Oral History Program Ralph G. Crandall Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 30 September 2013 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Ralph G. Crandall Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 30 September 2013 Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University, Stewart Library 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: Crandall, Ralph, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 30 September 2013, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Ralph G. Crandall September 30, 2013 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Ralph Crandall. The interview was conducted on September 30, 2013, by Lorrie Rands and recorded by Avery Pince. Ralph discusses his experiences with 25th Street. LR: It is Monday, September 30th, 2013. We are in the home of Mr. Ralph Crandall in Ogden, Utah and we are conducting an oral history interview of historic 25th street, of Ogden, then and now, if you will. My name is Lorrie Rands and I will be conducting the interview and Avery Pince is the assistant. So we’ll just get right into it. When are where were you born? RC: What year was I born? LR: Yes, when and where. RC: 1922, July 22nd. I was born in Morgan. Just up Weber Canyon, lived there for a couple of months is all. My father had gone from Morgan down to the Southern Pacific Shops and they had a strike that year and he went through the strike because the strike men were dismissed and new ones had to come in. He was a farmer up there and he was a machinist when he got down here. He was capable of being a machinist with the amount of mechanical work he done on his farm equipment and that type of thing I suppose. It was rare that they made a person machinist but that’s what he was, his career. And so, he couldn’t get out of the shops because if you broke the picket line, you was liable to get injured because there was pretty good animosity going on there. My Grandmother, his mother lived down on about 26th and Wall Ave. The picket line wouldn’t harm the women and she could bring some food into him at times but it was a couple months after 1 I was born that he sent for my mom and me, and my mom’s older sister, who acted as a surrogate mom, so-to-speak, for the family. Dad’s first wife that died of the flu of 1918 and he had three children under four years old. My mom was born in North Ogden and he was born in Pleasant View. And he knew my mom during the school-time. Both now around 30 years old, my mom was the youngest of her family and she was left with her mom and an invalid sister because the rest of them just moved away: so she ended up as the care taker by default sort of. When Dad’s first wife died he had found out my mom was still single, so he headed to her home in North Ogden to see if she’d come and take his children and be his wife. And I’m the second born of that union. I had a sister that was born a year or so ahead of me but she died immediately after birth, so I’m the oldest of that family. We moved down to Ogden, of course, to be a family. I grew up in Ogden. LR: And where in Ogden did you grow up? RC: Well, our first place we lived at 1072 Oak Street. Mom grew up on a farm more-less and Dad was a farmer, with three children from him, myself and a sister that come along, they moved out to 2nd and Adams Avenue, still in Ogden it had an acre of ground attached to it and we was able to have produce and farm vegetables, a cow and the things people needed to survive in those days. Since he worked at the shops, Southern Pacific round house near 22nd and Wall Avenue for the locomotives coming in off to the rails for repairs. They called it a round house because the locomotives were put on sort of a revolving deck in the middle of this and they’d come in on the tracks and they’d rotate that 2 deck to a side track to work on those locomotives on those side areas, so it was a huge round building and they called it a round house. I can remember going in there when the strike was settled and seeing a lot of things that he accomplished. The locomotives in those days were all steam and the big barrel over the wheels of the locomotives was a boiler. The coal and the wood and whatever was used for the heat were pitched in by a fireman and there was an engineer who ran the locomotive. The boiler would build up steam and the steam would provide the propulsion for the locomotive to pull freight. There was this one thing that was quite interesting. I don't know if anybody ever realized it but those locomotives had tires on the wheels. They called them the tire, and you look at a tire and it’s something you put on a car and its rubber but this wasn't rubber, it was steel. The wheels of the locomotive were cast iron, too soft to run on the rails, so they put a rim of steel around that wheel. Now, that wheel was, like six foot tall, this rim was about an inch thick and about three inches wide and it would fit over the flange of the cast iron wheel. So, they called that rim a tire. To repair this, they had a gas fired ring that spewed flames out and they’d put this ring close to the wheel of the locomotive and they’d have this fire running on natural gas