Oral History Program Barbara Dibble and Emma West Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 3 March 2017 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Barbara Dibble and Emma West Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 3 March 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: Dibble, Barbara and Emma West, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 3 March 2017, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Harvey Neuteboom Father of Barbara Dibble 1942 Harvey Neuteboom Father of Barbara Dibble 1942 Emma West, and her mother, Barbara Dibble 3 March 2017 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Barbara Dibble and her daughter Emma West, conducted in two parts on March 3, 2017 and March 18, 2017, in Barbara’s home in Layton, Utah, by Lorrie Rands. Barbara and Emma discuss their lives and their family’s connection to Weber County as well as World War II experiences. Michael Baliff, the video technician was also present. Day One LR: It is March 3, 2017. We are in the home of Barbara Dibble in Layton, Utah, talking about her family, the Neuteboom family and the Dibble family. With us is Emma West, her daughter. I’m Lorrie Rands conducting the interview and Michael Baliff is with us. Let’s talk about your family: your parents, I’m trying to remember where they came from. MB: The Netherlands. LR: The Netherlands, and was it their parents who came? BD: Yes, it was their parents. EW: Yes, so the Neutebooms; the Dad came late 1890s, the wife comes in about 1905. He was from Holland, the wife was from Norway, and they both met here. Do you want to tell the story of how they met? It’s kind of a good story. BD: You probably know it better. EW: Well, his first wife had passed away. BD: They had two children. EW: They had two children, kind of farmed those out to family. He took a room in the Broom Hotel, down on Washington, and was working at Last and Thomas, which was kind of a fine men’s furnishing store, which was also owned by a Dutchman. Everett Neuteboom was the father’s name, and the story is, this is sort of just 2 family lore; I have no proof of this but it is a good story, that he would come down the stairs from his room in the hotel, and every day he would step over the maid scrubbing the stairs, until one day he happened to notice her, and she was pretty, so this was the woman he eventually married. LR: She was working as a maid at the Broom Hotel? EW: Well the story is that they met in the hotel, but I know that he was living in the Broom Hotel, so I’m just kind of assuming that’s the one that we’re talking about. LR: That is a cool story. EW: It’s a good story. So they married and they have nine kids together. LR: So he has his home with eleven children? EW: I think there was actually twelve, because he and his first wife had an infant son who died. There were two who lived to adulthood. Then he and his second wife go on to have these nine kids. He was very influential in Ogden. From what I’ve read he does show up in the big four volume set of Utah history. You can read a little biography of his early life, but he was a printer, and he was the Dutch Consul for Utah. LR: What exactly is the Dutch Consul? EW: I wondered that to? BD: Well I think it’s where they would be the final approval of travel or of passports or of citizenship type stuff. They would facilitate people getting passports to here from Holland. Anyway, they had consulates like that at the time for a lot of different countries that helped facilitate people’s immigration and travel. EW: From what I’ve heard he occasionally would have to go to San Francisco to take care of business and things. 3 MB: They’re basically like representatives of the ambassador to areas beyond the embassy. EW: So, I don’t know if he was Consul or Vice-Consul or what the exact title was. BD: I think he was Consul, I have the paper, and I have this picture. EW: But he was kind of a big deal. He was a big businessman in the community and in the church, which were almost one and the same in some instances. LR: Especially within the Dutch community in Ogden. It was very closely tied together. EW: Very close knit, yes. So he was quite the guy, and his wife was Norwegian. She never learned to really write English super great, and I think she had a hard time speaking English as well, but she was just this cute little Norwegian lady that had all these kids. MB: So she couldn’t speak English very well, what sort of language did they communicate in? EW: That’s a good question. LR: Because he didn’t speak Norwegian, did he? EW: I mean, she spoke enough, but I’m not sure could write really well. I just remember my Grandpa telling me she worked really hard to write her sons in the service during World War II but it was a real labor of love. So she knew how, but when she was under great stress or when she was really mad, it all came out in Norwegian. I think she still really tied to that language, and English was definitely not her first language. She struggled. BD: I don’t know how close some of those Scandinavian languages are, if it became easy for them to connect. LR: So Everett Neuteboom, do you know where he lived in Ogden? 4 EW: Yes I do. I got it written down in my book over here. I think I have it in this history. LR: He’s the one who owned the print shop that was on Washington between 24th and 25th, and the name was? BD: Neuteboom Printing. They had it until his untimely death, but when he passed away, the son’s just didn’t know enough, they couldn’t keep it going, and so they lost the company. LR: So it’s not something that he brought his kids into to learn how to do it? EW: Well he did, but they were teenagers. They weren’t in the position where they understood enough about business. That’s kind of how I understand it; they weren’t quite old enough to take it and run with it. I don’t know if there would have been business debts or just the day to day stuff, I’m not sure they knew how to handle it. I think they started out trying to run it. BD: Because I think they knew how to do the printing, they just didn’t know how… EW: To run the business. So eventually it just didn’t continue. They lived at 2719 Madison, between 27th and 28th on Madison. So Virginia, the Weber co-ed that we were talking about, she was the oldest, and then they had lots of other boys and girls. They all seemed to have had plenty of spunk, and were kind of mischievous. I’ve heard lots of stories. I wonder how my grandpa survived to adulthood, because I’m sure his Mom wanted to kill him sometimes. LR: Could you talk about one of those stories? BD: Sure, my Dad was the youngest, so he was only seven years old when his father passed away. I never knew this man personally, I knew my grandmother a little, but I didn’t know my grandfather because he had passed away when my dad was just seven. 5 EW: Everything that my Grandpa ever told me was that they had a lot of fun, and I know he personally liked to do pranks and things. When he was a teenager, his father had died already, his mother didn’t know what to do with him sometimes. He talks about going and sticking matchsticks in people’s doorbells and breaking them off so they keep ringing forever. Running people’s rocking chairs up the flagpole, just silly stuff. Taking out the bolts from the hinges of a door at Ogden High School. BD: They didn’t want class to go on too much, so he took the… EW: Pins out of the hinge. BD: So when the teacher opened the door the door fell off and shattered. EW: So class could be canceled. BD: He was a character. EW: I think they were all like that. LR: Did all of the brothers and sisters go to Ogden High? I know Virginia went to Weber College high school you said, but did most of them go to Ogden High? BD: Well my Dad’s brother who was just two years older than him, was the first Student Body President at Ogden High, so the older ones probably most of them went to either Weber High or Ogden High. EW: I don’t know. BD: But I'm not sure where the other ones went. EW: Of course maybe not all of them went to High School. LR: That is a possibility. BD: I think they did. EW: I know the younger ones probably did. Virginia, I’m not even sure if she graduated from this Weber College high school, couldn’t find any proof of that. I 6 know she goes on to Weber College because I have her transcripts, and she gets a two year degree there and then her teaching certificate and moves on, but that was still in the mid-1920s. That was kind of advanced education, especially for a girl. The boys, older ones, were probably working from what I’ve understood with the dad in the printing company. I’m not sure they did much in the form of advanced education. I think you only had to be through the eighth grade, so I’m not really sure. BD: I know Grant, the one who was student body president at Weber State, he went on to BYU and was student body President at BYU, and then was drafted and went into the service. EW: He was in the Army. The Dad, Evert, dies in 1930, and the family home was paid for, so they stayed there in the family home. Eventually the business has gone, so the oldest children, which is Virginia, this girl that we’ve been talking about, and then her younger brother, were pretty much the breadwinners. So she starts teaching and supporting the family. One of her younger sisters, who I also interviewed and wrote her life history, was two or three years younger than Virginia. Once when their mother had an extended service, she talked about how she and another sister would stay home from school on Mondays to catch up on the washing and help take care of the house and stuff, and then try and catch up on their school work the rest of the week. They still struggled, she remembered her mother sweeping up the coalhouse many times, trying to find enough fuel to keep things going. LR: So would that have been during the Depression? EW: Yes. 7 BD: I remember my dad saying that always at that time you slept with the window open, but he said many times the covers were frozen on the top. EW: Why people thought that was healthy I don’t know. It was a thing. LR: That makes me cold just thinking about it. EW: Yeah, but they didn’t seem unhappy. They played lots of board games, they went for drives. I remember my Grandpa telling me he would make a ketchup sandwich and go up in the canyon for the day, as a young boy. LR: On a ketchup sandwich? Alright. BD: There wasn’t any development in that hollow where 12th Street goes now, up to the canyon. That was all undeveloped, it was orchards and things, and they played there a lot. EW: Yeah, he’d be gone for the whole day. BD: Did a lot of adventures in that part of Ogden, riding their bikes. LR: So when was your father born? BD: 1922. LR: Okay. Was he born at home, or was he born in the Dee Hospital? BD: I’m not even sure. EW: I would guess he was born at home, but that’s just a guess. BD: I would have thought so, I don’t know if we ever even talked about that. He always talked about his older brothers and sisters, how he depended on his older sisters to give him a little bit of change so he could go on dates or have candy or do anything, because they were the ones bringing home money, and they would often buy his clothes and such. EW: They were teachers at his grammar school. So they knew what he was doing. He said he couldn’t get away with anything in the day. 8 LR: I don’t know if that was fair. EW: It probably was very necessary for him, because he was kind of a rascal. LR: He really grew up during the Depression. How did his father die? BD: Of a blood clot, actually. He fell at church, fell outside and he just felt pain, and so instead of a traditional doctor they called a chiropractor type doctor, and he massaged it and the clot moved into his lung, or his heart. I’ve heard both. EW: I remember Grandpa telling me he would come home from school for lunch every day. He comes home for lunch, there’s three doctors working on his dad. That wasn’t anything, he knew his Dad had been sick. That had been over a period of a week or ten days, from when he took the fall to when he passed away. But they didn’t tell him that his father had died. He’s home for lunch, he’s seven, and he didn’t find out until later. BD: Well they finally sent someone to school to get him. But it was later in the day. EW: So, he really didn’t know his father, he’s only seven. So it’s really his older brothers and sisters who raised him, and his mother of course, but they were the ones keeping track. LR: Well it sounds like she relied heavily upon her children to help keep things going. EW: She wasn’t in a position to get a job, really. LR: Well, she could hardly speak English, so that makes sense. EW: Yeah, and you know she had all these kids to raise. I think they just took it upon themselves to support the family. The two half-brothers from the first marriage, they came home for their father’s funeral, but went back to California where they were living to work, and were not really connected to the family. As far as I’ve been able to tell, they did not provide support. Maybe they just weren’t in a 9 position to do so, I don’t know. But I think the family just really came together and made it work. LR: Wow, that’s really cool. EW: But you know his obituary was published the same day in the paper, so he was very well-regarded. It was a quick turnaround. But it’s a very complimentary obituary, and he was well loved. LR: Did your father ever talk about how he felt when he found out about Pearl Harbor? BD: Yeah, in fact it was interesting, this story. They were in Stake Conference and the meeting was almost to close. They heard young men outside calling Extra, Extra, and the person in charge, the Stake President or someone, sent somebody out to get a newspaper. They came in and told them that war had just been declared and they closed the meeting and sent everyone home. EW: So this is what I have written, because I asked him about that. He was actually on a date to Stake Conference with the woman who he married, on the day that Pearl Harbor was bombed. He remembers that he could hear the call of Extra, Extra outside the Ogden tabernacle. The Stake President went out and got a newspaper, and interrupted President John A. Widtsoe. He calmly announced the news the country was at war, that the congregation accepted the news quietly. I don’t think they continued the meeting after that. BD: But I think all the young men at that time, there was no question that they wouldn’t enlist or become part of it. They all, I think, felt it was probably coming. MB: So at that point, he would have been around seventeen years old in 1940? LR: He was eighteen or nineteen. MB: Oh, I did my math wrong. 