Oral History Program Mike Schlosser Interviewed by Woodrow Johnson 14 August 2013 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Mike Schlosser Interviewed by Woodrow Johnson 14 August 2013 Copyright © 2014 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 since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial houses flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. After World War II, the railroad business declined. Some government agencies and businesses related to the defense industry 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 that appealed to 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: Schlosser, Mike, an oral history by Woodrow Johnson, 14 August 2013 , WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Mike Schlosser August 14, 2013 Mike Schlosser’s grandfather outside his barbershop ca. 1930 Mike Schlosser’s grandfather in his barbershop at the Healy Hotel ca. 1930 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Mike Shlosser. The interview was conducted on August 14, 2013, by Woodrow Johnson. Mike discusses his experiences with 25th Street. WJ: My name is Woodrow Johnson and I’m here with Elliott McNaly who is running the audio-visual equipment. We are here with Mike Shlosser on August 14, 2013. Mike, this project is about historic 25th Street and the greater Ogden area, to which your grandfather had a pretty heavy role in, so let’s talk about him. Can you tell us your grandfather’s name? MS: George Earl Baldwin. WJ: Where is he from and how did he get to Ogden? MS: He was born in 1889 in Pahreah, Utah. It is now the most remote ghost town in the state of Utah. He was the first born of John Henry and Martha Magnum Baldwin. He was born in a one room, dirt floor, log cabin. His father was a rancher and his mother was a rancher’s wife. He had one brother born three years later. After him a baby sister born five years later who died in infancy of diphtheria. He was raised in southern Utah in cattle ranching and mustanging. He was put on horseback at a very young age and put to work. To our knowledge, he had approximately a fifth grade education. We can’t find too many records about that because it was basically done by the church sisters and brothers in the Cannonville area which is a smaller community about 21 miles southwest of Pahreah. His father homesteaded this area and it was considered open range for 1 raising cattle and mustanging of horses. He was put to work because another hand to work was another mouth to feed and another mouth to feed was someone to do more work. He became quite proficient at it. For the remainder of his life, he had an affinity for horses and had an ability with them that was quite remarkable to witness. He also became quite a storyteller in his later life. In his mid-twenties he married my grandmother, they referred to her as Maggie. My mother, Ila, was born in 1916. The next child was born a year and a half later, which would have been my Aunt Maxine. In my grandfather’s early life, in his mid-twenties, because of what they did for a living they broke these mustang horses that they would catch in the canyons along the Arizona strip, he got hurt pretty badly and broke his back. It was just below the cervical collar, but just above his attachment for his spinal column to the base of his back just above the scapula. He always had a hump on his back from then on. They didn’t have the technology to really work on people like they do now. I asked him about his hump when I was just a small boy and he told me that it was from a horse bucking him off and hurting him really bad. This is what brought him to the Ogden area because he could no longer continue to actively ranch. He brought my grandmother and mother and one daughter to Ogden with very little money. They had heard there was a need for barbers in Ogden because of the railroad station on 25th Street. He had heard that there was an opening at the Heely Hotel on the corner of 25th Street and Wall Avenue. It was quite an opulent building. I remember very vividly the marble floors and the marble 2 staircase that went upstairs to the mezzanine level. There were always people in and out. My grandfather went to barber school in Salt Lake and to my knowledge, it was 35 dollars to go to the school and it was a two week school. They taught them all the theory of barbering and shaving and those things. He did quite well in the school and when it came time to take their tests, they were going to do the shave in the morning session and the state legislature was in session at the time and the legislatures, being politicians, as we know them, took advantage of the free shave. They came down to the barber school for their free shave from the students. Pick of the draw, my grandfather wound up with the governor of the state of Utah as his shaving dummy more or less. He took the test and when the instructor came by to grade it, the governor spoke to the instructor and said, “This is the best shave I’ve ever had in my lifetime.” He was awarded 100 percent on the shave just on the governor’s say so. That afternoon they did their haircuts and he got another one of the fellows from the legislature. He had very curly hair and he had a hard time getting it cut the way the man liked it. When they graded him, they graded him at 79 points. Passing was 80. The instructor told him, “You’re one point shy of graduating.” The governor was sitting right across from them and he spoke up to the instructor and said, “He shaved me this morning and earned one hundred and one points.” That’s how he got graduated and got his license. This led to the fact that he applied for the job adjacent to the Heely Hotel and got the job. He later bought that particular business. It was a two chair 3 barbershop with a shoe shine stand. My uncle Priel would go down on Saturdays when it was really busy and help out over the years. He was also was a barber. During the 30’s and early 40’s it was quite a going tradition that people would go into the Heely Hotel and spend the night from the Union Railroad Station. In the