and the idea was to get that ring hot and since everything expands when you get it hot, well that was gauged in such a way that the rim, the tire, was put on the rim after it got hot enough and it slid onto the wheel and this man had to be accurate enough to drive that tire on that wheel in such a way that it was against the flange because when it hit the cold cast iron it would shrink up and it would shrink up and seize onto that wheel. And that’s what they did for all locomotives for the driving 3 wheels. There is an interesting thing about that propulsion too, the pistons were in a barrel type-thing with steam running to it and then this piston had an arm that went to the wheel and a ram effect, and if the ram is pushed forward, it makes the wheel rotate and that was how they’d get the propulsion to run a steam locomotive and anything that’s round. Even in ships with paddle wheels and things like that. They had this steam type-thing. I couldn’t begin to tell you what year but it was first invented for steam ships on the ocean and then it was converted to locomotives. Interesting thing that crossed my mind, if the locomotive stopped and it was on dead-center, meaning that the arm that pushed the wheel around was absolutely horizontal to the wheel, and it was on dead center, that locomotive couldn’t move, no matter how much steam you put to it, it wouldn’t work. So they had to get the locomotive off dead-center so that the arm could be moved up or down from the center so that it could have purchase power to drive the wheel. It used to be a saying to somebody working in that and if you didn’t put out work, you were on dead-center, you weren’t doing anything. But getting back to the wheel of the locomotive, they used to use a pinch bar. A man would come up with leverage using a pinch bar which was a steel rod about an inch and a half or so in diameter and the end was a wedge shape and he would put that right under the wheel at the track and just by man power he could move that up because of the leverage he had and move that locomotive just enough so that it wasn’t on dead-center so that it could begin to get locomotion. LR: So, you learned all of this from watching your dad? 4 RC: Just learned all of that by watching my dad. There’s another thing that might be useful information that is interesting to talk about. When there is steam, no, smoke come out of the engine you’ve heard the old saying when you grow up as a kid, the engine is a chu-chu, chu-chu engine, and the chu-chu is when that piston would go back and forth and it would cause that sound. Because of the amount of heat that is generated in these boilers, the stack that goes out of the top of the locomotive to dispel steam from the boiler is round, chimney like, for the smoke to get out. But you couldn’t use a gasket under that because the heat of the steam was too hot, it would burn up everything they used for gaskets. So they had to take this stack, they called it a nozzle and they would have to machine it the best they could on a machine and then set it up on top of the locomotive. And this nozzle weighed tons—many, many pounds. Then they would put iron filings between the top of the boiler and this nozzle stand and they would just sit there and slide that back and forth using iron filings until it wore down to where the surface was smooth enough that when you bolted it down it was sealed. So they didn't use a gasket, they just tightened it up but they had to make this absolutely flat and absolutely made it and that motion back and forth wore that down, just like grinding, until it would come to the point where they could look at it and find there was no ridges or grooves. Then there were numerous bolts around this nozzle stand that hooked onto the boiler of the locomotive and pulled it down tight. He would work on that nozzle stand with the bar with arm power he would move that back and forth for days and days until it 5 got to the point where it smoothed down to where it could be bolted down to the top of the steam engine and make it hold. LR: So did you guys live close to the station then? RC: Well, we lived on 20th and Madison and this was on 22nd and Wall. So I had to go from Madison to Jefferson to Adams to Wall and over two blocks and the round house was only a block below Wall, so you could figure that I was about a half to three-quarters a mile away. On a bicycle you could do that in a short time. I would take lunch to Dad from time-to-time if he didn’t have time to get it before he left. The round house is gone now; I don’t remember when it was removed. The steam locomotives are gone now. You see them come with museums and as a museum and they come to Ogden once a year or so. These half a dozen in the United States go to different parts of the country so that people could see what steam locomotives were and what steam engines were. Those wheels were, some of them on those big engines were higher than a man, even some as tall as eight feet high. I don’t know if you’ve been down to the station and seen those but that’s what they do and let people come in and see those and how that was in the past years. LR: Cool. So, you would take food down