10 EW: Probably just barely nineteen, because his birthday is in November. MB: So how quickly after Pearl Harbor did he end up going into the service? EW: He enlisted in 1942. LR: So he enlisted, he wasn’t drafted? EW: No, and his brothers enlisted also. So there were three of them out at the same time. LR: What was your father’s name? BD: Harvey Charles Neuteboom. LR: I know you said Grant was at BYU when he enlisted, or was he drafted? EW: I believe he enlisted. BD: Yeah, he went in the Army. My Dad went into the Navy Air Corps to begin with and went to Utah State for training. He did not feel good about flying, they wanted him to fly blimps, and he just had an overwhelming feeling that it was not the right thing to do, so he switched to the marines. LR: It’s a good thing he did, blimps were not very successful. BD: It said in his patriarchal blessing that he would be protected on land and sea, but it said nothing about air, so he didn’t feel comfortable about being in the air. He always told me that. LR: So, your father chose to go into the Marines. Where did he do his basic training, do you know? Was it at Camp Lejeune or in San Diego? EW: It says it here somewhere… I know he was in California for a time. BD: Yeah, I think it was for sure California. EW: He was in the 5th Marine Division. So looks like it was the Marine Base at San Diego. Trained at Camp Pendleton, right up on the beach of San Clemente. 11 Finally, he went overseas to the main island of Hawaii to what they called Camp Tarawa. BD: I don’t know if he saw other action before Iwo Jima or not. EW: I get the impression from the things that he talked about that that was the biggie for him. BD: That they just got on a ship and headed there. EW: They did some training in preparation for Iwo Jima, but I think that was their goal. BD: I’m thinking that first wave that morning, over half of his company was killed. MB: I don’t know if I caught this, but do you know when he switched from the Army Air Corps to the Marines? EW: He actually started initially with the Navy Air Corps when he enlisted in 1942. He wasn’t yet twenty, so this is his memories of when they found out about Pearl Harbor. “I knew that the only thing I would do eventually was to go in. At that stage of the game, if I wanted to enlist I would have had to have my mother’s consent to do it,” and I’m not sure if that was because of his age or because he was the youngest and already would have had other brothers serving. LR: That’s an interesting thing. EW: So I’m not well versed enough in the details of how all that would have worked. Turned out after that, all the news about the war was bad. Summer came in 1942, he got engaged to his wife in 1942. He wanted to be a naval aviator, so it sounds like he did the Air Corps thing in 1942. After that, he decided he didn’t feel comfortable flying lighter than air, so he resigned his commission, came home and got married, and waited to be drafted. I know they got married in 1943. When he was drafted, he joined the marines. 12 BD: Well I know he came home to see the baby born and then left, and didn’t see him again for over three years. LR: They were married in 1943, and baby would have been born? BD: Later that year, probably. LR: Okay. He was gone for three years. Did he stay in the Pacific the whole time? BD: He did. EW: Because he was wounded at Iwo Jima, and then sent back to Hawaii to recuperate. BD: While he was in Hawaii, the war ended and he was given the choice, he could either come home or he could go to Japan and help with reconstruction, and he chose to go to Japan. LR: I know I have it here, but I’d love to hear your version about what happened on Iwo Jima. EW: First thing I ever knew about it was the hole in the back of his leg. When I was a little girl we went swimming and he still had a big cavity in the back of his leg. BD: He was shot in both legs and the bullet came out the other side. Amazingly did not hit an artery or the bones. LR: That is crazy. BD: It is. I don’t think he loved to talk about what it was really like. He just commented on how the night before they were going to go up onto the beach that was a very soul searching time, knowing that many of them probably wouldn’t survive, and frightening, even though they hadn’t been through a lot to know what to be afraid of. He talked about the bullets, he thought they were crabs jumping until after a while he realized it was bullets hitting the sand up as they would run up the beach. The sand was popping up all over them, and how difficult it was. He made 13 the comment that more than half of his company were killed within a short time. When they finally made their way up, he always said, “You didn’t think too much about getting killed other than you were just trying to stay alive and do what you were supposed to do.” EW: He talked about how they would try to walk in each other’s footsteps so they wouldn’t hit a landmine. This wasn’t ever something that he talked about, but my husband and my sister’s husband interviewed him later in life, and he was a little more explicit with them. You can read his expressions of seeing bodies blown in half and, just the carnage that was there. He talked about being in a fox hole, and he didn’t smoke, but a lot of the other soldiers did, and the guy with him in the foxhole wanted to light up, and he says, “If you light that cigarette I’ll kill you.” BD: Because that’s how the snipers knew where they were. EW: He was mischievous but he was not violent. To put that in perspective, it was truly life or death, and that’s where he had to go to be able to survive. “If you light that cigarette I’ll kill you.” BD: He talked, he did talk about the famous picture that was taken there and how he was standing just to the side of that. Then he was wounded, was it four days after that? EW: It was on March 12, and that was his wife’s birthday. LR: Oh wow. The day he was wounded. EW: He always said he got her a purple heart for her birthday. BD: She got a letter and realized he was wounded. It was an interesting thing when he got shot, I don’t know if it was the time of day or what, but the medics knew that if they didn’t get him to the beach by that evening to be evacuated to the Red Cross ship, he would have to lay there longer. 14 EW: Yeah, there’s a cut off when they would stop taking out casualties. BD: One medic was killed taking him down to the beach, and he remembers just lying there that night and being in pain and feeling so sad that that medic had been killed trying to help him. LR: It’s interesting talking about it, because even though we’re not the ones who lived through it, there’s still a pall about it and it’s a little bit unsettling to go through it again. Was there a particular reason, other than the fact he was standing by when they took that iconic photograph, was there any other reason the photographer sent him a copy of that? EW: Well he talks about it like the photographer was able to make him a copy while they were still together on the island. BD: A lot of the pictures in here of the carnage of the beaches and stuff were from that photographer, he gave him copies of the photos he had taken. Dad said that picture was just kind of a fluke. The photographer said, “Okay, some of you guys come over here and let’s take a picture.” I can’t remember what my dad said he was doing, but he just was standing there watching them do it. EW: So his description, “We were sitting at the base of Mount Suribachi when I looked up and saw the first flag go up. Now that wasn’t the one that was famous, that was just the first flag. One of the officers had put a flag in his shirt and he carried it there and put it up. Then the photographer decided they needed a better picture than that, so they took that down and raised the other one, and that’s the one you see with the guys raising the flag. I knew two of those guys as speaking acquaintances, especially the Indian. He and I used to talk.” Then he gives some information about their friendship. Anyway, it sounds like he saw the actual first 15 raising and the famous photo was a little bit of a redo. That’s not a secret or anything like that. LR: Not anymore. EW: He was probably just forward enough to ask for a copy. BD: Maybe he had become friends with that photographer, I don’t know. EW: It certainly would have been in his personality to say, “That seems cool, can I have one of those?” He was just a very people person, it wouldn’t have surprised me if he had just reached out trying to get a copy. Maybe lots of the soldiers were given copies, I don’t know. MB: So how long after his injury was he convalescing with the Red Cross ship, or what was the process of that recovery? EW: Well, it says here, “I laid there on the beach from 5:30 that afternoon until almost 10:00 that next morning before they could take me in. They washed me all up, cleaned it out, wrapped it up the best they could. The next thing I remember after I woke up I was on a Higgins boat heading to a hospital ship, the USS Bountiful. I stayed on that and then went to Guam to a new hospital that they had just built, and I was there for about five days. Then they shipped me back to Hawaii. I was in a hospital called AIA Heights Naval Hospital near Oahu.” I think he was there for several weeks, at least. LR: Was it within his nature to instead of going home after he was wounded, to volunteer for Japan? BD: Much to my mother’s chagrin. EW: She wasn’t very happy about that, but I think he thought, “Well, now’s my chance. I want to see Japan, and they need help.” 16 BD: “I want to help and I’ve been out of commission for a while, I still feel that I need to give.” That was his nature too. LR: So out of curiosity, did he ever serve an LDS Mission? BD: He did not. LR: So that could have been a reason too. BD: He did baptize his very close friend though, on the beach. EW: He was a fellow Marine and he always felt like that was his mission service. LR: Interesting. MB: Was that a beach in Japan? EW: I think it was Hawaii, before they went to Japan, or before they went to the South Pacific. LR: So when did he finally come home? EW: Well, he has a story about that. BD: He came home through San Francisco. EW: Yes, but his big thing is always that he came home and had two Christmases, isn’t that it? Because of the way they crossed the International Date Line. BD: It was the day again, so he had two Christmases. EW: Did he come home in 1946 or 1945? I’m thinking it may have been 1946 by the time he got home. LR: Well that would make sense. You said he hadn’t seen his son for three years. EW: Yes. I can’t find the date, but I remember he talked about it a lot that he had two Christmases in 1945, because he crossed the dateline. He was eventually discharged in January 1946. LR: After he comes home and gets back into civilian life, what, what did he do? 17 EW: He started working for First Security Bank. He was a banker. I think he was probably a teller in the beginning, and then he got to where he was manager of their South Ogden Branch, and also was a loan officer at their main office in downtown Ogden. BD: Then he went to work for Western States Thrift I think was the name of it. It was next to LR Samuels, actually. It was a loan company, kind of like a Credit Union type place. Then he was the manager and helped start Citizens National Bank, which is no longer a bank, they sold out. At the very end of his life, before he retired, but after that bank closed, he became the head of food services for McKay Dee hospital and that’s where he retired. EW: That’s what I always remember him doing because he would always take us to the hospital for breakfast. BD: Everybody loved him there, he had a great sense of humor. EW: You know, he didn’t have any training in finance or anything; I think it was just probably a personal connection on how he got on in the banking industry. BD: Yes, he didn’t have a degree. He had some credits from Utah State from when he was up there for training, and he had gone to Weber College just a little bit. LR: Was that before he enlisted that he went to Weber College? BD: Yes. EW: But he was very much a people person. BD: He was President of the Ogden Kiwanis. EW: Yes Lion’s Club, the Junior JCs. I looked through the Standard and he shows up in the newspaper all over the place, because he was always giving a speech somewhere with one of these organizations. BD: He oversaw a lot of programs, he would emcee programs. 18 EW: He had quite the repertoire of jokes. BD: Then the fact that he was Santa for several years, how many did you say thirty? EW: I think over thirty, or just about thirty. He was Santa Claus at the… BD: Christmas Village, and then in the Ogden Christmas Parade at Thanksgiving time for over thirty years. EW: Individuals would hire him to come and be Santa at their family Christmas parties. BD: He just did it constantly. EW: That was a real source of satisfaction to him. He talked about that a lot to me growing up. LR: So when, when were you born? BD: In 1949. LR: Okay, and where do you fall within your siblings? BD: I’m the third child of four. LR: Your oldest brother was born in 1943, while he was still in the service, and then… BD: I had a brother born in 1947. I was born in 1949, and then I had a sister born in 1951. LR: Okay. What was it like growing up in Ogden post war? I know you didn’t know any different, but… BD: Well I think a great community, I felt very involved in the community because my Dad was always in everything. We always went to the parades, we always supported whatever functions were going on. I remember he had made friends growing up, they had all served, they had come home, and they were still close 19 friends. We often did things together with his friends. That’s one thing I just admire about that era, they stayed so connected and so loyal to each other. EW: They kept that until they died. BD: Yes. They were just close. They had a dinner group, all of those friends, and they met once a month for my whole life, and they did it till they died. EW: They would often talk, at least I would hear both of my grandparents talk about those days when they were young and had their young families, and how the women supported each other when their husbands were gone. One of the wives took my grandma to the hospital when she went into labor, and both of their husbands are serving, they were just really there for each other their whole lives. LR: That’s really cool. BD: I have such memories of how bustling downtown Ogden was, the stores that were there. It was just such a treat to almost every Saturday, you did your work in the morning and in the afternoon you dressed up and went to downtown to go shopping. The streets were packed and the stores were packed. LR: When you say downtown? BD: Yes from north to south, probably about 26th Street to about 22nd Street. LR: Okay, and it was mostly Washington Boulevard it was centered on? BD: Yes, Washington Boulevard. OC Tanner was just off Washington, and that was a popular men’s store, and B.R. Bingham, all those stores that aren’t there anymore. L.R. Samuels and Wolfe’s that became Castleton’s and Fred M Nye Company, all those stores that aren’t really there anymore. JC Penny was big, Kress’s, and Grant’s, all those stores, it was just bustling. You would eat at Keely’s Café if you went down to town. We would go down to see my Dad and get to have lunch at Keely’s if he was working during the week or something. 