Community Oral History Donald Pantone Interviewed by Alyssa Kammerman 13 October 2023 RootsBridge LLC Mission Statement RootsBridge cultivates connection in communities and families through the transformative power of storytelling. Our mission is to compassionately record life histories, honor unique experiences and promote empathy through shared narratives. By encouraging individuals to step into another's shoes, we cultivate deeper bonds between storyteller and hearer. In the communities we serve, we foster a sense of unity and compassion. We are driven by our passion for providing a platform for marginalized voices to ensure that every story is heard and none are diminished. We believe in a community where everyone feels connected and finds a sense of belonging. Project Description The Union Station Centennial oral history project is a companion to the Museums at Union Station’s “Heart of Ogden” exhibit, which commemorates the 100-year anniversary of the opening of the current Union Station building on November 22, 1924. In honor of the centennial anniversary, Ogden City contracted with oral historian Alyssa Kammerman of RootsBridge LLC to collect fifteen oral histories from community members who shared memories associated with the Union Station in Ogden. The interviews encompass the 1930s to the present day, thus documenting the period when Union Station was actively functioning as a train station and its subsequent transformation into a museum and cultural center. Community members interviewed included former railroad employees, Union Station employees, residents of Ogden, city employees, and museum volunteers. The diverse range of interviewees reflects the diversity of Ogden and provides a comprehensive view of Union Station’s impact on the community as a cultural hub and a place of shared history. ~ Oral History Description ~ An oral history is the spoken account of historic events in one’s life from the unique and partial perspective of the narrator. It is a primary source and unique interpretation of one’s lived experience. Rights Management This work is the property of RootsBridge LLC and The Museums at Ogden Union Station. 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 / as long as credit is given to RootsBridge LLC and Ogden Union Station. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Pantone, Don, an oral history by Alyssa Kammerman (RootsBridge LLC), 13 October 2023, Centennial Oral History Project, Museums at Union Station, Ogden, UT. Oral History Interview October 13, 2023 Interviewer: Alyssa Kammerman Interviewee: Don Pantone Abstract: This is an Oral History Interview with Don Pantone, conducted October 13, 2023, for the 100 year anniversary of the Ogden Union Station. This interview was conducted at the Ogden Union Station by oral historian Alyssa Kammerman of RootsBridge LLC. During this interview, Don shares his memories of watching his father play clarinet with the Ogden Union Pacific Railroad Band in the 1930s and 1940s. He recalls watching the roundhouse employees work on the trains, encountering homeless people riding the rails during the Great Depression, and observing the servicemen coming and going during World War Two. He goes on to describe his efforts to help his wife in her work on the Union Station Foundation once the Union Station Museums opened. AK: Today is Friday, October 13, 2023. I'm here with Don Pantone for the Centennial exhibit. My name is Alyssa Kammerman, and I'll be conducting the interview. So Don, thanks for meeting with me today. Let's start out with when and where you were born. DP: Well, I was born in 1927 in Ogden, Utah, at the McKay-Dee Hospital because my mother was a nurse and a graduate of one of the very first classes of nurses at the Old Dee Hospital. So in those days, a lot of kids were still born in the family homes, but my mother, being a nurse, I was born there. And I grew up, and the folks built a house on 29th and Kiesel, and that's where I first started school. 1 of 26 Went to Lewis first grade, no kindergarten in those days, just the half day of first grade. And I went to school there, but because I lived below Washington, I had to go to Pingree School, which was two or three blocks away. And then finally my mother and my friend's mother got us back into Lewis Junior High and Ogden High. And I graduated from Ogden High School in 1945. So talking about the Union Pacific Railroad, my father was in the music business. My grandfather was a professional violinist and my dad was a clarinetist, and they started Pantone Music store on Washington. Somehow my dad got to know a lot of the people that were in the Union Pacific and the Union Pacific had the Union Pacific Band, and that band was made of Ogdenites. My father was the only non-Union Pacific employee in the band, because he was a good clarinetist and I guess they needed him. So he was part of the band and as part of the band, he would take me to places where the Ogden Union Pacific Railroad Band performed – that was the proper name of that organization. And we would, in those days, go to the rodeo. They'd play the music for the Ogden Rodeo. Harmon Perry started the Ogden Rodeo and the Union Pacific Railroad Band played for the rodeos. They'd play music when the horses come out bucking; just like they have