Community Oral History Lee Witten Interviewed by Alyssa Kammerman 11 September 2023 RootsBridge LLC Mission Statement RootsBridge cultivates connection in communities and families through the transformative power of storytelling. Our mission is to compassionately record life histories, honor unique experiences and promote empathy through shared narratives. By encouraging individuals to step into another's shoes, we cultivate deeper bonds between storyteller and hearer. In the communities we serve, we foster a sense of unity and compassion. We are driven by our passion for providing a platform for marginalized voices to ensure that every story is heard and none are diminished. We believe in a community where everyone feels connected and finds a sense of belonging. Project Description The Union Station Centennial oral history project is a companion to the Museums at Union Station’s “Heart of Ogden” exhibit, which commemorates the 100-year anniversary of the opening of the current Union Station building on November 22, 1924. In honor of the centennial anniversary, Ogden City contracted with oral historian Alyssa Kammerman of RootsBridge LLC to collect fifteen oral histories from community members who shared memories associated with the Union Station in Ogden. The interviews encompass the 1930s to the present day, thus documenting the period when Union Station was actively functioning as a train station and its subsequent transformation into a museum and cultural center. Community members interviewed included former railroad employees, Union Station employees, residents of Ogden, city employees, and museum volunteers. The diverse range of interviewees reflects the diversity of Ogden and provides a comprehensive view of Union Station’s impact on the community as a cultural hub and a place of shared history. ~ Oral History Description ~ An oral history is the spoken account of historic events in one’s life from the unique and partial perspective of the narrator. It is a primary source and unique interpretation of one’s lived experience. Rights Management This work is the property of RootsBridge LLC and The Museums at Ogden Union Station. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching, and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text / as long as credit is given to RootsBridge LLC and Ogden Union Station. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Witten, Lee, an oral history by Alyssa Kammerman (RootsBridge LLC), 11 September 2023, Centennial Oral History Project, Museums at Union Station, Ogden, UT. Oral History Interview September 11, 2023 Interviewer: Alyssa Kammerman Interviewee: Lee Witten Abstract: This is an Oral History Interview with Lee Witten, conducted December 22, 2023, for the 100 year anniversary of the Ogden Union Station. This interview was conducted at the Ogden Union Station by oral historian Alyssa Kammerman of RootsBridge LLC. During this interview, Lee shares his memories of his father’s career as a brakeman then conductor for the Union Pacific Railroad. He also mentions his mother’s work in the Union Station coffee shop. Lee discusses working in the Union Station Museum as the Archivist for 20 years. AK: All right. Today is September 11, 2023. I am at the Ogden Union Station interviewing Lee Witten for the Union Station Centennial Project. My name is Alyssa Kammerman, and I'll be conducting the interview. So thank you, first of all, for coming and visiting with me today. It's very appreciated. LW: You're very welcome. AK: So for the first question, I kind of wanted to get a sense of where and when you were born, because I know your family had a lot to do with the railroad, growing up. LW: Right. Well, I was born in 1941 on November 23, actually, which is close to the date that the Union Station was built on November 24, 1924. So a little bit of trivia there. But yes, I was born in Ogden at the McKay Dee Hospital on 24th and Harrison. My home was at 2979 Adams Avenue, and my father worked for the Union Pacific railroad. And at that time, my mother was a stay-at-home mother. I had one brother from her first husband who was 10 years older than I was. His name was John Elzey, and he went on to become a drama professor at Weber State University. AK: Interesting, okay. And what did your dad do for the railroad? 1 LW: Well, my father hired on in 1938, and he was a brakeman when he first hired on. And in a couple of years, he advanced to conductor, and he worked as a conductor for passenger service for a while, but then he switched to freight and worked the rest of his career as a freight conductor. He made more money that way than he would have if he had stayed a passenger conductor. AK: Why was that? LW: I really don't know how the salary structures were made at that time. Of course, the railroads' main business was freight, and passenger service actually lost money. It was a loss leader, and that's one of the reasons that it eventually died when planes and automobiles took over. The railroads just wanted to get rid of the passenger trains. They just were not making money from them. So, of course, the employees that ran freight – and I'm kind of speaking spontaneously here, I don't have factual backing – but I believe Dad said when I asked him years ago that he made more money as a freight conductor. AK: That makes sense. So I want to kinda back up a little bit. I've heard stories about brakemen running across the tops of the trains to hurry and twist the brakes. Was that something they did in his time period or was that from earlier? LW: By the time my dad was a brakeman, he mainly worked in the caboose. The job of the brakeman in the caboose was to be a signalman and help the conductor operate the train. Sometimes the train would have to stop out in the middle of their journey and the brakeman would take a signal, either a flare or a lantern, and walk behind the train a certain distance, to warn any oncoming trains behind the one that he was working on. So that was one of the jobs of the brakeman. And sometimes when they were switching cars on the train and they were in a yard with turnouts, the brakeman would go out and throw the switch so the train could go a different direction, take a different track. 