Oral History Program Don Dunbar Interviewed by Lorrie Rands & Tanner Flinders 8 June 2016 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Don Dunbar Interviewed by Lorrie Rands & Tanner Flinders 8 June 2016 Copyright © 2016 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 Utah Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum honors men and women whose lives exemplify the independence and resilience of the people who settled Utah, and includes artists, champions, entertainers, musicians, ranchers, writers, and those persons, past and present, who have promoted the Western way of life. Each year, the inductees are interviewed about their lives and experiences living the Western way of life. ____________________________________ 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: Dunbar, Don, an oral history by Lorrie Rands & Tanner Flinders, 8 June 2016, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Don Dunbar June 8, 2016 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Don Dunbar, conducted June 8, 2016 by Lorrie Rands and Tanner Flinders. Dunbar discusses his father, Marvin Dunbar, and his experiences growing up and participating in rodeos. LR: It is June 8, 2016. We’re in the Utah Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum Hall of Fame at the Union Station in Ogden. We’re here with Don Dunbar talking about his father, Marvin who is being inducted into the Utah Cowboy Hall of Fame this year. I am Lorrie Rands, Tanner Flinders is over there with the camera. We just want to say thank you for your willingness to talk about your dad and be here with us. DD: It’s an honor. More than glad to do it. LR: I’m going to start with one question and we’ll kind of keep going. The question is, when and where was your father born? DD: Born in Logan, Utah, Cache County, USA on May 27, 1910. LR: So that’s a ways from Brigham City. DD: Yes. LR: That’s more north east. DD: Yes. LR: Was he born at home or at a hospital? DD: He was born at home. It was an agrarian community back then, largely agriculture. Utah State University was just getting a foothold there from 1892. His father was George Dunbar, an immigrant from Edenborough, Scotland. George 2 had somehow found LDS elders and he was baptized in the LDS church as a convert in the old days in Scotland. He and his younger brother, Dave, came across the Atlantic Ocean in a steamer, made their way to Logan. His dad George lived in a little shack in Hyrum or Avon and walked into town every day to go to work at a place called ZCMI. He was an early director of the Cache County Fair and Rodeo and George, my grandpa, was big into all sorts of livestock. Chickens of all kinds: Plymouth Rock, Rhode Island Reds, any kind of livestock that a farm would have, horses, mules, cows, hogs, lambs, chickens, ducks, everything. Very self-sufficient. Fruit trees, things like that. LR: So Marvin grew up in this farm lifestyle? DD: Yes. LR: His love for this developed at a young age? DD: Yes and his uncle Dave had a sheep ranch right where Utah State University is now. My dad, at an early age, four or five years old, went to help his uncle Dave on the sheep place. He was absolutely fascinated and obsessed with the team of horses. He’d rather climb all over the horses and lead them around and work with them than the other work that was on this farm, so he, at an early age, really got involved with horses. When he was eight years old there was a calf and he got on this calf and he rode it and somehow he stayed on longer than they ever thought he would. They applauded and giggled and laughed and the bug bit him. So that’s the beginning of his livestock rodeo career. LR: When did he actually start being involved in the rodeo? 3 DD: He was fifteen years old in a little place called Henry Lake or Grays, Idaho, north of Soda Springs. Beautiful forest area in Caribou National Forest and there was a tiny rodeo that was held in that area for just the surrounding cowboys that wanted to compete in it. There was a fellow by the name of Audlam, Floyd C. Audlam, he was an original stock producer and rodeo producer much like Karen Rosser and Cotton Rosser are, and he really encouraged my dad. He rode in this rodeo rough stock, bare back bronc, and he did pretty well so Mr. Audlam gave him twenty dollars. Now that was a month’s wages in those days for a cowboy on a ranch. He went from there to being flown from Logan Field in a Mooney, 1934, first cowboy ever to be flown to a rodeo in an aero plane. They flew him to the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair. He competed there, he competed in Madison Square Garden, New York and he won top honors at both those places as well as the Boston Garden. While he was waiting to ride a saddle bronc at the Madison Square Garden show, he was in a chute with a bronc and it bucked and pinched him to the side of the chute and hurt him real bad. He rode anyway even though he was badly hurt, he went ahead and rode. In those days you had to ride eleven seconds on rough stock, a bull or a bronc, saddled bronc, or bareback, now it’s only eight seconds. Lot of things about Marv Dunbar. He was so versatile. He was a bull rider, saddle bronc rider, bareback rider, bulldogger, calf wrestler, a calf roper, rodeo clown, rodeo pickup man, a judge, an announcer, and stunt man. He played in the movie the Misfits with Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, and Montgomery Cliff. In 4 that they used footage of him at the Pocatello, Idaho rodeo riding a saddle bronc out into the arena and he was a stunt man or substitute for Clark Gable and Montgomery Cliff in the Misfits. LR: I’ve seen that movie. DD: Yes. It’s a great story and a great movie and this is what’s peculiar about that, within a year after that movie was released, much was filmed