Oral History Program Cyril “Gene” Nopper Interviewed by Charles Trentelman 29 October 2013 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Cyril “Gene” Nopper Interviewed by Charles Trentelman 29 October 2013 Copyright © 2023 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 house flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. After World War II, the railroad business declined. Some government agencies and business 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 small 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: Nopper, Cyril “Gene”, an oral history by Charles Trentelman, 29 October 2013, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Cyril “Gene” Nopper October 29, 2013 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Cyril “Gene” Nopper, conducted October 29, 2013 by Charles Trentelman. Nopper talks about his memories of working for the Union Pacific and visiting 25th Street as a young man. CT: This is Charlie Trentelman. I’m interviewing Gene Nopper at Union Station for the Weber State Union Station Oral History Project. Tell me a little bit about yourself Gene. Where were you born? GN: I was born in Ogden, Utah at the Dee Hospital in 1934. Lived in Ogden all my life until I went in the army in 1956 to 1958. I went to the University of Utah, graduated in 1960. Moved to Oakland, California in 1965. Moved to Denver, Colorado in 1973. Moved to Carrol, Iowa 1978. Lived in Carrol, Iowa from 1978 to 1997. Went back to Ogden in 1997. CT: So you retired in Ogden? GN: I retired in Carrol, Iowa. This is my residence after retirement. CT: So pretty much lifelong with one or two interruptions? GN: Interruption from 1956 to 1997. CT: In ‘56 the town was kind of on its downward spiral. GN: Because the railroad was disappearing and I did work for the railroad from 1952 to 1956. I worked for railroad in 1958, and 1959, and 1960. Mostly summer jobs. In 1959 I worked for the Union Pacific in Denver, Colorado. CT: What were you doing for them? GN: My first job was over at the laundry. I was a night janitor. I worked the night shift as a linen sorter and a washer operator/dryer operator. Then I worked in 1 servicing trains putting linen in the train. I put linen in the bagging cars then I worked at the commissary which we set up supplies for the dining cars and we took them out to the dining cars. When the dining cars came into town we’d put them in the dining car. In 1959 I went to Denver as a dining car steward. I ran the City of Denver, the Portland, and I think if I remember right maybe a couple trips on the Overland. Yeah a couple of trips to Kansas City. Normally Chicago to Portland, Chicago to Denver. Then rode a trip on the Southern Pacific to the bay area from Ogden to Oakland and back. There were never any trips to Los Angeles on the railroad working as a steward. CT: Now you mentioned working in the laundry building first. The laundry building now is just a complete disaster, a vacant shell. What was that, describe working in that place. GN: Did all of the laundry for the dining cars. Napkins, waiter coats, waiter pants, tablecloths, and table tops, and table pads. Dish towels, sheet, blankets, pillow cases and the linen from Sun Valley, Idaho the sheets, blankets, tablecloths, table pads, napkins we did laundry for the Union Pacific Dining lines in West Yellowstone, Montana. Which was table cloths, table pads, napkins, cook’s coats and waiter coats. Cook coats and waiter coats for the dining cars. All of the dining car linens of the Union Pacific system were all washed in Ogden. CT: So they’d bring a freight car full of laundry every day? GN: Every day, every train in the baggage car would have two or three hampers full of dirty linens. We’d pull them off the train and take them over there, sort them out into bins and wash them and press them. Put them back in bins and put them 2 back on the train. The laundry had places to store linens in Omaha, Denver, Pocatello, Portland, Los Angeles, I believe St. Louis. Chicago, no we didn’t have anything in Chicago sorry. That’s northwestern. We would supply all the clean laundry to some of these and then they would stock the dining cars with those linens. When the trains would come through Ogden they’d throw the bags out and we’d put the hampers inside the baggage car or in the dining car. Most of the time in the dining car. CT: So every train in the system came through Ogden often enough to get or they exchanged the linens somewhere else but it all ended up here? GN: Except for the ones that bypassed Ogden going up through Pocatello up to Portland and Seattle. We’d service those trains from Pocatello. CT: That’s a heck of a big laundry system. GN: They ran three shifts a day. The third shift was usually me, the janitor who would clean the place up. Two shifts a day were washing clothes. CT: So there must have been mountains of laundry? GN: Well if you could’ve seen those bins. They’re about half the size of this room. We had a conveyor belt and we’d tip a hamper full of dirty linen on the conveyor belt and there would be about nine guys down the belt and about nine or ten bins and if you were pulling napkins you’d throw them in the napkin bin. If you were pulling tabletops you’d throw them in the tabletop bin. If you were pulling coats you would throw them in the coat bin. So guys who were all over this conveyor belt were looking for what they were sorting throwing them into the bins. 3 On the other end of the bin there would be a huge cart. The washer man would open the bin up and drag up a cart full of tablecloths or napkins or dish cloths or something like that. They’d take them to the washing machine, fill the washing machine. Once those were washed we put them in a huge spinner or dryer and spun all the water out. From there they went to the presses and mangles. The mangles did all the flat work, the presses were for coats and pants and things like that. Then the dryers were for towels and other stuff that went to the dryer. So there were three, after the linen was washed there were three processes. Either the dryer, the steam presses or the mangles. Then when they came down the other end there was another conveyor belt and as they would come out of the mangle or out of the dryer they would stack them and then there would by a girl down there with a tying machine. She’d bundle a sack of napkins, stack of tablecloths, or a stack of waiter coats then she’d tie them in a bundle. Then we’d sort the bundles into