morning, the men would get up and come downstairs and they would go next door through the alcove entryway into my grandfather’s shop and he would shave them and if they needed a haircut he would do that also. It proved to be fairly lucrative for him. In those days a shave was 15 cents and a haircut was 25 cents. You have to shave a lot of faces and cut a lot of heads to make a living at it, so a volume business and you’re only as good as your last haircut or shave, as they say in the trades. He was able to do it. He was able to make a living for his family and his family began to grow through more children. He had five daughters and one son. He was able to support their family. When the Second World War broke out, being quite an entrepreneur, because of the way he was raised where if you had an opportunity to make a dollar, you made a dollar. He found out through the grapevine that the troop trains were coming to Ogden and the word finally got out amongst the soldiers, which being in the military myself, information like this tends to have a life of their own. He made it available for the soldiers that would come up on their train layover. There were up to 22 trains a day that arrived in Ogden at the Union Station. There were as many as a thousand or more soldiers on these trains. They’d come up 25th Street when they had four hours to kill looking for something to do. 4 At this time, in the late 30’s and early 40’s, it was pretty wild down there. I actually know a fellow who was a beat cop for the Ogden Police Department named Vern Butcher. We used to get Vern to talk to us about these things and about the old stories. He said on any Friday or Saturday night, as a beat cop, you could walk out of any corner on 25th Street and look any direction and there was a felony going on. It was quite an exciting time for the Ogden area and 25th Street got quite the reputation because of this. Vern Butcher spent his entire working career for the Ogden Police Department down on 25th Street. He later went to work for the sheriff’s department when he retired from the police department. That’s how I met him, through the sheriff’s department here in Ogden. My grandfather was an interesting man. He was quite a storyteller and very well known in the community on 25th Street. He was referred to as “Cowboy Baldwin” his entire life. I actually mentioned that to Vern Butcher and asked him if he knew Cowboy Baldwin and Vern looked at me funny for a moment and said, “That’s your grandpa?” I said, “Yes, sir, he was.” He said, “I know him very well. He was a very interesting man and cut my hair for years and would never take a dime from me for it even though I insisted. Your grandpa said that because I walked foot beat on 25th Street, if something happened to me, I deserve to be buried looking nice.” Back to the original story, the soldiers would go up 25th Street looking for something to kill the time. There were numerous restaurants on 25th Street. My brother-in-law’s father owned one of the restaurants on 25th Street, which I understand he is giving you a piece on this project. There were four theaters 5 downtown at that time. Now, the Egyptian is the only one left. The soldiers would go to the movies and go eat or go to a bar, or they might find some female companionship which was quite prevalent on the street. Anything you could look for, you could find. When it came time to get back on the train, because they didn’t allow any alcohol on the trains, these are servicemen going to a war zone and rules didn’t really apply too much to them. They learned through the grapevine that the thing to do was to go up to the liquor store on 25th and Grant Avenue and buy a half bottle of whatever particular alcohol they wanted to have and go across the street to Saco’s Fruit Stand and buy a small watermelon or a large cantaloupe and take it down to the street into my grandfather’s barbershop. He would charge them a quarter to go in his back room and hollow out that fruit and stick the bottle inside and get on the train. My grandmother told many stories of having to reinforce my grandfather’s suit pants pockets because of the weight of all this change he brought home every day. My older sister remembers it very vividly of him coming home and putting his hand in his pocket throwing change out on the floor. As kids, we’d just dive into it. In those days, a quarter was a huge amount of money for a kid. My particular memories of the barbershop were as a young boy, we went to grandpa’s barbershop every other week for a haircut. I really didn’t particularly like having my hair cut, but I really did like going on 25th Street and watching the people because it was a very busy time. In the early 50’s when the Korean war broke out, he did this again with the watermelon and the cantaloupe thing. From the Second World War, he was able to amass enough money that they were able 6 to put a very nice down payment on their home on 31st Street. When the Korean War broke out seven or eight years later, he was able to buy a brand new Buick Roadmaster car that they retired with. I remember as a little boy, sitting on my grandfather’s lap driving that car. They used that until he passed away when I was 14. Quite an interesting life he led. He was quite a storyteller. My favorite parts of him were after they had retired, they would go up to Twin Lakes Idaho where they had a little sixteen foot Shasta travel trailer that they pulled with that old Buick. They had a 14 foot aluminum boat they would turn upside down and put it on top of the car. It was just not quite light enough that my grandfather could take it off alone. He always had to find someone to help him get it on or get it off the car. That’s why one of us grandsons was sent with him to help out. My grandfather had to retire from barbering because he developed emphysema from the microscopic hair that he inhaled. The doctor accused him of being a heavy smoker, but he never smoked a day in his life. Although, he could roll a cigarette with one hand, I watched him do it. He did it for his father as a young