Oral History Program Vernon L. Ward Interviewed by Mack S. Taft circa 1960s Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Vernon L. Ward Interviewed by Mack S. Taft circa 1960s 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 Great Depression in Weber County, Utah, is an Oral History Project by Mack S. Taft for completion of his Master’s Thesis at Utah State University during the summer of 1969. The forty-five interviews address the Great Depression through the eyes of individuals in several different occupations including: Bankers, Laborers, Railroad Workers, Attorneys, Farmers, Educators, Businessmen, Community and Church Leaders, Housewives, Children and Physicians. All of these individuals lived in Weber County from 1929 to 1941. The interviews were based on what they remembered about the depression, how they felt about those events and how it affected their life then and now. ____________________________________ 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: Ward, Vernon L., an oral history by Mack S. Taft, circa 1960s, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Dr. Vernon L. Ward. Dr. Ward discusses going into practice in the 1920s and practicing obstetrics throughout the Depression. He discusses medical care, finances, and the closing of the Ogden State Bank. The interviewer is Mack Taft. MT: When did you start your medical career? VW: I came to Ogden and took my state boards, and a month after I passed my state boards, which I think was in August or September of 1921. MT: What problems did a young doctor have then in starting in the medical field? VW: Well, a young doctor had a tough time of it. The older doctors here, who were established, were doing all right. I don’t think any of them were getting wealthy on their fees, but they were making a good living. But in my case, for instance, it cost me more money. I went in the hole more the first year I was in practice in Ogden than I did in any one year of medical school. MT: Now, what effect did the 1929 stock market crash have on you? VW: Well, personally it didn’t have any effect on me because I had recently specialized and limited my work to obstetrics, and my practice as a result of that was gaining every year. It was increasing, and since my fees were slightly higher than the general practitioner, paradoxically I got the ones who could pay. And the people who came to the office who we thought would be under hardship to pay the fee, we’d refer to a general practitioner whose fees were less. There was a great deal of charity that had to be done in those days, and I became busier and busier. My charity part of it consisted in free consultations. The other doctors who had difficult labors, and patients who couldn’t pay, had I been inclined to 2 charge them. Very often the doctor would say, ‘Well this patient doesn’t have much money,” and my reply to that was invariably, “Well, I’m not charging them anything. That’s up to you.” MT: During the Depression years, what would the fee for a general practitioner have been for a delivery? VW: The normal fee, when I came to town in 1921, was $25 for the whole thing: prenatal and delivery and post-natal. And, by the way, there was very little prenatal care given to the pregnant woman. Very often she would find herself pregnant, and she might be two or three months pregnant, and he would say, “Well, call when you’re in labor.” So that was the end of it. So it could well be that we were overpaid at that. Along about the time of the crash, the fee for obstetrics, I think my fee was $50. But an interesting part of this was the hospital part of it, the effect on the hospital. We used to keep our maternity patients in the hospital for, I think, two weeks at first. So I happened to be head of the department at the Dee Hospital, and I think it was Mr. Rosness that was supervisor then, before Mr. Evans came. He said, “I can’t collect anything since this Depression thing. I can’t collect anything from my maternity patients.” Well, I asked him, “How much would you have to collect in order to meet the expenses?” He said, “If these patients would pay $25, I could get by.” That was for two weeks. So I suggested to him, “Okay, you make it $25 in advance. And when they go into the hospital, if they don’t pay the $25 on admission and pay later, it’s $35.” So as a result, most of them paid the $25, and he began to collect. And he was about even until a few months 3 later, and he said, “I’m not quite breaking even. We’ve got to do something, raise the fee or something.” I said, “You can’t raise the fee. You’ve committed yourself. Better cut down on the stay in the hospital. You know about what it costs a patient per day to stay in the hospital.” He said he had an idea. He said, “Cut it to 12 days.” This process was repeated, and we got it to 10 days. And that goes to show you the difficulty that the people were in during the Depression days in paying their hospital bills. And, of course, the general practitioners who were doing obstetrics had a similar problem. MT: Doctor, on the new doctor coming in during the Depression, what would some of the problems have been? VW: Well, he just couldn’t collect any money. Nobody had any money. A lot of them took produce as part payment, from the farmers especially. They would take vegetables and sometimes meat, and there was a lot of that going on. Produce was used as a common exchange similar to what it was during the pioneer days, I would suppose. MT: Did you have anything to do with the script program that doctors and professional people worked with? VW: No, I don’t recall having anything to do with that. I suppose that if I would have charged for some of the consultation stuff, I would have had something to do with it, but I just marked that off. MT: What things happened during the Depression years that you feel