to your dad. What else? I know that we, last we talked about the fact that you delivered newspapers when you were younger. CR: Well, but that didn’t have anything to do with the railroad. We got off, it just so happened that 25th street was the passenger station for the passengers to board trains. I guess that’s a thing of the past as well. We don’t even have any passenger trains that come through Ogden anymore. We have freight that comes 6 through Ogden. But your question about newspapers. I must have been about 13 or thereabouts when that time came along that I delivered newspapers and I had a route between 24th and Lincoln to 28th and Lincoln and west as far as the tracks. As for residences, there wasn’t many when you got to wall, because it was all railroad tracks. Even in that yard now, there are acres upon acres of train tracks, and they’ve all been removed now, except major tracks that go through. But the newspaper route I had, I only lasted about a year with that. I delivered to the residents that mostly lived on 25th street but also what residences there were, north and south sides of 25th street. On Wall there is a hotel that still stands. It’s called the Royal Hotel and that was built for the porters and waiters that handled the dinner cars on the railroad and a lot of the people I delivered newspapers to lived down along Wall. There was quite a few houses between 26th and 28th street on the west side and on the eastside as well. South of 25th to 28th and then north of 25th to 24th, that’s where the paper route was. I never had much to do with the people that I delivered to because someone else collected the money, the route manager usually did the collecting. LR: What do you remember about the businesses then or the buildings on 25th street during that time? CR: Well, there was a nice hotel on the northeast corner of 25th and Wall, called the Broom Hotel. It had a nice big foyer in the middle and then I don’t remember how tall it was, a couple of stories I guess. It was a really nice place. Early in the years of the railroad town of Ogden there were a lot of dignitaries who would come including presidents of the United States and people from foreign 7 countries, and that was the hotel they usually stayed in. After the Broom Hotel, the new hotel was the Ben Lomond Hotel in the southeast corner on 25th and Washington so the broom hotel has been removed. But there is still some of those hotels down there on 25th that are still being used, but most of that is commercial now and it’s kind of a setting of store fronts from antiques to clothing to food to anything you can think of. There have been pawn-brokers down there, even diners. In 1937, when I had my paper route, Ogden was notorious for, some call them flop houses. They were prostitution houses really. Being in a railroad town, I suppose that is to be expected. But my contact was just simply delivering papers and I only lasted about a year. As far as the buildings down there now, I find that there is much commercialism going on down on 25th street between Wall and Washington than there is on Washington now, which is kind of a turnaround—you could call 25th street kind of the old town of Ogden. LR: I know last time we talked about the JC Penny’s and I can’t remember how that fits into the timeline but you managed to obtain a job at JC Penny. Would you tell that story? RC: We lived on Madison Avenue between 20th and 21st on the east side and on the west side of the street lived, the manager of JCPenny, his name was Lester Bergeron, I can remember that. He walked to work. JCPenny was on the northwest corner of 24th and Washington and during that time I was putting a bicycle together. I didn't have money to buy a bike, but I scrounged up parts. Frames, wheels and handle bars and things like that and put this bicycle together. This Mr. Bergeron was seeing me because I was out in the open, I 8 didn't have any place to work in the back, I’d work on the sidewalk right in front of the house and one day he came over. I knew him, but I don’t know if he knew that I knew him but anyway, he asked me if I would come to the store. I said: “Yes I’d like to.” and he said: “Well, I’d like to hire you.” And so I went to the store and he took me down into the basement, into a room. In those days, there were sidewalks all over Ogden by stores that had a freight entry and it was two big steel doors over a hole. The hole was about eight-foot square with these two doors at four-foot of that and they would open up from the middle and swing down and lay on the sidewalk and the freight would be delivered into those holes. From inside of those holes, they would take the freight into the different parts of the departments of the different buildings, where ever they happened to be. They opened these doors into this huge room and all I could see is cardboard boxes. He said, “Now, in those cardboard boxes are toys for Christmas and for the Christmas season.” He took the first box down and opened it up and whatever was in there, you put that together. And you put that box on a pile over there. Each time you’d gain some space and pretty soon you had the room minus the boxes and full