Oral History Program Floyd E. Fletcher Interviewed by Melissa Johnson 26 September 2013 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Floyd E. Fletcher Interviewed by Melissa Johnson 26 September 2013 Copyright © 2013 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 Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial houses flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. After World War II, the railroad business declined. Some government agencies and businesses related to the defense industry continued to gravitate to Ogden after the war—including the Internal Revenue Regional Center, the Marquardt Corporation, Boeing Corporation, Volvo-White Truck Corporation, Morton-Thiokol, and several other smaller operations. However, the economy became more service oriented, with small businesses developing that appealed to changing demographics, including the growing Hispanic population. ____________________________________ 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: Fletcher, Floyd, an oral history by Melissa Johnson, 26 September 2013, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Floyd E. Fletcher September 26, 2013 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Floyd Fletcher, conducted by Melissa Johnson on September 26, 2013 in Ogden, Utah. Floyd discusses his experiences on 25th Street, his memories of Ogden and Snowbasin, his time in the service, and his work at the Union Depot. He also shares his memories of his father’s furniture store in downtown Ogden during the Depression. Also present is Lorrie Rands, the videographer. MJ: This is Melissa Johnson and it is September 26, 2013. We are in the home of Floyd Fletcher in Ogden, Utah and we are interviewing him as part of our Business at the Crossroads project. Just to start off, why don’t you tell us about where and when you were born? FF: I was born in Ogden, Utah at 2344 Eccles Avenue and we moved from there when I was probably three and moved down on Jefferson Avenue when I was four, on 22nd and Jefferson when I was five. When I was six, I believe it was on 25th, just above Monroe. All in Ogden. Then I moved to Salt Lake when I was in the third grade, so I had to be nine years old. Then my father started a business in Salt Lake and it was during the Depression and a fellow he went in business with, my dad had more or less the money, and the fellow took advantage of that, so the business didn’t go through and part of it was because of the Depression. We moved back to Ogden when I was in the fourth grade; we were in Salt Lake only one year. Then he started a furniture store, which was new and used furniture, but his main work was coal stoves. Most people don’t know what a coal stove is today, or have even seen a coal stove. I imagine most people today 2 know what a stove is, it’s hard to tell, to keep up with the younger generation, who knows what what is anymore because of writing and different things that’s going on. Anyway, a coal stove is where you took coal, and that was a black substance that you’d burn in a fireplace or a coal stove or a furnace in the thirties. It wasn’t until in the forties, after the war, where gas started to take over the coal, but as a child, working in my dad’s store, I had a lot to do with coal stoves and heating and this type of thing. That’s where I started my education, you might say, was with my dad in his furniture store. MJ: When you were born? FF: I was born May 1, 1926, and I think it was a beautiful sunny morning, if I remember right. MJ: Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your family? FF: My family consisted of ten people, you might say. I had four sisters and three brothers and I want to say, if nothing else, with the way the whole world is today, I had the best parents, mother and father, in the whole world. I never once heard them yell, argue, or dispute. They taught all us children more by example, not by yelling at us or that kind of thing, it was more by example is the way we were taught. And of course, we did not have television to influence a lot of our growing up like kids today have. We had radio that was just coming in when I was born and we always had a big radio and there was, “Myrt and Marge” and, “Amos and Andy” and some of the early shows that we grew up with and we always ate dinner as a family. As the family grew, there were ten of us at the end, all at once at the kitchen table. Now my father having a store and people in business, 3 anybody in business, they do not—didn’t used to, they might today—but they used to lock the door up and then they’d spend an hour or two arranging the stock or doing office work and this type of thing, so my dad never did get home until around eight or nine o’clock and that’s when we all sat down to eat as a family. We all ate together; six o’clock wasn’t, “Stop the world we’re going to go in and eat.” We ate when my dad came in and we all sat down and ate as a family and talked about our days’ experience; we were all real close as a family. I’d say ninety percent of the time, we were all there at dinner. Until my oldest sister got married and, well, she went away to, I think it was the University of Utah to be a teacher and so she was the first one that wasn’t at the dinner table for some reason or another. We were a close family and we all loved one another and one thing that I want to throw in there that came up the other day in a discussion—we ate as a family and nobody left the table until we were all through. One didn’t gobble the food down in one swallow and run off and go out and play ball or any of that kind of stuff. They stayed and told their stories of the day and we listened to those stories of the day, which I think is one thing that’s missing today, why families aren’t quite as close or whatever today. And then the other thing, I went to dinner the other night and one of the girls had a cell phone. She was on the phone more than she was eating, which was really impolite, the way I grew up. My theory in life is we are all different and we are entitled to that, as long as we don’t break any laws within certain reason there. So, you need to be a family as a family to stay as a family the rest of your days. 4 Now, I don’t know if you want to hear each brother’s and sister’s war story, so to speak. We all kind of went our separate ways as a family. They all had their children and they were occupied with their children and families later on and so we weren’t that close as we were at one time. My not having any children, I didn’t have all of the responsibility and the things that my other family, brothers and sisters, had occupying their time. Because they all had to work to make a living to feed the kids and clothe them and pay rent and taxes and everything. I had a little more time and not any more money, but I went in different directions. MJ: Well, tell us a little bit more about your dad’s store. It was on Washington, correct? FF: My dad’s store was called Fletcher Furniture Company and it was 2210 Washington Boulevard and at that time, we were kitty-corner from Tabernacle Park, we called it at that time, which is now in the process of remodeling an LDS temple on the grounds. And on the other side—right opposite, straight through the park—was Farr’s Ice Cream Company, which is still there and we’d go through there about once a week, some or all of us would go through the park and buy ice cream cones for a nickel. That was a big treat living there by the park and the tabernacle and the ice cream store. I was in the fourth grade when my dad started the store and I worked there along with him and our main business was heating coal stoves, but we also had used furniture. If somebody was moving town, they’d call my dad up and say, “How much would you give us for this table or all the furniture?” My dad would give them a bid on it and sometimes