yea, they, I fired the band and they gathered their stuff and took it out and I took a sledge hammer and knocked down the bandstand. The next week 10 I put in a go-go girl and she waitressed when she wasn’t dancing. I was doing better that way then I was with the band. CS: That wasn’t me. ES: No. LR: This mural right here, how did it come into being? ES: That was probably about 1963, 64 something like that. There was an old railroader that used to come in here and he drank pretty heavy, his name was Tex Dunne. He told me one night, he said, “When are you going to let me paint that wall,” because all that I had on there was a few signs and nothing much to it. I said, “Well, I didn’t know you was an artist.” He said, “Yea, I paint murals.” I said, “Well, ok.” He said, “What do you want on it?” I said, “Put me a river, a cabin and some kind of animals.” He said, “Ok, I need a few things. You got a couple of planks that you can put on top of them booths so I can stand on them so I can paint?” I said, “Well, yea.” He said, “I need a four-inch brush, a gallon of white paint and a half a dozen tubes of color. I’ll start in the morning. The only other thing I need is when I start I want a fifth of Jim Beam sitting on the bar. When the Jim Beam’s gone, I’m gone.” CS: Every day. 11 ES: So he would get up and paint and dip that four inch brush into the bucket and get a little color here and a little color there and get up and wham, wham, wham, wham, and he’d get down and look at it and have a couple of shots and get back up and the thing started taking shape. CS: Paint brush in one hand and a bottle in another. LR: How long did it take him? ES: It took him four days. LR: Really? Wow. CS: I thought it was longer than that, but you were here not me. ES: No, four days. LR: That’s remarkable. CS: He did that, he did one of these, and every single bar on the street and ours is the only one left. They covered them up, they painted over them, sandblasted down to the brick or whatever, but ours is the only one and he has protected it with his life. We’ve got Weber State College working on it right now fixing it up. LR: That’s what he said when I talked to him. I just think it is fantastic. ES: Yeah, a few years ago, his granddaughter came, he’s long passed, but his granddaughter came in here and she heard that it was still here. It’s got quite a deal for a granddaughter to come back after that many years and. CS: I have a friend that has a small painting that he did, so he might be famous, I don’t know. 12 LR: Let’s see, so you said you had some stories that, but you didn’t really elaborate, would you like to share them? ES: Sure. Well I can tell you some gory stories, I mean, I’ll tell you a few of them. LR: I’d love to hear them. You ok hearing them? Make sure she’s ok. CS: It doesn’t matter to me. ES: Well, for instance, she’s with me one night, we come, we were down here working had some extra help and we walked across the parking lot and went to the hotel to get a cup of coffee. There was a Mexican guy, slim built Mexican guy that I had known for quite a while, and he told me that he had had troubles with this other Mexican guy that was outside, and he said, “That guy is a rat, and I’m going to kill him.” I said, “Well, ok, do what you want to do I guess.” So me and her went over and had some cup of coffee and when we come back, the cops were out in back here, and the guy that was gonna get killed was dead, and what the guy had done was beat him to death with a brick. CS: He’s lying there in a pose flipping the bird off. It was, I shouldn’t say that, but it was kind of funny to see him lying there in that position, but it was like he’d been posed, but he was flipping the world off when he died. LR: As he was dying. CS: Yeah, it was weird. 13 ES: And they finally caught the guy that did it, but that guy, that other guy that guy had ratted this guy off and some other guys and so this guy took care of him, but it was kind of weird that his head was laying on the curb and his body was in the parking lot and he had his hand up with his, giving the finger. CS: I’ll never forget it. LR: So was that common? ES: There were a number of those over a period of a few years there. CS: What about the Indian that drank the, we walked next door and that Indian was drinking that, what was it, vodka? And he let out a war hoot and was on his knees and he let out a war hoot and after he drank that whole fifth and he, I guess his heart blew up. He went down and we’re going, wow, he died. But I mean it was whoa. ES: There was that bootlegger that had this building next door to us. This store front, and the guy’s name was Big Mac. He was a bank robber out of Dillon, Montana. He spent some time up there in the prison and then come down here. Big heavy-set guy, wore bib overalls, never had his shoes laced up. He sold a lot of whiskey though. Anyway, he was selling whiskey over there and this Indian walked in and sold him a fifth of vodka, and the Indian went outside there and chugged the fifth of vodka. CS: Wasn’t outside though it was inside the building by the front door. ES: But he went outside and did a war dance and walked inside and sat down and fell over dead. 14 CS: We just stepped over him and left. What do you do? We didn’t have anything to do with it. ES: I’ll tell you, that Big Mac was something else. He was always into something. Stolen property or something like, or bootlegging or whatever he could get. But he had set up a camp down in the jungles behind the railroad, and in tramp heaven down there. Anyway, he had a guy that moved in with him, his name was Lucky. Lucky was kind of a smart guy, he was a smart alec. Well the two of them had come up here on the street and that Lucky had the habit of giving me a bad time, and so I had got into about three altercations with him and then it got to the point where he’d just look in the door and go like that to me, you know, like he was pulling a trigger on me, so anyway, he didn’t get along with too many people. But, they went back down to their camp there by the river, in the railroad and they’d been drinking and a couple of guys come off a freight, a younger guy and an older guy, and come over to their camp and was drinking with them. The older guy says “Well, listen, I’m gonna go up town and see if I can do some hustling.” So he left the kid there. Well when the old man got back, the kid had the hell beat out of him, and the kid told the old man, he said, “That guy there beat me up, stole my marijuana.” So the old man went over to him and confronted this Lucky. Lucky jumped up and said, “Yes, I did that, what the hell you gonna do about it.” Anyway, the old man got up and he side stepped that Lucky 15 and caught in him with a knife in the kidney area towards the back and whipped it through to the other side. Cut his spine in