in Reno, a year after that movie was released all of them were dead. Clark Gable died, Marilyn Monroe was suicide apparently, Montgomery Cliff from a car wreck, and Marv Dunbar hit by lightning in South Logan, June 14, 1963. What kind of curse come with that show, the Misfits, but it’s a great show with a great story. I got a copy of it from Amazon. LR: It’s a great story. DD: Yeah, it is a good movie. Black and white. He never got a paycheck for that and he should have. He did a lot of stunts for rodeo people. He was closely affiliated with Apple Valley famous people, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans and Glen Randall, world famous horse trainer. Glen used to bring 150 horses that were in Ben Hur to our place every summer because after they filmed Ben Hur those chariot races were so popular that Glen and his sons, Corky and Glen Jr. would, take them to all the rodeos and fairs all around the country and reenact that chariot race including the wreck. So that was popular. We had them horses at our place every summer for thirty years, beautiful White Andalusian descended horses. They’re born black with black eyes and as they mature they go white but the eyes stay black. 5 LR: I want to back up just a little bit. Did your dad have any formal education? Did he go to school? DD: He graduated from Logan Senior High. He was in ROTC. He loved that, he became a sharp shooter in ROTC. He attended Utah State University, back then it was just a college, Ag College or something like that, and the usual classes, physics, chemistry, that sort of thing. The text books then, when he attended college cost twenty five cents and the tuition was twenty five dollars for a quarter. It was before they did the semester thing. He did well, he loved college, very intelligent man, and brilliant man. Well loved, lot of friends. LR: Did he ever pursue the ROTC? DD: Nope. His brother did, he was a doughboy in World War I, George Dunbar. He come back and he brought back with him a 1917 Eddystone Enfield rifle which is a 30 ought 6, 30 caliber, same caliber John Browning used in his MG90 and many of the sporting rifles. Somehow my dad wound up with that rifle and hunted deer and elk with it, I wound up with it after that. LR: So he graduated from Utah State? Did he finish his degree there? DD: I don’t know that he finished. He graduated from Logan Senior High though. One other thing, he did graduate with a college degree from Professor Barry’s School of Horsemanship, a correspondence course in, I think it’s in Ohio or Illinois. In those days you could even get a law degree by correspondence course and that’s what he did. He exceled at it. His whole life was horses and rodeo animals and ranch critters of all kinds. 6 LR: So apparently after he finished that course at Professor Barry’s School of Horsemanship he started his own business at the age of eighteen? Could you talk about that a little bit? DD: Yes, it was a riding academy where one could take a trail ride, learn how to ride a horse, or just have a pleasure ride in Marv Dunbar’s Open Air Riding Academy with a sales pitch of ‘Ride to Health.’ A lot of people came in and it was located in Logan right where Sunshine Terrace is now. I wish I had a picture to show you this, my dad gave my mother a horse, she was about that age, and I have a picture of her on this horse that he gave her at Marv Dunbar’s Open Air Riding Academy. My mother, his wife, died a few years ago at age ninety six at Sunshine Terrace, it was built right on the spot where his riding academy was. She died right where she first met my dad and fell in love with him. LR: That’s kind of cool. That actually was going to be my next question, how did your parents meet? DD: It was there. He was already a star of the rodeo and he put Logan on the map. Back in those days, with the depression just starting, people didn’t have money to pay rent but they go to a movie, they go to a silent movie and maybe the talkies were out by then. They go to a fair, they go to a rodeo and so these cowboys were out of work and they found that they could go put in a little bit of purse, a little bit of an entrance fee and ride a bronc or a bull and make some money. They were very creative that way, just never say die. I mean these guys would just find a way to plow around. 7 My mother undoubtedly went to one of his rodeos and became a fan. Of course she was into horses too cause she had a horse when she was a little girl and rode the entire Mendon Mountains up on top and they were drawn together. Both of them shared a love for horses and then the excitement of the rodeo. When he started winning a few ribbons here and a few there and few trophies here and finally hundreds of ribbons, hundreds of trophies, dozens of saddles and some of the purse, started winning some of the money, that really got exciting. He built a guest ranch on the Logan River, four acres on one side of the river and two on the other with a log cabin house, barn, and a bunkhouse, which is still there and it’s basically a historical spot and had many, many people from all over the world that would come stay with us. Had movie actors; Slim Pickens, Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, I knew Festus myself, Festus drank a lot of beer and I even had a beer with Festus one time in North Hollywood, California. Ben Johnson and “Yakima Canutt” that taught none other than Marian Morrison, or John Wayne how to do the stunts, they rodeod with my dad and so these guys were all friends. Back in those days every cowboy and rancher in the west knew every other. There’s just thousands of them, it’s just a tight knit community. They all met at the rodeos. LR: So he became well known through just constantly winning? DD: That and having the guest ranch where people would come and