might have been beneficial to the public, or to yourself? VW: Well, I think this may sound paradoxical, out in left field, but I think that a 4 Depression is good for the people. I think we need one right now. I think that a good Depression would be the best thing for the whole culture right now. We’ve been so affluent. We’ve been getting paid more for less work, and that leaves the individual with time on his hands. Now if he could use this time on his hands to produce something, that would be something. But as it is now, he’s chasing rainbows trying to amuse himself, and he’s less happy. I think that he is much less happy. There is no such thing as a substitute for work. The individual who works hard enough to be tired enough to sleep well and enjoy his meals, he’s the happiest man in the world. And it doesn’t matter what he does, it doesn’t matter what kind of work he does, that’s the important thing. And now, you see, now they’ve made money and leisure their goals in life. There’s not going to be any comfort or happiness or anything like that. MT: Do you feel that there are any personal characteristics that you have developed yourself, that you might have developed during the Depression that are beneficial to you? VW: Well, I think that we learn some of those things indirectly. I’ve had a patient or two that have taught me a lot. One of my first patients was a young man when I was in general practice about 1921. And he came into my office short of breath and so on. I could recognize that he was having heart failure. I sent him home, and the next day I went to see him. He lived down here in the river jungles with his mother in a shack. He had a wife and two little kids. And this boy was very sick. But he had that particular kind of heart disease that is very unpredictable. People look like they’re dying, and then they get out of it. And I remember his 5 mother saying, “Doctor, why don’t we let him die. There’s no use of letting him suffer like this.” And I explained to her that this was this certain type of heart disease that was unpredictable. Anyhow he began to improve. So I didn’t see him again (this was in early spring or late winter) until about September or October. He came in, and of course I recognized him right off the bat. He said, “I want to pay you something on my bill.” I talked to him and found out that he had been working at the Echo Dam as a blacksmith. Imagine, a heart like this and he’s a blacksmith. And I said, “You haven’t worked more than two or three months out of the year. How can you afford to pay anything on your bill?” “Well,” he said, “I’ve saved it.” He told me that he had moved away from his mother and lived out on 9th Street, and paid $3 or $4 a month rent for a shack out there. He said that he had an automobile that someone had given him. He told me that he didn’t have to buy oil for it because the others discard out of their cars. He said, “All I have to buy is gas.” Now there’s an example of an individual living within their means. And it doesn’t matter what the income is, it’s the man who can save, that’s the wise man. And I think that’s been a lesson. Some such lesson as that is needed today. And that’s why I say a Depression wouldn’t hurt us. It would do us a lot of good probably. People would have to get along with less, and there would probably be bread lines and so on. MT: Are there any other incidents that you remember from that period of time? VW: I don’t remember any right now. MT: What do you remember about the closing of the Ogden State Bank? 6 VW: I remember that it was really a shock. No one ever expected that bank to close because it had the reputation of being a very sound bank. I think the difficulty was that they had given loans to the sheep men when the prices were high. And they were lending $18 to $20 per head to sheep men, and the price of the sheep went down to $3 or $4 per head, and brought this thing about. I wasn’t affected personally. I had a loan on the first little home that we bought, but I also had a checking account, and so I had enough in my checking account to make up the difference on what we owed them. And we got out of it so that I wasn’t so much adversely affected by that. But of course a lot of people were. It was a real shock to the community to have that bank go out. MT: Do you remember anything about the turmoil in other banks at that time? MT: Well, I didn’t know enough about it then. I was so interested in my own work that I didn’t take much interest in the economic affairs at that time. But I know there were a lot of people that lost what they had, and it was a tough deal. But I think out of that Depression some good has come. You can’t go through something like that without something good coming out of it. Some people only learn by experience. MT: Were you affected directly by the stock market crash? VW: No, I didn’t have anything to do with the stock market in those days. I was busy paying all of my debts. I was in pretty heavy debt when I got out of school, and I was doing all I could to pay off the debts. So I didn’t have any. But the other doctors in town that were in the stock market – my friend Dr. Bartlett, for instance, he got in the stock market fairly early. He came here in 1914, as I 7 remember, and he just didn’t panic. He just went along and let it set there and bought additional stocks as he could afford to buy them. And of course they were so depressed that it didn’t matter what you bought, you could take your finger and put it down on a stock and buy it. And later it went up many times, so that the people in the stock market, the friends that I knew, got through the stock market all right. Of course they were individuals like my doctor friends who were having an income and who could afford to do this. People who were buying on a margin, of course they lost everything.