Oral History Program Maxine Jamison Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 26 May 2017 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Maxine Jamison Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 26 May 2017 Copyright © 2018 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii 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 The World War II "All Out for Uncle Sam" oral history project contains interviews from veterans of the war, wives of soldiers, as well as individuals who were present during the war years. The interviews became the compelling background stories for the "All Out for Uncle Sam" exhibit. The project received funding from Utah Division of State History, Utah Humanities Council and Weber County RAMP. ____________________________________ 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: Jamison, Maxine, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 26 May 2017, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Maxine Jamison 26 May 2017 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Maxine Jamison, conducted on May 26, 2017 in her home in Kaysville, Utah, by Lorrie Rands. Maxine discusses her life and her memories involving World War II. Michael Ballif, the video technician, is also present during this interview. LR: It is May 26, 2017. We are in the home of Maxine Jamison and we are interviewing her about her life in Kaysville, Utah during World War II for the World War II and Northern Utah Project at Weber State University. My name is Lorrie Rands conducting the interview and Michael Ballif is with me as well. So, Maxine, I just want to say thank you for your willingness to sit down and talk with us and start with when and where were you born? MJ: Well, I was born just about three blocks from here. March 5, 1919. I was born in my grandparent’s home, right down in the middle of Kaysville. My grandparents were William Henry and Ellen Carter Bone. They were pioneers here. They had a nice home down there. He was the second postmaster in Kaysville and from everything I can understand, the post office was in their home, in their living room. The home is Stewart’s Gift Shop now, on the property. Stewarts bought the old home and tore it down. That’s where I was born, in my grandparent’s house on the property that was inherited by my father. LR: Who were your parents? MJ: My parents were Edwin Bone and Vivian Bacon. LR: Were they both from Kaysville? MJ: Yes. There was an old saying in Kaysville - Kaysville has Hydes, Bloods, Bones and Bacons. We were part of them. 2 LR: Where did you live growing up? Did you live in that same area? MJ: I was born in my grandparent’s home and we lived there for a while. Then mother got a bee in her bonnet. She wanted to go up to Idaho where her brother and sister were, to be a farmer, but my dad was a carpenter. I guess she had tears over it, so they sold the property and bought a farm up in Idaho. MB: Where in Idaho? MJ: Rigby. Then my mother didn’t like it up there so she came back. My dad had to come back because he couldn’t manage a farm all by himself. LR: How long were you in Idaho? MJ: I think I was two when we came back. LR: I’m assuming you moved back to Kaysville. MJ: Yes. I moved back with my grandma Bacon. She lived in a home over by the Bonamart home. That’s a big home on the corner. Everybody knows the Bonamart home. We moved there with my grandma. The home I was raised in was on Second North and Fourth West. It was a neighborhood, you know, just like any other. LR: How long did you live there in that home? MJ: Until I got married. We moved there just after I started school. There’s no kindergarten in my day. LR: So, you started school in the first grade. Where did you go to school? MJ: The old school is no longer in existence. It was the old Kaysville School. At that time, they went to the eighth grade and then went to Davis High. My first teacher 3 was Edna Layton, who I just adored. She was a lovely lady. She was one of our neighbors too. LR: What was your favorite part about going to school? MJ: Reading. Wouldn’t you know, that’s just the thing I can’t do now because of my eyesight. MB: What did you like to do for fun in Kaysville? MJ: We played run sheepie, run at night. There’s a game called ante-I over. It was throwing the ball over the whole the house. One group would be on one side and one on the other, and you’d catch the ball and run. It was just little dumb games, hopscotch and jump the rope. My dad finally said, “You’ve got to quit playing jump the rope. I can’t keep you in shoes.” MB: Do you have any memories of the Great Depression? MJ: Oh I remember the depression, yes. We had an acre property, so we had cows and pigs and chickens. When Franklin Roosevelt took over, there was WPA and NYRA to put people to work. Oh I admired him. My dad was a WPA worker. He was a boss at that time. My brother has his time book. A lot of people in Kaysville did road work, and I don’t know what else they did. I was just a kid. We didn’t ever suffer because