stay, notables, VIP’s, movie stars, many of them. In addition to that he, along with a fellow that was also famous, Walter G. Mann, an attorney in Brigham City, and a very 8 famous sheriff in Box Elder County, Warren Hyde, they started something known as the Intermountain Quarter Horse Association circa 1939, and that became very popular. What they were doing was, my dad brought in the foundation sires, the foundation stallions, the purebred quarter horse flesh and it became very, very popular for pleasure riding because these horses were very, very gentle. They were dog gentle. Bullet proof, bomb proof, mostly and they were so indispensable on cattle ranches for working cow calf operations, roping horses, and cow cutting horses. He was followed with a fan club and he would ride in Madison Square Garden, New York or wherever. I think I burned out on rodeos by the time I was five years old. We went to every rodeo within eighteen hundred miles of Ogden. Every damn one of them. No, I still like rodeos but it got tiresome. I love being out on the road and I love the smell of hamburgers at those rodeo concessions at night. About ten o’clock at night, oh that smelled good to a young kid. Marv was good and he was very popular. Had thousands and thousands of friends. Just very popular guy. LR: I’m curious as to what drew the people to his log cabin, his ranch there up in Logan. DD: Horses. The love for horses that they could trust. The Indian Nations of the Bannock and the Blackfoot tribe of Idaho would come down and buy horses from Marv cause he would never cheat them. He would give them a good horse for a good price. When he was struck by lightning and killed the sixth ward church, which is still on Main Street and 4th South in Logan, those Indian tribes came down in full ceremonial dress regalia and honored my father. I’ll never forget that 9 and the place was just packed. It was the biggest funeral Logan ever had up until 1963 and these Indians came down and just honored my dad with the chants and the drums… I’ll never forget this. He was a pretty special guy. LR: Yes, I’m getting that. So you mentioned he went to every rodeo within 1800 miles or more… DD: More, New York, Boston. LR: But how did he, what got him out to the ones in Chicago and New York. DD: Well he flew to those but the ones that were within say the Pueblo show or say the Reno show or Pendleton, Oregon. He had this 1949 GMC Pickup, a green one, six cylinder engine, he put a horse rack on the back and he’d load up one of his best studs, say Matt McCue in the back of it, the saddles, packs, ham and cheese sandwiches, and a few cans of sardines and off we’d go to this rodeo. In those days if you didn’t have money for a motel room you just threw your bedroll out there behind the chutes and sleep all night out with the horses and cows. Wasn’t roughing it. LR: When was he the all-around champion seven years running? DD: Marv Dunbar at eighteen started to ride. The all-around champion seven year thing would have been in the fifties and possibly the early sixties. We had a guest that came one time to our ranch in March, his name was Casey Tibbs, a world champion bronc rider and he was from California. Casey kind of took the title away from my dad and some others, Jim Shoulders, some of these other guys who were on the national level of the PRCA. But Marv rodeod until he was forty three years old, and most quarterbacks on a football team, they’re done in their 10 mid-thirties. They got too many aches and pains and broken bones. He was riding bulls and broncs at age forty three. One of the things that my sister wanted me to tell you was how strong he was. This guy was just in shape all the time from braking these colts with a rope and dragging them around and all the things that go on a farm or a ranch or a guest ranch. There was this kid that was an absolute juvenile delinquent. He was a big stocky kid and he liked to fight and he was harassing the kids that were on a sleigh ride on a hill behind our place; the poor kids couldn’t even ride down the hill on their sleighs. My dad went out to stop this bully from harassing these little kids and the bully challenged him to a fight and they got in a terrible fist fight. My dad beat him and the kid, after that I guess he wound up in prison later on, but my sister wanted to be sure and get that story in today. She asked me to specifically tell you about that. Another one, Logan River ran right through our place and there was a waterfall with a pretty good sized trout hole, deep hole with German Browns and Rainbows. There was this one exceptionally large trout that my dad was trying to get and he wanted to get that. He was a fly fisherman, I was a bait fisherman, and he went after this trout that was about five pounds. Kept going after it and after it and after it and he could not hook that trout. So my sister kept trying to get this fish too, so one day she went down there with a pitch fork and managed somehow to spear this Rainbow Trout and bring it back and show my dad, and he was just green with envy that his own daughter had outdone him with that trout in the backyard. We’re still laughing over that one. 11 LR: So how many children did Marv have? DD: Two that we know of, my sister and I. He was a handsome ladies man. LR: Ok, kind of back up just a little bit. When were your parents married? What year? DD: Oh. Well, he was born in 1910 and he got married at twenty eight, so it would have been 1938. She would have been seven years younger than him. She was born March 8, 1918 I want to say. Right around there. LR: So he was twenty eight, so he was already well established in what he was doing with his business. He had already built the ranch. DD: The first one, yes, the Academy. Then the other one he moved it down on the river. Used