2 AK: Interesting. Do you have memories of your dad’s time as a brakeman, or was he a conductor by the time you were old enough to remember? LW: By the time I was born in 1941, Dad had become a conductor. And the main thing I remember is that he was gone at all hours of the day. They could call the crew to take a train out and it could be three in the morning or two in the afternoon. And this was quite disconcerting to my mother because it was hard for her to plan her life around this, and social activities or holidays. He could be gone on Christmas Day if they needed him to take a train out. AK: That's hard. So as a kid, were you allowed to come visit him at the train station? Like were you here at the Union Station growing up at all? LW: Well, I was nuts about trains, and I was told that whenever we got anywhere near the yards, I'd say, "See tooh-train, Joe. See tooh-train." Joe was my dad's first name. I didn't call him Dad. I said, "See tooh-train, Joe," [laughing]. So there was a few times in which he would take me down and show me his caboose. Now, this was the early 1940s, and the conductor had a caboose assigned to him permanently, so whenever he went out on a trip, he would take the same caboose out, he could keep his personal possessions and things on the caboose. And so he would take me down and let me climb up into it and up into the cupola. And there's two wonderful photos that I was able to find after he died. One shows me on the steps of the caboose, waving like a brakeman would wave and up in the cupola, looking out and waving from the window. Those now can be seen here in the museum at the Union Station as part of the caboose exhibit. AK: That's awesome. And about how old were you when you would come and you would climb up into the cupola? LW: Well, these photos were taken in 1945, so I was four years old. 3 AK: So I remember you mentioning off camera that your mother was a waitress for the railroad. Is that correct? LW: Right. After Dad hired on and they were living here in Ogden, she got a job as a waitress in the restaurant here at the Station. They called it the Beanery, it was the coffee shop, and she often worked the night shift. It would be just her and this other woman. They became longtime friends as a result of working together. That was during the war years. There would be as many as 100 trains come through Ogden during a day, and so they were kept busy. But there would be times at night in which there were no trains and so they would kind of lay down on the wooden benches and wait for the next train to come. And then once a train did arrive, there's like a 30-minute break between exchanging Union Pacific crews to Southern Pacific crews, so the passengers would get off and come into the station. And of course, they'd all want coffee, or eggs, you know, they want their breakfast, if it's in the morning hours. And of course, they had to jump to and wait on all of these passengers and get them fed in 30 minutes so that they could get back on their train to continue on. AK: How long were her shifts usually? LW: I don't know, really. I would assume eight hour shifts, but during the war, I'm not sure just how long she worked. She didn't really tell me that, just complained about the conditions [laughing]. AK: Was she ever a part of the Ogden Canteen that was here during the war? LW: She was, and I asked her about that, and she participated by working with her trainmen’s auxiliary lodge. You know, the trainmen had a union and they had a women's auxiliary at the time. So all the wives of the trainmen formed an association of their own, and they, during the war, would get together. She said that they would wrap bandages for the medical care of the wounded. There was a 4 hospital north of Ogden at Brigham City where wounded soldiers would go in hospital cars, and, of course, these bandages that the women wrapped could be loaded onto the hospital cars for use. AK: So when you say wrapping bandages, where did they get the material from? LW: I don't know where that would come from. It would be local suppliers, I'm sure, that would supply the material to do that. But it would come in probably large sheets, so it would need to be cut and rolled up, ready for use. AK: That’s interesting, since now they just come packaged in these nice little rolls. LW: Yeah, this was during the war and the Army department probably could get some of that, but this was their way of trying to help and participate in the war effort. AK: I was going to ask: I've heard about Harvey Hotels and the “Harvey Girls” who worked there. Was your mom a Harvey Girl? LW: Oh, the Harvey Houses. Yeah, that was on the Santa Fe Railroad and that ran through Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona into California. And some of those old Harvey houses still exist, but the Union Pacific didn't have an equivalent of that. AK: Okay, that makes sense. So you graduated from Weber College in 1964, correct? LW: Yes. AK: And then taught in Hawaii for 33 years. LW: That's right. AK: So what brought you back to Ogden after you retired? LW: Well, after I retired in 1997, I really couldn't afford to stay in Hawaii [laughs]. My retirement pay was much less than my regular pay, and so I decided that it would be economically beneficial for me to come back to Ogden. And also, my mother was getting on in years and my father had died, my brother had died, so she was pretty much alone, except for my brother's family. And so I wanted to be here to take care of her. She wasn't ill or anything, but... She finally died in 2005, and so I 5 had several good years with her. And while I was working, I would come back during summers. Her