boy. It was interesting to watch that happen with one hand. I remember that very vividly. My father asked him one time to show him how to do it and my dad couldn’t do it. It was more or less a game to them. They would fish all summer long. Being of pioneer stock, my grandmother canned everything they had. You name it, if it could go in a bottle in a pressure cooker, she put it in there. She put fileted trout in a quart jar in that little 16 foot travel trailer. There was no bathroom in it and it had a heater in the floor that if it was on, you better not step on it 7 because it’d burn your foot. There was a little stove, a one basin sink with a water tank, and they had to go to town to get their drinking water. They pretty much roughed it up there. There weren’t any approved camp grounds or anything, but they would go out fishing every morning and my grandmother would go with my grandfather and myself and other cousins and we would fish in the early morning hours, usually trolling. In the evening, my grandfather and I would go and grandma would stay back at camp, and that was when he told me cowboy stories which were very illuminating. He was quite good at describing the terrain and the time of the year and what he was doing and how it got to be out in that area. He told me the story of going out to check cattle one day at about 16 or 17 years of age, and as he was loping his horse across the prairie. His horse all of a sudden gathered himself and jumped. It caught him off guard and he nearly fell off. He reigned up the horse and turned him and brought him back to see what he was jumping over and there was an Indian lying there in the trail. It was an old man whose tribe had left him and moved on. This man was named Chief Wohose, he was very elderly and my grandfather gave him some water and tried to give him some food, but he refused the food. Through broken English and what little bit of Piute my grandfather knew, he ascertained that he wanted to be left alone as that was their custom to leave their elderly along the trail. Ashes to ashes dust to dust is how they looked at it. He had a lot of occasions dealing with Indians as a young boy. He was chased several times by Piute Indians down in the Bryce Canyon areas because that area was their sacred ground in the area at that time. The 8 white man was still quite a novelty to see and especially a man alone riding a horse out in that country. My grandmother was shot in the leg at 13 with an arrow by a Piute Indian who tried to catch her. She told me that her horse was too fast for him, he couldn’t catch her pony. She outran him and got home with the arrows protruding out of her leg. Until the day she died she had an indentation on the side of her calf where the arrow struck her. I’ve asked her several times over the years about it and always got the same story that an Indian chased her as a young girl. It was a very interesting lifestyle. My grandfather, when he started his business, he really started it from scratch. He did have some business come in from the hotel next door and from the people down the street who found out there was a barber shop there and he became quite successful at it. As a young boy, I remember my grandfather had a fellow who had been a porter for the Union Pacific Railroad and in those days they referred to these black men as George Porter, because of the man who invented the Pullman car. They were the staff on the sleeper cars. They would make up the beds and clean in the mornings and assist people on and off. When the railroad did away with the sleeping cars, they were basically left high and dry wherever they were. He was originally from Mississippi and his name was Willie. I don’t remember his last name and I wish I could find a record of him, but my grandfather gave him a job and he shined shoes. He had a high back wooden shoe shine stand and I believe it was a two-seater as I remember it, and it faced the window. I used to love to get up on there as a little boy and watch the people 9 going by as 25th Street was very busy in those days with foot traffic as was all of downtown Ogden. People dressed to go shopping in those days. On occasion, my grandfather would give me 25 cents, but he would make Willie go with me and we would go up 25th Street and I’d go to a movie, or buy something to eat, or find treasures in the little shops along the way. Willie always stayed with me, but he had to stay outside because of the racial barriers at the time. As soon as I came out of the store, he was right there with me. He was quite an older man and I do remember him very vividly in my mind. He was very black in color and his eyes were very bloodshot. He looked to me like he was almost bleeding from his eyes because they were extremely red. I don’t know what really caused it, but I remember that he let me touch his hair. He was really the first black man I ever witnessed and I felt that his hair was very soft, but underneath it was very coarse because he used some type of a hair dressing on there. He was an interesting man. He always had some kind of hand lotion he was working with on his hands because his hands would get really dry shining the shoes. What else would you like to know? WJ: While we’re touching on racism and segregation, I’d like to continue on that. Other than walking with Willie and him not being allowed in the stores that you were able to go in, did you ever see or experience any other form of racism or segregation on 25th Street? MS: I really didn’t. Being young like that, I don’t believe I really understood what was going on. I just knew that Willie would just tell me to go in and when I came out he’d be right there. I didn’t find out until years later really what caused that, I just 10 thought he was being polite and was going to stay outside and for whatever reason he didn’t want to go in there. It didn’t really register with me. As a young kid, being the first black man I ever saw, he was my friend. He would have me hold his hand as we went up the street, especially if we crossed the street to the other side. I guess