to be the Logan junkyard, the landfill, and he just covered all that up and built a log cabin house on top of it and it’s still there. Looks like a golf course, the guy that lives there now takes very very good care of it, it’s just manicured very well. LR: Do you know if it was hard for your mom to live the rodeo lifestyle? DD: Yes, it was very hard. LR: Can you elaborate on that a little bit? DD: I don’t think we ever starved but it was often hamburger and not often steak. He did ok with winning the purses to keep him going but probably the best livelihood came in from his foundation quarter horse stallions that he would get a stud fee of twenty five, fifty, or seventy five bucks, breeding a farmer or ranchers mare. Back then it was a dollar ten an hour for a trail ride or a riding lesson, either one. Now trail rides and riding lessons are often eighty, a hundred dollars an hour depending on where you go. He did have a hard time with it. My mother was a 12 housewife and augmented income by giving riding lessons and trail rides to doctors and lawyers and their wives and just anybody that would come in. We had a guest ranch where we could house quite a few people and we were full of honest pride with the barbecues, outdoor patio barbecues, in the summer from the first of May till Halloween. Pork chops and hamburgers, they just loved coming, of course they get fish in the river right next to the barbecue, while they’re waiting for their pork chop to be done. Lot of people came… got fond memories of that. We never knew a stranger. We had people from Germany and Italy, California, you name it, all over the world, Australia. It was fun to have this diverse group of people come with us and they all felt like family by the time they left Marv’s “Bar D stables” guest ranch. I still cook to this day, I’m proud of it. LR: What was it like growing up in an environment like that? DD: Well it put me on a horse and I would be a fish out of water if I didn’t have a horse. They gave me a horse when I was a year old. You had pictures of me on the front page of the Herald Journal with Utah State University professor, George Henderson. My horses name was Skyrocket and as a two, three, four years old we’d climb around on this horse, he would just stand there. If you fell off he would wait for you to get on again. We had to use the fence to climb on him. Just being around horses we were early taught the dos and the don’ts, don’t ever walk up behind a horses hind legs. Stay away from their hind legs, that’s the number one cardinal rule that we teach everybody, the first thing with riding lesson. I don’t even need the horse to give you your first lesson. Stay away from the hind legs, all horses will kick. It could be a dog bark, a flutter of paper, somebody driving by, 13 an automobile engine backfiring, stay away from their hind legs and you won’t get hurt. All horses will kick, even the most gentle ones. So… we had horses that were just as sweet as the kitten and to grow up around that I had the best childhood in the world. I was like Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, with the river and campfires and pup tents along the river and fishing and horseback riding. We’d tie our ropes out from the cottonwood trees and swing out over the holes and let go and drop down in the water and dam up the river in July and August. Get it deep enough and we could let go and have our own fishing hole and our own swimming hole. I grew up in the rivers and lakes of Northern Utah, Southern Idaho and Western Wyoming. To this day I’d rather swim in a lake outdoors than in a municipal pool. Learned to swim in those places. Nearly drowned in the Logan River twice. Growing up the barn was so fun, so fun to play in. In the fall we’d have fraternity and sorority parties or sometimes LDS ward parties. They’d come and do barn dances. The barn had a hardwood floor on top of it and they would put corn shucks and pumpkins in the corners and the kids, Freshman and sophomores, would come do this barn dance with a live band and then they’d go down under the box stalls in the hay and the straw and make out in the mangers down in the bottom of it. It was just a lot of fun, things like that. LR: I want to talk a little bit about, you mentioned that your dad did a little bit of cowboy clowning. DD: Yes. 14 LR: Rodeo clowning. I know back in the day they called it, I can’t think of what they called it. DD: The clown’s basically to protect the cowboy from the bull and the bronc. LR: Right but they don’t call it clowning, no they do call it clowning today. They called it something different back then. DD: They had a pickup man that would save them from ornery critters. LR: I interviewed Dean Steed last year and there were two different names and so I’m trying to remember it. Anyway, which did he enjoy more, rodeoing or clowning? DD: Rodeoing but the clowning is part of it. Around the campfire at night, the deer and elk hunting camps or at the barbecues, he would tell stories. He was a master story teller and he loved doing that too. It was almost the forerunner to this cowboy poetry thing. It was that kind of a jaundering. He loved horses, he loved rodeoing, and you get a little colloquialisms out of all this heritage and history like, “There ain’t a horse that can’t be rode, there ain’t a man that can’t be throwed,” little things like that. My dad had a sense of humor. He loved to name horses after politicians. There was a guy that was former mayor of Salt Lake named J. Bracken Lee, way back in the late 60’s. Now one Friday night Bracken Lee had some of his police officers, some of his staff back in what could only be described as a speak easy somewhere in Salt Lake. They were back in there, they had some girls and they were ladies of the evening, and they were