Oral History Program Inez Davis Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 1 November 2016 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Inez Davis Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 1 November 2016 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: Davis, Inez, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 1 November 2016, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Inez Davis 1 November 2016 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Inez Davis, conducted on November 1, 2016 in her home in Clearfield, Utah, by Lorrie Rands. Inez discusses her life and her memories of World War II. Sydnie Shields, the video technician, is also present during this interview. LR: It is November 1, 2016. We are in the home of Inez Davis in Clearfield. We are talking about her memories of growing up in the Taylorsville area, and World War Two, for the World War Two project we’re doing. I’m Lorrie Rands conducting the interview, and Sydnie Shields is here as well. Thank you very much for your time, and for your willingness to do this. We’re just going to jump right in with my first question, when and where were you born? ID: I was born in Taylorsville, Utah, in 1926. LR: Okay, and what day and month? ID: June 30, 1926. LR: At the time, and having grown up in Salt Lake I understand a little bit about the area, was it called Taylorsville at the time? ID: Yes. LR: Was it really? I didn’t know that. ID: Oh yes. LR: I had always envisioned that the name came later. ID: No, Taylorsville was there right after Murray, we’re two and a half miles west of Murray, so it’s always been there. At the time that we lived there it 2 was just a real small little town, with the church and maybe a couple of thousand people around there. It’s really built up now. LR: Yes it has, I agree. You mentioned before that you were born at home. ID: Yes. LR: Then, did you live on a farm? ID: We lived on two acres, at the time. My grandparents lived down below us, and we grew our own vegetables and canned our own stuff. Pretty much just survived like that. Had chickens, and a cow, and my brother raised pigs. LR: What did your parents do? ID: My dad worked for the LDS Church, helped set up the warehouse at Salt Lake. After that he worked at the Remington Arms plant, during the war too. LR: Where did you go to school? ID: I went to Plymouth elementary on 4800 South and Redwood Road. The junior high was also Plymouth, and then I went to Granite High. LR: Was that the old Granite High? ID: The old Granite High School. LR: Okay. Do you have any fun stories that you remember from when you were a girl? ID: Yeah. All the neighborhood kids would get together. We had one light post, up in the middle of town of our little community there, and so all the kids would get together on the weekends and play run sheepie run and 3 hide and seek and kick ball we used to call it, now its soccer. We used to do a lot of things like that. On Halloween, lot of kids would go out and turn over outhouses, and got caught. LR: Run sheepie run. What is that? ID: Somebody would go and hide and then the rest of us, almost like hide and seek. Then we’d run to try to find him and grab him and haul him back into the goal. We had to haul him back under the light. LR: Strange question, but why turn over outhouses? ID: Oh, just to get in trouble. It was a whole big group of kids, and that’s the only entertainment we had. We didn’t’ have things like video and all that crap now. We had to get out and entertain ourselves. LR: I’m just trying to envision turning over an outhouse. ID: It was bad. LR: That’s what I’m envisioning! ID: It was, and we got caught. We had to go and set them all back up and that was terrible. LR: So not something that you would recommend kids do is turn over outhouses then? ID: Yeah. LR: Okay. How many siblings did you have? ID: I had five sisters and one brother. There was seven of us, and they’re all gone except one. LR: Where do you fall in that? 4 ID: I was the, Gwen Kenneth, Chloe, Velma… Five. LR: You were the fifth, so you had four older siblings? ID: Yes. LR: Let’s go ahead and talk about what it was like leading up to when war was declared. ID: Well, for one thing, I married my first husband. He was in the service at Kearns, and we had one child, and then we went back to Pennsylvania to his folks. He was killed back there, a drunken driver hit him. I was there about six months, and then came home. When I got home, after I got home a couple of months, I found out I was pregnant with my daughter. My mother and dad cashed in war bonds in order to get money enough to send back to Pennsylvania to get me and my sister, the one that’s just older than me, and her husband, and girls on the bus. We had to ride the bus for five days and six nights, with