20 LR: Would you guys wander over to 25th street? BD: That was kind of a no-no. You wouldn’t go down 25th, but as teenagers we did. We’d drive down there, point out red lights and other things. It has been fun to see that restored, because the street wasn’t quite that way as much when my Dad was young, and he used to talk so much about even the lower parts of Ogden because those were the places that were so important to him. East Ogden was more my era, I remember the Berthana. It was turned into a roller rink after a while, and I spent a lot of time roller skating there. As far as my parents, my mother was home for many years and then she started to work, just seasonally with the IRS out on 12th Street at the Depot. She audited tax returns and processed tax returns after we were all in school. But I am sure we were considered middle class, and we had a fairly small home on Eccles between 35th and 36th, it’s still there by the way. We didn’t have much, but Mom and Dad made possible any opportunities that we wanted. I had art lessons and I had sewing lessons and piano lessons, and I am sure those things would have really been a sacrifice for them. My brothers were both really athletic in Ogden, my oldest brother played football for Ogden High. But they wanted us to have every opportunity we could have. It was interesting, though, because it was still the era were they paid for my brothers to go to college but I had to pay for myself, because women didn’t need to go to school. So it was still that mentality. EW: I don’t think they felt they were being unreasonable. BD: No, that was just the way it was. Both of my brothers were in college and that was an expense and they needed to go, and I just wanted to go. EW: I remember when I first heard that I was appalled. 21 BD: But still, it was not malicious at all, that’s just the way the mindset was at the time. LR: Before we get any further, I would like to talk a little bit about the two sisters that were involved with the geology teacher. They would have been your aunts, correct? BD: Yes, they were my mother’s sisters, so they weren’t Neutebooms, but they were Watkins. LR: That’s right, they were Watkins. It’s interesting, because this is right after the war that these two sisters are in college, which in and of itself is an amazing deal, and they went with Dr. Buss? BD: Walter Buss. LR: On these amazing trips. I know you’ve done a lot of research as you’ve looked at it, and if you could talk about a couple of the highlights and some of the things you’ve learned as you’ve researched their trips. EW: Yeah, I thought it was just so interesting. I heard both of these women talk about this event in their lives, so it obviously left a big impression because it was a story that kept coming up. I had the pictures, I had the travel journal, I found some newspaper articles in the Standard, and so it was a community thing. I don’t know exactly how many kids were on it, but enough to fill a bus. That they would want to sign up for that in the first place, I mean, it was a cool trip, and they both liked the outdoors, but they slept literally on the side of the road. They would unroll their bedrolls at night and sleep under the stars. I don’t know what sort of provisions they had for keeping boys and girls separate, but it seems like they were all there to learn. 22 It talks about them having a fun time, and they seemed to just be really interested in having the experience and learning, but it must have been really uncomfortable riding in the bus with no air conditioning and stuff in the summer. They sleep on the ground most of the time for three or four weeks or however long their gone, the food is fine, but average, and they have to do homework. It was a very educational experience, because they were excited they were to sign up for the second year, they wanted to do it again. They go all down through southern Utah the first year, across Nevada, up through some of the main parks and some of the things in California, up into Canada, and then down through Yellowstone. LR: That was the first year? EW: That was the first year. My aunt Madeline writes about seeing and being in Yosemite or somewhere and they were willing to just sit and listen and take notes and it was an educational experience. They were there to learn stuff. I don’t get the impression they were there to play, even though they had a good time together. They were college students, but everybody seemed really committed to the learning part, and it just struck me that that was so much a part of post-world war two, “Let’s just move forward and we’re going to take advantage of every opportunity.” It must have cost their families quite a bit of money relatively speaking, to be able to do that. LR: Especially both of them together, because they both went together, right? EW: Yes, both of them together. LR: That’s cool. 23 EW: It’s really cool. The Aunt that’s still living, I asked her where she got the money for this, and she said, “My mother just saved money throughout the year because she wanted us to take advantage of the educational opportunities.” BD: Their mother sewed, or was the seamstress, for all the wealthy women of Ogden. She altered and made their clothes. I remember often as a little girl being at her house and seeing things spotless because an Eccles or so and so was coming to have something fit. EW: I think their parents, they were both born in small towns in Illinois, and had not had the educational opportunities that their children were able to have, so they were very anxious for their kids to have opportunities. But I think it’s so great that it wasn’t just their son that they wanted to educate. My grandma wasn’t that interested in that, she was the one who was home, and she was happy with that. She was married by then, anyway the other two sisters were not so happy doing the housework and things; they wanted to be out seeing things. So the second year they go down through some of southern Utah into Arizona, Texas, and then down into Mexico, and they’re gone for weeks. It was interesting to see the relation, or at least their perception as young college students of the Mexican people, the Mexican culture. I know they weren’t necessarily trying to be pejorative, but some of the comments we would recognize today as, “Hmm… that doesn’t sound very good.” But it’s interesting to see the way culture changes, and our perceptions. LR: I’m amazed at the rich opportunity, being able to travel like that. Especially as a young woman, and all under the guise of education. EW: They were there to learn. It really wasn’t a pleasure cruise by any stretch of the imagination. They got rained on in the night, and they would have to stop 24 because the bus broke down. They couldn’t always get food, they had to use anything they could find along the way. It was very well planned out. Dr. Bass, this wasn’t his first trip, and what I heard them talk about was that he himself was a force. They were in it as much to learn from him personally as they were to experience the trip in general, which just really says a lot. That a teacher had that much influence, and from everything I’ve been able to read about him, it seems like he was well loved for many, many years. He had a really big influence on them, and lots of other students. LR: Thank you. I got so caught up in the story I forgot to make a transition. I was going to ask you about your mother during the war. Did she do anything outside of the home? BD: She actually went and lived with her mother and father again and had the baby there while she was living with them. She had the baby in the hospital, but she lived with them. All she ever wanted to do was to be a homemaker and have children. I’m sure she didn’t have another job during that time. She just helped her mother. EW: I think she helped take care of other people’s kids when they were out doing other sorts of work. I remember her telling me about that. BD: She helped her mother. She was the oldest girl, so these two girls that went on the trip were younger than my mother. So she was probably helping to take care of them, do meals and cooking and whatever. As she continued in her life, she cooked, and whenever they had parties she did all the cooking for them. EW: When one of the sisters who lived close by, when she would have a party she would say, “I’m going to have a party, could you make this this and this?” LR: Your Mom would say okay? 25 BD: Yes. LR: Wow. Growing up, where did you go to school in Ogden? BD: I went to Grandview Elementary, and to the Mount Ogden Junior High just as it opened, and then to Ogden High. LR: Okay, where in that time did you meet your husband? BD: I didn’t meet him till we were in college, we met at Weber State. LR: He went to Weber State too? BD: He did, and he graduated from Weber. He went his first year at Utah State, then went on his mission, then came back and graduated from Weber State. MB: Where did he go on his mission? BD: To Italy. LR: So after you graduated from High School, did you immediately start going to Weber? BD: I did, the next fall. From the time I was a junior in high school, I worked for the bank where my Dad worked; I did the printing, I printed checks. But I had a job, always felt like I needed my own spending money and whatever, so I had been working and saving money to go to college. LR: Which you had to pay on your own. BD: Yes. MB: I’m curious. I don’t’ know if I caught this earlier, but why was college such a priority for you? BD: For me? I was just driven from the time I was little. I graduated with a degree in social work and art. I worked as a social worker for Salt Lake County as an adult probation officer for Weber County, then as a counselor at MOWEDA. I just was driven, I was one of those people that thought, “I’m not gonna get married and 26 have a bunch of kids.” So I ended up getting married and having seven kids. But I was very driven to go to school, while my sister, who was two years younger than me, she went to Weber State for a couple of years but she didn’t love school as much as I did. I was President of La Dianeda, which was the girls’ sorority at Weber State. LD they called it. I think it’s still there, I was real involved. I was one of the charter members of the Ombudsman's committee for student rights. So I was just active. MB: Kind of like your father was active? BD: I was politically minded I guess. Worked on a few campaigns. EW: And you built lots of floats. BD: I did. Sweepstakes floats for homecoming parades. While I was in college I worked at Fred M. Nye Company. Day Two, March 18, 2017 LR: Alright. When we left off last time, we were just finishing up with your father and your side of the family. Tell us how you met your husband? BD: At Weber State! I was in my senior year, and he had just returned from a mission. We met at the Institute actually on campus. Actually, I was starting my senior year, just right in that fall. LR: Where did he serve his mission? BD: In Italy. LR: Okay, about what year was this that you met your husband? BD: We were married in 1971? EW: So it would have been the fall of 1970? BD: Yes, the fall of 1970. 27 LR: For some reason I thought it was much earlier than that, but that’s okay, because I never asked you when you were born. BD: I was born in 1949 and he was born in 1948. LR: Okay. So you were truly a part of the baby boom generation. BD: At the time I had a brother at Weber State also. LR: So did most of your siblings go to Weber State? BD: They did. My older brother got a commission, I don’t know if they were doing ROTC at Weber State at the time or not, but he got a commission to do ROTC at BYU, so he went there after Ogden High. We all graduated from Ogden High, but my brother two years older than me and my sister two years younger than me, all went to Weber State. LR: That’s very cool. Tell me your husband’s name. BD: Cleve Merrill Dibble. LR: So he was born here in Layton, correct? BD: Well, McKay Dee Hospital, or the old Dee Hospital I should say. LR: But he was raised here? BD: Yes, raised on this farm. LR: What do you know about his family, their background here in Layton? BD: Okay. They settled this farm in 1880 when it became available for homesteading. EW: It was part of a large acreage. BD: A large piece clear into Syracuse, a lot of area. EW: But they did homestead, and the original center where that family lived was a little farther east than here. The parents of that family, and we have pictures of them on the corner on the other wall, was Philo Dibble Jr., and his wife, Antoinette Cleveland Dibble. They were from the Centerville area, and they came 28 out here. It was commonly called the Sand Ridge, because of the sandy nature of the soil through the Layton, Syracuse area, and down into Western Davis County. I’m not sure if Layton was incorporated then, or it was necessarily known as Layton in this geographic spot. It was kind of more the Sand Ridge. BD: A little farther up on Gentile, the old Layton home, that big old Victorian as you pass on Gentile was there, but Layton, West Layton and West Kaysville, the agriculture areas were kind of just all one. EW: Down into Syracuse too, and as far as I understand it, the family bought the land, they came and worked the land in the summer, and then lived in Centerville for the winter for a while, and then eventually they did build here and settle here. They had eight or nine kids. BD: Nine kids I think. EW: As they got to adulthood, there were various parts of the property that were their inheritance. So I think that’s how this home and surrounding acreage was acquired. BD: It was their son George, my husband’s grandfather, who received this land but I don’t know exactly how much. EW: Just the way that homestead properties were divided up, I don’t know if it was 180, 360, or 320 acres. They were all kind of just divided into eighty acre parcels, but his sister had some land farther west, and there were other of the children who had various parcels in the surrounding area, but this is the one that the George Dibble family had. He was a teacher, not primarily a farmer, though almost everybody did it on the side in some form; that’s how he grew up in that kind of rural atmosphere, but I think they also must have had a real priority on education, even the nuclear family of Philo Dibble and his wife, because they 29 made it a priority to make sure the kids were in school every winter. As they got older, there were several of them that became teachers, and I think they identified more with Southern Davis County. Eventually they did settle here, but George taught in Bountiful and Centerville as he grew to adulthood and had his career. He studied at the U, he worked out in the mines in Western Utah County for a summer to earn money for school. He did a few things, but eventually he was a teacher, and he married another teacher, and she was from Bountiful as well. They built this home and settled here. LR: Just so I have it straight, who was living here? EW: That was George, and he married a woman named Ella Tolman. Of course there are Tolmans all over the place in Bountiful and Centerville, and most of them come from the same guy, because he had several wives and lots of children. I think if you go back far enough, most of them were pretty much related to the same family, but she was a teacher also and she was a principal, which was kind of a big deal. She was principal at the high school. “High school” was just a few rooms really, but in Syracuse. LR: This was after she got married? EW: No, this was before she got married. BD: How old were they when they got married? EW: Well she was thirty and he was thirty-five, which was really late. BD: They then went on to have five children. EW: So they had known each other professionally for a long time, and he kind of courted her for quite a few years. She was also courted by another teacher, who went on to also be a known name in Davis County educational circles. But eventually those two married, and I just think it’s really funny that on their 30 marriage license, she says she’s twenty-five, even though we know, if we do the math, she’s not twenty-five. LR: Even back then women lie about their age. EW: I asked her son about it, she died way before my Dad was even born, because I noticed the discrepancy as I was working on her history, and he said, “Well, she thought it was her own business and nobody else’s. She knew the notice would appear in the newspaper, and she didn’t particularly want anybody to know how old she was, so she just put how old she felt.” Before her marriage she had quite the career. She taught in Bountiful for a long time, then was out here in Syracuse a long time. She had written for the local paper, the Weekly Reflex, which was kind of out of Kaysville, kind of a county paper. She was a political candidate, so this was way before the rest of the women in the country had women’s suffrage. She was on the ballot, she didn’t ever win anything, but she was on the ballot a couple of times for Davis County Recorder, once as a Republican, once as a Democrat, which I understand was fairly common, you just picked the party you felt like that year and you would go with. It is in about 1902, I found all this out through the newspaper, and those are my only sources, so I don’t have anything more than that. From what they reported she runs for I think the school board, and she’s running against E.M. Whitesides, which he was a very well-respected educator in the county. He’s got an elementary named after him, he went on to become the superintendent of schools in Davis County, so he was a big name even then. He gets like thirty-seven votes and she gets two, which are probably her and her husband. But still, to even be on the ballot, to be nominated was pretty cool. Up until the time of her marriage, she was a principal out at Syracuse. 