gambling and they had all kinds of whiskey and stuff flowing. The police chief at the time was a fellow by the name 15 of W. Cleon Skousen, very famous guy now. Skousen was born in Canada and was the police chief and he arrested J. Bracken Lee and a few of his men at this sort of debauched get together and put the mayor, J. Bracken Lee, in jail. The following Monday morning he bailed out and fired Cleon Skousen who was the police chief. Well my dad named a horse after J. Bracken Lee. So we had this horse, it was a Palomino, good horse, but it was named Bracklee or J. Bracken Lee. He would do things like that. He would name a horse after some event that was just hilarious or memorable. LR: He also helped create the Cache County Sheriff’s Mounted Posse. DD: And the Brigham one too, both of them. LR: OK. How did he get involved in that? DD: Well, back in the day we were still using horses for the cavalry in the U.S. army. Archie Anderson up here, another inductee, was breaking colts and horses for the army and was far more emphasis on riding, it was before snow mobiles and before razors and ATV’s. If somebody got lost in the woods, about the best way to get them out was on horseback. They would have the sheriff’s posse, which was also used for law enforcement if they had to find somebody that was absconding from the law. The sheriff’s posse made sure that the county would have a good selection of capable riders that could go out day or night and maybe rescue somebody that was lost in the forest. They put that together because they had to have good horsemen to put the horses together and make sure they were rideable horses for whoever the participants in the sheriff’s posse would be, so 16 they had to be good at it. That’s kind of how that came about, it’s kind of fading out. They still have some for ceremonial purposes. LR: But not much. DD: No LR: Ok. Talked about him being the first one to fly to a rodeo. DD: Yeah it was in a Mooney. About that, my dad worked at eight feet in the air on the back of a bronc or a bull. My dad could ride a saddle bronc or a bareback bronc to the buzzer, eleven seconds. With all of that going on, if you fall off you’re going to get maybe a broken neck or a concussion. I got a concussion one time. Well, he was air sick. He hated airplanes. He did nothing but puke all the way to New York, but he could ride a bronc and not get sick. Go figure. LR: That’s bizarre. DD: Isn’t it. LR: Yes. Have we talked about the Bar D Stables? DD: The Bar D Stables was the guest ranch in Logan. LR: So it’s the guest ranch that we talked about earlier? DD: Yes. LR: It’s the same thing, ok. DD: Though we had two of them. We had that one and then the one that was the browning outfit out here, it’s now known as the Fort Ranch. On the whole west side of the Promontory Mountains. Just past the Golden Spike Monument. LR: Let’s see, he published a lot of books. 17 DD: Poems, he wrote poems. I remember one in particular that when his dad died, just a tear jerker, he’s sending a letter to…it’s in my book. It starts out “Dear Dad and Dear God, please tell mother hello, I miss her terribly” that kind of thing. This man, he had a soft heart for being a tough cowboy. Yes he wrote poetry, no books, just poetry, little short one pagers. LR: Ok. So, he really wasn’t that old when he died. DD: Fifty three years old. Right in his prime. LR: You were kind of talking about that before we turned on the camera and I don’t want to make this more difficult for you, but could you kind of talk about that day a little bit? DD: Oh yes. Even before that, I’m thinking a couple months before, he was in the bathroom shaving. He would use the old razor strap, the foam, and the brush, all over his face, and he said “little fellows,” called me that on account of that was my nickname. “Little fellows, come into the bathroom, your daddy wants to talk to you.” “Yes, daddy, yes daddy.” He said, “Sit down on the tub I want to talk to you,” so he starts out with, “I don’t know that I’m going to be around forever,” and I go, “Yeah daddy, you will. You’re gonna live to be a hundred.” He said, “No, I got a feeling. I want you to promise your daddy something.” “Yes daddy.” “Promise your daddy you won’t ride those bulls. Those bulls are mean and they’ll hurt you in the rodeo. Promise your daddy you won’t ride those bulls.” “Yes daddy, yes daddy, I promise.” “Promise your daddy you won’t ride those bucking horses. They’ll hurt you too, they’re mean. Bareback or saddle. Promise your daddy.” “Yes daddy.” “Now you can be a bulldogger if you want or a calf wrestler 18 or anything else but you stay away from the rough stuff.” “Yes daddy.” So I didn’t ever ride in the rodeo on rough stock, they tell me I’m a damn good rider. I had to prove myself so when I was twenty one years old, I’d never broke my word to my dad, but I took up skydiving at the Brigham Airport and jumped out of airplanes. It was partly in honor of him getting sick in an airplane, I don’t get sick in airplanes, I love them. Two months later on the morning of June 14, 1963 I was ready to go with him down to this farmer’s ranch, Irv Anderson’s ranch, I wanted to go and he had a bad feeling about it. He said, “No little fellows, I want you to stay home today. I got a bad, bad feeling, I don’t want you to come with me today.” I was hurt, I wanted to go with him. So he had a premonition, ESP. He went down there and was standing next to a stud and mare with rancher Irv Anderson and this bolt of lightning struck him right on the forehead. It melted his trophy belt buckle, one of them that he’d won in the rodeo, probably the Madison Square Garden, and it knocked both horses out cold. Irv Anderson had some damage, he wasn’t the same till spring of the following year, and then he kind of come out of it. But it killed