half. Anyway, the old man grabbed the kid and hobbled down to the train and pushed him in on a train and they rode out. Well Lucky kept telling Mac, “You gotta get me help, I’m hurt bad. I’m hurt bad ya gotta get me help.” Mac said, “Well, ya I’ll get you some help,” and he just sat there. Well, Lucky died and then Mac went up and… CS: Went through his pockets. ES: Naw, he went up and called the cops and the cops came down and took care of things. Then later on, I’m talking to mac up here on the street, and he’s telling me the story, and I said “Well Mac, how much did he have on him.” He said, “Oh he had six dollars and thirty-eight cents left in his pocket.” Well he robbed old Lucky after he died. LR: A whole six dollars? ES: Yea. CS: No that’s just what he said was left. LR: Oh, ok. CS: He got everything. And tell them how Big Mac died hun. ES: I don’t know how he died. CS: He tripped over his shoe laces, walking down the street. ES: Oh yeah, I forgot about that. CS: He never had his shoe laces done up. 16 ES: He never had his shoe laces done up. CS: And he tripped and we called an ambulance. The ambulance wasn’t gonna take him and we said “we seen him hit, he hit hard.” They did take him and he died a couple hours later from… ES: A brain injury. CS: A brain injury. He hit hard. LR: Was the street that bad during the sixties? ES: Yea, it was pretty tame then. LR: It was tame then? ES: Yea. Better than it had been before. LR: So it was rougher before. ES: Yea. CS: We had a Spanish guy stab an Indian with an icepick, we still have the icepick in the back room, great big old [inaudible] right here by the door. ES: It was some Mexicans. CS: Yea, Mexicans stabbing a Mexican. For no reason, I mean, I’m back there tending bar, and I don’t think there’s any problems at all and all the sudden I see this ice pick and I see this guy get stabbed over nothing. ES: Yea, the guy was named um, CS: Preexisting argument I guess, I don’t know. ES: The guy was a Texan, from CS: Texas, Arizona? 17 ES: Texas, New Mexico, something. It was kind of slick looking Mexican, you know. Classy looking Mexican. Anyway, he got into this argument with a guy named Lucero, and this Mexican went to the bathroom and I noticed this Lucero goes back and just stands by the end of the bar there, and old Joe walked out of that bathroom and he hit him about three times with an ice pick and I used to have a metal bar behind the bar. Anyway, I grabbed that and I ran down and I grabbed the Mexican’s hand and he kept wanting to stick him some more times and I hit him so hard with that metal pipe I thought I was crushing his hand. He finally dropped the pick, the ice pick and then ran. But, CS: Was there an ice pick to begin with, and we just kept it? We still have it. ES: Anyway, the ambulance came and the cops came and I was kind of explaining to the cops a little bit, but not too much and I said, “Well, if you want to talk to the man, talk to the man. He’ll tell you what went on.” And then Joe said, “Naw, I don’t want to talk to ya.” I said, “Well, you want anything done on this Joe?” He said, “Naw, I’ll take care of him.” “Does he want to go to the hospital?” He said, “No.” So he didn’t go to the hospital and then Lucero, probably about four or five months after that ended up dying, and I don’t remember exactly how that happened. CS: Told you we had it. I don’t think anybody’s been stabbed since. 18 LR: Well no, I would… CS: That’s an antique. LR: Yes, that a great conversation starter. ES: Yea. CS: First time I’ve brought it out. LR: It’s great. So, with all the things going on, did you have a good relationship with any of the police? ES: With the police? Oh, well, half way. I used to police my own place; I didn’t like having the cops come down. I’d had the cops down a couple of, two or three times and it seemed like I had more trouble from the cops than I did the clientele, you know. The cops, some of the times, they caused their own problems, they’d bait somebody and pretty soon the guys fired up enough to go ahead and start messing with the cops. Then you got more trouble, but we had for a long, long time I never, ever called the cops; this one night I thought, “Ah shit, I should probably call them.” So these guys were fighting and it was going pretty good and they ended up in my office, in front, and so I called the cops and the cops came running down and we’d had static with two or three of those cops at some time or another and there was five or six cops in here and they broke up everything and this one punk cop come screaming up the street in his vehicle and slammed on the breaks and slid sideways and came to a stop out in front and jumps out of his car and runs for the front door, she was by the front door and she locked it. Boy he hit that door like a ton of bricks. 19 CS: He went and sat in the gutter. ES: We got out fill of cops. So he went out there and sat until. CS: We had our load limit. We got to give rid of some before we get more in. And again he sat in the gutter. LR: So, the Reed Hotel fire in like CS: That’s what I was going to bring up. LR: Can you talk about that a little bit? CS: Ya that was a horrible night, horrible night. Tell her about it. LR: Why is that? CS: They ended up bringing them in here. LR: The injured? CS: There wasn’t enough ambulances and health people to help them right away, so they had to bring them somewhere, so they brought them inside and set them in booths. Tell them about it. ES: This old man came walking up the street just about closing time, and there used to be a place just up the street called Uke’s Café. CS: This is Reverend Mac; he’s one of my good friends. ES: Anyway, this Uke’s Café they’d take care of all the wino’s and the whatever. And they had a pretty good deal going and what these guys would do they’d come in and get their social security or welfare checks and Uke’s would feed them, pay for their hotel room and give them enough money to buy a bottle of wine every day, and whatever was left, they’d get back. So she sold a lot of food and it was a big meal. It wasn’t 20 fancy, but it was a good solid meal. So, anyway, this old man was, they opened at about, I think they used to start working at six in the morning, something like that, so they’d be in there a little before then to get things lines up. Well it was colder than hell out and this old guy comes walking up the street. Anyway I asked him, “What the hell you doing out this late?” He said, “Oh, I’m going to go to Mary’s, Uke’s.” I said, “God, It’s not open yet, you know that?” He said, “No, no, I didn’t know that.” So he just kept walking up the street. Before long the hotels on fire and you could go out back and those flames are shooting off that second story, like a son of a gun. And it was right next door to me and I’m thinking, “I’ve got to get somebody down here.” So