31 One interesting thing that I found at the paper, I knew that she knew that music education was really important, so she always taught music in her classes as far as I have been able to understand, and played the piano herself, she thought that was important. She saw that their school didn’t have a piano, so she approached the school board, and they said, “Yeah we know, but we don’t have money for a piano for your school.” So she donated money for half of it, and that was kind of a big deal because a piano was a significant investment even then, and once the school board saw she was putting down earnest money, they put the other half in, and provided a piano for the school. Prior to that, she had purchased some land out in Syracuse, so a single woman, buying land for herself, that tells me that she was very independent, and a strong woman, and was not going to sit around and wait for something to happen. She was making her own way. She took her time deciding between her two suitors, and eventually they eloped to the temple in Logan. BD: But no one knew they were getting married. EW: No one knew. They just went for a drive, “Why don’t we just get married?” “Sure, why not?” They had probably had some kind of planning, but it wasn’t something they invited their family to, they just did it. They both were very private people, personally, but fiercely loyal to each other. BD: Soon after they got married, they had their first baby, built this home and he was called on a mission. She stayed here and made butter, we have a butter wrapper that we found in the walls upstairs when we were restoring this house. EW: Yes, but that may have been even after he had been home. BD: She made and sold butter to support him while he was on his mission. 32 EW: She also remained as the principal of Syracuse. They would board out there during the week and then come home here on the weekends. MB: So she was able to keep her career even after she was married? EW: Yes. LR: She was a working mother. EW: She was, and trying to keep the farm going. She was still trying to oversee people that were running the land, send money to him when she could, and deal with the finances. This is a book that I researched and wrote about her, and they have letters back and forth between them during this period 1910-1912. It’s just amazing. So we have his perspective from being in the Boston and Lowell area of Massachusetts, and his mission experience, which is interesting all on its own, but then we have her. “Well I’ve been at the bank to see if we can get another extension on our credit,” because he needs money. She’s under a lot of stress, she mentions needing to buy some tonic at the drugstore, that she’s losing weight, that she’s really anxious and stressed, and it would be very stressful. Totally understand that, but it’s kind of a family trait, we can kind of look down through the generations and say that’s where we get it from. We take after great grandma. BD: She was a very remarkable person. EW: She was a remarkable person. So she kept it together. When it talks about him coming home, I don’t know what the common way to receive a returned missionary was at the time, but she just said, “Just come home. I don’t want any fuss about it, we don’t want a ton of people over. Just meet in front of the house and we’ll be fine.” So they just went forward from there. They had their other children, and she did retire from teaching. He came home, and there’s some 33 correspondence between them about which school he’s going to teach at, and I think he ends up taking the one that’s way down at the end of this street, down almost on the Bluff road. There were several small schools that kind of dotted all these communities through West Layton, West Kaysville, West Syracuse, and they’d be kind of the one room school variety. They certainly didn’t pay very much, so they had to farm or starve. It’s interesting, while he’s on his mission, he gives her lots of advice about what to do with various crops, she’s still milking the cow, she still has the chickens, she’s growing the strawberries, she’s canning fruit, and she’s teaching. It was quite a remarkable period. BD: But then she died relatively young. LR: How sad. BD: Her youngest was just ten. EW: So she raises her children, her oldest two to adulthood, she had a son go on a mission to Germany, and then another son go to Germany, and this was in 1934, so middle of the Depression. Then we have another series of letters, where she’s writing to her son on a mission, and he’s writing home, so we get a little bit of his perspective to see what’s going on with the Nazism, because he’s very much a student of history. It’s hard to know if he recognized exactly what was going on, because a lot of people didn’t, even the ones who lived there. But he describes some of the parades he sees in the streets, and how it’s another holiday for someone’s birthday or whatever. At home she’s describing what they’re doing here, gives kind of a hint of the way the Depression hit the county. She talks about a hobo camp that was right off of I-15; there’s a little pull off where they have construction vehicles right to the east between Kaysville and Farmington. When I talked to the Layton City 34 Historian about this thing she had mentioned, he said that’s where it had been, kind of in that vicinity. So the train would come through, and the typical kind of single migrant guy that you think of when you think about the Depression would stop there. Cities wouldn’t want them in their vicinity, so they kind of pooled there. She talks about harvesting things and people coming and going, so it’s an interesting history about this small part of Layton. She talks about taking the Bamberger railroad to visit her parents in Bountiful. Well, I think her Dad had died by then but her mother was still alive. So it was interesting to do some research about what the Bamberger railroad was for this county, it was a huge part of transportation through the county. Anyway, she mentions in passing that she’s been to the doctor a couple of times that she’s not feeling well. But I think it’s in the spring of 1934 when she ends up with an attack of appendicitis, and her death certificate makes it sound like it was probably an infection that stemmed from appendicitis. BD: The gangrene. EW: She probably could have been saved with more modern medicine. But she was only fifty-seven or fifty-eight, still had fairly young children because she hadn’t started having children until she was a little bit older. So her son’s still on his mission, he gets the word out of the blue, just a total surprise. He stayed and finished his mission, but it just shocked the whole family, and her husband especially. I don’t think he was ever a super-warm and open person, but I think this really made him retreat into himself. It was really hard for him to maintain a relationship with his kids, I think she had brought out more of the best communication qualities and things of him, and I think he couldn’t talk about her, so that was an off-limits topic. 35 BD: She was Primary President at the time for what was called the West Layton Ward, which has been a ward for about 130 years, the Layton Second Ward. The casket was right here by the window, and all the children marched down from the church. EW: They placed a white flower on her casket. She was primary President for like twenty years, she had a relationship with the children. BD: Just very beloved. There are still people around here that remember her, Lucille Cox for one, Ella was so important to her. Lucille just lived across the street as a child, and would go to school with the kids that were here. EW: Her funeral, her obituary and everything just really speaks to the fact that she was well-thought of. George received a letter from the governor, Henry Blood, who was originally from Kaysville, and had been in education, that they loved her, that they missed her. I don’t have a copy of that, I just know about it because they talk about receiving it. Charles R Mabey, he’s like her step brother in law, or cousin, but he was also a state leader at the time, and he speaks at the funeral. H.C. Burton speaks at the funeral, and he was another prominent educator. I don’t know if he was superintendent of schools at the time but he goes on to be superintendent of schools. So that was late spring, early summer that she passed away. I also happened to find out that, based on something that I read in one of the letters, that 1934 the worst drought that Utah had ever seen. So Depression, worst drought, and their Mom dies. Everybody was just devastated. Eventually, the drought starts to ease, but I think they just felt so bereft. George tries to reach out and be there for the kids, but they were all still in shock. The youngest son, I heard him speak about it as an older man. He describes it as they closed ranks, and they just became really tight knit together. Even after they 36 lost their father, and it was the late 1950s when he passed away. He lived here in this home until he passed away. But they were super close. BD: The brothers. EW: There were brothers and one sister. There had been another sister, but she had died in 1918, I think? Part of the flu epidemic I imagine. She died as a toddler. So there were the boys and then the one girl left. Even as adults they corresponded, they got together whenever they could. The one sister kind of took on the motherly role for the family. She was nineteen, I think when her mother passed away. She starts cooking and cleaning and doing all the house stuff, but one of her older brothers was very sensitive to the fact that if she didn’t get out on her own she would probably be in that role forever, taking care of her father. So he really encouraged her to go away where she couldn’t come home on the weekends. So she became a teacher, and ended up becoming a teacher in Beaver County. Can’t come home on the weekends! She meets a fellow teacher, and they end up marrying. But I thought that that was really perceptive of the brother. I don’t know what her father thought about that, or if he even thought about it at all, but for her brother to realize, “You gotta get out of here.” LR: I got to thinking, what was it like for the father to see his sons go off to war, having just lost his wife? EW: Charles the oldest, registered for selective service in 1940, but never served. He was likely deferred as a student. Philo, the next oldest, did serve and was part of the invasion of Normandy. BD: But then my husband’s father, they wouldn’t take him, because someone had to stay on the farms. EW: He was classified 11-C (2-C)- deferred in agriculture. 37 BD: He always felt that he was lesser, because he wasn’t able to go. Ben the youngest brother, graduated from the Naval Academy in 1944, but he never served. So they stayed here and ran the farm. LR: So the other two brothers, I know they have an interesting story. BD: Yes. Philo, since he had been on a mission in Germany, he spoke such good German that he ended up in intelligence and was at Normandy. He was an interpreter, and would intercept the German messages and would interrogate German prisoners. EW: Apparently he was super smart. These were super smart kids. So he had learned German just from living there, but he was really smart to start with, so I think he just really studied the language. Missionary work was a little bit different back then, they had more discretionary time, so he was able to make a really thorough study of the language. BD: At the time he had probably been a student at the U because both of their parents had been there for real academic study. Weber State was just coming into itself, and Utah State was an agricultural college. EW: So he comes home from his mission and goes to the U, gets his BA and Masters in Philosophy. Then he goes to work for the Farm Security administration in DC, then World War Two comes out, he joins the Navy and serves in Naval Intelligence. That’s why I’m sure that his language skills kind of led him in that direction. But he has quite an interesting personal account of the invasion of Normandy. He was at Omaha Beach, and that he was an effective interrogator, because he understood and spoke the language so well. He retires from the Navy in 1946, he goes to the US Embassy in Cairo, kind of under diplomatic service and meets his wife there, who’s Swiss but has grown up in Egypt. 