my dad instantly. Which wound up being the biggest funeral Logan had ever had. The Herald Journal, Ray Nelson was the editor, he wrote a very nice tribute to my dad that came out a couple weeks later. That was an interesting day for me, wow. I had some disconcerting feelings when he wouldn’t let me go with him, I couldn’t figure out why. I went down to the neighbors and I remember I was sitting on the sidewalk about three or four houses down, when this lightning bolt hit. This ugly black, dark cloud 19 come in over the west from the Wellsville Mountain over South Logan and that was the storm that got my dad. He’d been an outdoorsman all of his life, he knew the dangers of lightning. A lot of fishermen get hit, a lot of people out on golf courses, people out on canoes and boats get hit on lakes. The thing about that was, we got a phone call about eleven o’clock and my mother takes the phone. I hears this, “Gotta go to the Budge clinic,” and her voice just goes hysterical and you get this premonition feeling and, uh-oh, somethings dreadfully wrong. So she got my sister and went off to the Budge clinic on 4th North and about 2nd East in Logan. Then they come back an hour and a half later, it was raining really hard and I’m looking out the window by the door of the log cabin house and my sister and mother are arm in arm walking and I knew something terrible had happened so I’ll never forget that scene. Then they hit you with things like “well you got to be the man of the family now.” Well I’m nine, how am I going to do that? I heard that a lot. I was so sad that day. So sad and depressed and towards five or six in the afternoon there was a sunset, the clouds dissipated and the sunset was a really pretty one but they tried to console me. I remember one couple who had a store or a market. Why they did this I don’t know. Bizarre gift for a bizarre event. They brought me a Dracula model, I don’t know what was with that but anyway, I got over my dad’s death pretty quick. It was lonely without him and I had his personal effects, a dozen horses, the saddles, the bridles, the firearms, the ropes, the camping equipment, and the old 1947 GMC green truck. Engines still running to this day. We had, an old 1961 Ford Galaxy, and trout in the pond. 20 My mother and I kept the stable going with trail rides we also boarded horses too. We kept going with that for years and then we didn’t board them too much more after that cause we were busy out at the big ranch. Cattle operation, cow calf, and I loved it out there. What I didn’t learn on the stable, on the riding stable, I learned out there with horses and cows. I went and got a degree from USU in nutrition and food science, animal science, red meats, meat marketing, merchandising, everything, the whole program up there. In the end I wanted to take over the ranch, but a 23,000 acre ranch, the property taxes are pretty hefty and substantial so my mother, and step-dad in their late sixties opted to sell it for retirement money. But I went out there the day before yesterday and it still looks great. Other than it’s a little dry. Took a guest out there. LR: How old was your sister? DD: She’s twelve years older than me. I was nine when my dad was killed so she was twenty one. She had one child, my eldest niece was just little, three or four months old. She’d been married about two years, I remember. LR: I’m curious as to what it was like trying to continue this, your father had this legacy that he had built, was it hard to keep it going when he was gone? DD: Yes, but as a labor of love. I was a cowboy born and made, as he was, and all I had left was his personal effects. It was my identity. The saddle horses, the barn, the riding tack, all the equestrian supplies, and the lifestyle. Getting on a horse everyday was second nature to me and very comfortable and I would feel lost without a horse. When I was in my mid-twenties, my parents, my mother and step dad, sold the big ranch out at Promontory, the old John Moses Browning 21 ranch, 22,582 acre ranch. For two or three years I was just lost cause I had to sell my horses, my steers and cows, and it was just horrible. It was like your better half being taken away from you and I thought I could adjust by skiing. I had a gal teach me how to ski and I took up flying, did the skydiving thing more. It would not replace the horses. It’s like the old saying, “you can take the cowboy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the cowboy,” and so even to this day I just feel terribly alone and lost if I don’t saddle up a good horse and go for a ride, either out in the desert or up in the forest, either one. As far as growing up without him, that was hard. I remember in sixth grade, May Day, the last day of school, everybody in the sixth grade was required to stand up and take a turn at bat at a baseball game. My father had died several years earlier and I knew how to shoot, I knew how to saddle horse, knew how to pick out a horses feet, I knew how to feed them and water them and do everything right and lead them around, not to be afraid of them, I knew all the do’s and don’ts around horses. But I had never once had a baseball mitt in my hand or a bat in my hand. So I got up to bat and I struck out and I was so embarrassed and all the other kids were jeering me and laughing at me and everything but none of them could go home at three in the afternoon and saddle up a horse and ride up dry canyon. I did, in the third grade, so that’s what comes to mind when you ask me that question. It was lonely, terribly lonely, but it was fun. I mean growing up on a river, all the stuff you can do with the river. I hung around older kids in the neighborhood and one time, peak runoff of Logan river, end of May, older kids, four or five years older, wanted to go inner 22 