birthday is January 11th, so we would celebrate Christmas here in Ogden, and then she would love to fly back to Hawaii with me and spend a couple of weeks and we would celebrate her birthday over there. So that was a great tradition. All my friends over there got to know her and love her. And so, like I say, that was one reason I came back here. The third reason is that I love trains. And even though there is the Hawaii Railway Society in Hawaii that is active in restoring old Hawaiian railway equipment, I wasn't that interested in getting involved with that. And so back here I would have more of an opportunity to get back with working with model trains as well as the real ones. AK: So you came back about 1997, is that correct? LW: 1997, Yes. AK: What changes did you notice between the 1964 Ogden and the 1997 Ogden? LW: Well, when I left in 1964, Ogden still had a lot of people downtown. There were a lot of stores. There was the Ogden Mall. And so there was a lot of activity downtown. And 25th Street was just kind of a rundown, seedy area at the time, and respectable people didn't [laughs] frequent that part of town. But I came back to visit, you know, several times over the years, so I gradually started to see these changes. So by 1997, when I came back, downtown was almost deserted. The Ogden Mall was gone. The shops in downtown were mostly closed, you know, clothing stores and shoe stores like that that used to be open. 25th Street, on the other hand, was being restored by the 25th Street preservation group that had formed. And so it had been cleaned up, new businesses were moving in, and it was becoming the place to be. And also the Union Station, which had ceased to be a train station in 1997, was being converted into a museum. 6 AK: How soon after you returned to Utah did you start to volunteer with the Ogden Union Station? LW: Shortly after I got back, I was looking in the newspaper and there was a little article about a group called the Golden Spike Chapter of the R&LHS (Railway & Locomotive Historical Society). And it was a railroad group. The R&LHS stands for “Railway and Locomotive Historical Society.” It's a national academic society in which members around the country do research on railroad history. They publish a Journal Quarterly, which is an excellent journal on railroad history. So I thought, "Well, gee, that sounds interesting." They met here at the Union Station. So I came down to a meeting and got acquainted with the fellows and ladies that were members, and the director of the museum at that time, Bob Geyer, was one of the officers of the chapter. So I got talking with him. He had made a pitch for volunteering at the Station, and I didn't know that was a thing, but he acquainted me with that and I said, "Where could I be useful here?" And he says, "Well, Lee, we have a whole collection of documents and photographs, but they are not organized and not readily accessible to the public. And I'd like to see the public get better access to them." And he says, "So we need somebody to organize the collection and create a library and an archive." And I thought, "Well, that sounds kind of interesting, rather than just sitting in one of the museums waiting for somebody to come," [laughs]. So up on the second floor, they provided me with a little office and a desk and a space for the collection. I got a computer to help with cataloguing the collection. I enjoy using computers, so that was attractive. And we bought an application called PastPerfect, which is a company that makes archiving software for museums and libraries. And so I became acquainted with how to use that, and that became my major tool for cataloging books and photos and objects. There was 7 no system, nothing had been established. And I just kind of had carte blanche to do what I wanted to do. So, over the next 20 years I built up the collection and cataloged it. When the city took back control from the Union Station Foundation, which was running the museum, they decided that they wanted a professional archivist and librarian to manage the collection. And... I kind of felt that my job had been done. Plus, they questioned the accuracy and validity of some of the things that I had been doing, and so I felt it was time to leave. So I did [laughs]. AK: I'd like to hear a little bit more about the early days of your archival work. So all of this material that Bob Guyer told you about, was it just stacked in boxes? What was the state of it when you started? LW: Well, a local photographer had donated about 2000 photos and that formed the basis of our collection. It was the.... Oh, the name escapes me now of the fellow who did these photos, but they were in little packets, and it had a proof taped on the front of the packet so you could see what the photo was, and inside the packet were the negatives. Now, a lot of these had been printed, so there were prints of these, but the majority of the collection was in these little photo packets. Now, they had already been put into a little file drawers and not really organized, and so I went through them all and, knowing as much as I did about railroads, and the history of railroading, I was able to begin to catalog based on that. And so I would put them in groupings and input labels so that if somebody wanted a picture of the Big Boy, I could go to this catalog and find the image that we wanted. Also, each of those, I put into this PastPerfect, so that it was all searchable, you know, by keywords and that sort of thing. A lot of work. AK: Sounds like a lot of work [laughs]. That's so fascinating. So with these negatives, were you able to develop them or scan them in at all so that way you could look through them? 8 LW: That was the next big advancement – not the computer itself, I had a computer and a printer, but I wanted a way of getting prints without having to send these negatives out of our possession to some other company. So in looking around at available