we had milk and eggs. LR: Was your father in charge of the WPA here in Kaysville? MJ: No. He was just a boss of a certain group. He was the foreman. LR: Because you lived on a farm, you managed. MJ: Well, it really wasn’t a farm. A lot of people had an acre of ground and pigs and chickens. That was just a home in those days. 4 LR: So you never felt like you went without during the Great Depression? MJ: Not without food or anything, but clothing. I remember I went to Davis High and I wore the same dress for what must have been weeks before I got me a new dress. I mean, we washed it and starched it. I remember wearing the same clothes. You wore silk stockings to high school. You’d take them over to Chris’s and they had people that mended them. It was so much an inch for every run, maybe ten cents. You’d have to pay to get them mended, and you’d wear them again. It was reweaving. It was interesting. LR: What are some of your memories of going to high school? MJ: Oh I loved school. My best friend was Alice Blamires, and she was also my second cousin. We had been born the same month. We’d done everything the same, only when we were going to be baptized, I got the measles and she got to be baptized before I was. Guess what else she did before me? Died twenty years ahead of me and I miss her. We grew up together, cousins and best friends. MB: What are your memories of Christmas growing up in Davis County? MJ: You know we always had a good Christmas. You’d hang your stockings up, and in the toe of your stocking you’d have an orange and you’d have some nuts and a banana sticking out the top. You’d get small gifts. I remember the main gift I got one time was a pretty pin and it was stuck to a board. They had old coal stoves, heaters, and when they gathered up they must have gathered up my pin because I remember looking and looking and couldn’t find it. We’d get things like new clothes and that. I don’t feel like I was under privileged or anything. My folks took good care of us. It wasn’t anything big and elaborate like now. 5 MB: Were you involved in any sort of activities in high school, any groups or clubs or anything like that? MJ: No. They had the Pro Schola club, but I didn’t even apply because I couldn’t have afforded the sweater. The sweater cost five dollars or something. I don’t think I’d of got in anyway. I wasn’t one of the popular girls. Didn’t matter, I wasn’t crushed or anything. LR: Were you working while you were going to high school? MJ: Babysitting for twenty-five cents an hour. MB: Who did you babysit for? MJ: There’s a park down here called Barnes Park. I used to tend those little boys. They were neighbors. They were just up the street. They were Emily and Roland Barnes’ children. They only had three. When my second child was born, March 20, 1947, in the hospital over in Salt Lake it was. In those days, the paperboys could come and sell papers. So, they sold me a paper and I looked and here there’d been an accident. These little boys that I’d tended all the time were dead along with four others. Mr. Webster put them in a station wagon taking them to some kind of a game. As they went over the railroad tracks that were here, there was no overpass, the train hit them and killed seven kids. All of those little boys, Emily and Roland Barnes’ only children, they were all dead. I tended those little kids from when she came home from the hospital. She was just a neighbor, not too far away. Just a lovely person too. I’ll never forget that. The parents took their property and made a park for the kids in Kaysville, which I thought was a great thing. The park is farther down where the railroad was because that was the 6 Barnes property. They had moved from wherever they were when I tended them. They were living in one of the Bonamarts rented homes and they moved down to the Barnes property that was a farm. I wish they’d never moved because then they wouldn’t have gone over the railroad tracks. They put the overpass in after they got killed. LR: What do you remember about Pearl Harbor Day? MJ: Well, quite a lot. I had graduated from Davis High and they had offered me a job as a telephone operator. It was Sunday and you worked alone. During the business hours in the week you usually had two operators there and maybe a manager, the woman manager. Anyway, I’m sitting there all by myself and one of the operators called me up crying, Mary Conrad. She said, “The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor.” That telephone in those days was a big board with holes and lights. That whole thing just lit up and I’m trying my best. Then the chief operator, Manita Robins, calls and said, “Do you need help?” I said, “Yes, immediately.” It was so awful because I had my boyfriend and I’d just seen him off to go to the Philippines in the service. People were calling and crying. She got me some help, but that changed everything once the war was on. That was so awful to be there and hear them crying. I had seen some boys get on the Bamberger saying goodbye to their