it was quite a sight to see a toe-headed kid being escorted up 25th Street by a black, older man, but I didn’t think anything of it really. I didn’t really have any more exposure until later on in school here in Ogden. We had a couple of black kids in our school and they were my friends. I really didn’t experience any racism until I was probably in high school. Then I really noticed some of this stuff because they were just other kids. I played sports with them, I had gym class with them, I’d shop with them and have regular classes with them. We really didn’t have what I considered to be a problem. I never heard anybody say anything bad to them because the one fellow I was in high school with was so well-liked that he was actually a member of the student council because he was a very good athlete and a nice guy. As a kid, I didn’t witness any of that down on 25th street. I’m sure it happened. I do know that Willie lived in the old porters and waiters hotel and it was really the only place that black people were allowed to live in that particular part of town unless they were able to buy a home somewhere. I don’t remember what happened to Willie. I’m sure he passed away or he might have moved somewhere, but I don’t really know what happened to him. WJ: With your grandfather’s barber shop being so close to the porters and waiters, do you recall very many African Americans coming in for haircuts or shaves. 11 MS: No, I don’t recall that ever. I don’t even know if they were allowed to go in the shops because of the segregation problems in the early fifties and late forties. I do remember that the people who would come into the shop to get a haircut, shave or have their shoes shined knew his name and would speak to him because he was right there in the beginning of the shop when they came through. They always seemed to be very polite to me. That was probably an overtone of the time I’m thinking, but he seemed to be able to make a living. My grandfather kept him there for a long time that I can remember. He was kind of like a fixture there at the barber shop. He would also do clean up things and sweep the floors and stuff like that to make himself useful and helpful. I don’t remember any people on 25th Street that weren’t white. I don’t remember that at all. WJ: So, obviously it was very busy during WWII and we covered that. You would have seen more of the Korean War era, do you have any memories of being around the soldiers on 25th Street or in the barbershop. MS: I have a vague memory of it. I don’t know if this memory is of an actual occurrence or if it was something that was told to me later on in life, but I do have a vague memory of some soldiers being in there. I don’t really remember too much about it. WJ: Do you feel that with both WWII and Korea ending, Vietnam used a lot of different forms of transportation, do you feel that the railroad leaving hurt your grandfather’s business. 12 MS: I think so. I remember as a kid, going down to the railroad station and going through the underground tunnels that took you out to the different tracks that were going through. I don’t remember how many there were, but there were a number of tunnels that you would go downstairs under the tracks and come up on the other side. I remember that we used to hear the trains all the time and the whistles blowing and so forth. Later in the sixties, the train service started to change. Airplanes became more popular and people started to fly and it was faster and cheaper to fly. I did notice a decrease downtown of people coming through. It was a very busy hub railroad station. My grandfather retired in about 1963 or 1964 and I really didn’t go back down to that area until my high school years. I do remember it and I remember my father saying things like he couldn’t get certain parts anymore for some of the tractors because the trains weren’t coming often enough to bring freight in and things of that nature. WJ: There are lots of rumors of tunnels and opium dens and those kinds of things on 25th Street. Do you have any experience with these tunnels at all? MS: There was a trap door in the back room of my grandfather’s barbershop. In the photo you’ll see the grape stakes of the back wall and it was behind there. You went through that doorway into the back room and it was a fairly small room, maybe 20 feet long and about 10 feet wide. In the one corner there was a trap door in the floor and I do remember going back there one time and that door was open. Prior to that, it was pretty heavy floor and I probably didn’t pay too much attention, but I did see the trap door open and I went down the stairs and they were old, wooden, rickety 13 stairs and it smelled funny. It was kind of a musty smell. At the bottom of the staircase there was a big steel door that was set into the wood frame that was locked because I tried it and I couldn’t get through it. Years later, I asked about it and that was one of the doorways that went into the tunnel system, which to my knowledge is under the gift house today. That’s where the barber shop was, where the gift house is built now, which is owned and operated by Scott Vanleeuwen. There are some places still in downtown Ogden that have those. I do know that over on 24th Street, under the old paint company is where the pony express office was and underneath that are some of the adobe stalls they used for the horses and things of that nature. I have seen that, but as far as up and down 25th Street, I’ve never been in the tunnels, but there was always talk about them. WJ: Did your grandpa say anything to you about his tunnel entrance. MS: Yes, he told me to get up out of there and he was a little stern about it. That’s really the only thing he ever said to me about it. I was so young then that probably if he did say anything about it. It was kind of a curiosity for me to see the open hatch and the staircase that went downstairs and it really did have a funny smell to it as I remember, but I don’t have any real experience in the tunnels themselves. WJ: When we were here before, you did mention very briefly that your grandfather was friends with Harm Perry. Do you remember anything about Mr. Perry? 