we’d end up with a whole house of furniture or maybe just a table. My oldest 5 brother, who was two years older than me, when he was sixteen and able to drive, we’d go out and deliver this furniture and pick it up, and that was quite a lot of fun and challenging and meeting different people and how the other side of the world lived and what was going on. That was before World War II, but my dad had all kinds of stoves; big stoves, little stoves, round belly, pot belly stoves they called them for heaters that we put in the house that was just a round circle and you’d throw coal or wood in and build a fire and that was the way we heated our house. Some had the luxury of a coal furnace in the basement, kind of like the gas furnaces today, but it was a lot bigger, and you had a room usually they called a coal room and you’d call up the coal company and a truck would come in and dump a whole truckload of coal into your basement through a window. Then you’d take that coal and put it in your furnace after you build a fire to get it going and burn the coal. That coal furnace was replaced by what they call a stoker and a stoker was where you took coal that was ground up about the size of golf balls, and you’d fill up the hopper, which would hold two or three gunny sacks full in comparison, a sack of potatoes and then it had a worm drive in the bottom of it and as the furnace burned the coal up, the worm drive from the coal would go in automatically into the furnace. That was an automatic way of feeding your coal stove and then that worked really good and that didn’t last too long, when gas came in and Wyoming was full of coal and gas and they brought in the gas line down Weber Canyon into Ogden and I don’t know what year that was, but that was the start of gas furnaces and gas stoves. Gas and electricity for heating and cooking. My dad’s business went more into the furniture and he got interested in 6 antiques and LDS church history. In his business, going up buying and selling furniture, he had a lot of opportunities to buy what they called antiques. And so he got interested in antiques and the history of Ogden and Utah and the church and everything and we were more of an antique store than we were a furniture store and my dad, he didn’t like to sell any of it, he liked to collect. We were collecting more than we were selling, but he did sell enough that, for a family of ten, we did have an average living in those days. Then he retired in about, I think it was around 1955. He sold the store, well, he didn’t sell the store, but he went out of business and he didn’t own the building, he rented it and then he—about two years later—he passed away from pneumonia somehow. And then my mother, she lived another six or eight years after that and she was alone; all of the family, the children, the boys and girls had married and moved out and were raising their own families. We had apartments above our store, and so from the fourth grade to the eighth grade, I lived above my dad’s store, the whole family did. We started out in the front of the store overlooking Washington Boulevard and at that time, street car tracks were running down Washington and there were street cars and they’d run quite late at night, and so it took us two or three weeks trying to sleep the first time we were there when we moved into the apartments and then after that we never did hear, we got used to the noise and never heard the sound of the street cars again. They lasted, I can’t remember when they dug up all the street cars and replaced them with buses, but they had two sets of tracks going right down the middle of Washington. And then we moved to the back of those apartments and my dad rented out these rooms, we called them 7 bachelor rooms and they were one rooms, usually with a gas stove in and an oven and a wooden ice box, which we’d go to Farr’s Ice Cream, and get a ten or twenty pounds of ice and put in the refrigerator and that’s what we’d use to keep our butter cool and whatever. Those apartments in the summer, they’d get up to a hundred degrees because there was no air conditioning in those days at all. So one of my first jobs when I was in the fourth or fifth grade, other than working with my father, my job was keeping up the apartment. It had a big hall that was about six feet wide, carpet runner three feet wide down the center, and then hardwood on each side of the carpet. My job was to vacuum and keep that hall dusted and the apartment had to be, it might have been 75 to 90 feet long, deep the apartment was. So, I’d get ten cents a week for taking care of that hall. For all the people that lived up there, there were probably at least ten rooms, ten other people living in the separate rooms, plus our family of about maybe five or six at that time. We only had two bathrooms for all those people. Ours was separate from the renters. My job, of course, cleaning the halls, was also cleaning the bathroom and that was my first paid job taking care of that. I worked it up later when I was about 15 to 35 cents a week, passing out hand bills for what at that time was American Food Store, on about 2150 Washington Boulevard. Every Friday night somebody would come and pick us up from the store, take us up, clear up to the reservoirs at the top of 21st, 22nd street up there where there is drinking water for Ogden. Our job was to go from there, clear down to Washington Boulevard, passing these hand bills out on the grocery store, what was for sale and that, until we got to Washington Boulevard and that would take 8 us two or three hours. That paid 35 cents, so that’s my second job, which was all walking and we weren’t allowed to put anything in the mailboxes in those days except the mail, so we had to put everything on the porch and half the time the wind was blowing up there on 21st and Harrison, so we had to stick them in the doors and we got cussed for doing that, so it was kind of a rough job when you have to work with people and you’re a kid. MJ: What other businesses do you remember in that downtown area? FF: Well, I remember all of them because I went to school in the fourth grade on Madison, which was, I’d say, 2450 Madison Avenue, so I had seven blocks to walk from our apartments to school. I remember our lunch, in those times, there was more grocery stores than there was any other kind of store because there was a grocery store straight across from our store, a grocery store that I passed those hand bills for and another grocery store down in the middle of the block, then there was another, smaller grocery store still down further. For some reason, I seem to have got the job of going to the grocery store if we needed anything because our first refrigerator was probably big enough to hold five loaves of bread. Really small, because it was half ice. So if we needed anything, which we were lucky, I’d just run across the street and get fresh bananas, fresh apples, whatever we needed. It was fresh because that store was our refrigerator, but going to school there was one, two, three of us going to Madison I think at one time, yeah. And I’d go across the street, which was a Safeway store and buy a can of jam, which was eleven cents. I’d buy a loaf of bread that varied from a nickel to ten cents a loaf. We would take that can of jam and the bread 9 and makes our lunch out of it, which was usually two sandwiches each and maybe a banana and an apple; we’d get three lunches out of twenty one cents in those days. And this was during the depression in the thirties and the hamburgers were a nickel and they were like your dollar or dollar and a half hamburger is today. Coming home from Madison School, we had the opportunity of coming down from Madison on 25th Street down to Washington and then along Washington toward 22nd Street. Or we could go down 24th Street, through the park, down 24th Street and