I called and they came down. Well, the place across the street was open and it was a restaurant and the fire department came and there was a fire escape out front and some old man had gone out the window and was standing on the fire escape, but he couldn’t get down because there was no latter going down to the floor. They had to get him off, and he died. I think there was, God it seemed like to me there was quite a few people, I don’t remember exactly, seems like twenty or better that died in that fire. But it was kind of weird, I, the police and the fire department was going in there and getting people and bring them down and for instance they brought this woman in and set her over in a booth and I was feeding them shots of whiskey because they 21 were burnt. And this woman had this police coat on and she got it all huddled up and moaning and I says, “Let me see.” And so I took the coat and I opened it up and her breasts were melted to her like candle wax. God it was terrible. Anyway, so I got to feeding the hell out of liquor to them. I said “just go ahead and drink.” And I walk out back and there’s an old guy and these two big firemen and they’ve got this guy under each arm and their dragging him down the stairs and I hear, “Plunk, plunk, plunk.” With all the lights and crap you’ve got, I could see this nail sticking up and he comes down and he hooks on the nail and they just yank him and pull the nail through and I said, “God Damn.” It was cruel and there are people lying on the sidewalk down to, across [inaudible] the Lincoln side. People lying out front and this undercover cop was across the street and the fire department had run up the stairs with a hose and they come flying out of there and left the hose up there. This undercover cop went up, he’s got a pea coat on and I knew him well. He ran up the stairs and grabbed the hose, and this big black dude with a big ol’ round belly come walking through the fire and he’s got a pair of shorts on; blue like silk underwear like, those, not the boxer shorts, like women wear, you know. Anyway, he had a pair of them on and he comes wandering through the fire and that cop put that hose on him and brought him to the stairs, got him to the stairs and then, grabbed a hold of him and brought him down the stairs. And he set him on the curb 22 and there was a photographer around, I don’t know where in the hell he come from, but he was here, and that cop was reaching down and getting water out of the gutter and pouring it on that guy. He died too. That was a bad one. But over the years, you know, I think that place had caught on fire probably three or four times that I remember. That last one was a bad one though. LR: How did it start then? ES: That old boy that went up the street? He was cold, there was no heat up there, and so he put a bunch of newspapers in the sink, and started them on fire so he could keep warm. And that’s what started it. LR: So the hotel actually had guests living in it? All this time I thought it was abandoned. I had no idea there were people living in it. ES: Oh yea, yea. MJ: What year was that? ES: Oh, man, I don’t remember the year. LR: I’m going to get my jacket, hold on. I’m sorry. ES: Getting cold are ya? LR: I’m always cold. If I’m not cold, something is wrong. There, I’m sorry. ES: I’ll tell you another weird one. My folks had a place up the street and I was up there, I used to switch back and forth, go up there and maybe pull a shift, come down here and pull a shift. In those days, see they didn’t bother you to damn much as far as the ID’s went, but I had put this license in my folks name anyway cause I was too young to have a license. 23 Levy was renting the place, had a lease on it, and I think his rent was I remember $300 a month, and then there was an old guy named Francis Rounds, that actually owned the license, and Levy would pay him so much for the use of the license. I don’t know how much he was paying him, but the licenses were all frozen, I mean you couldn’t get a license, the only way to get one was to buy one from somebody that already had one. The city wasn’t letting any go and all the bars were down here on two five, there was no bars anywhere else. So, when I came in here I went to this Frank Rounds and see if I could buy the license from him. He says, “Yeah, you can, them licenses are going for hundred and a quarter. Yeah, I’ll sell it to you for five hundred dollars.” I said, “Five hundred dollars?” And he said, “Yea.” I said, “Well, let me give that some thought.” So I left and about a week later I went back to him and he said, “You still looking to buy that license? I said, “Well yeah.” He said, “It’s a thousand bucks.” I thought, “Well you sucker.” So the third time I went back, it was fifteen hundred and I thought “I’m not even going to mess with you anymore, I’ll just buy it now,” so I bought it the license and then I put that license in my folks’ name so, in case there was some problem with me, being under age. 24 I’d been down here and I went up to my folks’ place, and on the corner was a place called the M and M. and then it was Armstrong’s sporting goods store, and then my dad’s place. So I got to dad’s place and he wasn’t going to come back down here, and there was a guy, I’m not going to tell you his name, Gail Dunn, he come out of the M and M and he was standing heading west, standing there on the corner waiting for the light to change, and this guy come from someplace, I don’t know where, and jumped on his back and slit his throat, all the way across, and jumped off. Gail Dunn put his hands up and of course blood is coming all over and he turned around, and the guy said, “Sorry man, wrong guy,” and took off. LR: Oh my God. CS: Now a days it would be oops. LR: Did Gail make it? ES: Yea he did make it. He went back into the M and M and they called an ambulance and they come down and they squared him up actually, which really surprised the hell out of me, because he was bleeding like a stuffed hog. I always thought that, “God almighty” I don’t know how he made it through all that, but he did. He was a tough old boy, I’ll tell you, he was tougher than hell. LR: How do you think the street has changed since you first acquired the bar? ES: Oh, Drastically, the only think that was down here was the derelicts, and of course the sidewalk was all up and down and the curbs were high. CS: It was fun. 25 ES: It was just a plain skid row, that’s all there was to it. CS: Yea, but there’s, you’ve always told me, he’s always told me there’s different kinds of bums. There’s rich bums and poor bums. There were rich bums down here being skid row bums too. ES: There was people that was on the skids, that were athletes, attorneys, doctors, they were just, the alcohol had got to them and they were just down and out. CS: We had a lot of the people of the cloth come in. LR: So, did you ever know of a bum that went by the name of Airplane? ES: Yes CS: I loved Airplane. LR: Why was that? ES: He was a little character, man, I’ll tell you, he’s one of the like, dusk headlights. He’d walk out into the middle of the street and try and stop traffic just to dust the headlights. Yeah, he was a crazy little bugger. CS: Did he die in the fire, or did he die across the street in the (Unintelligible). ES: No, he died in the fire. CS: He was the last one to die in the fire, and it took him a year. It took him a year. They were pulling guys out of the back of that place and if I remember right, they were pulling him out and he caught on a nail going down the stairs. ES: It wasn’t him. CS: It wasn’t him? It wasn’t Airplane? 