14 MS: I don’t. I do remember that he went to my grandfather for his haircut for years. They were friends. I know that my grandfather contributed to his campaign a couple of times. They had a very close relationship, but of course, Mayor Perry knew everyone in town. To this day, people talk about how well he interacted with the businessmen downtown and how he brought the Pioneer Days Rodeo to town and installed all these traditions that we now celebrate here in the Ogden area. As far as meeting him, I don’t remember meeting him. I may have, but I don’t know. The gentleman in the photograph, we have no idea who he is in the barber chair. I initially thought it might be the mayor, but it’s not. We compared a picture and it’s not. WJ: Do you remember your grandfather sharing any Harm Perry stories? MS: I don’t really unless it would be something that was related to me later in life. I don’t remember him telling me too much about any of that. I do know they were friends, I know that much and they were business associates and that he cut his hair for many years. WJ: Behind every man is a better woman, as the saying goes, and you mentioned your grandmother, Maggie, before. I was wondering if you could tell us about her since she obviously is such a huge part of your grandfather’s life and your life, so I’d like to hear a little bit about her as well. MS: Well, my grandmother, Maggie, was born in Cannonville, Utah. At fifteen years of age, she met my grandfather, and they began a relationship that lasted for well over 50 years. She was of pioneer stalk and her father was a polygamist who married two sisters a few years apart from each other. He had 17 children by 15 those two women, of which the first wife passed away after her seventh child and her mother would raise all of those children. Her half-sister, we refer to her as Aunt Maude, lived in South Ogden and I have very fond memories of Aunt Maude. She was the youngest of the children, my grandmother was the second youngest of the children from the second marriage. My grandfather was called to go on a mission for the LDS church. This would have been right around 1917. My mother was about 3 months old when he left, which left my grandmother and mother home to take care of themselves in a log cabin on what was left of the family ranch. My grandmother took a job cooking for the miners up the canyon which was 13 miles further up the canyon. She would have to get up at 4 in the morning and get the fire going in the stove because there was no heat in the building. She would get breakfast started and go out and feed the stock and get the horse hitched up to the buggy and when she finally had everything warmed up and ready to go and had my mother fed, she would heat rocks and she would wrap those rocks up in cloth and put them in with my mother to keep her warm, as she was a very tiny baby and she would drive the 13 miles up to the mine and cook breakfast and lunch for the miners. In the afternoon, she would start the dinner work and another woman would come up and feed the miners the evening meal. She would go home and take care of her garden, animals, and her way of life to keep herself alive and keep my mother alive. While my grandfather was on his mission, he was in Tennessee, and he told me the story that he and his companion were walking down side of the road 16 and it was extremely hot and humid. He was not used to this kind of weather being from the desert country of Utah. He said that he had a fan in the button hole in the lapel of his coat and in those days the missionaries weren’t allowed to go around in just church sleeves, they had to have their jackets and a tie on all the time. He said that it got so hot and he sweat so badly that it melted his waxed collar to make the collar stand up. It actually melted to where it just kind of fell down around his neck. They were walking along a truck came by with some men in the back of the truck and they stopped alongside my grandfather and his companion and asked them what they were doing and explained to them that they were on a mission for the LDS church and the men in the truck milled around for a few minutes and asked them again, “What are you doing?” They said, “We’re on a mission for the LDS church.” “What is the LDS church?” “Well, we’re Latter Day Saints, Mormons.” They understood what that meant and the men wanted to know why they weren’t in the military because the draft was being instigated for World War I at this time and they explained to them that they have a deferment because they were on a mission from their church. The men didn’t buy that and they got out of the truck and surrounded my grandfather and his companion and beat them within an inch of their lives. The men threw them in the back of the truck and hauled them into Nashville and threw them in the county jail. It took three days before my grandfather was well enough to even walk because they beat him up so badly. He was finally allowed a phone call and the only phone that was in Cannonville, Utah was in the general 17 store. He called that number through the operator and they sent word up to the cabin that he had called and would be calling back later and my grandmother came into town and waited for the call. He explained to her what happened and she was quite concerned and he asked her to tell the bishop what was going on so they could get someone in the church authority to get him out of jail. She went to the local bishop and was told that he was too busy getting his winter crop in and he wouldn’t have time to do it for at least a week. He wasn’t sure of the timeline and this didn’t sit well with my grandmother. So she drove the buck board out to where the stake president lived and spoke with him about it and pretty much got the same story. She went back home and stewed over this for not very long because she was a very determined person, and at this time weighed about 90 pounds and never stood more than five foot four in her life. My mother