then along Washington Boulevard. Or we’d go down 23rd Street or 22nd Street, so it varied on how we came home to who we came home with our friends or if we were going to stop at a store or what. We had all the stores in Ogden, there was Newberry’s Five and Dime, Cresses, Grant’s, Woolworth’s, which were all the main five and ten cents stores in those days and so going along Washington on either side of the street from 25th Street to 22nd, they were full of stores. There were no vacancies, it was all full and a lot of clothing stores, women’s clothing stores, furniture stores, Boyle’s, there was a Sear’s there was a C.C. Anderson’s, a big Penny’s store, a big Grant store, a Wright’s, the Egyptian Theater, Colonial Theater, Orpheum Theater, L.R. Samuels, which was the biggest high end women’s store, then later on there was Fred M. Nye and Buehler Bingham and there was a Clifton’s. MJ: Yeah it was a really thriving area. FF: Yeah, and we were all going and this was during the depression and right before World War II and everybody seemed to eat and so it wasn’t half empty, but it was very interesting, sometimes you’d walk on the east side of Washington Boulevard 10 and sometimes on the west side of Washington Boulevard and the stores were completely different, completely different experience. Sometimes we’d wander through the five and dime cent stores and look and see what toys they had on sale or what they were, the latest whatever it was and it was always interesting. Unless we had to hurry home and help my dad in the store and we usually knew when we left in the morning if we had to be at my dad’s store right when we got home from school. As we got older, we got more work and delivering furniture and other high end jobs as opposed to just polishing furniture and cleaning it. Washington Boulevard was really an interesting place in those days, a lot more so than what it is today as far as somebody walking down for a grand tour of what there was. MJ: Being there on Washington, you must have seen a lot of the parades that went by. FF: Every 24th of July, which was a big deal in Utah. It was a big deal in Ogden and they’d start about the 19th of July starting with rodeos and parades, horse shows, all of this kind of stuff and I saw, in my life, I probably saw eighty rodeos, five hundred parades, because we lived right there and when we had the apartments above the store in the front end there, we were seventy five feet at the most from viewing the parade. We saw every parade that went on and we saw every horse show. I saw all the parades I ever wanted to see before I went in the service, so I didn’t go to another, maybe two or three in Salt Lake, but I didn’t go to many parades after that or rodeos after that. But, the other day I saw on T.V., they had this parade on Ogden, I watched for a half hour on the Ogden Channel of horses 11 going by, they had five million horses in this parade and it must have been a horse parade because I saw one covered wagon and a dog I think, everything else was a horse, for a half hour and finally I gave up on the parade and I said, “I’m going to see something else.” I was hoping to see something different as when I was a kid, but they had all different in dress uniforms, different horse clubs and all kinds of stuff. I couldn’t believe there was that many horses around as there are. My horse story is—do you want to hear a horse story? MJ: Let’s hear it. FF: My grandfather, my mother’s father, was a blacksmith. He came from Sweden and he joined the LDS church, and then he came to Ogden and his store was about four stores south of my dad’s store and he had this blacksmith’s shop there. His main trade was shoeing horses. He had two forges, what you build a fire in a brick container in those days and then you put air through it. It had a blower through it and it made it real hot and you could put iron in there and get it red hot and then he had about five hundred different kinds of hammers and he’s pound this metal into anything you wanted. He could make it out of all different kinds of metal he had. So, he had that shop and when I was about ten or twelve, he’d come down to the store and he says, “Hey Floyd.” I get choked up thinking about it. My grandfather come down and he said, “Hey, come give me a strike,” which meant he had this big amble that they beat the iron on after it was red hot. He made all kinds of stuff out of iron: gates, fences, lamp posts, any house decoration, anything you wanted, but shoeing the horses was the main thing. So when he’s making something and he needed some help, he’d be holding a 12 hammer on a hot piece of iron and a strike was when he would take a sledge hammer, which was about ten pounds and I could hardly lift it in those days. He’d say, “Strike,” and I’d hit his hammer to put more pressure on this hot metal to bend it more so than he could do just hitting it. He’d come down and say, “Strike, strike,” and I’d do that about ten or twenty times and I was done for and by that time usually it was in the shape whatever he wanted. He invented this thing for shoeing horses. Have you ever seen a horse shoed? MJ: I haven’t. FF: Horses have hooves that are about three or four inches thick and they’re like a big toenail. They take a horse shoe, the size of the hoof, and they use about eight to ten nails to drive this horseshoe into the hoof. Okay, here I am a kid, my grandfather would heat the horseshoe up red hot and stick it on the horse’s hoof and it would burn into the horse’s hoof so it’d fit exact and a big smoke would go out one end of the store and the other depending on which way the wind was blowing in the blacksmith’s shop, and then, he’d take these nails and a big hammer and they call them a horseshoe nails, which were special nails and drive through the horseshoe into his hoof. And as a kid, can you imagine them doing that, driving nails into our foot, which was, nobody tells you that foot is dead, on the horse, but that was, oh, that was horrible. But anyway, he ended up inventing this thing to hold them—wild horses or specially trained race horses, for shoeing the horses. It would clamp the hoof in. When they did it before they’d put the horses hoof between your knees and shoe them. This thing was a big cradle-like on each side of the horse and it actually clamped the horses hoof in and you’d 13 could hammer it in there without it kicking you or bucking or even moving. And so, he got the reputation, for all around Utah and all over Wyoming and all that, for shoeing special horses. So, he had a good business shoeing horses because he kind of specialized in that as opposed to a lot of this other stuff he was doing. MJ: What was his name? FF: His name was Peter Ernstrom. He joined the church over in Sweden and then he came to Ogden is where he ended up. I think he must have married his wife in Sweden before he came to Utah. MJ: You lived in the store apartments until about eighth grade; where did your family move to after that? FF: In the eighth grade we moved to 2472 Monroe Boulevard. A big apartment right on the corner, so we were right next to these apartments. We had no privacy at all because there was ten or twenty apartments looking right into our backyard, but we had a nice house there. I went to school at Central Junior High, which was kitty-corner from our house on 25th and Monroe on the south west corner. It’s all torn down and changed there, it used to be Ogden High School, it was the Ogden High School until they built a new one on 28th and Harrison. So anyways, we could hear the tardy bell go off at our house and if we were outside we could run from our house and get in class in time so we weren’t late for school. Because they had this big bell outside the school that was five minutes before class started, so that gave us time to go there. So my mother lived there all her life, and