38 BD: Her father owned a hotel in Cairo, so she grew up there. EW: They get married back in Switzerland, they have three kids, but he become part of the corps of men who are the beginning of the CIA, and he starts working all over the world. I’m not sure even his family knew all the time what he was doing. BD: But they had a home base in Washington D.C., that’s where they always lived. EW: He serves all over Europe and the Middle East and Asia and his family was with him a lot of the time. But any time they had home leave and he had a chance, this is where they would come. BD: They would come back to the farm. EW: Kind of for a respite and to connect. If Philo was in town, then everybody came, if they possibly could. It was a big deal to get together. He died when I was still really young, so I don’t remember meeting him personally. I know his children. But, he eventually retires from the CIA and settles in DC. He stayed there till he passed away but he is buried in Kaysville. LR: He came home. What about the other brother? EW: The older brother was Charles, I don’t think he served in the war. I couldn’t see in his obituary that he did. He may have been just old enough that he was maybe not their main target. He was also super smart. He goes to the U, gets his BA in History in 1936, gets married, and gets his Masters from a university in Mexico, probably Mexico City in 1938. He gets his PhD from the same university in Mexico in 1942. So he’s off doing anthropology in Mexico. BD: He also studied at Harvard. EW: Yes, so he comes home after that, studies at Harvard. But he basically went and lived with the native Mexicans for a long time. He got amazing at the language and studied anthropology. He eventually came back and is a professor at the U 39 for his whole career. Very well respected. He becomes world famous in anthropological circles for his work in translating the Florentine Codex. MB: That was him? BD: That was a thirty year project. EW: This is just the down and dirty explanation. “A complex and detailed encyclopedic history of the Aztec civilization.” He translates that into English. I have to refer to my notes because it’s kind of complicated. “The Florentine Codex is an important record that was prepared in the late 1500s by a Spanish friar that worked in Mexico, and a team of students. It eventually ends up in Florence in a library. So that’s why it’s called the Florentine Codex, because it ended up there. BD: This friar had taken it back with him to Italy. MB: That’s really valuable, because the Spanish, after a while, they didn’t really like anything in the Aztec language or in the native languages. The Inquisition actually came over and burned all the records that remained in the Americas, so this is a really valuable record because it’s so rare. There’s only like two or three actual documents written in the Aztec language that still exist, and this is one of them, and it’s really important in the study of the early Aztec period. EW: Charles worked with a colleague named Arthur Anderson over a period of thirty years to translate the codex from Aztec into English, and you would never have known it. He lived in Bountiful, he had an orchard. He had this funny little house that I don’t think was ever completely finished. BD: It was a basement house. EW: They just built it up as they could. BD: Eventually they built an upstairs part. 40 EW: I mean total absent minded professor stereotype. Just kind of rumpled and quiet. His wife typed all his manuscripts and proofread them and was his editor, and he just would hardly say two words to you, unless you were really in something that he understood. BD: He was an incredible teacher. Everyone would just flock to his classes because he was just so amazing. He received the highest award in Mexico. EW: The Mexican order of the Aztec Eagle, the highest honor in the Mexican government, in 1981. Then in 1984, he’s awarded the decoration, the highest award in Orden de Isabel la Católica, Spain. BD: Around the world, his name is just commonly associated with the Florentine Codex. I don’t think people in Utah even have a clue. EW: There’s an article in the Fall 2000 issue of the Continuum, which is the University of Utah magazine, about him, his accomplishments and his work at the U. If you want more details it’s there, but a super smart guy, and just so unassuming and was always so kind to us. BD: He would grow the fruit and we would grow the produce, and we would trade. He would bring us fruit and we would bring him peas and potatoes from here. EW: I remember at his funeral I took some notes. His younger brother was the only surviving member at that point, so I made sure to take lots of notes about what he said. He said Charles would just take off on a road trip, and he’d maybe have a handkerchief and a toothbrush in his pocket and that was it. He’d go down and visit his brother in Arizona, and just kind of show up and stay for a while, two days or something. I think he just got used to a minimalist life. BD: He had an office in his basement, just stacked with books and papers. He continued to use those blue composition books, I don’t know if they still use 41 those. He would have his students do them and he would correct every one personally, he had no assistant. He wrote hand notes in every one, and I think that’s why students loved him so much and he was so well loved, because he was so personal in critiquing everything. He just had stacks of those on his desk and he would come home in the evenings, after he was done in the orchard, and sit in his office and do papers. He was quite a man. EW: He and his wife were quite a couple. She must have been really smart too, because otherwise they never would have been able to keep up with each other. It mentions in his obituary that she’s his editor and his typist, kind of keeps him going with these projects. When she dies, it was only about four months later that he died. He just couldn’t stand it, and I think he died of a broken heart. They had been married for sixty-five years, and he died not long after her and they are both buried in Bountiful. BD: They have brilliant children. EW: Really smart kids. LR: So we’ve talked about the two oldest. EW: We talked about the sister a little bit. BD: The little girl that died had been next, then my father-in-law. He farmed here and was kind of a quiet man, but a quiet server. He was just so well loved in the community and sought out for advice. EW: People would come to him for agricultural and just life advice. He was an advisor to a lot of people, and was just always really concerned about individuals. He wasn’t one to be in front of a crowd, though he was a Bishop, and he did serve in a Stake Presidency, so he could do that when he needed to but that wasn’t his inherent personality. 42 BD: His wife played the violin, and they probably spoke and played at about every funeral there was in this general area. He was often sought after to speak at funerals because he was so insightful, and was everyone’s friend. I think another interesting thing was that his funeral was such a gathering of cultures. Hispanics, Japanese, Greeks, and all that had come to this area, he was such a benefactor and treated them so fairly. I think it’s really interesting to note in the World War Two time, they had a Japanese family that lived here on the farm, the Sueoka family. They had been working at the mines, and that was considered a defense job, so they could no longer work there. Originally they didn’t have to go to a camp if you had a sponsor or a job somewhere. So his family sponsored them to come live here, and the families loved each other. I know the family, we’ve stayed close with them over the years and been to funerals of those who grew up here. I’ve felt like the Sueoka could have never survived had it not been for this family that allowed them to come and live here. EW: They didn’t live in the main house, there was a little house on the property. BD: It’s about where the corral is, and it wasn’t even that great of a house, didn’t even have indoor plumbing. EW: It was just the one room. BD: It had a little shack where the sleeping quarters were and a little shack where the bathhouse was, with boardwalks between them. LR: I’m curious as to how the Dibble family came about to sponsor this Japanese family. EW: That’s a really good question. I wish I knew a little more about that. BD: My husband’s sister wrote a little paper about them. She says they came because the sugar factory here said they could work there. My father in law, 43 sometimes in the winter he would work in the sugar factory, and somehow they connected that way, and he said, “We have a place you can live,” and they didn’t end up working at the sugar factory, they became hands on the farm. LR: That in itself is such a unique story. EW: Later in life they, when my dad and his siblings were more teenagers, the family had foreign exchange student from the Netherlands. Next door were the Greek families that came here. I don’t know if they had been in the mines or where they come from. BD: They came in through San Francisco and they emigrated from Greece, and heard that there was work up here in mines. They saw that the ground next to ours was up for auction, that it was for sale, and then they bought it. We are still really close friends with that Greek family. EW: A very multicultural neighborhood. BD: Which is amazing. One of the Greek daughters, she’s probably ten years older than me, but she’s passed away now. Anyway, after she was born, and she was born here, they arranged her marriage as a baby to this Greek man who was ten years older than her. She graduate from Davis High School, Layton wasn’t built yet, went to Greece, and married him sight unseen, and then came back here and farmed. They had a wonderful life. LR: Usually the opposite. The man goes back to Greece to find the wife, and not the other way around. Wow. BD: He was a merchant marine and all other kinds of things. We loved him. Anyway, I think that’s just amazing, in today’s world, that you would feel that devoted to your parents that you would go do that. LR: Right, that’s kind of a strange. 44 EW: But culturally not strange. LR: Not for them, it wasn’t culturally strange. BD: I think it’s amazing. LR: Barbara, it must have been fascinating, moving here and integrating into this family. BD: Yes, for sure. LR: Can you talk about that a little bit? BD: My husband has one brother, there’s just two boys and five girls in the family. There would have been eight, but the oldest one was stillborn. There are two girls, then my husband is the third child, and then his brother is just after him, and then there’s three more girls. He was the one that loved agriculture and even though he became an educator too, that’s what he did. But he’s the one that kind of stayed farming, and his brother became an engineer. His brother ended being an engineer in Phoenix. EW: Just a big emphasis on education, which I think is just something that filtered down from those parents, George and Ella. They were educated, I think more so than most of their farmer friends in the area. I don’t know exactly, because I don’t know everybody else’s family history, but I think they worked very hard to make sure that they had that level of education and refinement in their family. I think that has filtered down to all of their children and grandchildren. They have a lot of educators through their descendants and people have gone on to public service and just to have more of a worldview than just we are only our little insular farming community. BD: Coming into this family was such an interesting experience for me. I had never had experience with agriculture aside from seeing some in Illinois with my family. 45 Everything stayed the same for him, and I just kind of moved in, and it took years for me to really integrate myself into agriculture circles. It was a real learning curve, but such a great way to raise our family. The blessing has always been, for us to be able to have a rural agricultural upbringing and still be close to culture, music lessons and educational opportunities for our children. MB: When you married into the Dibble family, how much time did you spend with all the extended family, like the uncles that you had talked about and all of those individuals? BD: Quite a bit really, because my husband was farming with his Dad. Originally when he graduated from college, he intended to just farm full time, and so that was our life. We lived actually on Angel Street, just really close here, and then we eventually built our home here on the farm. I felt like I was probably closer than most of his other siblings to actually getting to know his aunts and uncles. EW: This was home base. This was where everyone came. BD: Everyone came to the farm that came from out of town, so I really did develop quite a relationship with these people. MB: My other question from last week is how many children did you have and what years were they born? BD: Oh dear. I know how many. Seven children. Emma is the oldest, and you were born in 1972. Mary-Ellen was born in 1973, then Merrill was born in 1975. David was born in 1977, and Kenneth was born in 1978. They were just at opposite ends so they were almost years apart, but it was only a year difference. Anna was born in 1981, and Margaret was born in 1985. MB: When did you and your husband go to Italy? BD: We were there from 1995-1998. 46 MB: So you did have quite a few children with you when you went over there? BD: We had three full time and two as they finished missions came and lived with us there. So we had five that had that experience. EW: It was the two oldest who never made it over there. BD: Yeah the two girls didn’t make it over there because they were having little babies and bought houses and stuff. LR: So I’m going to come back now, a little bit. I wanted to make sure that I understood the lineage right. So there is George and Ella, who built this home, and then your husband’s father was born, right? Cause George was the grandfather. So your husband’s father was? EW: Ralph. LR: Ralph, thank you, and his wife was? BD: Carmen Merrill. LR: Did Ralph and Carmen live in this house as well? BD: They did. They lived here when they very first got married. EW: When his dad still lived here to, right? BD: When his dad still lived here and they took care of him. When they started having children they moved to the house next door, and my husband was eight years old when they moved back into this house when his grandfather passed away, and then they lived here the rest of the time. EW: Did they build that house? BD: Well sort of. The basic shell of it was the one the Japanese family had lived in, but they moved it over here from the corral, and they built a little bit more around it. When my husband was actually born they lived there, and they remodeled and built around it when he was born. They moved it there sooner than that, because 47 the sister tells me that Mother and Dad had a bed, the two little girls had a pull out trundle bed, and the crib were all in one tiny bedroom in this house. LR: So how many children did Ralph and Carmen have? BD: They had eight, the first one was stillborn, and then they had seven more. MB: Did you say that they had moved the house? BD: They did. Put it on a trailer and jacked it up. EW: Wasn’t very big, but still... BD: Basically two rooms. LR: That’s still kind of fascinating to me. You hear about that all the time now, not so much back then. EW: I think it was fairly common, though. People’s cabins, kind of the original house that would have been on the property would quite often be picked up and moved. LR: I’m trying to envision doing this without the benefit of hydraulics, things we take for granted today. That’s a lot of work to do. So they had seven children, one of which was Cleve. BD: Yes. LR: Okay, and where did he fall in that? BD: He’s the third child. LR: I’m sure we covered this last time but I didn’t write the notes down. So Cleve was born in? BD: 1948. LR: Okay. I understand now, cause it was his father who never actually served in the war, he was kind of left here to work on the farm. EW: I think it was he wasn’t allowed to serve in the war. He was classified as needed in agricultural, whatever that classification is, I don’t remember what the code is, 48 but there is one. My husband’s grandfather was the same way. He got his draft card, and it says he’s labeled whatever the code is as in the agricultural industry. LR: That’s really cool. So eventually Cleve goes to Weber State, where the two of you meet, and you’re married in 1970? BD: 1971. LR: Okay. I know we talked a little bit about you moving from Ogden to this little tiny town of Layton, how it must have been a little bit of a culture shock. BD: It was. I hated to leave the door because I was afraid to get lost, because everything looked so far away and big. The streets went on for miles, a mile between each street. He’d say, “Just run down there and get something,” and I’d say, “I can’t, I can’t find my way back home.” LR: It’s almost as if you were used to the landmarks of Ogden to get where you needed to go. So your nearest neighbor, besides across the street, was how far? BD: Well they were across the street, and you could just see through the fields. When we built our home, two doors west, and I don’t know how far that would be away, but my mother-in-law was here. On Gentile there were spotty houses around and then you’d see other people through the field. My mother in law talks about how in the mornings, when she was raising her families, you could see everybody’s farm house, and on Monday mornings, they had this running contest to see who could get their wash out on the line the quickest because they can all see each other. It was who was up and busy the earliest in the morning that would have their wash out because none of them had dryers, so they always just hung their wash out. LR: So I assume in the wintertime they would hang their wash indoors? 