tubing. They went up to the mouth of Logan canyon, just below the dam, and I went up with them. I didn’t know how to swim, they did and they had better inner tubes than me and I had a rope, a tether tied around my wrist around this inner tube and it had a slow leak in it. These kids got on and the water whisks them away at about thirty knots and I was going about thirty-five miles an hour, it was fast and it was cold and it’s instant hypothermia. Places in the river are as deep as this ceiling, I mean you can’t fight the hydraulics, the water is just treacherous and I was doing pretty good until I come around the bend and a limb was out like this, caught me in my throat and slipped me off in the water. Now I don’t believe in coincidences. A neighbor kid, Kent Miner, was walking up riverside drive, saw that I was drowning, I’m bouncing off the bottom of the river and the rocks, going up gulping for air, inhaling water and the tube’s just kind of doing this. He managed to get down there, grab that tether, that rope and drag me out, start giving me CPR, mouth-to-mouth. I had what I would call a near death experience. I was out of my body, I was up in the cottonwood trees looking down on this guy working on me on the side of the riverbank and I couldn’t tell which was real, where I was or where that was. Just very dream-like and the ice cold water in my lungs was terribly painful but only for a while. Then I blacked out and went through that very strange experience. LR: I’m curious a little bit. Your father seemed to be the type of man that was always going, always busy, always had some project going. I know you didn’t have him for a long time, but what type of an influence do you think your dad had on your life in the short amount of time that you had him. 23 DD: Love of the outdoors in every sense of the word. Love of the outdoors. We did everything outside. One day he did something inside. My mother had a group of her girlfriends around the kitchen table with a tea party, coffee and coffee cake and she was ignoring him when he was hungry. He’d been out in the barn shoeing two to three horses, had an appetite, so he comes in and she ignores him. So he goes out and he puts a halter on one of these horses and he brings the horse in the back door, through the front room on the carpet into the kitchen and says, “When do I get lunch?” He’s standing there with this horse in the kitchen, full sized horse, that got her attention and out the door he went. He got his lunch pretty darn quick after that. Love of the outdoors, a desire to be the best sharpshooter I could be, to learn everything there was to know about horses and beef cattle, and to just excel at everything with a horse. I look at good horsemen, whether on ranchmen, or dressage, or in rodeos, or whatever, I see them as artists. I know what we can do with a horse and you can see some of it with the arena shows. I see good horsemen and horsewomen as artists and my experience has been giving riding lessons all my life, that if a girl, a young girl, is interested in horses at age eight or nine or ten, they’re far better than the men. They’re far better than the boys, they got finer touch with their hands, they have more of a bonding, and an affinity with the horses and the young women that are interested in horses turn out to be far better equestrians than many of the men. I found that over and over. I can usually teach somebody how to ride in six Saturdays, half day Saturdays. It gets pretty tiresome doing it all day long but I learned a love of the 24 outdoors. Even now I’ll take my sleeping bag, also known as a bed roll, and a canvas and throw it out on the grass at night. Take the border collie cow dog and just sleep looking at the stars. I build a fire and roast a hot dog or a hamburger in a black skillet. Even now I do that, I never get tired of it. LR: Would you consider your father to be more self-taught, I mean I know he went to school, but would you… DD: The Professor Barry’s School of Horsemanship filled in with all the theory and all the terms and known approaches and known styles of riding and breaking horses and dealing with them, but I think it was in his blood. They asked Annie Oakley once if her skills, as the world’s best shot, was something she was born with or something she acquired or learned and she said, “Both. I was born with it and I practice.” She fired 10,000 rounds a month in order to be the sharpshooter she was. Marv was in the saddle twelve hours a day, and so were we for years, we were cowboys once and proud. LR: I hate to already have a last question, but you’ve done such a great job of talking about your dad. I like to ask this question because it makes you think a lot. I like the answers I get. What do you think your father’s legacy is? Within the cowboy community or without. DD: The code of the west. He was honest in his dealings. The code of the west, at least my version of it and Marv Dunbar’s would be: never touch another man’s wife, never touch another man’s horse, never touch another man’s dog, you plum always tell the truth, and you plum always kill a rattlesnake. He also would never get on his knees and ask God for something that he could do for himself. I 25 remember him saying that. He’d read the Book of Mormon but he’d been alienated from the LDS church as a kid because his dad had been in the bishopric in the sixth ward, somebody absconded with some money and Grandpa George got the blame for it. Many years later they found out it was this other guy, but half of the family—Marv had three brothers and four sisters, half the family, it made them even more dedicated, devout LDS and the other half just totally rebelled and he went with the rebellious side. He was spiritual but not religious and one of the things that broke his heart, one