of toys. I can remember wagons, little tricycles, little scooters, little baby buggies, little trains that little kids would sit on and scoot with their feet. Numerous toys, I can’t even remember all of them. That was my job and it was well worth it because it was depression time and to have a job of any kind, let alone a kid like myself, it was needed because the family was pretty destitute as far as groceries and things were concerned and that was an income. I think I made 50 cents an hour, I don’t really remember. But 50 cents an hour, I don’t 9 know what inflation would do with 50 cents an hour from ’37 to now. That’s kind of an interesting question, somebody might get ahold of that and see what its worth from them to now. I’d hate to guess. LR: I’d think it’s a pretty good wage. AP: I would too. Especially for the times. LR: After you joined the military service and got back here into Ogden, you opened up your own business and were able to provide a service to Ogden. Can you talk a little bit about that? RC: When I first got out of the military, I was separated from the military in southern California. I got a job in California, for the state of the California. Kind of an interesting thing that happened there. I was in my grubbies, I was working on my car and I passed the employment service and I walked in. I had kind of a greasy t-shirt and whatever you have working on a car and they wouldn't give me the time of day. They thought I was a vagrant I suppose and I walked out of there and I thought, “Well, that was a dumb thing to do,” Since I was an officer in the Navy and I actually flew airplanes in the Navy, the next day I put on my uniform and walked into the employment office and boy they rolled out the red carpet and I got a job the very next day interviewing service people at the San Pedro Naval Port, where the seamen were discharged. My job was to interview them and give them the certain options they had and answer questions they had ask employment and some of the things that were available to returning veterans there. My point about this is that if you are looking for employment, just simply be prepared and dress like you need a job and want one. It wasn't too many years 10 ago, I volunteered for about 11 year’s right here, in my later life to give people pointers on employment because I had my own business. My employment was in California. I used to go around to different businesses and see if they would employ people and I became interested in utility trailers, box trailers. I guess the common name for them now is U-Haul, but I thought that it would be a good thing to do. I didn't see any when I was still here in Ogden so I bought 30 of them. I had them built, just the frames of them. I had them shipped from California to Ogden and put them together here, such as putting the boards on for the side walls, boards for the floors and I had to get tires and tubes for the wheels to put them together so they could be useable. This was in July of 1946. I was separated out of the Navy in December of ’45, so were talking about a six month period from the time I was released from the Navy to when I got back here in Ogden. I had them shipped to my parents’ home—ended up on the River Bridge at 1828 Washington which was right on the river, on the east side, right on the river bank. It was a small building I rented from an individual. I had about a third of an acre around there and I set the trailers out on the ground and I rented them out. I provided a service to people that needed to haul things and go hunting with them, a lot of things like that—kind of a forerunner to what’s going on nowadays. Trailer businesses are immense now. I went on that river bridge in 1946 and was there until 1951. That year the river flooded and it sort of wiped out the ground part that I was located on. I had to run it all by myself because there wasn’t income for anybody else. I kept track of where the trailers were rented, where the people lived that rented them and I put 11 them on a map of the city and kind of watched where the dots were. It moved the center point of where I figured was a good place to be, quite a ways south. I ended up at 3776 Wall Avenue. This was on the east side of Wall and at that time there had been a shop building built by the person in the iron railing business and he quit or retired or something and I took that property over. Interesting thing, if you went south on Wall Avenue from Ogden City when you got to 36th street, between there and Riverdale Road, there was nothing but dirt then. So I had to go up 36th to Lincoln and then South to get onto Riverdale Road, but my strategy was to move to where there was sort of a center point of the area and that’s why I went out there. I expanded on that building, I hired different people to work for me from time to time. Otherwise, I pretty much had to do things myself. I’d go from sort of hand to mouth for income, which I guess you could say wasn’t a very good idea, but it worked out. I built an addition to that building and then in about in 1951 or ‘52 along in there. Now, before I went in the service, I had a friend, I asked him if he would like to join the