technology, these scanners were available, and so we got a grant to purchase one of these, and the scanner came with a little mask that you could put the negatives in, and then you could scan that negative, and then the computer could make it into a positive image from the negative image. And it was just a click o a button, you know, [chuckles] “reverse,” and you would get a positive image, so then we could make prints of any size that we wanted. If there was a new exhibit and we wanted to exhibit some of these, we could make nice photographs and and have them mounted and that sort of thing. AK: That's amazing. So when you mentioned exhibits, did you do a lot of rotating exhibits, or was it mainly the kind of ones you have here now? LW: That was up to the museum manager. I wasn't really in charge of the exhibits. Early on, I did do one exhibit that I was really excited about. It's been taken down now, but I would receive donations from various sources in our library. And one day a large manila envelope came along, and it was from a family up in Idaho. It had a set of 8x10 photographs of their father E. O. Cook, who was a railroad engineer. There was about 10 of these photos, and it came with a document called “A Day in the Life of an Engineer.” It was made in 1945 by one of the Union Pacific reporters doing it for their company newsletter. And so I'm looking at these, and here is this picture showing the engineer and the conductor in front of the Big Boy, 4020, and the conductor was handing orders to the engineer. I looked at that conductor and I said, "That's awfully familiar." And sure enough, it was my father. The only image I had of him on the job. And, of course, this is the same year that he took pictures of me on the caboose [chuckles]. 9 But anyway, there was a second picture towards the end of the photo story in which he and his brakeman are standing on the back of the caboose as it goes out of Riverdale, going east to Wyoming. And so those two images, I was so thrilled to see those. I had access to a large old desk that had a glass top on it, and so I made an exhibit with those images and the story and putting them under the glass. So it sat out for several years in the museum, and then it got changed out with some other exhibits. But that was... And I've got copies on my wall at home as well. But that was... Things, serendipitous things like that made my job here so exciting. AK: Absolutely. That is really cool. Are there any other stories of interesting things you came across in the archives? LW: Well, there were a lot of images of old Ogden, of the old Union Station, the depot when the railroad first came through here in 1869, and they started service in 1870. And side story to that: my Witten relatives, my great-grandfather and his family came on the first passenger train into Ogden in 1870. They converted to the Church in Virginia and came out. Now they were smart. They waited 'till the train to come to Utah, and not handcarts and covered wagons [laughs]. AK: That's really cool. So you said you found photographs of them in the archives? LW: No, there weren't any photos of them. But I do have, you know, through other family sources. AK: So from what I understand, and correct me if I'm wrong, the Union Station Museum is Utah's official train museum, is that correct? LW: Well, the Utah State Legislature designated it as the Utah State Railroad Museum, yes. And there is a document stating that. It's in the archives. AK: Do you know what the process was for that designation? Or was that before your time? 10 LW: That occurred while I was still in Hawaii teaching, so I wasn't actually here when that happened. I became aware of it when I started volunteering here. But it happened before I was here. AK: Okay. That's good to know. So as you were working as the archivist here, were you involved in getting the word out that you had this amazing resource of Ogden train photographs, and documents and everything? LW: Oh, we did. I'm trying to think of a specific incident. Of course, when the Internet occurred, we were able to put out on Facebook and things like that. And the newspaper every once in a while would come in and say, "Do you have pictures of this or that?" And we would do that internationally. I would get requests from other countries to ask if I had an image of a certain type of locomotive or that sort of thing, and also book publishers, particularly publishing history texts for schools. We would contract and make a little bit of money supplying images for publication. And so there were little things like that. I can't say there was a concerted effort on our part, or on my part to publicize the museum. I think that was pretty much the job of the museum staff and the director. AK: Speaking of books, did you write a book on Ogden, or on railroads? I'm trying to remember. LW: I didn't write a book. I did make a handbook of photos: the history of the station, its various incarnations and our collection and that sort of thing, and it was printed and it was sold in our gift shop. There was a professor at Weber State, Richard Roberts who had given the archives a manuscript that he had written. It was a wonderful history of the Union Station. It was typewritten and we had it in our archives When I came across it and started to read it, I saw what a neat little treatise this was. It wasn't very long, but it was a wealth of information and statistics that I hadn't found any place else. So what I did was scan those pages and convert them into text. And 11 then he had some old grainy scans of historic photos that he had made. So I found most of those images in our archive where we had good copies of them. I would get those organized, and put it all together, so when he would, in his treatise, talk about a certain event or something, I could insert a picture. I formatted that, and it became the publication that we mainly sold in our gift shop. AK: You said earlier that