26 ES: No, it wasn’t him that got caught on the nail. LR: Did you ever know his real name? ES: No, we probably did at one time, but. CS: You know what, if we didn’t nickname em, they were already come nicknamed. We nicknamed everybody. Just like my name is cin, it’s not Cindy, its cin. And this is Freddie or Eddie, you know. They don’t know his real name. CS: Tell them about the stabbing across the street. ES: In the Rose Rooms up there, after a period of time, the cops wanting Rose out, run her off. I think she went down to, seemed like she went down to Nevada or Arizona. Anyway, one of her pimps was a guy named Eddie Gordie. Ed Gordie was kind of a, just a part time crook. He still played a big-time role in [inaudible]. Somebody would ask him for money or something and he’d grab them and slam them up against the wall and, “You know who I am? My name’s Eddie Gordie and don’t you forget it.” And then he would grab him and take him to the restaurant and tell them, “give him whatever he wants and put it on my bill.” That was Eddie Gordie, and I knew him years before I got in here and but when I got in here he had just become a goddamn drunk himself and him and two brothers, there’s Big Stogie and Little Stogie, and Eddie Gordie, they’re going to go rob a grocery store over the 24th street bridge, Richardson’s market. Gordie was drunk and in the back seat of the car. Well those two went in and robbed the place and cops come and got all 27 three of them and of course Gordie was with them too then. Well all of them went to the joint. Gordie and little stogie served their time, Gordie got a face lift while he was down in the joint and come out and looked like a pretty boy. Him and little stogie took off and went to Arizona and Gordie just died a couple of years ago, I think little stogie is still alive. CS: How do you get a face lift in prison? Did he get it cut up so they had to stich him? ES: No, hell no, he could get about anything he wanted, he just had to make arrangements for it. CS: So he used to slam somebody against the wall and then go buy then something to eat. I remember you would beat people up if they wrote you a bad check for twenty bucks, it’d be two teeth. Then you’d bring them back in, set them at the bar, after you’d take them in the bathroom and cleaned them up and you’d buy them a drink. He was always well respected. ES: Naw, she’s talking about some guy that used to, boy had a hard time with bum checks. I just hated them. CS: We don’t take bad, we don’t take any checks anymore. ES: Anyway, this guy he tells me, he says, “Oh, why don’t you take this check from me? I said, “No, I don’t want any checks.” He was just begging me, and he says, “I’ll tell you what, I got a pawn ticket for a gun, and I am so sure that there’s no problem with the 28 check that I will give you my pawn ticket, and if there is you can have the gun.” I said, “Well ok let’s try it, it’s twenty dollars.” and I thought “um.” Well the check bounced. So I grabbed the pawn ticket and I went down to the pawn shop and the gun was gone too. He run a scam on me. So I seen him in the bar and I thought “Well, I’m gonna have a conversation with this fella.” And he swung on me and we went to it and he got hurt pretty good. CS: Look at the size of his paw. ES: I took him into the bathroom and was cleaning him up and he turned to me and says, spit two of his teeth out into his hand and said, “Well that makes us even don’t it? Twenty bucks for two teeth” I said, “No, no, no. The next time I see you, you’d better have that twenty dollars in your hand and be walking towards me. Cause if you don’t, you’ve got two ears, and there’s gonna be two ears missing.” Anyway, yeah, he paid me. CS: Did you tell her about the time when the guy came through the glass and caught the guy in the throat? ES: No. CS: No? There’s that one and then down at the Japanese place when we were down there and he got in a fight with all the blacks and you went to the hospital that night. The only time I have ever known him to go to the hospital. 29 ES: I had this brand-new girl working, and it was a balmy ass night, closing up, my truck was parked over here and there was a guy at the doorway to Rose’s Rooms, upstairs. It wasn’t Rose’s Rooms any more, they were renting it out. So, this guy was yelling, “you son of a bitch let me in.” And he was pounding on the door. Then I could hear the guy in side, “god damn you, get away from here.” So that went on back and forth. CS: He says, “You’re with my wife,” or something. ES: Anyway, I started mocking him, I said, “Hey you son of a bitch, get out of here, God damn you let me in.” and this guy turns around and looks at me like, “What the Christ is the matter with you.” So after about four or five of those, I hear a bang, and I see this fist come through the window, and that guy is standing outside, just stands there for a second, and he turned around and he walked down to the corner and out underneath the red lights, walked back to the curb, fell over dead. The guy had a knife in his hand [shows the motion of breaking through a window with a knife in hand] hit him and caught him right in the throat. CS: He could see him because of the shadow, so he went right for his throat. ES: So, we called the cops and this young cop pulled up and boy he was beside himself, he was a rookie and he didn’t know what the Christ to do, man he was shaking and he had a hell of a time. Anyway, they finally, some other cops came and took care of things, but the cops went upstairs and they went to get the other guy, and there was a woman upstairs and 30 she was putting bandages and stuff on this guy’s hands because he cut his hands when he went through the window. That woman was the guy downstairs’ wife. She was in the hotel room with another guy and I thought that was ironic as hell. You know, I sit here, and it make you wonder, because life is so short and it’s really nothing to it. That was probably about 2:30, 3 in the morning and by the time the cops got through and all the other crap got through they took the guy off, it was just turning daylight. The city brought a water truck down the street and turned it on and blew all the blood down the gutter. Stand there looking at that blood and water going down the gutter and you could see the thick blood going down with the water, and I was thinking, “You know, in an hour, everything will be dry and life went down the gutter, the guys out here, he’s dead, and nobody knows the difference.” Just how close, or short life can be. That’s the way things are. LR: When the railroad stopped being the big thing, how much did that effect you guys? ES: Well, it used to be that the railroad was a big payday and of course a lot of those railroaders would come into the bars and cash their checks and buy the hooch and mess around with the women. CS: His daddy said there was more money on the floor after closing then there was in the till. I remember he would come in every single night and grab a five slot, looking under the booths and pick up all kinds of money. ES: Yeah, used to find a lot of money. 