49 BD: No, even when I was first married, I hung my wash out. You hung it out in the winter if it wasn’t storming, and it would sometimes freeze, but it would dry still, and it always would smell so good. If it was a stormy day, you had drying racks and you hung it all over the house. EW: Grandma still hung a lot of her stuff out to dry, until she had her stroke and couldn’t do that anymore. She had a clothesline out behind the garage. She’d hang her sheets and stuff out there. LR: So what was it like for you raising a family in this small community? BD: Well I loved it for the fact that you didn’t have a lot of outside influence. My children, their brothers and sisters became their friends. They had a lot of chores because as the boys got to even six or seven years old, they were weeding onions and they had work to do. If you wanted friends to come over it was an occasion. We had to call and go get them or have their mother’s bring them and we’d take them home, so we didn’t have neighbor kids at the door all the time, and that part was great. Personally, I loved the fact we didn’t have a lot of outside influence. We went to public schools but I read with them a lot. All summer I would check out textbooks from the school, the last math books they had, and have them do pages of math all summer. Every day before they went out to work they had to do a page of math, just to keep up, and we did a lot of reading. My degree is in social work and art education, and so I taught them a lot. We did art projects all the time, and I just loved the fact that they didn’t have a lot of outside influence. The kids did community sports. EW: Some of us had better careers than others. I did not have a good community sports career. 50 BD: Yes, but we took advantage of community programs, and we did a lot of 4-H, which was really big in that time period and still is in certain forms. We would enter in the county and state fairs. That was always a big deal. I taught 4-H, and others around here taught 4-H. I did cooking, animal projects and different things. That was our summer, we were busy with things like that. LR: So when you first got married you lived in this home, is that correct? BD: No, we lived on Angel Street. There’s the newer subdivision now, but there’s this little tiny house, it’s next to Jay and Marjorie Simmons. That’s where we lived, until we had four kids. LR: That’s a tiny little home. BD: It is, it had two little bedrooms, one little heater in the living room, didn’t even have central heating, and it didn’t have a garage. Well, it did have a garage, but it had a lot of mice. That street was a little more sparse than it is now. No curb and gutter or anything, but that’s where we lived until we built our home down here. LR: About what year did you move into the home that you built? EW: Was it 1977, because David was just a baby? BD: Yes, so it wouldn’t have been too long after he was born. EW: I think it was the fall of 1977, because I started school and we were in that other house just briefly. LR: So did you change schools or did you still go to Layton Elementary? BD: Layton Elementary served everyone from the Mountain Road down to Syracuse. So our kids were on a bus quite a while every day. LR: Where it is now, no one beyond Angel Street goes to Layton Elementary. EW: But I went to school with kids who lived up near the Mountain Road, and when I was in the Second Grade they built East Layton Elementary, and that’s where 51 they all went, but it took in a big swathe of East Layton, it was still a very big geographic area that went to that school. But I went to school with kids in second grade that I didn’t see again until High School, just because of the boundaries. BD: To put it in perspective, even back where the Layton Hills mall is, and where the Target and that is, we used to farm on those grounds. We used to drive up there and farm. LR: Was it part of your property? BD: It wasn’t part of our property, but we ran it. The people who owned it didn’t want to farm it, so we grew onions up there. EW: I remember when the mall was built it was a big deal, it changed a lot. BD: Took in a huge amount of farm area that had been farmed. We owned about a hundred acres, but when my husband and his dad were farming full time, we were farming between 250 and 300 acres, so we had another amount that we rented and still farmed in order to make a living. LR: What did you farm? EW: Mostly onions and potatoes. They farmed potatoes here from the time they started this farm, and we still do. There were also a lot of tomatoes grown in this area, sugar beets. There used to be a sugar factory, there was a processing plant for tomatoes, so a lot of people grew those. We grew green beans for Del Monte, and peas. We would double crop those. Actually, Del Monte had a plant close, but I don’t know, it was probably in the early 1980s I think Del Monte pulled out of this area and took everything to the Northwest, so we quit growing those crops. LR: So the onion factory right here at the top of Angel Street, how long has it been there? 52 BD: It’s been there a long time, it’s been there as long as my memory. But there is also an onion packing plant out in Syracuse, so before that one they would take it to what’s called Utah Onion out in Syracuse. LR: And the sugar factory was? BD: Was on Sugar Street, about where the Smith’s distribution center is. LR: So Smith’s kind of took over that area? BD: Well I think it was actually across the street, towards the west, kind of where that industrial area has gone in. MB: Where was the Del Monte? BD: It was actually up in Tremonton. So they would come and harvest everything and put it in these huge trucks with tarps on and take it to their plant. EW: It was a big event when they brought their big machinery down here. They would do it at night. BD: They would do it at night because the beans would be more crisp. So they would bring these big machines. The kids thought they looked like big… EW: Big monsters or something. They were huge. They would come slowly down the road, a big long line of them, and you would stand at the window and see their great big headlights. They were out in the field, you would hear them all night. BD: There were several machines in the field at a time and several people grew for them. When they did peas, they would pick the pea, shoot the vines out and shell the pea and shoot the shelled peas into a truck. EW: So they were big machines. BD: It was really an amazing process. LR: How many years did you do that? BD: Oh, several. They were doing it when I got married. 53 EW: But I think they were doing it before then. BD: Yes, but they had been doing it for quite a while, several years, and then it was another ten to fifteen years after we were married that they were doing it before they pulled out. LR: I know we haven’t talked a lot about your husband, but I am curious. He had this long career in education, and yet he was a farmer. BD: Yes. He was a farmer who had another job so he could afford to be a farmer. EW: His heart was very much in education as well. BD: He loved education and he loved the students he worked with, but that was a career that worked well with farming, because when he was teaching he had more free time in the summer. I have learned over the years something about people who grew up in agriculture. He just loved the land, and he would do anything for it. In our early years, he would be up early in the morning delivering a load of potatoes before he went to school at seven. He was up at four, and then would come home and work, but all this time he was very active in the Church. At twenty-seven he was a Bishop, then he was in the Stake Presidency, so things that were very time consuming. He always would just stop the tractor and come in, go to his meetings, come home, maybe work again till midnight. He did a lot of farming late at night and then all summer. Other people might scoff, but for him, getting on a tractor was his stress release. He just couldn’t wait to get home and out in the field and leave everything else behind. But I think he was an incredible teacher and he just did amazing things for students and for church. He had a gift with it all, but I think he always considered himself kind of an old farmer. 54 EW: I always felt like he was so connected to the arts, and to culture. His time in Italy I think had given him a real appreciation, and just growing up with his mother who was very attuned to that as well. We often would go to Salt Lake for concerts or sometimes into Ogden for stuff like that. They made sure we had music lessons from the best teachers available. There were several of us who studied piano with an adjunct professor at Weber State, Carol Hurst, Dean Hurst’s wife. We had voice lessons in Ogden, and we just never felt like we only knew the farm. We knew the farm, and knew how it related to everything else, and loved it, but I think we all grew up with a very larger sense of there’s this whole refinement of looking at the world, and it includes the beauty of what’s here on the land, and the beauty of the arts, and the beauty of education. We were always encouraged that we were all going to go to college, and I don’t think we ever felt hampered at all by the fact that we were in agriculture. We had the freedom to explore other avenues. BD: My mother and dad would give us money at Christmas, and my husband and I would buy symphony tickets for our family for a couple of different times. In the summers, I would take them on field trips to either art exhibits or cultural places in Salt Lake for a day. I just felt it was really important that we spend our time doing that. My kids got a lot of talent from their dad’s part of the family, so they were all very talented. EW: And from your side of the family. BD: Emma had the Presidential Scholarship to Weber State, and Mary-Ellen had a music scholarship. Our son Merrill had a leadership scholarship there. EW: But we all certainly felt tied to the agricultural part of our lives, and we still do. 55 BD: Yes. We made sacrifices for that, there were a lot of times when our sons were out with their friends and had to be home to change the water at eleven o’clock, kept them out of a lot of trouble. If there was ever stuff I thought I never wanted them to go there, I told the kids, “You gotta do this, you gotta be at work.” My husband used our kids and their friends working on the farm. In fact in the front of Layton High yearbook the year our son Merrill graduated was a picture of him and his friends loading onions at our farm with the assistant principal. Lots of the kid’s friends worked for us in the summers. That was another thing that was so great, my husband being in education, especially in a high school setting, we knew the kids friends. It was always, always fun. They were in and out of our house a lot, so that was an added benefit for us. Maybe for some kids that wouldn’t have been fun for their dad to be at the same school they were at, but for us it worked well. EW: It worked out for lunch money! BD: And he would interrogate the boys asking the girls out. EW: It was a little intimidating for some. My husband’s one of his former students. BD: As well as Blake, Mary-Ellen’s husband. My husband used to say, “If there’s any advice it is be nice to your students, they might be in your family someday.” But he had an incredible memory. He could meet somebody on the street twenty years after he had been their teacher in junior high, and he’d remember their name. He’d say, “Oh yeah, I think you were in fourth period, you sat on about the third row,” or “I remember that one time, that presentation you gave,” or “I remember that day when we did this.” He just had a great gift for knowing students. I think he knew every students name at the whole school. He just had a 56 gift for that, and I think kids felt like he was on their side, because he called them by name in the halls. EW: I think even the ones that were in trouble, and would end up in his office, he made very sure that they knew he believed in them. Even the ones that had lots of challenges, he never gave up on anybody. MB: Going back to the beginning of what you were saying, I’m just taking on one little thing. So your husband, he delivered potatoes at four in the morning, or something like that. Where did he deliver those to? BD: To Bangerter and Sons in Bountiful, who at the time was a wholesale sale distributor. He would have workers come in early, and he’d want potatoes early, so we would dig them the night before. In the summer we would deliver all day, but by the time he started school we were still digging potatoes in August, September, and so we would dig after school, a couple of loads, and then the next morning he would have to deliver them before school. MB: Your husband, he was a farmer, he was an educator, he was involved in some fairly high level church callings. So how often would you see him? BD: We waved at each other occasionally. I learned early on that his life was going to be busy, and I had the good fortune of being able to stay at home with the kids, even though I had worked before we started having children. I was a counselor at MOWEDA detention center. Anyway, he was gone a lot, but I think for the children, when he was home, he just had this great ability to change hats. If he was home he was totally focused on the family. If he was at church he was totally focused. He could just change in an instant from where he needed to be. I think the fact that they could see him, like after school and he would come in and change really quick and get out to do some farm work, he was still, in their eyes, 57 he was home, because they could see him in the field or they could be with him in the