two kids, and one of them was really sick. We stopped in one of the towns in Pennsylvania to try to get a doctor to come to the bus station, couldn’t get any help, so we caught the next bus and came on home. LR: Okay. I’m going to take you back to when war was declared in December of 1941, you were still in High School. What do you remember about that time? ID: Well, I don’t really remember too much about it. I do remember that when we would start panicking when we heard different reports, that the teachers would try to calm us down, explain what was going on and 5 different things like that, because it had an effect on all of us. It was just kind of bad all the way around. LR: So did you feel like you were always afraid? ID: Oh yeah. We always had that panicked feeling until everything was getting over. LR: Do you remember what kind of things the teachers would say to help calm you down? ID: Well, eventually things will be better, and just calm down, take one day at a time. I think it was more the sound of their voices, on how calm they were, they got to all of us. We all understood then more or less, but it was rough. LR: I can only imagine. You said last time about how some of your older sisters would go out and do a little bit of the bond drives. ID: Yeah, they’d bake cookies and sew, that kind of stuff, and then they’d go out to different dances for the USO, and they raised money. Anyway, they could raise money to send for the war effort. LR: Do you remember ever being involved in any of those? ID: No, that was about the time I got pregnant with my second husband. I don’t think I was going to be out doing too much of that! LR: Well you mentioned you met your first husband during the war. How did you meet him? ID: I met him at a dance and we just got along really good. There’s really not much to say about that, other than I hated the war, hated him being out 6 there. All the black people’s places were beautiful, and all other people’s places were raggedy, grassy, they weren’t kept up. The barracks wasn’t kept up, other than where the black people lived. We used to have a lot of dances and stuff out there, too. LR: Why do you remember the difference between the black people’s homes and the white people’s homes? ID: I don’t know, because back then, I think, it was because of the discrimination. If you want to know the truth, when we was growing up, we were afraid of black people, because we had never been around them before. Since then, I’ve completely changed, I think their wonderful people. I’ve worked with a lot of them. They were all segregated, there was blacks and the other ones was all in their own sections. They’d have a bus for each section, like if they wanted to go to town and stuff, they’d have one for the black people and for the white people, and one for the other people. LR: Kind of funny how we remember certain things. ID: A lot of the white people that lived right in close, started watching how nice their yards and stuff were. So then they tried, they came around and was trying to make theirs a lot better. First it just started out with three or four barracks, by the time Paul got out of the service, the biggest part of the places were pretty well kept up. They’d all gone in and really gone through it and tried to make things better. LR: Now the area we’re talking about is in Kearns? 7 ID: Kearns. LR: It was a depot there? ID: Air force. LR: Air base. So your first husband was an airman? ID: Yes, he was. LR: He would have been in the Army Air Corps at the time. ID: Yes, he was the air force. LR: Okay. So when, I think you mentioned last time, you got married in 1943. ID: Yes. LR: Did you live with him in the barracks, or did you get a home? ID: We had a little apartment up on Redwood Road, then we lived with my parents for a while, and then we got us an apartment in Murray. He ran a Murray Taxi Cab for a while. Just before we went back east, he worked at the, I think it was Murray Smelter down there. Then we, Thelma and Dick, my sister and brother in law, we all took off and went to Pennsylvania. That’s when we had all the stamps. Had to have tire stamps, sugar stamps, flour stamps. That’s when we had to have all of that. LR: So you remember the rationing? ID: Yes, definitely. LR: What do remember the most about rationing? ID: Using all the neighbors shoe stamps, because I would run around on that stupid giant strike, I think they called it then. We’d slide our shoes to stop on the gravel, and it would wear the bottom of our shoes out. The sole 8 then was almost like cardboard, because they could not get the leather. But we had a good time, though. LR: What other things about rationing were difficult at the time? ID: Well, what was bad was that we couldn’t get things like sugar or flour. It’s kind of hard to feed a