31 CS: That was his routine. We found that stuff in the wall, you heard about that? LR: No. CS: You didn’t hear about that? ES: We were remodeling the bathroom back there, the men’s room, and guys tore into the wall and found a couple of wallets back in the wall. CS: Found a wallet and an envelope full of pictures, dated back like seventyfive years and I found the descendants to the woman. She just had picture and certificates and insurance policies and stuff like that. But I have yet to find the gentleman’s, why he must have been 18, 19 years old when he was in here drinking and somebody reached in his pocket and stole his wallet and brought the money out of it and stuck it down a hole in the wall. A month ago, we decided to do a little wall and changing things around and opened up that wall and we found three empty bottles of whiskey and those items that had been in that wall all those years. I’ll show you the stuff. ES: There was, in the back of this place when I came down here, there was a big patio back there. [Cindy shows us the items on her I-pad] CS: That was in the wall. There was a gold ring, I mean this was all in that wall, and I still have it, I can’t find the descendants to it. I probably have called fifty people and received sixty calls back, and got a lot of information on him. 32 Well I got a lady that, she tried to claim it because I finally told her that there was three thousand dollars in the wallet, because she was rude to me and wouldn’t let me talk to her father, and I thought her father may have been a grandson or great grandson of the owner of this, and she was upright rude to me, “Do not call my father again and blah, blah, blah.” I said, “Well, you know what, it’s just because I found a wallet in a wall in Ogden, Utah in a bar, and I won’t call you again, I just wanted to return the three thousand dollars to somebody, and I’m sorry, I won’t call you again.” And I hung up on her, because she had already hung up on me twice. And I’m thinking, “I wonder how long it’s gonna take her to call me back?” She called me back about twenty minutes later and she said, “I’m sorry but I called the relatives, and yes we are related and I’d like to know where to get that money.” I said, “You know what, I just made another phone call and I found the proper owner.” She hung up on me again. [looking at the I-pad again] This was in the women’s, and these guys were just happy as could be. These different pictures were in that one. That’s buck, that’s my picture. That’s behind Weber State where you guys hang out. That’s where we live. LR: So these were just sitting in the wall? 33 CS: Yes, and ok, this is a bottle of wine that was in there, that’s buck again. It was in the newspaper, it was on television. It was pretty unique. Then we, tell her about redoing the back of the building. ES: There used to be a big fence, tall fence with the same kind of material that’s on the bar that went all the way around, so it was a big patio back there and great big doors that opened up. Well the back of the building was the same way and so those wood slats went up about seven feet, eight feet maybe, so I was going to tear all that down. I was tearing this stuff off the back, off the wall and there used to be some windows out there at one time and they just put those sheets of wood up and closed them off. So I must have found thirty wallets back there. CS: He never showed them to me. Not one wallet did he show to me and I was here at the time. ES: Yea, I found a shot gun that the stock had been broke off of. There was a window there that this cat had got down into and then stuck his arm in through the window and bled to death right there and it was mummified. CS: Mummified. What did you call it? ES: Mummified. There were bars on the windows, and everything was spray painted green. It had a gate back there and the whole thing was enclosed. We had a back area and it was all enclosed with a wooded fence, and that was tore down when the Hilton was built. There was a great big hotel out there that the Japanese people lived in and me and this one winer guy, we’d hit that thing on a regular basis after people moved out, and go in 34 there and pulling back rugs and everything. We pulled a lot of stuff out of there. Old coins. ES: Got a roll top desk out of there. CS: Yea, they’d just up and left it, they didn’t care. ES: And spittoons. There was a lot of old crap back there and there was a guy by the name of Lee that had a cat and he was tearing down those buildings and we was talking about places down underneath the tunnels and stuff. Well he pulled his cat up in there and he was tearing down the place and his cat fell three floors down and he had to have another cat come and pull him out of there. CS: But see, it was a Japanese place and he said that those tunnels were opium dens and stuff like that. ES: There was a lot of lottery tickets and stuff like that down there and some pottery. What else, did we get, we got some little porcelain slippers out of there that had little flowers and stuff on it. It was kind of neat. CS: Yea, some sake, shot glasses and stuff. We still got most of the stuff. LR: How did the two of you meet? ES: Her mother actually worked for me. CS: Three times, he kept firing her because she kept stealing from him. She was good for business. ES: Yes, she was a hustler. CS: Was she the dancer that you (h)fired that time? 35 ES: No, but, yes she came down and looking for her mother one time, and her mother wasn’t too nice. CS: She kept going missing, MIA. ES: She had about five or six kids. CS: She didn’t take care of us very good. ES: Her Grandmother raised her, but she came down looking for… CS: I was the lucky one. ES: She came down looking for her one time and she was a mess, and I never would let her go after that. CS: I walked in and my mom was sitting there intoxicated, very intoxicated with somebody and I got very upset because she had left my brothers and sisters for a few days without food or water and they were all younger than me, I mean, they were very young. And I got very upset. He put her in a cab and sent her home and then he took me across the street for a cup of coffee because I was very, I was crying, I was crying hard. And he mellowed me out and my grandma told me never, ever come down here. She always warned me about 25th street. Probably a week before that I was driving down the alley looking for the red lights with my friends. You know, so scared, and then this time I was walking through the front door and I happened to fall in love with the owner. So we were together ever since. I wouldn’t marry him till about fifteen years ago, I wouldn’t live with him either. I’ve always been independent. 