music today, they had a live band for those rodeos. Another situation, they marched in the Pioneer Day Parade. They marched the whole distance, the band would play. And so my father, who is a musician and in the piano business, he was interested in mechanics and 2 of 26 airplanes and had kind of a mechanical mind, and he loved the locomotives and the railroad. So when I was a child, fairly young, he knew a lot of the railroad people that were in the band, and almost every night we'd walk down from 29th and Kiesel and come down to the Station. All in the early evening was when all of the trains were coming through. Trains from the Southern Pacific would come through and stop at Ogden, change locomotives and crews and go from Ogden on up Weber Canyon to Evanston and on to Chicago. So he knew when the trains were going, and then we'd go down and stand by and watch the locomotives. He knew a lot of the engineers and he'd hold me up while they were waiting, and the engineers would put me in the cab, and I'd think of how hot it was from the fire burning underneath the boiler. But the engine was making noises, steam was coming out of places and everything [laughing]. But we loved to do that and we'd always wait 'til the trains pulled out. That was my introduction to the railroad, and we did that for quite a few years 'til I guess I finally grew out of it. Part of that I can remember, the Union Station and the underground walkways that went to the trains, you could go in and when you bought your ticket to go to maybe Chicago, San Francisco, or wherever, the sign would tell you what track your train was on, and so you'd go down through this tunnel and as you went west, you'd see from one to... I think there was about seven or eight tracks, and then you'd go up the stairs and there was your train. Baggage carts were going; They were a wheeled cart with big metal wheels, pushed by humans, 3 of 26 but they'd have all the people's bags and they'd pull 'em down to the baggage cart, and that was close to the locomotive so I could watch while we were there. My dad would sometimes be talking to one of the railroad employees that he knew and was a good friend of, and they'd be chatting, and I'd look around and I'd see these carts, and it's kind of like sitting in an airliner today; you look out the window and you see the bags being put into the airplane. Well, this is the railroad age of this country, and bags came on these carts to the baggage car and got put in there, and I used to watch all of these pretty big carts pushed around on the railroad to the baggage cars of the respective trains and loading the bags. And I thought that was pretty interesting. So that was my introduction to the railroad. And then we took occasional trips. We rode a train up to Evanston. My father and my uncle in the music business sold the piano to the Evanston High School, a grand piano. So it was delivered and had to go up and they took me along. When we got on the train, just a passenger train, rode up to Evanston, got off, and got the piano installed. And coming back, the railroad used to put a passenger car on the end of a freight train and it was just a car for local business. And somehow coming back down from Evanston, we were in this car and I remember as a young kid how rough it was because all those freight cars were kind of jerking in between, and on a couple instances, sped up and slowed down around the curve. This car at the end of all that gave you a pretty rough ride. And it was a cold winter and that car wasn't heated too well. But anyway, that was one of the railroad trips I remember taking. So that was kind of fun. 4 of 26 AK: Did they have a way to heat the cars? DP: Beg pardon? AK: Did they have a way to heat the passenger car? DP: Well, yeah, but it wasn't very effective. So, then another train ride we took was the Union Pacific Railroad on Sun Valley. They started Sun Valley – Union Pacific Engineers in Omaha built the first chairlift at Sun Valley, kind of designed it and built it. Well, they were going to have a rodeo, and so this rodeo needed a band, and so the Ogden Union Pacific Railroad Band got tasked with the job to go to Sun Valley. So the whole band got in a Pullman car and a train pulled us right into Sun Valley and the railroad was there, and they just did this Pullman car, parked it on the siding, and that was the hotel and the home for the band for about four or five days. And the band would go out and the rodeo would be in the afternoon and they'd play and then come back. And then, everybody would go to bed in the Pullman car. And it was awful hot. The dark green color that the railroad car is, sitting in the sun all day absorbed awful lot of heat. And I just slept in the upper bunk with my dad. I guess I was only ten. So we'd crawl in there, and the rest of the band got in all different, the Pullman booths, up in the bunk. And then when it was over, the car got hooked up to a train and pulled back to Ogden and we got back to Ogden. So that's most of my youth, with the Union Pacific Railroad in Ogden, except that it was really important that in those days, switch engines would take cars all over Ogden on rails to the different businesses that was loading and 5 of 26 unloading the different freight cars so that... Now trucks do it, but