bunch of kids and family without much of that stuff. But during that time the neighbors all chipped in. Practically everybody chipped in if you were low on something and you let them know, then they’d come and bring you theirs if they had plenty. We had one neighbor up the street that always brought over food. Every time she’d bring it over, she’d tell us, “Oh I over cooked, and I thought you could use this for your family.” Her husband used to hook us on the back of his car, with our sleds, and pull us around with the sleds, and stuff like that. We used to have a blast. LR: Sounds like it. So would you say there was a sense of almost community during the war, where everyone’s helping one another? ID: Yes definitely, everybody helped everybody. LR: Have you ever seen that type of community since the war? ID: No, I really can’t say I have. When we first moved in here, the neighbors were all community guys, we had parties and stuff like that. They don’t do that anymore. LR: Interesting. What did your first husband do in the Army Air Corps? ID: He was just an Airman First Class. 9 LR: The reason why I’m asking is the Air Force wasn’t established until 1947 or 1948. ID: He enlisted in the service and I really don’t know what he was doing out there. LR: Okay, you mentioned that your dad worked at the Remington Arms during the War. Do you know what he did there? ID: Just helped pack the boxes of bullets and stuff like that. LR: So, they manufactured ammunition at this plant. ID: Yeah. LR: And this was in Murray? ID: Oh, this was at Redwood Road, up north, I imagine it would be about 21st south and way out West. I don’t remember exactly how far out West. LR: That’s okay. What, what was it like when the war finally ended? Do you remember how you felt? ID: Relieved, everybody celebrated, and went out and fired off guns and that was about it. LR: But, definitely a sense of excitement and relief, okay. That’s really cool. So, you moved to Pennsylvania with your husband when he was discharged. Can you talk about why he was discharged? ID: It was called a hard luck, or a hard something discharge, because of his parents, his mother had fourteen children, and they needed his money that he was getting. He was sending home part of his check to them all 10 time, then when we got married it cut their money off, so they gave him this discharge. LR: Like hardship, maybe? ID: Hardship discharge, yes. So then we stayed around a while and we worked and sent money back there to them, and then we decided to go back there. He had a truck driver’s job back there. LR: What was it like for you leaving a relatively larger community to live in a small town? ID: Well, really my town was small at the time when I was growing up, but we lived in little tiny dinky place back there worse than what was in Taylorsville. We lived on a big old family orchard, and it was different. I mean the eastern people, to me, was different than what I was used to out here in the West. LR: I’ve heard that. ID: A lot of Eastern people never adapt to living out here, I don’t know. LR: So how long, exactly, were you in Pennsylvania? ID: Six months. LR: Okay, so you were in Pennsylvania for six months, and after your first husband died, you came back here. ID: Yes. LR: I’ll let you decide if you’re not comfortable with any questions, you just say so and we’ll move on. ID: Okay. 11 LR: Was it hard coming home, knowing you were coming back alone? ID: Yes, it was. I did have my sister and my brother in law moving back with me, but, it was hard coming home. I didn’t know what I was going to do, how I was going to live. It was really hard, especially with one kid, and, then after I found out that I was pregnant with the other one, my parents, they didn’t know how to handle that either. We were short on money. LR: As a single parent did you have any options at the time? ID: Yes, I went to work. LR: That was your option. ID: That was my option, I went to work. I worked over at the Murray Pharmacy. I worked at Skippy’s restaurant as a waitress. I worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken when they first opened up. LR: You mean that original store in Salt Lake? You worked at that original store? ID: It was a chicken coop. LR: Wow. That’s kind of cool. I mean, that was the first KFC that they ever opened. She worked there. That’s cool! ID: Then I worked at the Murray canning factory. LR: Right. How long after you got back did you meet your second husband? ID: Let’s see, I got home in 1945, married him in 1949? LR: So a few years. ID: Yeah. LR: Okay, how did you meet him? 12 ID: I met him through my brother in law and sister. They told me I could come up and live with them if I didn’t make eyes at this friend they had. That was a mistake. LR: Because you ended up making eyes. ID: It was