was four or five months old. My grandmother basically was not going to stand for being put off. She hitched up the buck board and put together enough provisions to last her a few days and bundled my mother up into every quilt and blanket that she had and headed out to Salt lake City from Cannonville. It took her three days camping on the prairie. This story was relayed to me by my grandmother on several occasions and other members of my family. This was in the dead of winter. I can’t imagine being in an open buck board trying to drive this horse across the prairies of Utah on goat trails and cow trails. There were very little roadways to speak of all the way into Salt Lake. Once she got into Salt Lake, she said, “I really looked a fright. My hair was all out of place and I was very dirty, but I went straight to the 18 church’s general authority’s office building and went inside with your mother in my arms.” There was a man secretary sitting up on this big desk on a small platform and when he recognized that she was standing there he asked if he could help her and she explained to him what was going on with my grandfather. The gentleman came back at her with, “Do you have an appointment?” She explained, “No, I don’t have an appointment. I have just arrived here and I drove myself with my tiny baby all the way from Cannonville in the buck board.” The gentleman said, “Well, you’ll have to make an appointment and you’re probably going to have about a two week wait.” This infuriated my grandmother. She had just about all she was going to have about being put off and she went back out to the buck board and as her story went, she said to me, “I reached in above the blanket and the seat of the buck board and took out a 30/30 rifle and walked back inside the building right up to the man in front,” and in her terminology, not mine, hers, she said, “I fanned a bullet into the chamber and slammed the butt of the gun down on his desk and said I will see the president of this son of a bitch, and I will see him today.” She did. They took her back to Cannonville three days later in a stagecoach that the church paid for. One of the brothers from Salt Lake drove the buck board back. They put her up at the fort halfway for the night so she didn’t have to sleep out on the prairie and they paid for that also. I think she made a fairly good impression on the fellows downtown in the church of general authorities and my grandfather was out of jail. Two weeks later they did it to him again. It was the same type of 19 scenario. My grandmother told the story as a continuation of this story. This time she said with a twinkle in her eye, “Mikey all I had to do was tell the bishop this time.” As the saying goes, “Crap rolls downhill.” I guess it came from Salt Lake down to the bishop that this was not good. There was some other legislation that took place somewhere and someone in authority got involved in this. As I understand it, reading some of the history, it was fairly common for the missionaries to be accosted like this because the church was not really well thought of in those days. Sometimes you just had to stand up for yourself. I know that my grandfather did not resist them because he told me himself. WJ: Earlier you mentioned Vern Butcher. Do you know of any of his stories of 25th Street? MS: He did tell us quite a bit of stories there in the break room and about a couple of shootings that he was involved in. He was actually shot as I remember. Don’t quote me on that, but as I remember he did get shot in one of those. It was either shot or stabbed. Vern was a big man. He probably stood 6’5” and weighed well over 250 pounds. You didn’t have a small man walking foot beat on 25th Street. He told me that just like in the big cities they carried a knight stick and he got quite proficient with twirling it on the leather thong that it had to hold on to it. He said that in those days there were no radios for the police. They had a red light on the city and county building and when a call would come in, they would turn that red light on and it would flash and they would know to go to a call box and call in to see what was going on. You always would walk out of whatever business you’d just been in and keep your eyes peeled up toward the city and 20 county building. This was in the days before there was a lot of trees downtown that had grown to full size. The city and county building only being 10 or 15 years old at the time. He talked about a number of ladies of the night that were prevalent on the street. He talked about the bars and the fights that went on and the soldiers that met trouble on the street in one form or another. There was quite a bit of that going on because they were taken advantage of by the flim flam artists as they called them in those days. I don’t remember too much more about what Vern had to say, but it was very spell binding to listen to him. He was not a man to stretch the truth and if he said that he bopped somebody on the head with a knight stick, he thumped him. I do know that when you arrested someone when your afoot, you had to walk him to jail. If the friends were around, they didn’t want you taking him to jail, they tried to take him away from you. You had to be very determined about what you were going to do. He also told us on one particular occasion that sometimes you couldn’t do anything because you were all by yourself or you had your partner with you and there wasn’t anything you could do to stop what was going on because you were out-numbered by the amount of people out there. It’s the sign of the times of the 30’s and early 40’s. WJ: When we were here for the pre interview. You mentioned a man only known as “Airplane.” Can you share some experiences there? MS: I don’t remember his real name as we called him wino. He was an alcoholic and he lived on 25th Street. He would stay in the cheapest hotel or he would sleep in the back alleys or in cars. He had been a certified public accountant as a young 21 man and alcohol took over his life and he was quite a small man when I knew him. This was