in those days it was the railroad. So I remember that very well. And so after I got out of high school, I kind of got away from the railroad and then I spent a lot of years working as an engineer and then decided that I knew a couple of people that were in the car museum. And I married Janica Olsen, and she liked to come. She was a great-grandchild of John M. Browning, and so she got involved with the Heritage Foundation and the Union Station Museum. So she worked really hard with the decorating of the flowers of the Union Station, and volunteered in the Browning Gun Museum. So I got pretty closely involved with the museum and the Heritage Foundation as her husband. They had dinners and meetings and things like that, and so I got dragged along with her and got involved. And Leon Jones, I knew him. I got to know him quite well and a lot of the other people. And so I thought I'd kind of like to work and volunteer in the car museum. So that's when I came down and talked to Sam. I had to start out, I spent a few weeks, two of my days here in the railroad museum and did my time in the cowboy museum. And then I finally got down to the car museum and I've been working in the car museum, which is very fascinating. I was a mechanical engineer. I've loved airplanes, cars, trains, and ships all of my life. I've read about them and studied 'em and knew how they worked. And so that's basically been the reason I'm here in the cars today. AK: So I have a few questions from what you just talked about. 6 of 26 DP: Okay. AK: So, first question is, were there a lot of people in Ogden who were employed by the railroad? DP: A lot of people. Oh, that was the major employment in Ogden City for quite a few years. The Southern Pacific, the Union Pacific and the Rio Grande all had employees here. And then they called it the OUR, and that was the “Ogden Union of Railway” something. And that was jointly owned by the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific, and they ran all the switch engines and the switching in the yard, to the best of my knowledge. In those days, engineers and conductors were like airline captains today. It was the middle of the Depression and they were some of the highest-paid people in the city, other than doctors and lawyers. And all the rest of the people that were railroad workers, the engineers and the conductors, had good salaries and they were considered like airline pilots today: highly paid and pretty wealthy people with a good job. AK: Speaking of the Depression: do you know if railroad travel slowed down during the Depression? DP: I think I was too young to witness that. I don't think... It seemed, pretty much, because that was when we came down and looked at the locomotives, and as a young kid, it looked pretty constant to me. Now, whether it was or not, I don't know. But I think it was such a significant means of transportation and moving 7 of 26 goods that I think it was pretty constant. And then the minute the war started, it just... We had troop trains through here and goods shipping. Ogden Arsenal made bombs, artillery shells: all moved by rail. Hill had railroad tracks all through that west area, in between the buildings that's now gone. But they were, railroad cars would come in there and get loaded with all the bombs and artillery shells that were built in that arsenal and come out and put on the railroad and shipped to the coast, all by rail. So that was a gigantic boost in the rail traffic. AK: Do you remember seeing that difference of significantly more people during the war? DP: Oh, yeah. Kind of go around there and you'd see Sunset or Roy and Riverdale and that was not very populated. So you'd see trains that go in and out there. As kids, we'd ride bikes down to the river, and the mills on the bottom of 30th was the biggest structure in that area, and you'd see these trains. And then of course we had the Bamberger, which was an electric railroad that went from Ogden to Salt Lake, but that sometimes paralyzed all of those tracks in and out, going up Weber Canyon. We'd drive up the Canyon and see these trains with tanks and artillery and goods going back and forth. AK: So did the Bamberger stop at Union Station as well? DP: No, its station was up on Lincoln, and it ran along Lincoln to 30th and then kind of went... You can see the old tracks. At 30th and Lincoln, I think, is still the building where the electrical equipment was, put the electricity in the lines for the Bamberger to run. And that was rail, too. But that was just a block from here. 8 of 26 AK: So would you come down to the Union Station during World War Two as well, to watch everybody come and go? DP: Early, probably. By the time I got to junior high and high school, I got to be a teenager and I got out of going down here with my dad. But I used to bring my family later when I had two or three children and lived up on Tyler. We'd drive down and park behind what was the Shupe-Williams Candy Company and watch the trains. I kind of taught my kids. I enjoyed that as a kid, and so I would bring my children down, oh, sometimes once, two or three times, maybe, a month, or once a week. And after we'd had supper, we could come down here and park the car and watch the locomotives pull out – the steam locomotives. And then eventually, it turned