of the few things, when my sister got married she got married in the LDS temple in Logan and he couldn’t go cause he smoked cigarettes. He rolled his own, Camel Shorty’s, and he couldn’t get a temple recommend cause he didn’t pay his tithing. They claim “Tithing Fire Insurance,” and maybe he would have lived and that lightning bolt might have struck elsewhere, I don’t know about that. I’m not afraid of lightning at all. I love it. I love every light show ever seen, I’m not a bit worried about it. I been in some horrendous thunder storms. Mink Creek, Idaho in a sheep camp in the middle of the summer, just unbelievable… popping lightning, here, there, everywhere twenty, thirty feet away. I love it. Doesn’t bother me a bit. But I’m going to be somewhere where I’m grounded or not going to get hit. Sheep camps, perfect place, it’s totally insulated. Or in a car. So I’m not a bit afraid of lightning. I love it. LR: You mentioned your father had brothers. How many siblings did he have? DD: George came home from World War I as a doughboy, we don’t know what happened to him, he disappeared after that. My uncle Gene wound up being the 26 lead in Preston for Utah Power and Light in that little power plant they have up there, there’s a hydro plant. What was the other one? The sisters were Emma, Lorraine, and Claire, Aunt Clarisse. Aunt Claire took an attitude towards the LDS church, started a bible study of her own in Grants Pass, Oregon. It flourished. Aunt Lorraine and Aunt Emma were devout LDS. Aunt Emma helped my sister teach me how to swim, after that episode in the river they figured I better learn a few things or that may happen again. I’m trying to think of the other brother’s name. I can’t think of it. George, George was a Fairgrounds director in Logan forever, decades. He was so good with chickens and ducks and geese and prize hogs and prize lambs and that was the world back then. It was agrarian, agricultural and everybody, sixty percent of the whole country had farms and ranches, we were just into that. I think there were six farmers that fed every American back in the 1940’s and now it’s like one farmer feeds 600 or something like that. It’s just amazing, we must be pretty efficient or we’d all be starving. LR: Right. Do you have any questions? TF: No. He’s covered everything. DD: Do either of you ride? Your horses are waiting for you. LR: I do not. DD: You ever been on a horse? I hear horror stories all the time. LR: I think once. DD: I get this one all the time, “When I was a kid we jumped the fence, got on the horse and either bucked off or we fell off.” Hear that one all the time. So what I tell them is up Logan canyon, my friends, the Lundalls, have got a riding 27 concession and its Beaver Creek Lodge. Lovely overnight bed and breakfast and Razors, ATV’s, and the horses. The horses are really good ones, I would vouch for most of these horses up there if not all of them. I promote for them. Now what’s interesting is Lundall Iron Works was on South Main at Second South and Main in Logan and we used them a lot when we needed things for the farm, for the ranch. Old Ezra T. Lundall would let us put a big sign up that said Bar D stables six blocks east, horses for hire, boarding, and all this stuff on it. It’s come full circle, they promoted for us when we had a riding stable, guest ranch, and gave riding lessons, now I promote for Lundall’s. The grandkids got in it and they’ve got the riding, kind of an interesting twist on it. Here’s the sales pitch, kind of tongue in cheek, “for spirited people I’ve got a spirited horse, for gentle people I’ve got a gentle horse, for people who don’t like horses and don’t like to ride a horse I’ve got a horse that doesn’t like to be ridden.” So there you have it. LR: That’s good. Are there any other stories you’d like to tell before we turn off the camera? DD: Yes. When I was about four, Marv, who was an avid fly fisherman had these hip boots, these waders, and it was in the spring and he come back and had something real special. He was a master at building suspense. He had something in his hip, he said “there’s something in there, you better find out what it is but be careful. Better be careful reaching down in there, you don’t know what it could be.” So I’m all curious and wondering what that is and kind of scared and I reach down and I pull away, I didn’t know quite what it was. He had a baby duck down in the bottom of this boot. Soft fuzzy duck. You reach down there and feel 28 the duck and after all that he dumped the boot out and here come this yellow fuzzy duck out and we put it in the pond and had ducks in the pond. He was a prankster, one of the things he used to do in the winter time was he’d say he was a magician and he could do black magic. He would take a poker of the fireplace and he would tie a piece of thread around his knee here and over here and you couldn’t see it, it was black and he’d have the lights down low and he’d hold this poker and say a few chants and look around the room at his audience and he’d pull his hands away and his poker would be standing up. He’d go like this and move his leg and the poker would lean that way and then that way and they couldn’t see the thread. That was one of his favorite tricks. I had one that was a take-off of that where we had four point deer, the entire head mounted on the wall and one patio party they were all in there partying and I got this deer and put it up in the window. It looked like the deer was looking in on them all and they seen that and the women shrieked. So a little bit of the “Puck”, Puck in me from Midsummer Night’s Dream. LR: That’s good. Tanner, do you have any other? TF: Nope. LR: OK. DD: I’ve enjoyed this today, thank you both. LR: No, thank you Don, I appreciate your forthcomingness and willingness to talk us.