parents as they got on the train to go maybe just down to Fort Douglas to be trained. Seeing them and then thinking, well maybe they’re all dead. A boy from Kaysville did get killed there. A Green boy got killed on Pearl Harbor Day. LR: How long did you work that day? 7 MJ: Oh you worked four hours on and four hours off and four hours back on. LR: Did you ever get a break that day? MJ: I think I just worked my shift. There’s only two could work at the board. That’s all the positions. If the chief operator would come, then she’d take the phone and answer off there. It wasn’t like now. Everybody was plugged in to two different chords. You answer with one and pull out the other. It was awful. LR: So after that day, how long did you work as a telephone operator? MJ: Well, pretty soon after Remington Arms came and I worked there for a while. Then I met my husband and we got married. LR: Where was the Remington Arms located? MJ: Down in Salt Lake somewhere. I rode with some man here that was taking a bunch down. LR: What did you do while you worked there? MJ: I operated a machine. A piece of metal would drop down and we pulled a lever down and it would punch the bullet out of the metal. The scraps would fall one way and the bullet went the other. Then there was a supervisor who came around and he’d pick up that bullet and put it in some kind of gauge to make sure it was just perfect. If it wasn’t perfect, he adjusted your machine. LR: Do you remember how long you did that? MJ: No. LR: Do you remember how you got that job working at the Remington Factory? 8 MJ: Well I know how I got my telephone office, they offered it to me. I didn’t drive then, but I think I went down with a group and we applied. It’s so long ago, and not that important too. LR: When did you meet your husband? MJ: Oh in 1943. LR: Where did you meet? MJ: Well, I went down to see my friend in California and I met him. He was down there looking for work because he’d been rejected by the army because of his bad heart. He was so depressed because everybody else got drafted but him. I met him down there and then we got married September 12, 1943. LR: After you got married, where did you guys live? Did you move from California? MJ: Well, here for a while. My husband was from Brooklyn, New York, so we went back to see his folks and stayed back there for a couple of years. Then I got a job at the Kaiser Company. They made purses and pretty dresses and stuff like that. I worked in the office. I kept track of gloves mostly, but you could see ZCMI where they’d ship. That made me homesick. I met my in-laws and lived with them for a while. Then my sister’s husband was in the Great Lakes Training thing, she went back there to visit him and came and lived with us for a while. Her name was Venla. When the war was over and he got to go home, she was going home. I said, “Well I haven’t been home for a long time so I’ll go home just for a trip.” My husband said, “You get back there in Utah and you’ll never come back home, I know.” He went and quit his job and came with me. So then we ended up living in Utah. He loved Utah. He said Utah is God’s country. I had no intention of leaving 9 him and not coming back because I liked my job. You know they say New York people are this, that, and the other. I found them warm and friendly. Well this wasn’t New York, this was actually Brooklyn. I can tell you the address - 1260 Broadway, Brooklyn, New York. That’s where we lived. His parents, his Jamison side of the family, they owned a laboratory and we lived in the top of their laboratory in our apartment. It was the Jamison Laboratory. They did pregnancy tests and fitted trusses and had wheelchairs and those elastic stockings. It wasn’t a pill laboratory. I guess it’s not still in existence. That was the family, and yet he left instead of working there. If he hadn’t of gone to California, I’d never met him. MB: So you grow up here in Kaysville, then you met your husband in California and you moved to New York, the very heart of New York, Brooklyn. What was it like coming from Kaysville and then moving to New York? Was there a bit of culture shock? Was it just different? MJ: No. They always say they’re so cold in Brooklyn. My mother-in-law took me on as a daughter. She had one daughter. She only had two kids, Edward and Eleanor. They took me in as another daughter. She was good to me. I feared an interfering mother-in-law, but she was very good to me. My mother-in-law said to me one day, “You know, down to Kaiser Company there was a sign that said help wanted. Why don’t you go down and see it.” So she told me how to get there on the elevated, and I went down there and interviewed. That one said, “Would you be able to start today?” I almost died. Well, what happened, their PBX operator, you know the one that takes calls, she’d just quit and they were 10 desperate. Isn’t that something? They were desperate for an operator, so I took the operator job and then helped with the books. LR: You were in New York when the war ended, right? MJ: No. We’d come back here. My dad wasn’t too well. I came back and Ed came back and then we were living in Kaysville and I had a baby. That was January 18, 1945. Then we moved when she was just a baby. My sister’s husband was in the war and over in Clearfield they had a subdivision they’d made for returning service people. So we rented their house and she lived with her in-laws. When the war ended, I remember, Pat was just a baby and everybody was going to town to Ogden to celebrate. We were sitting there with a baby because we couldn’t go. So that would be August of 1945. She was just a little baby and nobody wanted to babysit while we went and celebrated. LR: What were your feelings about the war ending? MJ: Oh I was so relieved. People I went to school with got killed in it and we were really glad. Then my sister’s husband would be coming home. Then we’d have to find a new place to live, but I was glad that peace was coming home. LR: How were you affected by the rationing that occurred during the war? MJ: Well, not at all. I grew up poor and I was used to doing without. You’d do a lot of your own cooking and a lot of your own sewing. It really wasn’t different than now with baby food and that. You could get what I needed for her and that. I don’t think you need a stamp. I remember you need a stamp for shoes and I used my stamp for these shoes. I mean, those shoes hurt me. I’ll never forget that. So you 11 could buy Keds, you know gym shoes, without a ticket. So I had to wear gym shoes except to dress up, and then I wore those that hurt. LR: Was there a difference in rationing between Kaysville and Brooklyn or was it pretty much the same? MJ: Oh, well it’s all a difference. It’s like a different world. Here people made their own bread. My mother made her own bread and I did. Back there, you bought everything from the store. You didn’t make your own bread or anything. I can’t see that it made any difference. When we lived with Ed’s mom, we lived like her, of course. When I worked, we just bought our own bread and stuff like that. I think you’d eat healthier here because you’d have vegetables in your garden and milk from your cows and that. I don’t remember having any tension over the rationing at all. Now if they’d have rationed ice cream, my husband would have died on us because he loved ice cream. MB: After the war, when your sister’s husband came back, was that when you looked for a new house? MJ: We moved to a place over here in Kaysville. It’s a great big red house and on the top it’s got like the turret thing. We lived in that. It was nice. It was glassed in, so our couch fit there in the window. We had two kids before we finally bought a house over in Clearfield. LR: You were living in Clearfield because your husband worked at Hill Field. Is that right? MJ: Yes. LR: What did he do there? 12 MJ: He worked for the base motor pool. He loved it. He loved Hill Field. LR: Is there a particular reason why he liked Hill Field, your husband? MJ: He loved Utah. People were nice. He liked the people. He liked everything about Utah. In fact, he didn’t even go back to his own mother’s funeral. His brother-in-law died and he went back then, but he said, “I didn’t leave anything there. I’d rather have Utah.” LR: How long did you live in Clearfield? MJ: I’d still be living there. We moved there just before Steven was born, and Steven is 67. I’ve been here five years in October. I still like Kaysville better. I had nothing against Clearfield, but Kaysville was my hometown. LR: What were the differences between Clearfield and Kaysville? MJ: Well Kaysville, I was acquainted with everybody because I grew up with them. I was a relative to half of them. You know how it is in a small town. My sister and her husband lived in Clearfield. I liked Clearfield. There’s nothing wrong with it, but Kaysville was always my hometown. Not the way it is now. It has nothing to do with what it used to be. LR: How is it different? MJ: In every way. When we were kids, in the evening, dad would put us in the car and we’d go down through the farm country. They have a van here that they take us on a little ride once in a while and they’ll take us down to what used to be the farm country - great big huge homes. I’m amazed. It used to be the barn was almost as big as the home when it was a farm. I’m amazed at those big homes. That wasn’t Kaysville the way I grew up. They had cowboys here one time and 13 they played Tumbleweeds, that song. That made me think of Second North. It was a two lane gravel road and on each side the tumbleweeds grew. Then in the fall, I don’t know what breaks them off, but they’d go tumbling. The wind makes them tumble down and I remember my dad driving over some and it was scratch, scratch, scratch. They used to drive the sheep on the cattle carts down here. The road would be completely covered with sheep, the dogs yapping at them and the shepherd on the horse. It was so relaxing and different. When I was a little girl, if we the grass grew high on the side of the road, my