exactly who I went after. So that’s where I met him. In the Anchorage. You know where the Anchorage is? LR: I don’t. ID: It’s right across the street from the Freeport Center down here on… LR: Antelope. ID: Yeah, right across the street, that used to be a big brick place, they have different apartments in there now. But we lived right there. LR: So after you married your second husband, did you stay here in Davis County? ID: Yeah. LR: You mentioned you lived all over Davis County at the time. ID: Well, yeah, we moved a lot. We lived in Kaysville and Layton, that Anchorage twice, and Birdland Park. That’s all right here in this vicinity though, pretty much. LR: Okay. So you got to see the Clearfield area really grow and get bigger. ID: It’s a lot bigger now. LR: What did your second husband do, I’m sorry, what was his name? ID: His name was Robert, and he worked at the Navy base. He ran the tug, pulling lots of little trailers. He worked there till 1960, that’s when you were 13 born, then he transferred and moved up to Hill Field, and worked up there at the air freight terminal. That’s the only two places he worked, oh and Jim’s out here, the tire company. He worked there. I think that’s about it. LR: When all said and done, how many children did you have? ID: Seven. Two with my first husband. The others were Bob’s. LR: I meant to ask, how many girls, how many boys. ID: One girl, and four boys. LR: So basically, two girls and five boys. ID: Yeah. LR: You almost had the same dynamic, only the opposite of your parents. Alright, after you married your second husband, were you able to just stay home with your kids? ID: I stayed home with them a lot, but I did at one time work at Hill Field for six months. That’s when I found I was pregnant with Pen, the second one. So I quit then, and didn’t go back. LR: Do you remember what you did at Hill Field when you were working there? ID: Well I was oiling air plane engines and all that good stuff. It was what they called maintenance. LR: It sounds like you had fun doing that. ID: Oh, I did. We had a blast up there. I liked afternoon shift, because that’s where you could get up and get stuff done at home and then I could go to work and come home, the kids would all be in bed and fed and… that was good. 14 LR: Sounds like it. You mentioned when you were in High School the teachers really helped you be calm during the war. As you look back now, as a parent yourself, can you appreciate more now what they did to help you? ID: Oh, definitely. I think they done really good to keep all of us calmed down. I know one of my teachers had a daughter and she thought his daughter was on the bus at the same time the bus got hit with the train down in South Jordan. I remember the day that happened, how upset he got. When he found out she wasn’t on the bus, she’d miss the bus, but how upset he was, and how all of us kids went in and tried to calm him down, the same way that he had calmed all of us down. It worked. He went home, but he was really upset. But other than that, I think the teachers did a wonderful job. We got a pretty good education out of it. SS: Do you think it would have been a lot harder to deal with the idea of war if the teachers weren’t so calm? ID: Yeah, if the teachers hadn’t helped us be calm, I don’t know what we would have done. Let’s put it this way, we were hyper. We were really worried about everything, and, it was impossible to sleep. When the teachers would get to school, and the teachers right away could sense how we felt, so right away they would start in on some different thing to calm us down. I just don’t know how to really explain it. But I don’t know what we would have done with that one. SS: So they were a large part of coping with the idea of war? ID: Yeah, definitely. 15 LR: Okay. Do you have any other questions? No, you’re good? Okay. I’m just going to kind of throw this out there as kind of a final thought. Are there any other stories that you can think of that you would like to share? ID: Well I’d like to share when we used to walk to school, over the snow drifts, I’d lose all my boots, and my dad would have to go out and dig the snow boots out of the snow. We didn’t have a car, and the only one that did have a car was my uncle. So he’d take us to school. The regular days we’d walk, and when we’d get to school, the teachers would immediately pull our shoes and socks off and start rubbing them and everything because they’d be ready to freeze. I remember jumping out of barn lofts on the kids and all that old stuff. I was kind of a hellion. I was the one in the family that was kind of different than the rest. I just believed in going out and having a good time. LR: Well it sounds like you did. ID: I did. LR: Okay. Well, thank you Inez for your time. I appreciate it. I love your stories.