you were part of the model train group called the Hostlers? Tell me about that. What is it? How did you get involved? LW: Well, I've always been interested in model railroading. When I was in Hawaii, I lived in a small apartment, so I couldn't do much in the way of building a layout. So after I moved here, a couple of the members of the R&LHS that I mentioned before talked about the Hostler Model Railroad Club. And so I became acquainted with them and came to one of their meetings and decided to join with them. I've been a member for 25 years of that group, and their forte was for the members to build these modules, four feet or six feet long and about 30 inches deep. Each member would build his own scene with mountains or whatever, a village, on these modules and they were designed so that there were three tracks at the front of each module so they could join together like Legos. And those tracks then would line up and you could run trains around a large layout made up of these individual modules, and there were some that were curved, so they formed corners, and others straightaways. So this was their main interest and they started putting on shows out at the Browning National Guard Armory out in South Ogden. The museum director at the time, Teddy Griffith, came to that show and she sayd, "Mike," he was the president, "Why don't you bring that show down to the Station? That should be something at the Station." They thought that was a great idea to have more room. So the next year, they began to come to the museum on the first weekend of every March, and 12 we would take over the entire building and set trains up. We would bring in other clubs with their train modules of different scales. There would be a Lionel train group and that sort of thing, and then we would have lots of vendors come in and set up their wares and sell train material. And so that built and continues up to this day. We had a hiatus because of the pandemic, of course, but last year we came back and had our first show since the pandemic, and it's been a great partnership. The museum, and museum staff loves to have us come because we bring in, well, I think our highest number was 10,000 people. And it's kind of leveled off to be around 5,000 or 6,000 now, over the weekend, but that's still a lot of people. And the aisles would be filled with people going back and forth, and it's just a really exciting weekend. And then the club compensates the museum; we donate several thousand dollars back to the museum. Over the years, we've helped purchase many things in the museum. They needed new light bulbs put up in the grand hall, so we have donated money for that. Several of our members every week would come and take care of the model railroad here in the museum and keep it running. And we would put a certain amount of money in an account so that we could buy new locomotives or new cars and maintenance material to keep the model train running here. So we've had a very close relationship with the museum. AK: And it sounds like so much fun, too. LW: Well, it is. And since I've left volunteering here, we were able to get a storefront in the Newgate Mall and we're building a model train museum there. And ironically, I am the board member in charge of displays and archives [laughs], so I'm having a great time putting displays up, and we have just a small little library. People donate books, and so I'm keeping track of the library and, and other artifacts that we get. 13 We're building a permanent layout, and we're trying to be as historical as possible. So the layout depicts the area between Ogden and Echo. We have a model area representing Riverdale and Washington Terrace, Weber Canyon, the town of Morgan, Taggart's Curve up in Weber Canyon, and the town of Echo as it looked back in the '50s. We have a branch line going to an elevated section that represents Park City, because historically there was a branch from Echo to Park City at one time. The our model train comes back into Ogden on the mainline. One of our members is building a model of the Union Station. So we're going to represent the Union Station. He said it's going to take him about a year, but he's built a mockup, just cutouts, to show where it's going to be and what it will eventually look like. So this, even though it's not part of the Union Station Museum, it's a little area where people can get some idea of railroading in this area, and that's what we're trying to depict. AK: So were you a part of the group that actually built the model in the museum? LW: No, some of our Hostler members did work on that. There were others that weren't in the club, but they all knew each other and that was constructed before I was here. I knew some of them after the fact, but I wasn't involved with that. AK: That’s really cool. Were you ever a part of helping to restore the locomotive that's in the Trainman's building behind the Union Station? LW: Yes. That was when I joined the group in '97 here at the Station, the R&LHS group. That was their main project. That was pretty much the reason that they even existed. That locomotive was donated to the city of Salt Lake in 1941. It was an old, Rio Grande, narrow-gauge locomotive that mainly ran in Colorado, up in the mountains where the narrow gauge tracks were only three feet apart as opposed to four-feet eight-inches that we have on our standard gauge here. Well, they donated it to the city of Salt Lake, and it was set up in Liberty Park, and sat there from 1941 14 until about 1975. They took it out of the park and the city gave it to the Utah State Historical Society, which was housed at the old Rio Grande Station in Salt Lake City. And so it was put up on blocks in the back of the Rio Grande Station, and just pretty much sat there in the weather and deteriorating. Some of our members went down and they approached the historical society and they said, "Hey, if we can get this up to Ogden, how about letting us restore