36 LR: So how long have you known each other then? CS: Since I was like nineteen. ES: Yea, and she’s sixty-four? CS: Is that how old I am? I might be. ES: Yea, that’s next year, so, next year, I know, because next year, social security. CS: Oh, that’s right. LR: You guys are great. CS: I thought I was already getting that and he was just signing my checks. You know, he’s pretty sly like that. Direct deposit right into his account. LR: Melissa, do you have any questions? MJ: The only question I had, you mentioned that you knew, well, you were talking about the fire story and you knew that there was an undercover cop that you had known, I was wondering if you knew Arlyn Garside at all, an undercover cop that was down here? ES: Garside, yea, I remember Garside. MJ: What do you remember about him? ES: Depends on how you want to know, why do you want to know? MJ: Well it’s actually, we’ve heard lots of stories about him. We’ve interviewed his son and we’ve interviewed other people as well. We interviewed Rose’s lawyer and talked with him a little bit, so there are very different opinions about Garside. CS: You need to be nice. 37 LR: Is it possible to be nice and honest at the same time? ES: You never talked to his daughter? CS: They’re still alive, you’d better be nice. MJ: His daughter, Ann, was there when we interviewed his son. ES: Were they nice about him? MJ: His son was, I think had a lot of respect for his dad. But talking to the lawyer, it was a very different side and very different story, so and there have been other people as well that have mentioned, “Oh yea they remember Garside being downtown [inaudible]” So I was just kind of curious what you remembered about him. ES: Oh yea, I remember CS: What about Merv Taylor? Did they mention him? ES: No, Merv Taylor. I better not say too much about Garside, the reason being is because, you know, if the family is around and they still have respect for him there is no reason diminishing that respect. CS: What about Merv Taylor? He was a very, very good friend of ours. He was on that fire also, he was a hero, in fact his picture was on the front cover of the newspaper the day after the fire. ES: He was the one pouring the water on him. CS: And he was undercover at the time. LR: So Merv Taylor was the undercover guy? ES: Yes. 38 LR: I don’t know either of these names, so you’re talking about men I’ve never heard of before. CS: Merv’s a wonderful guy and a great friend, and he was an asset to the police department. ES: See, Garside, in those days, well he was about on his way out. He was limping on a horned leg. He was almost gone. MJ: Yes, he was patrolling. I think more in the early 50s I think. ES: Yes. CS: I don’t remember Garside being over there at that fire. ES: No, I don’t remember him at the fire. CS: He wasn’t at the fire ES: I don’t remember him at the fire either. LR: Let me, kind of as a final question, unless you have more stories. ES: Let me tell you something first. I told you a number of stories that are of blood and guts and stuff like that. All this is over a period of 50 or so years. There’s a lot of times that you see bad times during this period of time, and there is a lot of times that was really fun and really enjoyable. The good times always, always outweigh the bad. The bad times are interesting to look back on and to understand what was going on in that period, but the fun times always outweigh them. Over the years, it’s been a lot of real interesting people that we’ve met, and it just beat the hell for me that there was a choice to make, you know, go to Hill Field and work or go into business in a bar, and I would 39 have stale mated going to Hill Field. I feel that I had a much better interesting life by coming through here instead of going to Hill Field, or some other job. CS: Those transients next door, they used to depend on us, I mean, they’d come in here and they were drinking that toke and they’d sit in a booth and I’d charge them fifty cents an hour booth rental, because at that time they could come in and drink their own bottle because the liquor store is right across the street. So I’d charge them a booth rental and I can say that now, it’s the statute of limitations. They’d fall asleep with the bottle and I would walk behind the bar and if it was half empty I would fill it up with water and sell it back to them for a buck when they woke up again. So there was a lot of those transients at Easter, we’d have Easter eggs for them. We’d boil eggs and give them Easter eggs. At Christmas we’d give them little Christmas socks and we knew these guys, so we knew what they needed, and we knew if they needed gloves or whatever. One guy was on, he could only have baby food. I didn’t know why he could only have baby food. We were out one time and come back and the guy had taken a rifle and shot himself and he left a note to give to me saying that he couldn’t do it while I was around because he loved me so much, because of the kind of person I was. I would give him baby food, and he had cancer and I didn’t know it, and the cancer was getting so bad that he finally killed himself while we were up on the mountain. 