folks would send me out with the youngest cow. I’d put a stake in the ground and the cow would eat all the grass on the side of the road. We weren’t the only ones. That’s the way people did, save the city mowing. Then in the spring, you’d go down before the grass was high and it was asparagus growing all over there. You’d come out and pick asparagus on the side of the road. Don’t forget, I’m almost a hundred years old. When I was about five or six, we had rented a house up where Granny Annie’s is. Of course, there was this little highway. I sat on the porch one time and I went in the house and I said, “Mom, I counted ten cars went by and I’ve been there for an hour.” That was a novelty to see ten cars. LR: When you were living in Clearfield and your husband worked at Hill Field, were you working or were you just raising your children? MJ: I just raised my children until they got to be everybody in school and then I went to work for school lunch. LR: Did you work in your children’s school? MJ: Oh yes. I worked at Doxey Elementary for a long time. 14 MB: Where is Doxey? MJ: It’s in Sunset. My husband did a dumb thing. He went out and bought a car we couldn’t afford. So, I said, “Something’s got to be done.” So I went to work. I thought maybe just a year. It ended up several years, but it was nice. It’s hard work, and I had six kids. That wasn’t easy, but hey did it kill me? I’m still around. I decided hard work keeps you going. MB: Do you have any memories that stick out to you from your time working as a school lunch lady? MJ: Nothing special. There were no big catastrophes or anything. The only catastrophe I remember was World War II and another thing. Have you ever heard of the radio show called War of the Worlds? Well, I was at the telephone office and people were crying. I think, “What on earth’s going on?” So I ring up my mother down here and say, “What’s going on there?” Everybody’s crying.” The tube was gone on our radio so she had to go next door and she says, “Mrs. Pearson’s watching a comedy show and she says there’s nothing going on.” It was Orson Wells scared the heck out of everybody. They were crying and everything because they thought the little green men had landed in Pennsylvania and they’re going to sweep the whole country. So I looked up at the mountains and I thought, “Well, they’ll be coming over the mountain and what can I do?” I told the chief operator the next day, “I just want you to know, I just wanted to pull my plug and run home.” She said, “Well at least you didn’t do that.” So that was twice when I was at the telephone office when it lit up like a Christmas tree. 15 LR: Are there any other memories you want to share with us about growing up in Kaysville or anything? MJ: I remember when one of the teachers at grade school, the Thornly girl, died. That was bad, when your teacher dies. Then the principal, Sam Morgan, got hit by a car coming to work. Just ordinary things. The worst things that happened were the Barnes kids getting killed. LR: I’m going to ask a final question, but before I do, I just wanted to say thank you again for your time. So the last question is - how do you think World War II affected your life? MJ: I met my husband. Things were so simple before then. Then, we just had radio. Once television came, you not only hear what goes on but you see. We became more sophisticated. You don’t know how innocent Kaysville was. Everybody liked each other as far as I knew. At my dad’s viewing, I remember they said when Ted went to walk uptown to buy something, he’d stop and say, “Can I pick you up something?” One lady said, “When he came by he saw my screen was broken and so he fixed it.” She was a widow lady. That’s the way we lived. You’re like a big family. When there was a death, we all mourned. If it was a wedding, we all rejoiced. So many soldiers came to Utah and brought all kinds of different cultures. My other boyfriend was a soldier and his culture was different. I think the war changed us because we were kind of insulated here and then people from all walks of life came. When they built Hill Field, we met people we didn’t know. In my estimation, that’s what made Kaysville not a little backwoods community, more sophisticated. 16 LR: Is there anything else you’d like to share? MJ: I’ve always liked people. The thing that brought me the most happiness in life was my family. I have six children that mean the world to me and they’ve made me a proud mother, grandmother, great grandmother, and great great grandmother for which I’m very thankful. My memories are of people that I knew and grew up with. I think it’s nice of you to want to interview an old lady, a blind old lady. LR: Well, I love getting your point of view and your memories. I think it’s fantastic and I’m grateful that you were willing to share them with us. Thank you very much. MJ: Just a simple home girl’s life. I guess you could duplicate that a million times around here. LR: Yeah, but you have a unique memory that no one else does and your life is unique.