in the mid-70’s that I knew him. The reason they called him “Airplane” is—because of his gin soaked brain I guess you could call it, he would mimic an airplane in flight. He’d put his arms out and make noises like an airplane and bank his arms when he went around a corner or made a turn. The particular night that I remember him the most for was I had just come out of the sheriff’s office in my patrol car and was sitting at the red light at 25th and Grant Avenue and I was going to go straight through the intersection and out toward the county area when I saw some movement coming toward me, which would be going south on grant Avenue. I could see a person coming at me, but I couldn’t tell what they were doing and it was about 11 at night and it was winter time and it was cold and I had my window rolled down about halfway and I could just faintly hear the noise he was making. He sounded like an airplane coming toward me and he banked really hard to make the turn to go west on 25th Street and he had his head down and when he made the turn he turned just a little bit too wide and went head first into a parking meter. I do remember hearing the parking meter make a twang sound that only a piece of steel can make when it’s hit with something really hard and of course “Airplane” went to the ground into the gutter and I looked over and saw him and honestly, I laughed. It was pretty comical to see. I thought, “Well, he’ll get up.” I sat there for a moment more and he didn’t move and I thought he hurt himself bad or possibly killed himself. He was moving pretty fast as he came around the corner. I pulled over there and he was semi-conscious and murmuring and blood was everywhere, he’d split his head open 22 from the back toward the front. He was bleeding pretty badly. I felt bad for him. He stunk really, really bad. I don’t know how long he’d lived in those clothes. I do know that the Ogden officers used to go out and round these guys up when the weather would get really bad and they’d take them up and put them in jail just so they wouldn’t freeze to death on the street. The judge in the Ogden Municipal Courts would fine them and they didn’t have the money, do they’d take the jail time anywhere from a week to thirty days. They’d take them up to the jail and they’d change their clothes out and wash them down with a hose because most of these fellows lived in their clothes for a long time and they did every bodily function they could do in their clothes while they were under this alcoholic stupor. Some of these guys were pretty pitiful to look at. I watched several of them go through DT’s in the jail. There really wasn’t much we could do for them other than refer them to the nurse. “Airplane,” as he was referred to, being in Ogden City on 25th Street, the Ogden police department really didn’t like the sheriff’s department to make arrests on 25th Street. Of course, this fellow was injured and was also intoxicated. I called our dispatcher and they said, “An Ogden officer down.” He came down and he was in a brand new El Camino police car and he had his dog in the back in an insulated box that the dog rode in with a wire mesh gate on the front of it. As soon as he saw how bad Airplane was bleeding, even though I had given him a great big sterile pad to put on his head to help stem the flow of blood, the Ogden officer refused to put him in his patrol car because it was a brand new patrol car. As I said earlier, “Airplane” stunk really bad and it was the kind of stink 23 that you just don’t want to be around. This Ogden office would not put him in the patrol car and he finally decided and he looked at me and I said, “I’m not taking him,” I told him, “This is Ogden City.” He went to the back of the patrol car and he dropped the tailgate and opened the door and took his dog out and walked him around and put him in the front seat. He went back and picked up Airplane, who was a very small man, and put him in the dog house and shut the door. A fellow came by from Ogden Police Department’s crime lab and he took a photograph with “Airplane” with his fingers through the grate and looking out and blood on his face. That picture hung up in the downstairs evidence room of the Ogden Municipal Building for many years afterwards and I was witness to that happening. It was a pretty comical deal. I do know that several years later there was a fire at the Marion hotel and the Ogden officers got there first before the fire department even got there and they entered the building. That particular officer drug out a couple of those guys and saved their lives. He went back up inside to try and get some more of those fellows and he found “Airplane” and he had expired from smoke inhalation. He carried him out of the building and he sat on the curb on 25th Street and cried holding this little old man because he had nobody in the world and the officer knew who he was and dealt with him for years and he just felt really bad that he wasn’t able to do more for him. I know that haunts him to this day, I know it does. He’s still a police officer, but I won’t give you his name. 24 WJ: You mentioned that the sheriff’s office and the Ogden City Police Department shared some ground, but they preferred that you didn’t touch 25th Street. Do you have any stories, other than dealing with Airplane, in or around 25th Street? MS: I have a number of them. Ogden city called us one night and they had a fight going on in a bar on 25th Street, El Borracho, I believe was the name of the bar as I remember. It was a large group of Hispanic men fighting and it boiled out into the street and it got pretty bad. The Ogden officers didn’t have enough guys on duty that were clear, that weren’t on calls, to handle it and they called us for help. We happened to be very close by, which was a rarity for the sheriff’s department. I do know I was sent to a fatal accident and I was in Hooper when I got the call and the fatal accident was at mile marker 43 on Monte Cristo and I was the closest car. That’s over 55 miles that I ran code 3, lights and siren. When I got to the accident