truck or whatever. I decided that I did not want them to grow up thinking either agriculture was bad or church was bad because he was gone. I just made it a point to let them know continually how his work, the farm, and the church service blessed our family. Yes, he was gone a lot, but if he was going to be gone late into the evening or something, we would take dinner and we would eat it on the ditch bank with him. EW: We ate a lot of meals without him too. BD: Yes we did, obviously. In the early days before the time of microwaves, I was forever trying to keep food ready that he could eat when he had the time, but we would just try to make time special. We wouldn’t have a lot of time, but sometimes at night, if he was going to be able to have a couple of hours we would take a picnic to the park, we would just try to take advantage of times where we could be together. EW: I remember him coming home from school, and he’d have fifteen minutes to change and put on his farming outfit and get out the door. I don’t think I was aware enough to realize that he might want to close his eyes for ten minutes of that fifteen, he might want to rest a little bit. I would go and chat with him, and he’d be laying on the bed for a minute, and I’d be trying to chat with him about my day, not really realizing that maybe he doesn’t want me to be here. He never said I can’t talk right now, he was always willing, he always listened, and would give the best of himself, even when he probably didn’t feel like it. LR: Where did he start teaching? BD: He started at Clearfield High as a resource teacher, then Central Davis Junior High as a Spanish teacher, and then Layton High. 58 MB: When did you start at the detention center? BD: I started there when it opened, which I would say was late 1970, probably. MB: How long did you work there? BD: I only worked there a couple of years until I had my first baby. LR: Where was that detention center located? BD: It was in Roy, but it was called MOWEDA, because it served Morgan, Weber, and Davis Counties. MB: Clever. BD: When it was called the State Industrial School in Ogden, I did a lot of teaching work there. It was toward North Ogden, which was the prison for youth, which is now down in Draper, but it used to be there. I taught there as a student at Weber State. MB: What was that like? BD: Really interesting. It was a little bit frightening, because you’d have a time to get there. They would escort me, guard would meet me at the gate, lead me to the room, lock me in the room with these students, and come back in two hours and let me out. That was interesting. But it was really a choice experience for me. It was on free time for these students, so it was in the evening hours and they came voluntarily if they wanted extra experience, so most of them were interested maybe in art because that’s what I taught. Several that grew up in the Indian Placement facility in Brigham City, were having struggles, but really talented with visual arts, and we were able to do the first art show, we held it at the Weber County Library in downtown Ogden for the students from that institution. We did some really great projects, but in the beginning they tested me a lot. They would steal the rubber cement, and we would have to search the 59 barracks until we found which young person had taken it, and I had to account for scissors and all that stuff as they left. If anything was missing, we’d have to search their barracks and things, but it was a good experience. LR: How do you think that experience helped you later, as you were raising your kids? BD: I think all those experiences did. As a student I was also an adult probation and parole officer for Weber County for a year-long internship. I think all those kinds of experiences certainly made me more aware for problems that my kids might face, and I think personally, it helped me to recognize that really difficult time for kids is the junior high age. Usually if you can get them past that age, they are fine in high school, that’s where I think the roots of the problems begin is that junior high age. It’s really a challenge. If they can have some really good friends in high school, I think, they have a better time of it. I’ve always had the philosophy that every bit of education that a parent can have blesses their family. I think it’s sad that in today’s world we are thinking more and more and we are telling women that they are unfulfilled if they are at home with their families, because I think every piece of education experience you bring to your family only blesses their lives. Not that we can’t do some of both, but it’s okay to feel like we want to give our children our time and everything we have. I guess a lot of my education motivated me to the kinds of things I did with my own kids. LR: So, in 1995 you basically picked up your entire life and moved to Italy for three years. BD: We did. LR: Talk about that for a little bit. 60 BD: That was an amazing experience. We were excited to get the call, and nervous all at the same time. We had a son serving a mission, two daughters newly married, and then our other four kids at home. I thought it was interesting, the Church Authority who interviewed us said that he was most concerned about the farm. He said, “We’re not in the business of people losing their farms, so if you can figure out how your farm will survive without you there, we want you to have this call.” So we came home, and talked to a couple of neighbors, and the family that owns J and J Garden Center. They had a big farm, and we were close friends with them, and they agreed that we would plant the crops that year, we left in July 1995. Because by this time my husband’s father had passed away, so my husband was solo. His mother was still here living in this house. Anyway, the Stevenson family, we planted the crops that year, then they took care of them and harvested them and gave us a percentage of that income. The next year they did the whole farm and they kept it the next two years, I guess, and then the other year they planted and we came home and we took it back over. It just worked amazingly, and we were just really blessed. We were also worried because we didn’t have any debt, but we did have a home we were paying for. So, one day, just out of the blue, as we were worrying about it, First National Bank called us on the phone and said, “We’ll just put your mortgage on hold for three years and you can just pick it back up where you left off in three years.” LR: Wow, that doesn’t happen often. BD: No. So we just had some amazing experiences, and then the challenge of getting kids ready to be gone for three years. Not knowing what we would find there, I was trying to take books, toys, and clothes for them. My husband and I were both really into literature too, so I wanted to make sure that at certain ages they were 61 going to be able to read certain books. The Church gave us a huge allotment of things we could ship, and so that was great, but a lot of it for me was books and things that I wanted to have available for my kids over there. Our second daughter, she lived in our home while we were gone, and the school district, right in a school board meeting, said they would hold a job, which I don’t think they do that anymore particularly. At the time they said that they would put it right in their minutes that they would hold a job for my husband to come back to. So it just worked, and we were really blessed. In the meantime, our son who was the oldest at home at the time, he turned eighteen, and was at Layton High, graduating senior. Since we were going on a mission, the Church would allow your sons, if they were eighteen, to go on a mission. Now it is everybody at eighteen, but then it was an odd thing. So he ended up getting a mission call in high school. We went to the MTC together, and we both left on missions. He went to Brazil. Our son that had been serving in California, he had been out for a year, and when he finished his mission, he flew from California straight to Italy, and lived with us there, and he went to the University of Padua, and studied languages. Then our son David, when he finished his mission in Brazil, he came to Italy too and studied art in Venice, he’s now an art professor at BYU, but he studied in Venice for a year. LR: So that experience for your kids turned out to be an amazing experience. BD: I was just going to say, our three youngest, they went to school on an American military base, well it was a NATO Base, so there were students from all over the world. There was not an international school in Padua where we lived, and so they went on this military base, and had a phenomenal experience. Our son, he started his junior year in Italy, and he graduated valedictorian, which probably 62 would have never happened here. There were twenty-three in his graduating class. He was a shy person anyway, and it became a wonderful experience for him. Then we had one in junior high and one in elementary, and I can’t say enough of the DOD, the Department of Defense school system. They did a great job and our kids made friends that they still communicate with. We loved the culture, it was a very easy place to live. Our daughter was a fourth grader, and they took the whole class on a field trip to Florence and spent three days in a hotel. Her teacher had a master’s degree in art history, so she became just a master of art history because she just knew art so well. Our two daughters were able to study piano there. We tried to get them into a conservatory, because music was a big part of our family, and you had to commit to eight years. Being Americans, they said, “We’ll let you just commit to five years,” but we could only commit to three. When we got home, one of the teachers from the conservatory called and said she would teach them privately. So they studied with this Italian teacher and she said, “Do you want to learn fast like Europeans or slow like Americans?” They said, “We’ll try fast, we guess.” She would walk around with a ruler and if they made a mistake she would whack their hands with it. It was just a different style, because she became a dear friend who still communicates with us. She loved our daughters, but it was intense. We were about a half hour away from the school, so they were not having a lot of social interaction with people on the base. We lived in the Italian community, so they didn’t have a lot of other things to do but practice the piano. They probably practiced a good two hours a day, it would probably take them almost two hours to get through everything that she had assigned them, and then 63 they would just practice. But Italy was an interesting community for the arts too, because they value the arts so much. Few people can afford to study unless you’re a real prodigy and the government helps pay for it. The music teachers make more than the physicians, more than the doctors. They’re the valued people in the country, so it’s really expensive to take music lessons. They studied hard and it was great, and all the neighbors would say they would rush home from work and open all their windows so they could hear our kids playing piano, because most people didn’t have an instrument or people that would even play. They would play music on their radios or stereos or things, but they really valued the arts, and so it was great. Our youngest daughter, she went on to have a Master’s degree in piano performance, I think mostly because she got such a strong base there. EW: They were there at the perfect ages, especially Margaret, for that music acquisition. BD: She turned nine years old when we were there, and then Anna was fourteen. What I am getting at is that it was an incredibly great experience for our children, enriching, and I think that they found it really opened up the world, in realizing that there are good people everywhere. There are good people who are not members of your faith, there are good people who are not Christian, there are good people everywhere doing amazing things, and it made them not afraid to embrace cultures and experiences. Our oldest son, Merrill, he ran a farm in Mexico, and now is a CEO of an international agricultural company and travels all over the world. Being in Italy was an amazing thing, and all our kids are still tied to our agriculture in some way too. They are all still committed to our farm here, but they have such full breadth lives. 64 LR: Was it hard to leave? BD: It was, it was really hard to leave. When we first got there I thought, “Oh dear, three years is going to be a long time.” I had been studying the language a little bit but I was certainly not comfortable. But when the last year came I just thought, “Oh, it’s going to be over to quick.” It was difficult for our children to come home. Our third son who came with us and graduated from high school, he prepared for his mission from there, all of his interviews and paperwork and doctors was in Italy. Then he came home and his sisters took him to the MTC here. They thought he was foreign, so for about three days he didn’t tell anybody that he could speak English at the MTC. He’s just quiet, he just thought it was funny that they thought he was an Italian speaker who couldn’t speak English. Finally he said, “I can speak English.” Our daughter came home as a high school student, and every day for about a year she would come home and say, “Can I go back to Italy?” She felt that everyone just wasted so much time. She had a lot of friends in Italy and occasionally did things with them, but we were just focused. When you’re focused on other things, church work and their music, she just felt like everyone here was just wasting a lot of time. EW: Hard to step into the middle of that social pool without having come through the ranks with it. BD: Yeah, it was just different. But we finally came back to normal. LR: How much had the area changed in those three years you were gone? BD: A lot really, and has continued to change so much. I think just in my husband's and my life together, compared to his parents, there was dramatic changes. I mean all the time he was growing up and his Dad and things there was one little 65 place you get a hamburger, and two or three little stores. It had been the same for so many years, and as our life began together, it was just a time where things were changing it became so much more a metropolitan area. So we saw some changes, certainly. Before we had left, my husband had sold his biggest tractor, in order to have the money to pay the taxes and keep the farm alive while we were gone. So it was interesting when we got back, that first night, all the farmers in the area had gone and picked up a tractor and had it here saying “Don’t you want to buy this new tractor?” Of course he did, and it took us a few years to pay for. Emma and I were talking yesterday about this area, and how much agriculture has changed. It was, in the beginning, such an agricultural area, and I think part of the reason is it being a pretty small space between the mountains and the lake, this swath is probably some of the best farmland in the country. It’s also become the metropolitan area of the Wasatch Front, and everything happens on this area, so it’s not a surprise really that it’s gone into homes. It’s not like the Midwest, where huge farms could assimilate other small farms. This has basically