to the diesels going, and they weren't as much fun as the steam. [laughs] AK: Why not? DP: Oh, I, I don't know. The engineers, you could see them better. The steam and the black smoke and the noise of the steam engines. That was... For us old people, steam engines are just fascinating. It was a wonderful thing. And I used to know all of the locomotives by number; the 7000 locomotive was the Union Pacific's passenger locomotive, and the 9000 was a freight locomotive. And I knew those locomotives’ numbers by what their purpose was. The switch engines had a different number, but the 9000 was a whole model of a Union Pacific freight locomotive. Start with 9000, I guess, and go up to 25 or 50. And then the 7000 was a model number or a design of a particular engine. And then we have an 9 of 26 800 out here, and the 800 was the successor to the 7000 as the Union Pacific's passenger locomotive. I never did get involved with the Southern Pacific because it was at the north end of the yard, and we lived at the south end. And I learned those different Union Pacific locomotives by their numbers and the model number of 'em and what the difference was, the front and back trucks and the number of main wheels. And I knew how you identified the locomotives, what a 484 was. AK: Did you have a favorite? DP: Oh yeah, I love the 800s. I thought that was the greatest engine, and it probably was in the world of steam engineering. And I gave a talk about this once in a class at the U about the final design of the greatest locomotives in the steam world. And I think I consider the 800 passenger locomotive and the 4000 Big Boy, the greatest locomotives that were ever built. They were the epitome of the steam age locomotives. And from then on it turned to be diesel power. I never considered they'd... It was never the same. AK: With how much you love the railroad and trains, why didn't you decide to work on the railroad? DP: Well, I just didn't. I was too involved in airplanes, so I liked railroads because they were machines and locomotives were machines, and I read books and everything about that. But I was always interested in aircraft and engineering. And so I just got into engineering, and most engineering graduates don't... The 10 of 26 railroad has engineers, a lot of civil engineers and engineers like at Omaha, that design equipment and things like that. But I just didn't go that way. AK: So I think I remember you saying that your dad's band, the Union Pacific Band, would sometimes perform in the Roundhouse. Is that correct? DP: No, no, not in the Roundhouse. They'd have concerts, but the Roundhouse was strictly a working place for locomotives. That's where all the locomotives were maintained and worked on. And I just lived up three blocks from the Roundhouse. I used to ride my bike down there, though, and wander through that. They had big air compressed guns that pushed the grease into the big journals on the drive shafts, and some of them would have the boilers open, cleaning the calcium out of the boilers that they did. And I'd wander through that roundhouse. And none of those guys bothered this kid. Nobody kicked me out. I would think I probably shouldn't have been there, but I was fascinated by the mechanical things going on in there and if I was bored, I'd just ride down there on a different day and wander through the roundhouse, and then watch 'em. One'd get ready to go and they'd back it out and I’d watch the turntable and the locomotive. And then I later had a cousin that went to war – he was a Marine – and came back and was living with us. He got a job with the railroad as a Hostler. They were the guys that took the engines from the roundhouse out on the rails and down to where it got hooked up to the train that was going to take out of town. And he worked for the Union Pacific and he somehow got a job. He only did it for about six months or a year, but it was an interesting job, and I thought that'd be a good job. But I was too young for that [laughing]. 11 of 26 AK: So did the railroad employees in the Roundhouse let you ask questions and make friends with you? DP: They just kind of ignored me. I just looked, and they had work to do. And occasionally my dad would take me down there. First of all, he did take me down there and he'd know those guys from the band and talk to him, and that's why he knew some of the engineers, and that's why I got to get up in the cab while they were waiting for the train to get loaded. It was fascinating. One of the other clarinetists and a very good friend of my dad's – name was Amedeo – worked for the air conditioning on the Union Pacific, and so he'd sometimes be walking up there and they'd get together and talk. And Amedeo would have to work on a car’s air conditioning, because air conditioning came into the railroad, oh, in the '30s, I guess. And it was really something new and exciting, and that was his technology, and that was his job, was the air conditioning. And of course, everything mechanical fails and it had to be fixed sometimes when he was in. So, “let's talk about what went wrong with that,” and if nothing was wrong, then he was just standing by to fix something. And they’d talk and he'd come up and visit my father. I walked down sometimes and looked at all of the mechanisms of the journals