scene I couldn’t even hear because the siren was above your head on a light bar in those days. This particular night, I believe it was a Friday night, in the winter time again and we went down there and we didn’t actually get inside. As I remember, we didn’t even make it inside the building and the Ogden officers were grabbing people and pushing them out the door. They would say, “Take that one, let that one go.” It was a pretty physical fight. There were a lot of guys that were bleeding and a lot of yelling and a lot of confusion going on. I remember we put four fellows handcuffed in the back seat of our patrol car and we kind of just piled them in there. We hauled them up to the jail and when you go to the ninth floor of the old city and county building, we had a holding room and it was basically a 25 steel room with a steel door and a little window and it had a couple of benches in there bolted to the wall and nothing else. There were no bathroom facilities and no water or anything. We would put prisoners in there until we could get them in individually to have them booked in at the screening desk which was an iron graded shield in front of the desk. The jail officer would stand behind that screen and ask them questions to get them booked into jail. We threw these guys in there to hold them and in the meantime, Ogden Police were bringing people in too. There were quite a number of fellows, I don’t remember how many, but there was probably somewhere between 8 and 12 people that got arrested out of this. Some of the fellows were a little banged up and we stared taking guys out and we were just helping because being with the sheriff’s department, the booking officer, there were two men on a midnight shift in the jail and it got a little hectic for them trying to get all these people taken care of and all the paperwork involved. I was helping to get this done and I more or less wound up being the guy that got the next guy out of the cell and brought him in. We’d put him up against the grading fence in front of the booking desk and we’d search them and take their property from them that had to be kept with a jailer like their belts and shoelaces and any money or anything in their pockets and things. Because it was winter time we were taking their coats also. We brought probably six or eight fellows in and got them booked, which probably took about a half hour to 45 minutes to get all of them booked. We finally grabbed one fellow and I brought him out and stood him up by the wall and I started to check his pockets. He was very verbal with me. He was 26 calling me every name you could think of and was extremely hostile and intoxicated. We started checking him and when I went and reached over to take his coat off I walked behind him and took it off his shoulders and brought it down over his arms. He had a knife sticking out of his chest. We got his ID out of him thinking he was an adult because he was in the bar. He was seventeen years old. We had to take him up to the hospital and that was the end of my night in the jail because they had to do surgery on him to have the knife removed. He didn’t bleed very much and it didn’t kill him. I remember the expression on the jailer’s face when he saw that knife sticking out of his chest. He had a couple of choice words to say to us about searching him. I said, “I didn’t search anybody, they came out of that bar handcuffed and we grabbed them and threw them in the car.” This fellow probably went 45 minutes to maybe an hour with a knife sticking out of his chest inside his coat. WJ: Wow. I imagine you’ve seen a lot then. Is there anything else you’d like to share with us? MS: My grandfather was an interesting man, he really was. In his local ward, he was a high 70’s and I do know that when somebody would not show up for their talk on Sunday in the sacrament meeting, they would call on my grandfather to fill in at a moment’s notice. He was always able to come up with some interesting story to talk about with his relationship with the LDS church and his ideas of religion. He was very highly thought of in his local neighborhood and ward. In later years, after he passed away the neighborhood changed very much. Minorities started moving into the neighborhood and I do remember as a teenage boy mowing my 27 grandmother’s lawn and I spent a lot of time down there taking care of her yard. Because of her age, she wasn’t really able to do that kind of work. She had a very good relationship with two different black families there on the block and I remember one fellow walked by one day just as I got there on my motorcycle and he came walking over to me and I’d never seen him before other than maybe once or twice around the neighborhood. He walked over to me and said, “Who are you?” I said, “Well, I’m Mike.” He said, “What are you doing here at Miss Baldwin’s?” I said, “She’s my grandmother I’m going to mow her lawn.” He said, “Okay, just wanted to know what you were doing here.” They watched out for her because she was a little old grandma and looked like a grandma and acted like a grandma and she was very sweet to anybody, it didn’t matter what color you were or what religion you were, she was a grandma and that’s how everyone referred to her. My grandfather and my grandmother are buried in South Ogden. We were just there not too long ago with another aunt and one of their children. It was interesting to walk over to my grandmother and grandfather’s headstone and talk to them for a moment. I hadn’t been up there since I was a kid. It was kind of interesting to see how the area had changed. When we buried my grandfather there was a very small pine tree just in front of his grave and that pine tree is huge now. He’s been gone probably 47 or 48 years now so a lot of history has gone on. 25th Street had changed a lot in those years. Now it’s very much a tourist attraction and eclectic place to go for dinner or the shops that are down there. That’s really all I have about that part of their lives. 28 WJ: Thank you so much for sharing with us. MS: You’re welcome. It was my pleasure. 29