it?" And they thought that was a great idea, so they raised some money and got it on a truck and brought it up to the campus here. They put it on a section of track by where the old Shupe Williams Candy Factory used to be, south of our current laundry building. So it sat in back of that building. And then there were some cars we got from Lagoon, some old wooden cars that were the same narrow gauge. There was a caboose, a gondola, and a flat car. Well, they were made of wood, and when the candy factory burned down, all of those cars were destroyed, and part of the cab of this 223 locomotive was burned. So the Station made the trainman's building–here at the north end of the Station–available as a shop where we could bring the locomotive to the north end and work on it here. We dragged it up here and began working on it. We were able to take the cab apart and rebuild it. I painted the cab and did various jobs. I'm not really that handy with mechanical things, but I learned a lot of new tools and techniques and we pretty much took the locomotive apart. But we reached a point where in order to go any further because the large driver wheels needed to be sent to some shop and refinished. We just didn't have the machinery to do that here. So we kind of came to a standstill, and that was about the time that the city took over the campus here, and our organization ran afoul with some of the demands the city was making We didn't agree with them and things came to an impasse, so the shop got closed down. But the president of the Cumbres & Toltec 15 Railroad, which is a wonderful old tourist railroad down in New Mexico and part of Colorado, knew about this project. He had come up several times, and he created a document of what it would cost to restore it completely. The state actually owns that locomotive, not Ogden City. Ogden City at one time thought they might take possession of it, but then that fell through. So the state had an idea of taking the locomotive and just making a cosmetic restoration and putting it as a static exhibit down by the Capitol Building in a new museum. Well, that didn't go anywhere. And so now I believe the negotiations with the state are at the point where they may be in agreement to release this locomotive to an organization in Colorado that would like to restore it. And hopefully the story isn't over yet. I think our part in it, we went as far as we could go with it, and this other organization hopefully can take it to completion, and it may even run on the rails again. (Interviewee’s note: The state is giving the locomotive to Ogden City. What the City has in mind for it is not determined) AK: So just out of curiosity, the Trainman's building, that was built in the early 1900s, is that correct? LW: That Trainman's building was built along with the original train station that burned down. My father used to check in at the train station when he would come to get his train. The trainman's office where they checked in was eventually moved down to 33rd Street, so this wasn't used for that. Maybe some of the passenger crew, the conductors in that would check in here at the Trainman's station. AK: Okay. So you said your father did check in at that Trainman's building? LW: Early on, yeah. When he was first hired on, that would be the main office. And I don't know when they moved down to the 33rd Street location. AK: Do you know what year your father started working for the railroad, then? LW: 1938. 16 AK: Okay, so it would have been the original Union Station? Oh, no. He wouldn't have been... LW: No, no, no. The original Union Station burned down in 1923. AK: Right. LW: Yeah. And this was built in 1924, so. AK: Okay. So he never worked with the original. LW: No [chuckles]. AK: It was always this building. Okay. I got excited for a second there. LW: No [laughs]. Yeah, no, he wasn't that old [laughs]. He was living in Ogden and he was born on 12th Street in 1914, so he would have seen the Station and known of the fire. AK: Do you know if he had memories of the fire? LW: He never talked about that, and I didn't even know it myself to even ask him [laughs]. I didn't know that much either. I learned much more after I became a volunteer here. AK: Are there any other important projects or anecdotes that you'd like to share about your time here at the Station? LW: Well, the Front Runner is just going by. And while I was a volunteer here, I watched every step of the building of the Front Runner's tracks and the station up on the other side of 24th Street. And because of my involvement here at the Station and the R&LHS and also the Hostlers, towards the end, before they had started running officially, they would invite us to go on trial runs with the Front Runner, so we were some of the first to to ride it and test it out. Then when they had the inaugural run, the big run with the governors and mayors, and it started up here in Ogden, I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in that and ride the train. I took lots of 17 photos that are in our archive now, a nice record of that inaugural run of the FrontRunner. AK: That is amazing. Also, I know it's way back a bit, but I wanted to ask if you had any other memories of the train station as a train station, before it closed down. LW: Well, I do. My first five years was spent living here in Ogden on 29th and Adams, and railroad employees' families could ride the train free as they had a pass. My grandmother lived in San Francisco, and so my mother would take my brother and I on the train down to San Francisco to visit her grandmother several times. And I just very distinctly remember coming into the station, you know, the hubbub. And, of course, there were lots of big wooden benches at that time, people waiting for trains and the coming and going. And then when it was time, I was, you know, super excited, and when it came time to get on the train, you had to go down stairs to a subway and you walked underneath the tracks. There was once 11 passenger tracks here, where now we only have two. So there was a subway that went the distance. You could go from the Station out to Track 11 underground. But I remember that it was often cold, and the smell: I could smell the steam engines and the diesel smells. And you could hear the clunk of the steam release of the locomotives up above. And I'd look up the stairs at the trains as we went by, and then we would walk up and get on our train and we would have a Pullman berth. Mom would sleep in the lower berth and my brother and I would sleep in the upper berth. They had those big heavy drapes that would close to give you privacy in them, and the smell of those, even [smiling]. So, that was my earliest memories of the Station here when it was actually a station. AK: Just out of curiosity, what did it smell like, the drapes and everything? Dusty? 