business. Because he had a job and there wasn’t enough income for both of us, he had to stay with the job he had until we could build a store. Then we pretty much turned partners for the next 34-35 years. I ended up with frontage on Riverdale Road and Wall Avenue and all that area through there. Actually, I was in South Ogden City. Where Chimes View Drive runs through the property was the border line between Ogden and South Ogden and I was on the Southside. So I was actually in South Ogden. I went from trailers to rental equipment, wheel barrows, cement mixers, tillers, and all kinds of different equipment and ended up as a RV dealer selling 12 travel trailers and motorhomes, pick-up campers and all that type of thing. I retired in 1986 after 40 years in that. LR: So from your vantage point, as you were able to watch Ogden grow and expand, was it interesting to see how Ogden changed? RC: Oh man, sure it was! Actually, on the corner of 36th and Lincoln, there was a drive-in theater there. It was a night-time thing and I could’ve bought that corner that time for $25,000, I remember that, but I could barely come up with the $8,000 it took to buy the place that I had bought at 3776 Wall. Now, if you fast forward from 1946 until now you got that whole corner that is Costco and it takes most everything from 36th street to the bluff of the road that drops down into the property of Costco, and the only other thing on the corner is the America First Credit Union there. Interestingly enough, I don’t know how long they’ve been there or when they came, but now the America First Credit Union is building a building on the corner, the northwest corner of Washington and 21st street and going from there, as far as expanding is concerned—and gracious me, as far as the growth of Ogden. When I was living on Madison in the first part of my school days, I went to the Dee School in first grade, to the Madison school on 24th and Madison for something like the fifth grade and then went up to 27th and Adams for Central Junior High School and then to Ogden High School for graduation from Ogden High in 1940. I went three years at Ogden High. Getting back to what I first started to tell you, I can remember a black smith’s shop between 22nd and 23rd on the east side of Washington that took big work horses and saddle horses and put shoes on the horses. I was going to try to 13 tell you the name of the black smith in there, I can’t quite remember that but maybe I will. I can remember going into that blacksmith’s shop and watching him take just a rod of iron and putting it in a hearth and getting it red hot and pounding it on, part of a railroad track, actually they called it an Anvil, and he’d hammer that flat and make it into the shape of a horse shoe and punch holes into it and nail it onto a horse’s hoof. Some of those work horse’s had hooves as big as a dinner plate, I can tell you that for sure. Interesting that he could put what you call a cork on those shoes. He would bend the iron down on the back of the two pointed edges and the circle part on the front he pounded out a cork, they call them a cork, it was a wedge that would clip into the ground for the horse instead of having just a flat horseshoe, they would have three corks that would dig into the earth, so they couldn’t slip when they were going. Later on, I can remember, it might even been that same black smiths shop, a car dealer, sold cars in there. His name was Jesse Chase and they were lined up in this building. I guess he had about 50 cars in there. Further south, there was implement dealers, those buildings right now are being renovated. There’s sports stores in there but they were originally used to sell Conestoga Wagons. The wagons like the pioneers came across the plains in. They sold plows, bailing machinery and tractors, swaths, cutting, hay cutting machines, hay bailer machines. I think it was called Steven’s Implement Company. Further south and back behind the Ben Lomond Hotel on Ogden Avenue between 25th and 26th was the old Weber Central Dairy. You could go in there and you could buy a cup of buttermilk for a nickel and if you didn’t have the 14 nickel you got the buttermilk anyways because it was depression time. In those early days, boy, I’ll tell you, a lot of kids and a lot of people would end up down there getting that buttermilk. I don’t know how they work things out now at dairies for buttermilk but we got buttermilk then. That brings me to another story when we lived at 2026 Madison. About the same times as the JC Penny circumstance. I got the idea that I wanted to be a cowboy and I wanted a horse and the stadium down by the river at the end of Madison avenue, north and down to the river was my motivation. They started rodeos down there in 1935. My dad says: “I don’t know how we can work out having a horse,” but he thought about it a little bit. Over in the north side of the cemetery on the east side of Madison at about the 19th block, there was Wheelwright Construction Company. They had a gravel pit and springs which ran water west to Madison. My dad contacted the Wheelwright Construction Company and wanted to know, could we put a corral on that stream so that