we sold it after she passed away. I can’t remember for sure, I think it was 1965 or 1966 when she passed away. It had an upstairs, three bedrooms 14 upstairs, my parents had the front bedroom, then there was what we called the sleeping porch on the back, which was about like a small bedroom, but it had all screened windows all the way around it and it was on the east side of the house and we could look out over the backyard and over into the neighbor’s yard and over at the apartments. My brother and I, that was our room and my two oldest sisters had one and then my other brother, I don’t know, we moved around as we got older and one moved out, but we had a closet on our sleeping porch for clothes, which was real small and then there was a, one of the other bedrooms, one of the guest apartments was a small closet about three feet by five feet and then my parents had a closet which was about six feet deep and the other bedroom had no closet for clothes. And so, there wasn’t much closet space like today. MJ: Yes. FF: Now, I’ve got five hundred miles of closet in this house I’m in now, mainly because we didn’t have any when I was a kid. So, we had downstairs, we had a nice living room, separate from the dining room. A nice dining room, but we had a big folding table that had room for probably twelve or fourteen people to sit around when it was fully opened, like Thanksgiving and half the Sundays we would eat in the dining room and then right off that was the kitchen, then a back screen porch that wasn’t too big and that was the downstairs. As you came in the front door, you went up the stairs to the bedrooms upstairs and then it had a basement, which was before they had coal, it was, when they had coal it was a coal room. I inherited that as a kid. There’s ten in our family and I ended up with 15 over fourth of the basement as my own room. I got interested in music, chemistry, radio, all kinds of stuff that stayed with me the rest of my life. So, I had my own room full of all those kind of toys, all on my own. I called it, I was called scientifical and that was a scientifical lab and that was just when music came front, the first phonograph record through round cylinder records and we had some of those my dad got in the stores antiques, but then, I’d have to say in probably 1935 or 1936 is when the ten inch round records came in which was the start of the record industry. I’ve still got a whole bunch of those records and I’ve got about a collection of about three or four feet long of old records like, Glen Miller and everything before the war and after that I’ve got and I play about one a year. So, I don’t know what’s going to happen to those after I’m gone, but then they went to LP records which were bigger than the ten inch, then they came out with a 45 inch, a 45 rpm record, which was smaller than the ten inch and, well I’ve got some of those and so we had to start a phonograph and the radio in the thirties, no T.V. The first T.V. came out in 1947 in Utah and that was a centennial, Utah Centennial, when the pioneers came to Utah in 1847, so in 1947, KSL, which was a church station, was the number 12 T.V. station probably in the world was Salt Lake number 12, in Salt Lake and that was 1947 and I saw it, the first time I saw it I was in Salt Lake, I was going to the University of Utah then. During the parade, this one store had a T.V. in the window. Now, what they’ve done to T.V., they’ve ruined it, in my book. They did go to color in 1953 or 1954, my wife’s sister had one of the first color televisions and I saw Cinderella on it and it was one of the first colored T.V. shows that was a regular show for 16 T.V. was Cinderella and every once in a while, I don’t know if she’s still alive, but every once in a while I’d see her, this gal that played Cinderella on T.V. and in shows probably in the nineties, I don’t know if she made it to 2000 or not because she’d have to be, well, she’d have to be ten years older than me, I guess. So, she’s probably gone, but I can remember that colored T.V. just like yesterday and it was Cinderella and it was a, on a scale of ten, it was a ten. Other than Dancing with the Stars today, all the shows are about a six or seven, in my book. There are better things to do than sit and watch some of that T.V. I didn’t watch T.V. because I was working all the time and when I wasn’t skiing I was working. And because T.V. didn’t come out until 1943 or 1945, I got interested in skiing in probably 1940 and Snowbasin started in 1939. So, I was exercising, chopping trees down and everything as opposed to watching television, so I never did see all these old black and white shows, so once in a while I see on T.V., they play them and I enjoy them because I’ve never seen them before. And they didn’t have all of this new talk and whatever, without going into that on it. Because, I was raised in the world where you didn’t have any of that and, like I said, I was raised by example and today, anything goes, anything, any who, what, what, if you’re ten years old or you’re five years old. This one neighbor kid, when he was five years old, he told me all about babies and where they came from and all about women and everything and he was five years old, so my first talk about that was from a five year old. MJ: Well, speaking of anything goes, you had mentioned when we talked before that you used to sell newspapers, but there was a specific area that you did not go to. 17 FF: Now my newspaper story was, I lived downtown, I’d see these kids selling newspapers. The Standard Examiner was on the southwest corner of Kiesel, and that was just a block and a half from my dad’s store, so I thought, well, there’s a way to make a whole bunch of money, you know, and I was making a dime a week, and I thought, well, I should be able to get better than a dime a week and work my way up, you know. So, I went down to the Standard and checked it out. In those days, the Standard Examiner was a nickel, and it’s just as big as it is today, except maybe on Sundays it might have even been bigger, but anyway, it was a nickel a paper and it’d come off the press about three o’clock and that was about the time that I got out of school and we’d go and buy however many we wanted at three cents a copy, so we thought we could sell, have a hot, good night, we might buy five papers, so that’d be fifteen cents, we’d sell those five papers and we made a dime. So, we made a dime each night. We were fifty cents a week and, but, I don’t think I ever made fifty cents a week selling newspapers, really. So I sold those, I’d go get those newspapers, now for some reason I don’t remember exactly, but I was taught by example and 25th Street, in those days, was a lot different than it is today. You just didn’t go down there. We weren’t into drinking, no smoking, no messing around, no nothing, so I remember, me, I don’t know about my brothers and sisters, but I know I never went below Grant Avenue from probably 26th Street to 22nd Street, I was never below grant Avenue unless I went in a car, as far as the railroad depot, right into the railroad depot visiting people or picking up somebody. 