on the car and watched the guy oil, you know. There was a person that came along, the journals on the wheels of the car, they were a bearing and that's a mechanical thing, and that kind of fascinated me. And these guys would come along and open it up, and there was just a wad of, they called it 'cotton waste', 12 of 26 and he had a big bucket of oil, kind of like water buckets with oil, and he'd just dump a little oil in some of the journals that need it. I watched that with fascination. AK: So I’m curious to hear a little more about the tunnels that you would walk through to get to the different trains. DP: Oh, yeah. AK: So you know how in the airports they have artwork on the walls and stuff of the terminals? Did they have anything like that in the tunnels here? DP: I don't remember. I think they were painted kind of blue and they had lights. They were kind of dark and dingy, as I remember. And because I really didn't spend too many times there, but I did go through them enough times to know what they were like and understand how they got to the different rails and that, but I don't remember seeing anything to decorate them or make them. It was just a means of getting from A to B. AK: Okay. Also, during the Depression, did you notice a lot of hobos on the rail? DP: Oh, yeah. We lived close to the Union Station – just three blocks up on Kiesel – so we'd get hobos all the time. They'd come up and knock on our door, and they'd say, "Could I cut your lawn for a sandwich?" And my mom would say, "Yeah," and she'd fix them a tuna fish sandwich or a cheese sandwich. And they were good people, just out of a job, like thousands and thousands of other guys, families and that. And so a lot of these guys hit the rails, that's what they called it. 13 of 26 Later, I was in the Merchant Marines and I was shipping out; one of my crew member mates had been one of those guys, they could get a ride in an empty boxcar or something or, you know, gondola, and he'd come up and just try to get a meal. And they were quite common, and they'd sometimes shovel, if we had snow, they'd shovel a lot for you or cut your lawn or a spade, do a little bit of work. Mom would always fix them up some sort of a meal and give it to 'em, and they'd say thanks and we'd never see him again. But that was very common. AK: Did your parents ever warn you not to talk to them, or were they not too much of a threat? DP: Oh, no. They were just somebody that came along, and there was really no fear of them being, you know, obnoxious or difficult or crooked. They were really good human beings that were hungry and trying to exist in that terrible Depression that we had. AK: So moving forward a little bit, you married someone who was a Browning descendant. You said her name was Janica Olsen, is that right? DP: Yes. AK: And she brought you to the Union Station as a volunteer? Is that correct? DP: Well, she was the volunteer and I was just the spouse for most of the years, until after she passed away, it's just that I've been down here as a volunteer, and that's just been about the last three years that I've kinda been down here. The 14 of 26 rest of the time I've been involved with the Hill Aerospace Museum. I worked for the Boeing Company at Hill Air Force Base for 26 years. AK: So I want to hear a little more about your wife's work with the Union Station, then. So she was on the foundation board, is that correct? DP: The foundation? Yes. AK: And did she help with the restoration of the building? DP: She did. Yeah. She, in fact, got invited back to Washington, D.C., for Ronald Reagan's – he did a presentation for the people that did these things. And she spent a lot of time with the gardening of this thing and came down here and did a lot of the planting of the different things, as well as a lot of those flower decorations hanging on the streets’ lights up and down 25th Street. She was the instigator of a lot of 25th Street and this Union Station. And, you know, we went back to Washington, D.C. with a thousand other people on the lawn of that. Well, President Ronnie Reagan told them how he appreciated all the work they done. They came from all over the country. So that was a nice event for us, for the family. AK: So, during that time period, was historic preservation becoming a bigger push nationally, where the president was speaking about it and everything? Like did the president, Ronald Reagan, promote historic preservation at that time? DP: Yes, he did. There was a whole national thing to do things like that. And that's what these people did and got invited for. Well, one of the things, I have a Piper 15 of 26 airplane, and I used to fly out to the Promontory Point, and that was in the 1950s, and I'd fly out there and land on the road, and the only thing there was that concrete pyramid that was decorated and engraved that this is where the rails met and the golden spike was driven. Now we've got the engines and that museum out there, and that little concrete post pyramid is just outside the door of the building. If you go out there, you can still see that. When I was flying out there and landing there, that's all there was, and I used to fly people out there to show them this pyramid. That was where the golden spike was driven. It was just minuscule. Nobody knew about it or ever