18 LW: It was kind of a musty smell. As I remember, they were heavy tarp-like curtains. And you didn't have air conditioning. They had fans, you know, that would circulate air in the car, but [laughs]. AK: At that time, were those Pullman cars individualized cars? Or was it kind of a community car with bunks? LW: Well, the Pullman cars that we got on were what they called 'open section'. So during the day, the curtains would be all tied back and they would be open sections of four seats, two opposing seats. And so you could see, you know, everybody in the car. They weren't enclosed like European sections are. And so at night the porter would come through and he would set the lower bed and upper bed into place when it was time to go to bed. AK: And was this during the time when porters were predominantly Black? LW: Oh, yes. The porters at that time were probably among the most fortunate of Black workers because being a porter was a plum job, and they were the one of the first to form a union, the Porters and Waiters Union. And when they would come to Ogden, they would have to lay over and of course, Ogden---a lot of people don't know this, but Ogden was a very segregated city at the time. Blacks were not allowed to live above Lincoln Avenue. They weren't allowed to sit on the main floor of our theaters. They couldn't stay in the hotels except right next to the train station. So this woman named Anna Belle Weakley and her husband opened a club. It's gone now, there's new buildings, just up 25th Street across Wall from the station. It was called the Porter and Waiters Club, and the porters that were laying over had a place to stay. They would have rooms, upstairs rooms. Downstairs, they had a club and they would have food, and it was also a bar and nightclub. It became quite famous in Ogden because some of the greats of Black entertainment – Cab Calloway and entertainers like that – weren't allowed to 19 entertain or perform in places like the Ben Lomond Hotel. So they would have jam sessions here in the Porter and Waiters Club, and white people in Ogden started to get familiar with the place and they started coming down. So it became quite a hot spot in Ogden to hear some great music and to have good entertainment with this Porter and Waiters Club. Anna Belle’s photos, is part of that collection that I told you about at the beginning, the 2000 pictures. There is a large collection of Anna Belle Weakley's photos that chronicles the Blacks in Ogden. And it's just a priceless collection. And they used a lot of images from that in a display that was in the museum here. They've replaced it now, but they do still have some of the images up on the walls there because they, well, some of them were red caps. They didn't work on the train, but they were carrying luggage to and from the trains here. AK: Do you personally have memories of that? Of the red caps, of Ogden’s segregation, all of that? LW: You know, I was never aware of that growing up until I got into, well, high school, but actually into college. I started college in 1961, and so then the Civil Rights movement was in full force. And the only memory I have experiencing an episode was one night we were down at Shakey's Pizza on Washington Blvd. A bunch of college guys, and one of our football players, a Black football player, I guess he was old enough to drink because he went back in the area where they were serving beer, but he wasn't back there long, and pretty soon he was coming back out. And we said, "Hey, where you going? You didn't stay long." He said, "Well, they said they wouldn't serve me back there." And we were incensed. We put our drinks down and we all got up and walked out. And so during that era of the early '60s, I became much more aware of how much of that is in Ogden. AK: Do you have any memories of the Royal Hotel, which provided a place for Blacks to stay? 20 LW: No, but I remember Red Light Alley [laughs]. 25th Street has, you know, the row of buildings. Out behind the buildings, they call it Electric Alley now. But the prostitutes, when they were open for business, they would put a red light in their window, and so if you drove down the alley, you could see red lights. And of course, it was the big thrill of us in high school [laughs] to drive down Red Light Alley, as we called it, and knew that that's where the prostitutes were. But that's as far as we went with it [laughs]. But it was an interesting part of the history of Ogden there. So now they call it Electric Alley, and most people who aren't from my era don't know really what that means. And they've turned it into a wonderful play area outdoors, you know, dining there now, and it's a much more enjoyable place to be. But that's Red Light Alley. So during the war, of course, there would be servicemen and there were a hundred bars here at the time, and so they had plenty of options for entertainment. AK: When you were in high school, were you discouraged from coming down on 25th Street? LW: Not discouraged, but it was just a challenge to see. We wouldn't walk down the street, but