18 All I knew, it was not a nice place, so I never sold newspapers below Grant. My 25th Street story today is probably two years ago, my sister, I have a sister a year and a half younger than me that lives in Roy. We got together—we’d get together once in a while and play cards and this one time she was going to have her hair fixed. She had a hair appointment and her daughter couldn’t take her or something. I said, “Okay, I’ll just come early and I’ll take you to your hair appointment before we play cards.” So, I go out in Roy there and picked her up and took her and I said, “Where we going?” She said, “It’s on 25th Street.” So we go to 25th Street and it’s right smack in the middle of no man’s land in my book, I’d never been there. I’d never been in that part of town, never, and this is eighty years later. And so, we drive around trying to find a parking spot and go around and around and finally I let her out because her appointment was due, so she goes into this, looked like a beer joint to me, a bar, and that’s where her hair appointment was. So, I finally found, went around the block a dozen times, but I found out there was parking in the back of 25th Street on the back stores where you go in. So, I went around the back and they had a sign above the name of the place where my sister went, so I went in there and it looked like a beer joint to me, but there were these gals that were fixing hair, so, and she must have been in there an hour, I don’t know why she was in there so long. Does it take an hour to get your hair cut and a permanent? MJ: It can, yeah. FF: Well, it seemed like a long time, so anyway, so I parked back there and I was watching all that what was going on in these back stores and the backyard and 19 the back alleys and it was, and I guess the opposite would be the Hilton or something off the 25th, 24th isn’t it? I see all these strange cars, strange people, you know, and so, I made sure my doors were locked. I wasn’t going to get mugged or robbed or anything. Here it is a hundred years later, so I go in there, well, when I was in there the one time, I told her I parked right by the back door there and she said, “Okay, I’ll find you.” So, she got through and we came out and we went home and played cards. But I swore, I was never going 25th Street again and I never went back, I’ve never been back. But people go there to eat in these restaurants and I see these advertisings and all of that and, to me, it wasn’t my cup of tea. But, being a skier, you’ve been to Park City? MJ: Yes. FF: Downtown Park City? Kind of like 25th Street? LR: I try to avoid downtown Park City. FF: But you’ve been through there? LR: Yes. FF: Okay, so it’s like 25th Street. There’s a resemblance; an old town there bringing up to date for restaurants and tourists and that. LR: Right. FF: And so, I was in Park City three or four times and Park City opened in, I think it was 1972 or around there. No…1962? I can’t remember, but anyway, so I was up and down there in 50 years, ten times, downtown Park City, but I didn’t feel that way about Park City like I do with 25th Street for whatever reason, because I guess I didn’t grow up there. But anyway, that’s what they’re trying to do with 20 25th Street and I don’t blame them one bit, because there’s nothing wrong with 25th Street, because what I see on T.V., the world’s gotten a lot more casual than I experienced and that’s just the way world’s going—casual. Who’s to say what’s right and what’s wrong, you know. 25th Street has a place for Ogden. They’re trying to promote tourism, I believe in skiing 500 percent and there’s no place really to go better. If you’re a skier you come to Ogden, where do you stay? There’s no real good place to stay, you know, a few of these, and then you go down 25th Street for the atmosphere and what it is, and that’s good. So, it has a Park City feel and you’ve got to eat, you know, you go to Snowbasin and you ski and then you, there’s nothing else to do after you stop skiing and 25th Street fits right into that if they do it right, you know, and they’re trying to. They have a lot of experience because some of these, I understand some of these ski places are coming into Ogden now and Ogden’s kind of growing and booming and it’s going to be a sports center, which I can easily see it being from my experience with skiing. And, now as far as golf and all these other sports, I’ve tried them and they just weren’t me. I didn’t get a feel for them, but I did skiing and because skiing had everything—new, old, changing, the styles came. Do you ski? LR: No. MJ: No. FF: Do you golf? LR: I’ve been once. MJ: I’ve gone a couple of times to the driving range. 21 FF: So, you haven’t experienced to get hooked on it enough, you know, and I think it’s the same way with bowling and golf and skiing and all this other stuff. You’ve got to get around it and see if it’s your cup of tea. Well, I tried them all. I was tall and in basketball I could throw a basketball in and it wasn’t even a challenge when I was at Central in tenth grade. I’d throw it in there and I lived kitty-corner from the school and the school had outside basketball courts and a football field. We’d go play football and go play basketball, what’s the big deal running down the grass with a football? Or throwing a basketball in a hole, what’s the big deal? Anybody can do that. You know, kids couldn’t catch me, but when skiing came and Dad got my first pair of skis in the store, and I don’t know why because that’s in 1937 and they weren’t even, skiing wasn’t even heard of then, but he got me this pair of skis in the store. My oldest brother, he had priority on the bicycles and all the good stuff that came in the store, he got dibs on. So, I got after he didn’t want it or shared with him. We had a big hill in the back of our store from Adams down to Washington, it slopes. We had this store, so we had snow back there so my brother, he gets on these skis and he—nobody ever skied, nobody ever saw it, but maybe on the news reel that they show, you know? So he’s sliding and doing his thing, so he and his friend went over to the cemetery where it dropped and dodges the river. He goes over there on one of those hills and he split his knee open. So, “No more skiing for me.” So, I got the skis, see? That’s how I got skiing. I took over the skis and they were about six footers of wood and a toe strap, no heel or nothing. So, I conquered the back hill in the back of our store one winter and so I said, “Hey, this is great.” And it just happened that one of my 22 boy friends, he went to a different school, now I can’t remember how I met him. He had just gone into skiing about like I did, so we hit it off, we met like it was supposed to be, so he had a car and I had a car so, I was fifteen and he had a car before I did, he was a year older than me and so I started when I was fourteen or fifteen I guess. Snowbasin built the first rope tow, I was one of the first ones up there I think on the rope tow, and so I started out and I looked and it was a challenge and you had to kill yourself to get up there and then you had to kill yourself to get down the mountain and you had to kill yourself coming home in a blizzard. The cars in those days—no four-wheel drive and the road was all mud. I’ll tell you, it was a challenge, so the challenge part was half of the skiing I think. I fell in love with skiing and worked myself up along that skiing, so that’s why I never had anything to do with T.V. or anything that came along there. I ended up a ski patrol later up there at Snowbasin in the fifties and that’s when I got interested in what the other half of Snowbasin is today, called the strawberry area. I was, I’ll say 1952, and that was all private ground over there and I wanted to build a ski area right next to Snowbasin, because that’s what they did in Salt Lake, I thought, “Well, they can do it, I can do it.” So, I went to the Ausler people who owned the property, they had, ran sheep up there and it was 7200 acres and it was all Coalville. In Coalville, the dividing line was, there’s a ridge there and Weber County is on one side of the ridge and Morgan County is on the other side of the ridge. These Ausler people originally owned all of Snowbasin, but Snowbasin’s drinking water came from Snowbasin ran down into the Ogden River, so they sold out or had to sell out to Ogden City. How Snowbasin started, 23 was the drinking water, went down Ogden River, so that was a watershed and then Alf Engen came here, he was a Norwegian from Norway and Forrester brought him in here and wanted him to