drove through it. And we flew out to it, would land there and look at the words on there. And yeah, that was fascinating to see that and then to see what they've done about it now that it became a national park. And it should have been done years before it was, because it was a significant thing, and that little concrete marker just didn't do justice to the event like they do today. And I've witnessed from that to what it is today, and I am glad that it happened, and it needed to happen. AK: Were you a part of putting together the museum and everything at the historic site out there? DP: Nope, I knew the... In the Reserves, I worked pretty close with this master sergeant, and his son started working on the locomotives, and I got to know him pretty well, and I did get up to ride in the locomotive. I went out there one day and he had it fired up, got in it, and we backed it out of the shop, down to the woodpile. And it was the Jupiter, I think was the Central Pacific locomotive, and we loaded some wood for the next day on it, and then he backed it back in there, 16 of 26 and I thought that was a neat event for me, to get to ride that far – if only maybe about 50 yards on that. But to see how it worked and how he pulled it back and forth. It was great, I got to do that, so. And I still like to go out to that ceremony. Oh, I love those two locomotives. I like the 800s and the 7000s, I like them, those two. I still like the way they work. AK: So when your wife was involved with the Union Station, did she ever pull you in on projects? DP: Oh, yeah, just a little bit. I don't like green things, and so I don't do much gardening or flower tending in the house. I've always said, "If it's greasy and runs, ask me about it. If it's green, forget it [laughing]". It's been my philosophy, and so I didn't do too much to help her. AK: Was she a gardener at your home, also? DP: Oh, yes, she did, yeah. She'd grow tomatoes and zucchini and all that every summer in the flower garden, and had a nice yard and foliage around the house and that. I planted the lawn on the house, but I didn't do it with any joy [laughing]. AK: So what were some of the projects that she had you help with here at the Union Station? DP: Here? Oh, well, mostly all of the foliage that's around here now. And then she just volunteered in the gun museum every Saturday. AK: But she didn't have you do any engineering things here or anything like that? 17 of 26 DP: No. I turned out the lights one Saturday night [laughs]. I learned how to secure the building and there's quite a few lights in there that needed to be turned out. But that's about all I ever did with that in those days. AK: That makes sense. So I want to hear more about your volunteering time. So you started volunteering here three years ago? DP: About, yeah. AK: Do you have any interesting stories from volunteering here; people who came through or things that you learned? DP: Oh, yeah. One day, I was here all by myself, and this gentleman came in and he said, "You know, all these cars," he said, "I work for the company that restored these." And he told me about the yellow '26 Lincoln. He said, "That Lincoln is original." He said, "That's the way it came from the factory." I didn't know that. He said, "That was not restored. That's original." And he says, "I'm restoring one up in Oregon." And he says, "I need to take a picture of one of the wheels of the front bumper or something." He said, "Could you let me in to go past the thing and go in and take this picture?" And it was early in the day, nobody was around. And I said, “OK.” And I undid the thing and he went in and got his pictures taken. That was interesting to learn about, and that he'd worked for the company and was familiar with the restoration of most of the other cars. That was something that happened. 18 of 26 I guess, other than that, some people just walk through and don't say a thing, other people are from... I ask a lot of people where they're from, and just a couple of weeks ago, a couple was from Italy, and some from China, quite a few come from China and Japan, and then most of the states. Last winter, we had quite a few people come here that were here for skiing, and they'd been skiing all week and they said, "We have to take a day off," or maybe the snow maybe wasn't as good, or it was a stormy day. So they'd come down to the museum, and I thought that was neat for them to do that, and it increased our attendance quite a bit during that skiing period of Powder Mountain. A lot of them came from Powder Mountain instead of Snowbasin, but from both hills, they'd come out here and got lodging up in the valley and did daily skiing – except when they'd either got tired or something or the weather was down up there, so they'd come down and visit here, and I thought that was a good thing, to have them come down here. AK: Are there people who come from a lot of areas of the world just to see this museum, or is it mostly because they're passing through? DP: Well, it's kind of hard to tell. I sometimes ask them if they'd been to the Hill Museum and they don't know about it. And I tell 'em about it and say they ought to go. And others, "Oh, yeah, we were there yesterday," or, "No, that's on our list tomorrow," and others say, "Oh, we haven't got time. We got to go on." So