we would drive down and we would keep our windows rolled up. I actually lived in the town of Roy when I was in high school, and so when I learned to drive, you know, then we could come into town after dark, but [laughs]. AK: Every teenager has to have some sort of rebellion. LW: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Yeah, this was the spooky place to be. AK: That's wonderful. Well, before we wrap up with my last few questions, is there anything else that you want to make sure we cover? LW: Let me look at my paper here. I have one, probably, last comment. You asked a question: "What can the community do to keep Union Station relevant for future generations?" I can comment on that. I kind of compare the Union Station, not this 21 present building, but the railroad in general, as kind of like a seed that grows into a big old oak tree. And over the years, the oak tree has been nourished and kept alive because of the railroad. The city itself has grown because of the railroad. And so the Union Station to me represents the current state of this, quote, 'tree' as a living part of the community. And I don't want to see it become a relic like an Egyptian mummy encased in glass. I want to see the Station as a living representative of the city. So keeping it an active train station---which I believe the Utah Transit Authority is contemplating, bringing FrontRunner back here, keeping the track alive and connected to the Union Pacific track so that eventually, possibly, Amtrak can return to the Station. And when Union Pacific does special trains such as the Big Boy and the 844, they can bring those in for their occasional exhibit. It would be a wonderful facility for private rail cars, supply power and water for private railcars to come in. You know, people coming in on skiing tours could use the Station as a base of operations. I mean, there's so many ways that the Station can be kept alive, and that's what I hope for it, as far as the community goes. AK: That would be amazing. And if they did do that, do you feel like that would bring Ogden to what it used to be – a hub of the West? LW: Well, you can't go back. Railroading is never going to be what it was. The future of railroading, as far as passengers go, really depends on the will of the national governments and the businesses and the people themselves, to make a modern rail system. They talk about high-speed rail and that sort of thing. I don't know if that's going to happen or not. It's going to be a vestige of what was once here. But I don't want to see the light flicker out entirely. AK: So the exhibit text talks about how Union Station's future was Ogden's future. And so I wanted to ask, why do you think that preserving Union Station was so important 22 to Ogden? Once the Union Station stopped having trains coming through, why was it important to preserve this building? LW: Well, I think I kind of answered that, didn't I? [laughs] AK: That's okay, you don't have to answer. You can say, "See above." LW: Ask the question again. AK: Okay, yeah. I just wanted to hear your opinions on why it was important to preserve the Union Station building. LW: Well, not to repeat myself, but oh, so much of Ogden's rail yards have been obliterated. We've lost the big roundhouse that Union Pacific used to have at the south end here, and the Southern Pacific had large rail facilities up past 24th Street. They were torn down before there was any conscious effort that I know of to preserve them. So that part of our history is wiped out, never to be seen again, except through photographs or old photographs. So it's just vitally important, I think, for this building physically to be here. All photos of this building are not going to cut it. It's got to be the building itself. You can build plazas around it to beautify the exterior, but the building should be the shining star of the city at the end of 25th Street. That can always be something to remind people where they came from, or where their ancestors came from, or where this city came from: a little community of 2,500 pioneer farmers to the big industrial cosmopolitan city that it is now. AK: How do you feel that the Union Station influences the community today? LW: Well, I hope it's not being taken for granted. People drive by it. It's there. It's always been there. It's kind of just part of your life that you don't think about. But if it can continue to be a place that has attractions for the people, not just something sitting there like a ghost, but like our Hostler group, for example, keeping the interior as an open space for public events or private events, even so that businesses might want to have a banquet here or an exposition here. And so, and the plaza, you know, 23 festivals, being part of the 25th Street Farmers Market. I wish there was a way to make a continual connection across Wall Street. In fact, eliminate Wall Street. I think there's talk of putting Wall Street underground and making this one continuous plaza up to Washington Boulevard. It would be a great thing. But yeah, just doing things to keep the Station in the public eye so they don't forget it, even though it's there. AK: Then, the other question I had is how does the community shape the Union Station? LW: I think the community shapes the Station in some respects with the voting booth. The people who run the city, the mayor, the city council has to be people who are not just interested in making a buck for Ogden, but are interested in keeping its cultural heritage alive, even though they're not going to make money off of Union Station, particularly. It's no longer a tax base because the city owns it. And I know they want to develop north and south commercial areas that will increase the city's tax base, but the city can just shape it by paying attention to it and nurturing it and keeping it alive. AK: Thank you so much. I appreciate all of your time. LW: Oh, you're very welcome. AK: That was fantastic. 24