look into the mountains where good ski areas was, so when he saw Snowbasin, he said, “That would make a good ski area.” But that ridge, Weber County, the river went into Ogden River and in Morgan County it went all down Weber River. So, but this Morgan County was 7200 acres, all private ground, which I found out and that’s what I was working on and the man that owned it, Ausler, he died, but he was married. His second wife had all the property. She was the nicest lady in the whole world and she’s kind of like my mother and reminded me a lot of my mother, and so from 1952 to 1972, I spent 20 years trying to get a lease or buy that ground somehow to get a hold of that property to build a ski area on there. Now, I didn’t have a dime, I was making 35 cents a week, so that doesn’t go very far toward the ski area. So the mother, stepmother to the seven children, and if you ever saw seven children that were different—seven people that were really different—that was them. One wanted land, one wanted money, and one wanted nothing, one wanted this and one wanted that; not two of them could get together. The mother had all this stock—10,000 shares, and she was going to be a nice stepmother so she divided the stock up and she kept a third and she split the two-thirds among the seven children. Now if you know anything about stock, you’ve got to have over fifteen percent or you don’t have any say so, and so she only had a third of the stock so she couldn’t say anything for sure. We could not get fifty-one percent of the stock to do anything with that property over there, so in 1952 when we had everybody 24 here, we had the guy from Vail, I wrote his name down because I knew I’d forget it—Pete Seibert. Pete Seibert came here and he was the one that started Vail. I talked to him and he flew here and he looked at it and fifteen years later he comes here and he gets a lease on it after I had nothing else to do with it. He comes along and he couldn’t do anything with it, he wanted money, so he was after money, not a ski area. Then Holding came along, so I don’t know how Seibert got a hold of Holding, but Holding came along and he saw it and between him and Holding’s one daughter, the daughter of the story goes, she says, “Dad, let’s buy it.” So, Earl Holding bought Snowbasin because his daughter said, “Hey Dad, let’s buy it.” Now, I had an option on it for, it’d be about a million dollars. I had an option with the Snowbasin people, but I came up with a buyer to buy the whole thing because I knew I couldn’t do it. So, I was trying to sell Snowbasin and this other package all at once. One, like it is today. And so I had Snowbasin for a million and this for a million, so for two million dollars, that’s what all of Snowbasin was worth one day. It was about 1975, let’s say. I have no idea what Holding paid for Snowbasin, I would guess it was around six or seven million total. You ever heard any stories? MJ: I don’t know, but I can imagine. FF: I’ve never heard, but it had to be somewhere around there as a package deal. So, I was out of it because I didn’t have a penny and my option went, I had a year that if I came up with the money and I tried Japan and I tried Watson, IBM, Art Linkletter, Howard Hughes, anybody that even thought of money, but in the seventies, nobody had any money for ski areas. There was no money around. 25 So, I couldn’t come up with anything so I didn’t get a penny out of it. Because of what I did though, putting that lease together and bringing this what’s his name in here, Earl ended up with it. You belong to Weber College, you know the ice skating rink down there? Do you ever ice skate it? LR: Yes. FF: Okay. Have you been in there? Come on, you go to Weber University. MJ: No. FF: Now I can’t believe this. I’ve asked how many people, they haven’t even been to Snowbasin. Snowbasin is a worldwide—people come from all over the world here to ski. We can’t even get somebody off there—to take a right up there and see the beautiful autumn leaves in a hundred years. MJ: Well, I have been to Snowbasin. I have been, but I just haven’t been to the ice skating rink. FF: Did you ever ride the gondola? MJ: I think we were going to, but we couldn’t that day. LR: Yeah, I’ll go up to the ski resorts just to look around, not to ski. FF: But you’ve been up there? LR: I’ve never been to Snowbasin. I grew up in Salt Lake, so I’ve been up to Snowbird and Park City. FF: And Snowbasin is better than any of them. The only one that can beat Snowbasin, everything considered, is Deer Valley, in my book. You know, for— well, this is the old days when we were all skiing. Now they’re all snowboarders, 26 you know. So, the whole world’s changed. You stick a cell phone on a snowboarder and you’ve got today’s people. Really. Talking all day and not looking where they’re going with or without the cell phone. But anyway, I just can’t believe that. Because there’s been a lot of people I’d take and I don’t do that anymore, I ran out of money when I had my heart surgery. But I’d take anybody that hadn’t been up there. I’d say, “Come on up and I’ll pay for your gondola ride.” It used to be only twelve dollars, I have no idea what it is now; I haven’t skied for two years. So, nobody here has been to Snowbasin. I talked to this guy, a head guy at America First down here. Do you know America First? MJ: Yeah. FF: I have to be careful. See, I’m in a different world. Okay, I asked him, I said, “You ever been to Snowbasin?” “Nope.” Here he’s head of all—they’ve got how many America First drive-ins or, what do you call them, stores—they’ve gone clear to Las Vegas and all of that. I was a member when they—I joined them, they started out in the Eccles building and I worked in the Eccles building and my wife says, “Why don’t you open an account?” So, I go down in the basement of the Eccles building and that’s where America First started, and I opened ten dollars account. Twenty years later, I went and got my ten dollars and I couldn’t believe how much money I made, because I never added or subtracted. My wife just said, “You should join,” you know. That was before we were married and now it’s all over the world and here this guy, I don’t know where he’s from, but he never knew anything about it and they’re all over the world. But anyway, so, Holding got a hold of Snowbasin and worked it up to the Olympics. Oh, what I was getting at 27 about that skating rink, that skating rink wouldn’t be down there. You know that new addition they got going down next to it is kind of in cahoots with it, isn’t it? It’s something kind of overlapping. Well, that wouldn’t be down there if it wasn’t for me. And, so, this is what my, if I did good or bad as a kid. And, I don’t remember doing anything bad. I chalk up a few things being good, I was in the service. I was training to be a B-29 pilot when the war ended, so I knew all about B-29’s and flying and I was the instigator in starting the Golden Spike Gem and Mineral Society in Utah. Yeah, this is in 1949 I think it was when we started, and there were three of us and I was one of the instigators. We went from national to I think it was in 1977 I think it was, national and we were state. We went from a national rock show to national because of me third—I take a third of that. But, part of my collection, have you ever been in the Union Depot? LR: Yes. FF: I’m just picking on you because you’re an innocent bystander. LR: My family’s a train family. FF: They are? LR: Yes. FF: Yahoo, I am too, I worked down there. LR: My husband’s family is a train family. FF: Oh, now what did they do? LR: My husband’s father was an engineer for the U.P. up until about 13 years ago when he retired. 