just a wide spectrum of what people want and can do and want to do. But it's fascinating to just talk to some of the people. And sometimes I watch some 19 of 26 people just go through and walk through like there's nothing there and come back out, and others ask questions and we spend a lot of time with them. AK: Did you have to learn a lot about each individual car before you could volunteer? DP: Yeah, kind of, I did. I've always known quite a bit about cars and different models and the evolution of car design from the ‘30s to today, and the different engines and the transmissions of 'em. But as far as, like, some of the history of those two older ones, I work with Lee, and he has great history, so he's taught me a lot of them and he's had a lot of reading and data that I've gotten to know about them. AK: Any other interesting stories from your time here at the museum that you want to share? DP: Well, I guess not. After this is over, I'll probably think of a half a dozen things I should maybe mention, but right now I'm out of 'em. AK: That's okay. You can always send me an email or give me a call if you think of anything else. One thing I forgot to ask you is, do you remember any of the presidential whistle stop tours that came through Ogden? DP: The what? AK: The presidential whistle stop tours, where the president would come through and give a big speech from the back of the train? DP: Yeah, I think once, in the Depression days when I was really young, they came down and they used to have observation cars with a little grille on the back. And I 20 of 26 can remember coming down, and a candidate for the presidency came out, and I was too young to really... The folks just kind of brought me down here, I think, with a mob of people. But I remember vaguely the event. This was sometime in the ‘30s. AK: So you would have been really young still. DP: Yeah, I was only seven, eight or nine or ten. I remember the 36th presidential election and Alfred Landon was the Republican running against President Roosevelt, and his slogan was "Vote for Landon and land the job." Oh, as a kid, heard that thing going, and that stuck in my memory bank all these years [laughing]. That's about the only thing I can remember about the presidents. But I know that that one time, there was a candidate; I don't remember whether it was the president, but I think it was a candidate on the back end of an observation car here in the Union Station on the first track. People were up and down and around it. AK: That's really cool. So, I know we've got to go soon. I'm sure you have your volunteering to get to. But I wanted to ask, how did you see Ogden change after the railroad stopped coming through? DP: Well, I guess I know that a lot of people stopped working for it, although I still have two or three friends that are still working for the railroad. But it was just when it was a freight railroad, when the passenger stopped, Ogden as a transportation center seemed to die, and it really went downhill in that respect, and got a lot more car traffic, truck traffic than used to be there. And then, uh, we 21 of 26 don't have any airline traffic. And so, I think it's left a really big void in Ogden. And it was neat when all these trains were coming in and people were getting on them, and I think it'd be neat again if the... I even felt bad that Amtrak deserted Ogden. I was disappointed, but I guess... and there's talk of trying to get it back and I'd like to see that happen. But, yeah, I think Ogden really got poorer. I think we got more unemployment and more homeless people because the railroad really had a lot of employees and that income into Ogden was really big. It's gotten so small compared to what it was in those days, and I think that's kind of a tragedy. AK: Do you feel like the railroad had an impact on Ogden's culture? DP: Oh, yeah, it did. AK: How so? DP: Well, I think it brought some pretty distinguished people in and out of Ogden that fly in and out of Salt Lake now, and they could have a good effect on Ogden. And I think the Chinese culture that the railroad brought: we used to have a lot of Chinese here, but that was kind of before my day – the Chinese kind of had left. And then I think the Black culture, because of the porters and waiters on the railroad. So we accepted Blacks. I used to go down and play with a guy named Scott Stewart. He liked airplanes, and I'd go down and have lunch with him. Mrs. Stewart, she'd feed me lunch. And I think the Black people, maybe there was some segregation in Ogden, but not very much. My dad, in the music business, 22 of 26 there's a lot of Black musicians. Who was the saxophone player that just passed away? AK: Joe McQueen? DP: Joe McQueen. He used to come to the store and visit with my dad and buy his saxophone reeds from them, and Black guitarists would come into the store, and I think culturally, we were way ahead of a lot of the country. I've learned since then what some of it was like that I did not witness in Ogden, Utah. We went to, for some reason my dad got an invite or bought a ticket for something and our family went down to a Sunday ham dinner, which was at a Black home on Wall. It was just another dinner with Black folks, but. We just went down and had a ham dinner, and they had kind of advertised an open