the horse could have drinking water and I could have my horse. The downside of that was we had to take cow because we couldn’t afford to feed a horse, but we could take the milk and sell it to buy hay for the cow and the horse and we worked it out that way so I could have my horse. That summer, I rode down Madison north down to the river to the bottom of the hill, down the flat part—you can go down there anytime and see that it’s blocked off from Madison, but you can still go down to the river and see it. In 1935 there was a rodeo guy in a tent there and his name was Monty Montana. He was hired by the first rodeo committee to be a trick rider and a roper. Because I was on my horse, I ended up riding for him to 15 practice down on that flat. Then, when he went into the rodeo, I hauled all of those ropes in there for him to use each night they had that rodeo. I can remember a lot of the people down in the Ogden Stadium, I can’t remember all their names but I can remember a couple people, some people I would even remember now. There was a man by the name of Yakama Kunut, there was a man by the name of Jazbo Fulkerson, there was Monty Montana, and Slim Pickens was also one of the guys that would come to perform at the rodeo in the rodeo season. There were numerous other people I never did get acquainted with. I was enthused by it because I thought it something I would be as a cowboy someday. LR: And you ended up with your own business selling trailers. RC: I ended up with my own business. LR: Good for you. RC: I don’t know if you wanted to go back to England about something, when I was in the military. Is that interesting at all? LR: If you would like to talk about it. RC: Well, I spent the year of 1944 in England and I was flying as a pilot in a four-engine bomber and our mission was to keep the German U-boat from knocking out our shipping. And the R&R, the recreation part of our stay in England was a pub. The people over there at the pub, when they would see movies from The United States, they saw John Wayne and people like him and others that were in movies, they found out I’m from Utah and since I didn’t look like an Indian, I had to be a cowboy. As far as they knew, there were only cowboys and 16 Indians in Utah; that was the mindset of the people over there. This pub, I mean they were just local people, farmers mostly. There wasn’t much of anything commercial but this big airport nearby. But anyway, trying to get on with the story, this one farmer, he had a horse and every time he would get on it, it would buck him off. They got to reasoning that if I was a cowboy from Utah and wasn’t an Indian that I was able to do something with horses to keep them from bucking people off. I didn’t have much of a choice. I got kind of ramrodded into that situation. So, I agreed to do that because I grew up pretty much with horses. I made a date and went over to this guy’s place and so help me that was the biggest, tallest horse I’ve ever seen in my life. It wasn’t anything like the ones I rode at home. I had to get up on to that horse and I looked at the thing they called a saddle, it looked more like a postage stamp to me. It wasn’t very big. It had a seat alright, but no horn to hang onto, no pommel, no back seat or anything like that. But it did have straps across the back and across the front of that saddle and they could adjust those straps to the girth that went around the belly of the horse. Depending on how far the withers was up on the back of the horse so that the saddle would fit. If you’d lengthen the back strap and shorten up the front strap, the saddle would go forward. If you’d lengthen the front strap and tighten up the back straps, it would push the saddle back. So I looked at the straps and by the time I got through looking, I noticed that the buckle, on the right rear of the saddle that the buckle was flopped clear over and twisted for some reason or another I couldn’t figure that out at the time. I undone the buckle and hooked the strap so that it was flat. In my head I got to thinkin’, “That buckle was 17 twisted and that buckle stood up on its edge rather than flat.” My mind said to me, ‘When that guy as he rode he hit the seat of that saddle and that saddle hit that buckle and that buckle would hit those ribs and off he’d come.” And that’s the first thing I did is flatten that out. So, in order to get on that horse, he had to give me a leg and practically throw me up. When I got up there and get in the saddle, he backed up because he knew that I was going to get piled off, but nope! I just road that horse all over the place, just had a blast. I looked at the ground that was all plowed out there and thought, “Well, if I got bucked off, that’s not too bad to land on.” But, you know, I gained the reputation of the world’s best cowboy over there in England at that pub because I fixed that buckle and I never told them that I changed that buckle, I just let them believe that I was a pretty good cowboy. LR: That’s a great story, thank you for sharing it. Coming back into the United States now, there was another story that you told that we would love to hear again. It was about the Ogden City Cemetery when