28 FF: See, when I was seventeen, that was just before the war, I worked at 2nd street, but that was after the war though. One of my jobs when I was seventeen was, these trains would come in a hundred and ten-- you don’t see the that long anymore—a hundred and ten cars and they had as big as a 4,000 locomotive as big as this whole house chugging and it’d shake the whole Ogden coming down Weber Canyon and especially going up. They pulled 110-120 cars. My job was mostly at night and I was tall and every car that went in was switched from the east, they’d come into Ogden and they’d switch all over the western states, so they had to know where they were going. Well, they had these deals they’d send ahead of you, “Car number so and so is going to Seattle.” So somebody would make up a card, so I’d have a bunch of cards for this train coming in at 2 a.m. and I had a staple gun. As the train went by real slow, if I was lucky, he was going just right, but very seldom, he was either going too fast or stopped, then I had to run down—do the whole chase him down to where they were switching them a mile down the tracks sometimes and put these cars on—stickers on the right car number. So, I’d sit there and staple those numbers and then they’d go in the main yard there under the viaduct, 24th Street was where the main switching took place and they’d switch all these cars around to New York, Seattle, or wherever they were going from these car numbers. One night, I was switching and I was tagging and I was down there and one thing you never did do is you never walked down the middle, you always walked between. Trains, when they were going this way, they were that far apart, just enough to stand between. This one night, I was right under the viaduct and it was blacker than coal because 29 there was no—that was almost before lights, really. And this flat car came down this track, and I happened to be standing in between the track going from one track to another or one train to another or something. Being tall, I’d go there and I happened to look just a little bit of glare from the viaduct—a car going by or something—I saw this flat car coming with nothing on it. It was coming right for me, not a squeak or nothing, usually they make a big noise, here it’s coming right for me and I jumped off that track right between the two tracks there, I bet I didn’t miss it ten feet getting hit one way or another off that and I wouldn’t have been here today. But I had a few other close calls and stuff, but that was my job one summer. There used to be a tunnel under all the tracks and you’d take the train on track 10 and get off the trains and walk under this tunnel and come out at the depot. I think they filled all of those things; that was a long time ago. I had the best rock collection in Ogden at one time because my job, I was an optician and my job was grinding and polishing glass lenses for glasses mainly. My job was polishing, so I had the best polish, so when I started, well, I got into my profession because of polishing rocks in the ninth and tenth grade at Central School. I made jewelry, like Indian jewelry, and I used to wear a ring on each finger and I had turquoise and Brazilian Agate, Tiger’s Eye, all kinds of rings, you know. I’d make them all myself, and so, but I had a big collection and I started building a house before I got married and I needed the money, so I sold my collection to the fellow, he was a shop teacher at Central, my collection for five hundred dollars, which one rock was worth ten times that much. So part of 30 my collection was part of his collection—did you ever see the rock collection at the Depot when you were down there? LR: I’m sure I have, I’ve gone through all the museums. FF: Well, they’ve moved it in the last year, but half of his collection was my collection, but it had his name on it. I could go in there and see, I could tell every rock that I polished in there, but I never said anything because, you know, it was his collection, he bought it from me. That polished rock is going to be here a hundred years after I’m dead. That’s going to kind of be my legacy and Snowbasin, part of Snowbasin is going to live after I’m gone because did you see in the paper about Snowbasin the other day? Snowbasin is about ready to take off where they’re going to start building houses and more roads and everything on that private ground up there. Do you read the newspaper? The neighbors, I don’t take it, the neighbors saved it for me because it had to do with Snowbasin. It’s nearing ready to start building hotels and, you know, doing like they did in Park City. But they moved the rock collection from the Depot out to Dinosaur Park. Have you been to Dinosaur Park? LR: The one up here by Rainbow Gardens? FF: Yes, now if you go upstairs where the dinosaurs are that’s where they moved the rock collection. Well, half that collection is work I polished and done. I put on the first gem and mineral show in Ogden and we had machinery and showed the public how we polished rocks and made jewelry and everything. Anyway, they moved it there by Dinosaur Park. So I have that to live after me and Snowbasin. MJ: Yep. 31 FF: And I can remember when Ogden High School was, when everybody moaned and groaned about building Ogden High School on 28th and Harrison, that was out of town. That was in the boonies. I went and got my haircut yesterday, does it look good? MJ: Yes. FF: I knew you were coming, so I got my haircut by my barber there on 24th Street and I went by there and all those kids were getting out of school and it’s not, when I was there, I was in the ROTC, do you know what that was? LR: Yes. FF: I was the guy that carried the flag. I carried the flag through the whole war when we went marching on parades and everything. I was the guy, the first guy on in there carrying the squadron flag or the battalion flag or whatever it was, you know, all the time I was in the service because I guess I was tallest and best looking. MJ: Yep. FF: I was in the crack squad at Ogden High School. Now, until I met this five year old I told you about that told me about girls, I didn’t know nothing about girls even in high school. I was in what they called a crack squad, it was the guys that did all this gun stuff. Here we had this dance, so there was about like twenty of us and we drilled and we were good. So, there was this dance and we were going to be there to open the dance, but I’d never been to a dance in my whole life. I go to this dance and after it was all over because we were first and then I go home. I 32 didn’t know how to dance, I didn’t know how to—even what a girl was, you know. But, anyway, where was I going from there? MJ: You were talking about being on the crack squad and… FF: Well, I was in that, but then, a month after I graduated in 1944, I went into the service. So, I joined the Air Force and I was training to be a B-29 pilot in Marfa, Texas. And I was at Amarillo and Marfa and Alpine and San Antonio and I like Texas. I think every kid should go in the service, not every kid should go overseas, but every kid should have the opportunity to go in the service the way I did and I don’t have an idea what they do as training today. Because there’s a lot of kids that don’t know nothing all the way through high school and they don’t know anything about the world. You go in the service and you’re meeting all kinds of people all over and your experience with what the real world is like and what some of the stuff that’s out there that you might face later as a kid. It might influence you to be a General, it might influence you to run up to Canada. This gal that worked for me, maybe I shouldn’t say this, but I was sick one day in 43 years. I was off work one day in 43 years. That’s a record I hold for myself, I don’t know anybody who’s beat that record. One day in 43 years. I had a girl, hired a girl as a secretary, first week she was off three days. MJ: Wow. FF: And she had a boy, and I can’t remember how old this boy was, but I remember her telling me that if he ever had to go