house for fundraising or something, and a lot of other people were there or their homes were open. AK: Was that the Royal Hotel that you went to? DP: No, it was in a home along Wall Avenue, oh, between 27th and 29th – or 26th? It was one of those houses on Wall, one of those bigger houses down there. And I can remember as a kid, just going down there and having ham dinner. AK: That is really interesting. I haven't heard that story before. Do you feel like being in the music business kind of helped bring different cultures together? DP: Yes, because there's a lot of good Black musicians and I think music's been a part of the Black culture from all of the days. And so that came to Ogden with the Porters and Waiters Club. And there was a lot of Black people that worked for the 23 of 26 railroads. That was a big source of employment for Black people because on the trains, all the porters and waiters were Black people – at least on the Union Pacific, that I rode on and saw and knew. AK: Was your friend's dad a porter or waiter? Or otherwise employed by the railroad? DP: Oh, I don't know what he did. Scott later went to work at Hill Field, and I lost track of him. This was when I was, oh, 7 or 8 that we did that. And, I never... He lived in Ogden, and he got a pretty good job at Hill Field. I don't know what his dad did. AK: Did your dad ever go to the Porters and Waiters Club? DP: No, I don't think, not that I know of. I did once. During the war, in high school, during Christmas, they'd hire us high school kids to deliver mail for the Christmas rush. And we'd have two weeks out of school, and I've got a job down at the post office delivering mail, and I could drive a truck. So on Christmas Eve, they wanted to volunteer to drive. They had a brand new little Chevy van car, if I'd work Christmas morning for special deliveries. So I showed up at 6:00, and I had a bunch of letters, and I had a letter addressed to this name, care of the Porters and the Waiters Club. So I went down, driving down there at six in the morning. It was kind of dark and scary for me, [laughing] and so. And I asked them if so-and-so was here, and the guy behind the bar—he was kind of grouchy towards me 'cause I'm just this young kid asking for this guy's name. And then he says, "Oh, no, he's not here. What do you want?" I said, "Well, I just got a special delivery letter for him." He says, "Oh, he's in the hotel right around the corner here, the Broom Hotel. He's up on the second floor." So I went up and knocked 24 of 26 on the door, and he answered, and I said "Is that you?" And I handed him the letter and went on my way to my next job [laughing]. So that's my experience with the Porters and Waiters, but I'd heard a lot about it. AK: You heard a lot about it? As in, did you have friends that went there? DP: Oh, just city talk. People would talk about it and I'd just maybe overhear it, mostly. I just knew it existed. AK: That is so cool. Well, just kind of finishing up, I have just a couple more questions. Why do you feel like preserving the Union Station was an important part of preserving Ogden's history? DP: Well, I feel because Ogden was such an important city in the history of the railroads of this nation, and we were an important city, and this was an important building, and the railroads were an important part of the development of the human species, of what we have today: of transportation, people going places, and this was the center, and I think we ought to preserve it. AK: What can the community do to keep the Union Station relevant for future generations? How can we continue to teach and to preserve? DP: Well, we could probably do a little bit better job. I think being involved with the Hill Aerospace Museum, I think there's more effort there for getting youth. We have the STEM sessions all summer, and the Union Station could probably do things like that a little bit more like this for the history of Ogden, the history of the development of the railroads, the technological development, because building 25 of 26 those steam locomotives and running them and maintaining was important as maintaining airplanes and engines. And the technology of laying tracks, the civil engineering and the maintenance is... There's technology involved. The mechanics, the engineering is here to create the basic engineering principles that are as much part of railroading and the history of that as there was the Wright brothers. And I think they could teach important STEM things. STEM is important. They talked about STEM: science, technology, engineering and math. They could use all of that that's done in the railroad industry today as basic STEM. The basics is just a lot of that, they're as much here as there is in other places, so I think they should maybe develop that by getting interns and things like that, and advertising the STEM things. They could expand on that a little bit more. AK: That's a great idea! I had never thought of that before, but yeah, that's an awesome idea. Well, thank you so much. Is there anything else you want to say before we turn off the camera? DP: No, I guess. AK: Okay, sounds good. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate all your time. It's been a pleasure getting to talk with you. You've got amazing memories, so thank you. 26 of 26