you graduated from high school, the pick-axe and the shovel. RC: Okay, alright. The year is 1940, the year I graduated from high school. In the spring of that year the individual that was a cemetery sextant, was a member of the bishop of the church and he looked out for youngsters. I was pretty ambitious and I got hired. There were about six teams of adults and a younger person like myself and we had a part of the cemetery to cut grass. Ours went from Jefferson to Madison, back to the middle of the cemetery up to Madison and back to 20th and that square was our part. We had a push mower, a real type of mower where 18 the blades twirled and cut the grass that way. There was enough grass in the area that it took five days to mow and you’d get to the point where you would start over each week. Sometime during that summer time there were more graves to be dug than grave-diggers. So they recruited a couple of us guys, but I guess I can only remember myself, but they drove four stakes in the ground and said here is a pick and here is a shovel. Go ahead and dig that hole down in between those four points until you can’t see over the top of the ground and that’s going to be the grave for some individual. You’d pitch the dirt out on a pile and then you’d put an artificial grass mat over that pile to sort of hide the looks of it. Nowadays they haul that away. So in 1940, I did that and I’ll fast forward to 1980, I'm a lot older and an adult now and I was called as the bishop of the ward that we live in, and as I was released from that position, the person by the name of Scott Smeddon, who happened to also be a school teacher as well as the Mayor of Ogden City, was called to fill the position of the bishop. I sat with him as kind of a courtesy to help him get the feel of conducting a funeral. Much to my surprise when we got to the cemetery, this is 40 years since I dug that grave. But guess what I saw there. I saw a dump-truck, a backhoe and a pick-up and there were five people there. There was a woman in the pick-up and a man in the dump-truck and a man on the backhoe and two other men leaning on shovels. And that whole scene was duplicated by my pick and shovel 40 years earlier. I did everything with a pick and shovel that they did with a dump truck, backhoe, pick-up and five people. That was a real surprise to me. It was interesting 19 because, I don’t know, it’s progress. I told Scott about that and he said, “Well, look at all the people you keep off the street nowadays.” AP: You mentioned that you went to Ogden High School. Were you the second class of graduating seniors? RC: No. I think I was about the third class as I recall. I think ’38, ’39 and ’40 graduated from Ogden High. I’m not positive about that but I’m quite sure that’s about it. Because my brother whose older than I graduated from Ogden High, which is on the corner of 25th and Madison, before the building of the Ogden High School up at 28th and Harrison. They had an ROTC in the school. I didn’t care for that. I just took a gym class instead. I didn’t like those wool uniforms in the summertime. AP: I can’t blame ya. LP: Yeah, yeah they do. I agree. AP: Do you remember anything else about Harm Perry? You said he started the rodeo—The Days of 47 Rodeo? RC: Not really. I can remember that his daughter, Rosanne, graduated from Ogden High the same year that I did. In fact, I think that was their only child, that Harm and his wife, Rosanne Perry, who is still living I’m quite sure. A good person. I was quite friendly with her. We had about 600 people in the class of Ogden High at that time I think. Probably one of the most interesting things that happened in that year at Ogden High was the choir, which I was in, went to the Music Educators National Conference in Los Angeles that year and performed in a Western United States, all by invitation. I don’t remember how many people went, but I think we were restricted to about 50 or 60. Some kids didn’t get to go 20 because they had to balance out among the four parts of the choir but I went. Other than that, there wasn’t much that went on, as far as high school is concerned. I can’t think of anything notorious. I did tumbling and that kind of exercise, climb ropes up to the ceiling and things like that. I did think about something though, I got pretty good at walking on my hands and I could walk around the entire gym on the black line, on my hands, clear around the perimeter of the basketball court, feet in the air. Nobody else could do that, I was the only one who did that. I don’t want to brag. LR: It’s okay. AP: Was your business close to 25th and Wall? RC: No, my business life was mostly at 37th and Wall. So, as far as the Union Station is concerned, going back to my father working for the Southern Pacific Railroad, I used to go to the Union Station a lot because we used to have passes on the train. Anywhere that the Southern Pacific went, we could get on the train free and ride. I spent my summers in California because my father’s brother, Uncle Leo, lived in Alameda, California. The bridge that goes from San Francisco to over the bay area wasn’t built then, it was a ferry boat then all the time. I spent two or