into war she would send him to Canada. And boy, she said that to the wrong person and that was me. That gal, if you walked into my, I made eyeglasses, had my own dispensing optician. If you 33 walked in there on July 1st and she knew your address and phone number and this and that and the other and what your husband’s name was. You could come back a year later and she didn’t know it. She couldn’t remember everything. So, after, I couldn’t fire her the first week, you know, because I told myself anybody I hired I’d give them a month. At the end of the month we’d sit down and we’d talk man-to-man if they wanted to stay if they like me or I like them or whatever. That was part of the hiring. Well, she was a ten, other than that one statement, she was a ten and so she stayed and she liked the job and she was with me, I’ll say two or three years at least and she was good. So, you can’t judge a person by one statement. I learned that and everybody’s different and they’re entitled to that, but it doesn’t mean that everybody has to get along with everybody just because you get married or something. But, if you sign a contract, like a marriage contract, I was thinking about this the other day, you sign a marriage contract, then you, that’s a contract and you’re married to each other and they are number one and number two and you for them and them for you, not whatever. So that’s the way I look at it. Now where are we going? MJ: Well, we’ve covered all the questions that I had, did you have any questions? LR: Oh, when you were working, when you were in the Union Station during the, I’m assuming you were there during the war years in the Union Station, so my one question is, do you ever recall the canteen that was operational during World War II? FF: Well, yes, now, I shipped out of Ogden, no I didn’t, I went out of Salt Lake, but I came home on three day passes, so I did come in the depot and, as I remember, 34 there were girls there that had donuts and coffee and I didn’t drink coffee, I had a bad experience with coffee and you don’t need to hear that, so that’s why I don’t drink coffee today because of a bad experience. It’s kind of like a dog biting your face off, you’re not in love with the dog. Whatever you got up there, you want to keep it, you know. I was working there during the war too, and the troops would come in, but there were five million people in that depot; that was packed every time I went in there. I probably went in there every other day, but it was more night because I was mostly on the night shift, but there’s all these soldiers, I can remember these uniforms, that whole place is full of them all the time and they’d be catching trains and going to Texas and going to, let’s see, they went to I think Reno out of here too and Seattle. I think they probably went ever place out of Ogden, but I can’t remember even any of my personal war stories. I have a picture of me on the train that somebody took of me once when we were leaving the depot, but it wasn’t anything that, it was just in the car. But I can remember millions of soldiers going through here and the Depot, and I remember all those wooden benches because all it was was a bunch of wooden benches and people sitting on them. Some stand and some sit and some leaving and some going. Train number so and so and half of them would take off. I don’t have any good stories to tell, but I worked there. MJ: Lorrie has been doing research on the canteen and the Red Cross women who ran it, so that’s her area of interest. FF: The canteen itself, not the USO? LR: Not the USO, the canteen that was in the Union Depot. 35 FF: Now if you’re from Salt Lake you wouldn’t know this art teacher from Ogden High School. I came home on a three day pass and met her at the USO and that’s where I probably had my first dance was with her. It was his daughter and she was a year or two older than me and when I got out of the service we went out on a few dates and that together and then she got married, but that was the USO, not the canteen. I can’t, now, if I remember right, it’s where the restaurant is now in that corner. LR: It wasn’t actually in the depot itself, it was outside. It had its own little shack. FF: But it was over in that area. LR: Yeah, it was in that area. FF: See, I never ate there, I don’t think I ever ate lunch. I’d go home at ten o’clock and eat with my dad. Really, and that’s the way I am today. When I got married, and I was married 49 years minus one month. No, 50 years minus one month. My wife would sit in this, from my whole life, from my dad up and my wife would say, “What do you want for dinner? Where are you going to eat it and when?” Those were the three questions. I’d sit here and I probably had, in, let’s see, we built this house in 1968, so that’s forty years, so I probably ate in this couch about ten times watching that, there’s a big T.V. in there—that’s one of the first big T.V.s made—and I’d usually eat, if it was before midnight, usually in the tub maybe. I was a tub person and I never ate at six. You know, at twelve o’clock, everybody eat, right? So, on the ski hill, everybody stops at twelve and they go eat and the whole hill, there’s no lines, no nothing, the whole mountain is to yourself, the best skiing in the world is lunchtime because everybody stop, it’s 36 like they’ve got to eat at twelve and they’ve got to eat at six. That was never in my life. My wife, this is a story I tell about cooking: we had been married about two weeks. She had a headache and she had a formula of tea and coke somehow, whatever it was, I don’t know. She says, “Will you heat me some hot water?” We had a steam kettle that whistled, you know. So, I put the tea kettle on, she had a headache and I put the steam kettle on and I didn’t do that right, so that was the last cooking I did for 49 years. That’s almost a hundred percent true. She liked to cook and I’ve got all the cooking stuff and right now I’ve got about two pans and two spoons and two this and two that and I’ve got a million, I give some to this person here to there. Need any dishes? So, when she passed away and it was about ten years ago now, I’ve been on my own, cooking, you know. I come up with some pretty good formulas, better than what I see on T.V. You know what they do, they take a tomato and a carrot and then they add five hundred spices to it and then that’s—all it is is a pile of spices. I use a little bit of salt. When my wife died, our sugar bowl was a mason jar, a quart mason jar—it’s down to this, so I’ve used about three fifths of a quart of sugar in ten years is all the sugar I’ve used. So, good or bad, and I never use pepper. My wife liked pepper and didn’t like salt, I like salt and don’t like pepper. She didn’t like sweet stuff, I like sweet stuff. So when we went to a restaurant, guess who got all the cakes and desserts? I did. She liked burnt toast, I like just off-white toast. We were opposite in the best things, so we got along a ten because we didn’t ever— our worst argument, we had a motor home and we were going to Portland or someplace and she was the co-pilot and she had the maps so she said, “It’s that 37 way,” and I said, “No, it’s this way,” she said, “It’s that way,” and I said, “This way,” and we were getting near the freeway turnoff, so anyway, I turned wrong and guess who was right? She was right. So, the only argument we had, really, because we never did have a dragged out argument. A few discussions and then we compromised, you know, because nothing’s worth being mad about with each other, right? LR: Right. FF: Now did I waste your whole day? MJ: No, this was great. Thank you very much. FF: I’m sorry I didn’t know more about 25th Street and the depot and I even worked there. Other than that, most people didn’t know there was a tunnel under there where passengers went. LR: It’s fun to learn about. MJ: Thank you.