40 But after the fire, we still help people I still give out gloves and stuff like that and jackets. I’m on Facebook and I give a clothing drive and you know we help out these people. I don’t do Christmas and I don’t do Easter and Thanksgiving and stuff like we used to because all our friends are dead. All our friends died. We were a family, a tight family. ES: Years ago, it was a skid row and you knew probably most of the people and it was a rough and tumble type life. My friends, I mean they wouldn’t come down because they were afraid of the street and. CS: I didn’t have no friends, mine were here. ES: And the other day I was sitting out there in front and I was looking around and I just see women going up and down the street walking with their kids and then that would never, ever happen in those days. Never. You’d never see, unless it was a hooker walking around. CS: Used to sit out there and we had those things were you had to put money in the parking meters. I seen a guy walk into a parking meter stand there 20 minutes and apologize for walking into it, to the meter, because he was so drunk. See guys try to crawl in their back window to get into their cars. We used to have a good time. ES: There was a lot of funny stuff. CS: We had some transients and they stunk so bad that I’d stand outside with them and pour ivory liquid on them and water and they could wash their clothes and take a bath at the same time. Out in front, and they loved it, because I was paying attention to them. Old Soley, man he used to have a 41 white shirt and man he would just suds up and I still hear him laughing when I would pour the water over his head to rinse him. ES: That guy was an electrical engineer and the skids got to him. But there was a lot of real interesting people. I remember there was a guy that was just one hell of an athlete and he could jump over a car in a parking lot, his name was Stu something but I can’t think of his last name. He would run at a car and open straight across the hood, open and never touch it. Some of them, I remember a guy that was in the stock market, and God, he made boo coo bucks and he was on the skids. And there were so many different walks of life that ended here. CS: We had a lot of hookers come in here and they’d give me their money and I’d save it for them because they didn’t want to give it all to their pimp, because their pimp would keep it all and only buy them so much. That way if I would save their money than they could perhaps have a better life not doing that. LR: Would you get in trouble, I mean, were you ever worried about doing that? That the pimps could come down here? CS: I was never worried, that’s me I never worried about nothing. I don’t know why. I always watch my back. Never got threatened that I remember. Did I ever get threatened? ES: Yes. CS: Did I hurt them? ES: Got a knife stuck in your leg. 42 CS: Oh yea, I got stabbed one time. Oh yea, that was no biggie though. ES: It was a biggie. MJ: It was no biggie? (Laughing). LR: It’s just humorous to hear you talk like…[unintelligible.] CS: That was outside though, that was not in the bar. That’s not even related to the bar. Yea, I got stabbed once. ES: She was the first non-blood woman to adopt a kid in the state of Utah. CS: I was the first single woman to adopt a non-blood child in the state of Utah and it’s in the history books at Weber State College. I found a child on the street, he found a child for me, I could not have babies. He found a child for me and I ended up getting it out of the Marion Hotel and he was… ES: Three days. CS: Well, I finally got him in my possession when he was two days, but he was two months old or something and he told me, go get the boy from the sitter we’ll go across the street at Star Noodle and show him off after we check out. ES: Closing time, you know. CS: Closing time, so I had to go to the babysitters anyways, to pick him up and he’s two months old. They got their days and nights mixed up anyways. He was so cute, and we had to just show him off. I had a Fiat. It was Doctor Rich’s car, Homer Rich, because at the same time I was working at, I was service manager for [inaudible]. I worked on Fiats, Saab, Mercedes. 43 I went and got my son and his name just happened to be Eddie. This guy walks up to my window, and my window is down a little bit. Walks up to the side of my car, and my son is in the other side of the Fiat, it’s a twoseater. And I saw him coming. I had just got that car instead of rolling the windows up, I rolled it down and he had a knife at my throat that quick and he got in and he said, “You need to move over. I’m going to stab you if you don’t move over.” I go, “No, I’m not going to move over, that’s my son, I’m not going to move over.” He said, “I’m going to slit your throat, I’m going to kill ya, stab ya.” I went, “I’m not going to sit on top of my son, I’m sorry, you do what you got to do.” I looked into my mirror and I went, “ya know, my husband is pulling up any minute, we’re going to meet and we’re going to go across the street and have something to eat. Wow, there he is now.” He stabbed me, and I was just right out, straight out front there. Some guys started to head out of the door and yelled back in, “Hey Ed, there is somebody out there messing with Cindy.” So He come out and said, “What’s going on.” I said, “Oh, nothing, I just got stabbed. This guy wanted me to sit on Eddie and I wouldn’t.” And he takes off after the guy. ES: I had this old green truck. I can’t remember what year that sucker was. CS: It was a little old 58, something like that. ES: Yea. 44 CS: It was a green truck, but he called it blue. I told you it was green, all these years I told you it was green and you said it was blue. You called it old blue. ES: Anyway, the kid took off running and then, what was his one, what the hell was his name? LR: Did you catch him then? ES: Yes. CS: By the time he got to the jail, well, he called us for bail, because we owned the Eagle Bail Bonds. ES: His name is Ronald Ransom CS: Yep, Ronald Ransom, that’s who it was. ES: What he did is him and another guy had taken off from here and they’d gone to Brigham City. At one time, and on the way back they stopped in Perry or one of those dinky ass towns and it was way on the west side and down where nobody would be coming around, and they went into a farm house and this woman had just had a baby and her old man wasn’t there. CS: A two-week-old baby. ES: These guys put a knife on the baby, they said they were going slit the baby’s throat if. CS: They took turns raping the mother while they. ES: Yeah, they took turns raping her all night, then they finally left. They ended up getting nailed up and they went to the joint. CS: He had just gotten out of prison that week. 45 ES: Ransom had been out for a week. CS: He come across me out front. In fact, he went to jail and Eddie caught him and he told the jailers that he had been beat up by five Mexicans. But he beat him to a pulp. And then, had to go to court and they accused me of being a prostitute and all this stuff in the court room and in those days, you had to give your name and address in open court. ES: Open Court. CS: Open Court, and so he bailed out or something, not through us. ES: Yea, he went out through Pappas. CS: Then he called me up one night and he said, “You know who this is?” I said, “No.” He goes “It’s Ronald.” And I went “Ronald who?” And he goes, “Ronald Ransom, what are you doing?” I said, “I’m just sitting here at the house waiting for you, got my door wide open, just me and my little pistol here, come on over.” And I sat up all night long waiting for him, and he didn’t show up. Sat there, opened the