three weeks down there each summer. I would get on the ferry first thing in the morning, with a pass to stay on it all day long and I would just watch the seagulls and watched ships and things go back and forth. Conductors never did bother us on the train cause they didn’t even care about us, we just had a pass to California and back. 21 AP: You made a comment last time about how Ogden kind of changed after the railway kind of moved to Salt Lake. RC: Well, we don’t even have any Amtrak in Ogden; we did have Amtrak for a while. I don’t know how many years it’s been gone. In the early part of the railroad, as far as the station and that was concerned, Ogden was more of a railroad town that Salt Lake because the trains came out of Weber Canyon from across Wyoming on the Union Pacific and join here. That sort of quit. I don’t remember especially, it just sorta faded away like things do. You go from horses to cars and nowadays, we go from snail-mail to no mail at all, as far as first-class mail is concerned. I think we’re in a world of hurt about the post office department right now. Technical advances in cyber-space has done so much. Looking at that camera now it’s pretty small compared to in the past. The automobiles we’re driving now and everything. People in space. Right now, in the paper this morning, it talked about two different private firms of delivering cargo to the space station, and doing it successfully, that’s NASA and it’s on its way out. LR: So did the closing of the railroad actually hurt a lot of the businesses on 25th street, did that effect your business at all? RC: No. Not as far as my business is concerned. LR: So it really was just centered, it really just hurt those on 25th street then. RC: Yeah. The only thing about 25th street is that it has lived with run down stores and run down places for years and years until the last 10 or so years and now it’s back in full swing again. It’s a lively part of Ogden and it’s a vital part of Ogden as far as Saturday things that’s going on. The farmers market is down there and 22 things like that. There is the federal building down there that’s replaced some of the other stores. Golly, I wish I could remember all of the other names of some of these stores that it used to have. One of the famous stores in the Ogden City at that time was Ross and Jack’s Café, its right where the bank sits on the corner of 25th and Washington. Not too many places I can recall but that was something that was pretty prominent was this particular café. You could buy a hamburger for a nickel. Actually, the movie picture building is interesting. It was the Egyptian Theater that has now been turned into a big commercial place for businesses and things that come in. But half a block west was the Paramount Theater on Ogden Avenue. Then there was the Lyceum Theater on 25th street, just below Grant on the south side, there was a moving picture firm east of Washington on the south side, no, the north side of 25th street. I forget the name of that one. There used to be a place called the White City, it was a ballroom up there on 25th Street. and it really a nice pretty place, people danced there. And then down on 24th, on the south side just below Grant is the Berthana, but that building is still there. They’re going to renovate that, it was a dance hall that was really famous and they turned it into a roller-skating rink later on and now it’s back refurbished to some degree. We used to go to dances down there but. So right now I’m so surprised when I drive around Ogden to see the many, many residential areas being built. Clear up to the mountain behind Weber State College, clear up to the shoreline of the old Bonneville Lake, even beyond when you get a little further south in to the Uinta area, that’s even above the shoreline area, there is even homes up 23 there overlooking the city and going clear-out where it joins Harrisville and North Ogden. It’s absolutely amazing. LR: I just have one more question, I don’t know about you, Avery, but Ross and Jack’s made me think of this. What was your favorite restaurant on 25th street? If you had you pick one of the many that were there. RC: As a restaurant is concerned, I didn’t have any money to buy meals out of a restaurant. I could go to Ross and Jack’s café and buy but it never dawned on me as a youth to go to restaurants and far be it for my family to either. But obviously there were some there. Most of them, you would find they were in the hotels like they still are. There are only one or two things I can think of—noodle parlors, there was one on Ogden Avenue and one down 25th street that’s recently been terminated as far as a restaurant, it sits vacant right now. But noodle parlors were prominent for a lot of years. As far as steak-houses and things like that, like you think of now, that wasn’t even part of my vocabulary even. LR: I can relate to that. Well, I am so grateful for the time you have given us and the stories you have shared about Ogden and some of your adventures. We appreciate your time and thank you so much for allowing us to do this. RC: Well, it kind of turned out to kind of be a pleasure to me. I got a kick out of it. 24