stayed a family farm area because of the lack of a lot of property. When it was homesteaded, it had fairly big parcels, but considering what it’s like in the Midwest, where thousands and thousands of acres that a conglomerate can own or several brothers or whatever, it’s just been different here. Families haven’t been able to maintain, and there hasn’t been enough to give to all of the families as they’ve grown and married, and so that’s why you’re losing so much agriculture. It’s not that people don’t value it here still, it’s just that those who are farming they pass away, and in other areas like the Midwest, Upper New York, where there have been agricultural stipulations put where it can 66 only be sold for agricultural prices, but here, there is nothing like that. A family that is no longer on the farm, how can they weigh selling it at 8,000 dollars an acre to a farmer as compared to 80,000 dollars an acre for development? You can’t fault the people that farms have gone into houses, because I think it’s just the way it’s gonna be in this part of the country. It is sad, but I think it’s just been a natural evolution of things. A lot of changes. They are going to build a school on our property, so that would make all of my family happy. Davis School District has bought a big parcel of our ground for an elementary school, it’ll be sometime in the next five years probably. EW: Are they going to name it after Dad? BD: He would probably say no. LR: I have a couple of questions for you Emma, from something your mother said earlier about being able to grow up without that outside influence. Your kids don’t really have that option today. Do you feel like they’ve lost something in that? EW: Well we certainly live in a much different neighborhood than I grew up in, because there are houses around me. Growing up we did have neighbors, my grandma was right here and we had some neighbors to the west of us, but not a lot of kids. I think I have tried to take the best of what I grew up with and try and keep that as a tradition. I didn’t just let all the neighbor kids come and hang out at my house all the time. I sometimes would say we’re not having friends right now, or hey its lunch time, everybody has to go. But as I’ve been a 4-H leader, I’ve tried to keep the tradition of, “Let's learn these home arts and lets involve the neighborhood with it,” because even though growing up we were a very insular family in lots of ways, there were some kids in the neighborhood. When we had 4-H, we had fifteen kids come over, and sometimes we went to their mom’s 67 house and she would be the teacher. So I just try to make sure that we’re doing these things to be part of the community, because I think we still felt that we were very much a part of the community. It’s not like we were little house on the prairie living in the middle of nowhere, but we have tried to help our kids be good friends together. It’s been nice, I’ve loved where my kids have grown up, and it’s been great. But we’ve been down to the farm a lot, they’ve all had a chance to work here, and I try to talk about it a lot. They don’t always want to listen to my history lessons. LR: I don’t understand that. EW: We might not have the same context, exactly, but I tell them, “These are the lessons that have been important in our family, and these are the values and traditions that we’ve had, and that you are part of this tradition, and these are things that are passed down to you and these are things we expect you to do with it or this is what you have the opportunity to do.” They all still feel connected to this place. My kids have grown up in Kaysville. Far enough away that we haven‘t been here every day. BD: But her son, last summer, was here every day working. That’s one reason we wanted to keep the farm, even a small part going, is to have something for our grandkids to do. There’s not a lot of places for kids to learn to work these days, and it’s an important value. Her children are incredibly musically talented, as is she. EW: But I think that’s been the biggest thing I’ve tried to say, “What are the values that we’ve been given?” The context is different, but I think my siblings would probably all say the same. From my observation I feel like we’ve tried to pass 68 down that part, even though we don’t all have the same context of where we’re applying it. LR: I know we’ve been at this for a long time, this is our third visit, and honestly I could sit and listen to you talk about the community and your farm, and be here for a very long time, and I would be content. But I kind want to end with a final question, and it’s two-parter. So I’m curious from your point of view, how do you think your father’s experiences in the War shaped the way he raised his own family, and how have you tried to pass that on to your own children? BD: I think to begin with, a great loyalty and love for this country and for freedom. I think those men of that World War Two time, and women, whether they were in service, Red Cross, or whether they were home with their families and their husbands gone, they gave so much. When we sacrifice so much, it gives us a lot, and he loved the country, the community and people, and he certainly instilled that in me; a quest for learning and seeing the good in everyone. I think that was a great quality my father had, he saw the good in everyone, I don’t remember him ever saying bad things about people or picking out their faults. He just always saw the potential in people, and certainly passed that onto us as children, and particularly me, I think I was a lot like my father in a lot of ways. He felt committed to being part of the community through service, as far as what he did with Kiwanis and things like that. Love for family, he loved his grandchildren, and his children, and we spent a lot of time together, and I think that certainly has carried over for me. I want those same things for my family, being committed to people around us, recognizing that the world doesn’t revolve around us, that we’re part of this big picture, and we have responsibility to love and support and help others be the best they can be, be part of the process. 69 LR: Thank you, and finally, Emma, as the family historian, as you’ve researched your family, have you seen this type of tradition continuing through the generations. A love of family, love of education, a sense of community? EW: Yeah, I think it’s been one of the blessings. Knowing where you come from helps you know who you are. It’s given me a real sense of self, as far as I know I have this bunch of people piled up behind me, I’m kind of a conglomerate of what they were able to give. So from all the branches of the family, I really tie strongly to this idea of education. Mom mentioned music, that’s been a big thing that’s come down through several different branches. Faith, loyalty to country, and then you see the stories also of maybe choices that weren’t, we all have those. But then feeling a real tie of place as well, knowing, I live here, and there’s ghosts of my family everywhere I go across the Wasatch Front. I feel very connected to know that my family lived in Ogden and different places for so long, to know that we have a great history with Weber State University, to have been there myself, to know we have connection with South Davis County, because that’s where some of my family came from, to be so connected with this land. Then across the country, I know this is where I came from in Illinois and Kentucky and New York. I think just for me personally it gives me more strength that I have these people behind me that have been amazing and ordinary all at the same time, because ordinary people are amazing. Everybody’s life story is amazing, there’s nothing ordinary about any of us. I feel like I know these people because I do, even though most of them I’ve never actually met, or when I knew them they were old. Having learned about their histories and feeling like I’m so connected to them, that’s what I want to pass on to my kids. 70 Just look at this heritage we have, that’s what I got from an interview from my Grandpa’s brother. That’s what they got from their parents, they just understood that this is your history, from Mom’s side, from Dad’s side, from our extended family, and that means you are who you are and you’ve got to go forward, because you’ve been given all this rich tradition. I think that’s what I feel, just a real web of connection to place and to people. To feel the strength that if they did it, I can do it, and if they did it, I better do it. I can’t be the weak link in the chain. LR: That would be one of the best explanations I’ve ever heard of why learn and study history. Especially your own family, personal history. That was awesome. EW: It’s given me a way better connection to local history and also American history too. To have the context of, and this is jumping back to I think our first interview, but where our family came from in Illinois, the book I ended up writing, I think I showed that to you the first time you were here. Being able to see how World War I affected them, and how they dealt with that, it’s given me a much better appreciation for what people on the home front did at that time, and it’s given me much more of an ability to let my son go. His decision to join the Army came as a big surprise to me. He said he had been thinking about it his whole life, and I thought, “Wow, which life are we talking about, I’ve never heard you mention this even once.” The thought of sending him into harm’s way was really nerve wracking for me. But looking back and seeing that I do have this history of military service in our family through different people, and other mothers having the strength to say, “I love my country enough to let you serve.” LR: Well thank you, you’ve just made me cry, I appreciate that. Thank you so much for your time, I appreciate both of you and your willingness. 71 BD: It’s been a pleasure, really. EW: You know more than you ever really wanted to know. 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Harvey Charles Neuteboom, father of Barbara Dibble, conducted in January of 2002 by his grandsons Blake Haycock and Aaron West. Harvey opens with how he met their grandmother and then moves on to how he found out the U.S. had joined World War II and his subsequent experiences in it. HN: I met your grandmother on a blind date at a church dance in the fall of 1941. We’d been dating a little bit, gone to a couple of movies, and we’d gone to stake conference, December 7th, 1941, at the old tabernacle, down where the Ogden Temple is now. We were sitting in the audience. The stake was being split; from the Mt. Ogden Stake, they were taking off the South Ogden Stake from it. Elder Widtsoe was the one who had come up from the Quorum of the Twelve and did it. By the way my mother had known him over in Norway, he was a Norwegian who had joined the church, and I believe he was a mission president over there at the time that Mom, Grandmother Neuteboom, joined the Church. We were sitting there and he was speaking and it was winding up the meeting. We were just listening to his final talk, when all of the sudden the audience could hear someone yelling outside “Extra! Extra!” In those days we didn’t have news like it is today, so when something came up they just made an “Extra”, and would go peddle it around in the streets for people to listen to. So Bp. Lofgreen, who was my bishop, got up and went outside and came back with a paper. He walked up to the pulpit, put his arm around Bro. Widtsoe and he said “I have some news; it’s very bad. Pearl Harbor has been attacked and we are now at war with Japan.” Everything was just as quiet and soundless as it was. Of course, I, along with my friends, were just eighteen year old. No, I guess I had just turned nineteen. In my mind I was hoping to go on a mission soon. You had to be twenty I believe it was, to go on a mission in those days, and I was just looking forward to that time. The news hit me pretty 2 hard, along with everybody else. I knew that the only thing I would do eventually would be to go in. At that stage in the game, if I wanted to enlist, I would have to have my mother’s consent to do it. It turned out after that the war went on, and all the news about the war was bad. As time went by and springtime came, and summer came in ‘42, Grandma and I were pretty much planning on getting married. In ‘42, I became engaged to her. At the same time, I wanted to become a naval aviator and be a fighter pilot in the Navy, so I went down and took all the tests and passed them all. All I had to do was get my mother's signature, and that was the toughest thing in the worlds to do! You see, already I had three brothers ahead of me, they had all gone in. I had my oldest brother, Everett, who had run away from home when he was seventeen, he was a half-brother, and joined the Army, and he’d stayed in. He was now a Major in the regular Army. My other brother Ray, who was single, and my brother Grant, who was at the time attending BYU, and had been at Weber State where I was, he went on to be a paratrooper and was a Captain in the 511th Airborne that landed in the Philippines. He was in transportation, he had always been a truck driver, and he worked in Motor Transport, and in the army. He was down in New Guinea. I was the baby of the family, so I still had to have my mother's consent to join. So, when I brought the papers to her, she just didn’t want to sign it. I can understand why; with three sons already gone, she didn’t want me to go. But I convinced her that it was the best thing to do, so I did join. I left in December and went up to Utah State to school, where I took what they called Civilian Pilot Training; that was the first stage of becoming a fighter pilot. We used to go fly on the afternoons and weekends up there. I earned my private pilot’s license, and when I graduated from there, that was the next March, after that I came home. Oh, we got 75 dollars a month for that, by the way. BH: Did you have to go to boot camp or anything before? 3 HN: No, that was the first stage of it, then I got my orders to report down to St. Mary’s Pre-flight School, at St. Mary’s University near San Francisco. It was a Catholic school, but they had turned it over to the Navy. We went down there, a group of us. There was about half a dozen of us from Ogden, good friends of mine; Frank Newman and I were friends in school and we were there at the same time. There was a Junior Preece who was a great basketball player at Ogden High School, he was there with us. We took our training. It was all ground school then. We learned everything from Morse code to meteorology, and all that stuff. When I graduated from there, instead of getting to go on to fighter school to be a fighter pilot, they put me in what they called “lighter than air” school to fly like what you see over the Super Bowl games, the big balloons that you see there. I was going to fly one of those. I didn’t want to, but that’s where I was sent. I went up to Moffett Field, which was just outside of San Jose; that was where they did the Dirigible training. So I did that training there. It was at that point, come around the middle of August or sometime there that I just decided I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to be a fighter pilot, but they would not all