drapes and everything. Sat on the couch just waiting for him, house unlocked, would not show. Anyways, I come down here the next morning, I told the bar tender that he had called me and stuff and she called Eddie and Eddie called Merv and him and Merv went and found him and took him back to jail. He ended up going to jail for tampering with a witness, because I was a 46 witness, to my own assault, he did and he ended up going back to prison, not for attempted murder, but a misdemeanor or tampering with a witness. ES: That old truck, CS: Go figure. ES: That old truck, I jumped in that truck and I, he was running down the sidewalk, I drove up on the sidewalk screaming down the Goddamn sidewalk and he jumps off to go across the street and I hit the curb and took off the curb and went across the street and I’m driving up the other side on the sidewalk and he pulls out, and goes out by the bus station and gets me on the corner and he stopped and I had the window down and this goddamn troll throws down the gun and I fired off that sucker and it didn’t go off. CS: It’s a good thing. ES: I threw the damn thing out and got out and beat him to a pulp. CS: Never carried one after that. He was too short tempered, I wouldn’t let him. ES: After it was all over, there was two Mexicans, in fact when you guys first sat down there was two big chunky Mexicans boys that was here. Their father and another guy pulled me off that guy and otherwise I think I’d of probably killed him. He went to jail and tells that other bonding company that all those Mexicans beat him up. But anyway, I come back down here and went out back and I took that dog-gone gun fired it, and it went off. And I thought “Goddamn it, that sucker is lucky, or I’m lucky.” 47 CS: You’re lucky. LR: Either way you look at it, yea. My last question is this, you’ve been here a long time on this street, you’ve seen a lot of changes, you’ve kind of hinted at it a little bit, but do you like the way the street is now? The changes they’ve made? ES: Ya know, I’ll put it to you this way, when the changes first started happening and the redevelopment, the restoration of 25th and all that stuff, I didn’t like it at all. I liked it the way it was, and I kept thinking, “Well, maybe I just like old things.” But now I look at it and I’m getting some pretty good age on me and I look at it now and I think “God, it’s just not that bad now.” CS: Well the streets been good to us. We own quite a few buildings down here. I didn’t mind the changes till they took the street festival away from us, because that was ours, that was our baby. LR: Are you talking about the Moon Harvest Festival? CS: No, the Street Festival. Harvest Moon is nothing compared to that party we used to have on 25th street. The whole block. ES: The Street Festival. CS: It was called the Street Festival. Used to have wrestling matches out the front door, and they took that and Mayor Godfry called me on my birthday, matter of fact, one day, and said that we wouldn’t have the street festival anymore, that the city was taking it and there was nothing I could do about it, and he was absolutely right, there was nothing I could do about it. 48 ES: Ya, we took an estimate one time and, well what happened, I went to a meeting one time and this guy was running the street festival and I told him, I said, “you stopped the festival right at 25th, I don’t know why you don’t bring it down the street.” He said, “No, I’ve got enough to do, I’m not going to do anymore.” I said, “Well give it to me, I’ll take it.” He said, “Oh God, go ahead and do it, I don’t care.” So I brought it down the street and what I did is I moved the concessions down with big boy toys and stuff like that like, you know beauty contests and bands. CS: We made a lot of money and the city seen that. The city wanted it. ES: You know, like the first year we were selling draft beer and boy just going through the beer like a bat out of hell. Then a few years later when we had to sell beer inside and they could take it out side and then we could sell cans inside and they couldn’t open them till they got outside and they just kept whittling at us and whittling at us and finally this mayor came in and he said well, that’s not Ogden city. CS: They turned it into a family-oriented event and nobody came. No body from out of state showed up. ES: We had estimates at 60,000 people down here, and that’s a lot of people. LR: Yea, that’s a lot of people. ES: I mean it’s almost, 49 CS: The hotels were full. We really helped the economy of the street, but the city wanted that money and they took it from us, and took the concessions and charged people an arm and a leg to get into it. I mean, they took away our arm wrestling right out the front door and put in a fish pond, just to slap me, just to slap me. Stuck that fish pond out there. The little kids lined up to go fishing. But what I miss mostly on the street is the lights. The red and the green and the yellow lights they used to all come together and be up in the air and I guess that’s downstairs in city hall or something, our light, and they took that out and they put in the pole lights and when that happened, I cried. I sat out there and I cried. I thought, “This is the end of an era.” We’ve had so many movies filmed inside the Kokomo, and up and down the street and I think that really worked for the movie industry. When that last light came out on Lincoln, it broke my heart. ES: Well it was an interesting old street, and it’s interesting now, it’s just not as interesting, or as wild. CS: It is what you make it now. I sit out on the cement stoop and I visit with transients and people that are getting off a train or going on a train and we’ve had some interesting, interesting people that we’ve taken pictures of. People go, “How can you sit with those stinky ass people?” Well, you know what, their people and I enjoy hearing the stories and where there from and I’ll come and look in the fridge and see whats in there and give them some food. I’ve got four bags of clothes right now to take outside 50 and set on my cement stoop and let the people have at it, but I’ve got to make sure the weather is good; I don’t want the clothes getting ruined. Nice clothes. ES: Yeah, it’s been a good old street, it’s done us well. LR: Ya know, I almost loath to stop talking, I want you to keep going, but I don’t want to take any more of your time, you’ve been very generous with it, and I appreciate it. CS: He tells great stories, doesn’t he? LR: Oh, heavens yes. CS: They’re the truth. LR: That’s what we were looking for. CS: If my husband ever dies, he’ll be buried in a white shirt, because he is truthful. He ain’t gonna leave me. ES: I don’t want to. CS: Nope, he ain’t gonna leave me. LR: I can’t say as I blame ya. Well, thank you so much I appreciate your time and your willingness. 51