different hampers and then those hampers would get sent back out. They’d get loaded on a baggage truck and we’d pull them out and spot them on the different areas of the tracks. We usually could guess pretty close where the baggage car would stop or the dining car would stop. We would be out there when the train would pull into town and as soon as they got the door open we’d throw that stuff in there and pull all that stuff out. CT: How many people worked in that building? GN: Oh it was a lot of people. I don’t know the exact number, but there were at least three or four washmen. At least nine or ten linen sorters and a lot of girls. Then in 4 the front of the building there was a seamstress shop. They had about six girls with sewing machines. They were sewing up coats and tablecloths. Sewing up waiter coats and cook coats. When the press girl would notice something that would need to be prepared she’d set it aside and then send it up to the seamstress. The sewing room would repair it and put it back into service. CT: This stuff was all white wasn’t it? GN: No most of the tablecloths were yellow. For the new dome diners they were pink. CT: Why pink? GN: I don’t know whether pink is a good enough description of the color. They were almost golden pink, matched the silverware on the dome diners of the city of Los Angeles and San Francisco were gold. They weren’t real gold, but that was the color of them. CT: So this would have been in the 1950s? GN: 1950s yeah. CT: So you spent one or two years working in the laundry? GN: 1952 to 1960, every summer except for the two years I was in the army. I worked in the laundry, the commissary, or the dining cars. During Christmas holidays I would work in the baggage room and we would sort the Christmas mail. We’d work the mail cars on the mail trains at night. CT: What was the commissary like? GN: The commissary supplied the food, can goods, the meats, and vegetables for the dining cars that stocked out of Ogden or that passed through Ogden. We worked twenty four hours there every day. The dining cars as they passed through like 5 Las Vegas, Evanston, or Reno would send a telegram to the Ogden commissary and say okay we’re out of this and this and this. We would get the food, canned goods that they wanted, washing materials like soaps, we’d get the bread, the flour, the meat. We had dishes and silverware in there too that we would provide for the dining cars. If the car was stocked here in Ogden it went out of Ogden with a full complement of food and dishes. As it would pass through the various commissaries like in Cheyenne or Omaha or Denver or Pocatello, Los Angeles. They could pick up additional supplies. CT: That was back when the dining cars did all the cooking itself? GN: They cooked everything. CT: It’s not like Amtrak now where it’s all microwave. GN: We would take out steaks, rack of lambs, halibut, a whole halibut. CT: A whole halibut? GN: Well a big chunk of fish and we would take out all the tomatoes and cooked celery and potatoes. We would have bread on there. The Union Pacific was known for its French toast. It’s nothing more than Texas toast, wonder bread Texas toast that was deep fried in a deep fryer in the diner. It was really good. If you ever ate it you’d remember it. CT: Where did the UP get all of that? Was it all locally sourced? GN: It was all purchased locally. However, we would put dry ice in there to keep the freezer and the refrigerators. Then we put Presto logs for the ovens and for the stoves. The Presto logs came somewhere from the northwest, I’m not sure. The dry ice came from Farr’s I think. 6 CT: What is a Presto log? GN: A Presto log was a compressed saw dust with some sort of chemical in there. It was about this long and about this big around. Throw them in there and you could light them and they would burn slow, they would heat the range, the stove. They would keep the oven hot. CT: They did that on the train? GN: They did that in the dining car kitchen. Then they also had charcoal briquettes that we put in there. The charcoal briquettes were to be used under the grill. So the first thing the cook did in the morning was get in there and he’d start the fire in the range. He’d get the charcoal briquettes and that would heat the water too. Course a lot of the water was heated by the steam of the train. There were huge water tanks above the range where water was stored. CT: Basically a fireplace log and charcoal to cook with? I never knew. I always assumed it would’ve been like gas or maybe steam heat from the train or something or electric. GN: The train would keep the serving counters warm and there’d be hot water in there and steam in there, but the heat for the stove, the range, the ovens, the grill came from Presto logs or from charcoal. CT: That blows me away. This is in the 1950s. It just sounds rather low-tech, but apparently it worked. GN: I think some of the dome dining cars in the 1960s and 1970s had more advanced. The means of heating things, it was probably gas. 7 CT: So the commissary here in Ogden must have had quite a network of buyers then to get all this stuff? GN: There was a commissary store keeper whose job was to keep the store supplies. Sometimes stuff would come in from Omaha or places like that where the main offices of dining cars were from Omaha. Soaps and things of that nature would be bought in bulk. Like the Presto logs would come in a box car and we’d just park the box car on the side and when somebody would order a half a dozen Presto logs we would just go to the box car and unload them. We didn’t try and store them in the building. CT: So then you worked in the baggage or the mail you said? GN: Yeah we sorted mail. When a mail train would come in we’d take about 8 wagons and pull up to the door and then some guy would pull the mailbags out and we each had a destination for the mailbags. He would say, “This is Portland” and he’d throw it to the baggage truck for Portland. We’d pile them up, catch them and stack them up. So there would be about six or seven guys working each door. That way we’d go to another door and the cars that would be open in Ogden we worked. CT: You were out here on the landing pulling those carts with the real big wheels? GN: Yeah those great big wheels. We were working alongside the car. The mail train would come in on one of the tracks and we knew which car we had to work or what bags we had to pull out. 8 CT: Were you working for them, there was some year that was in the late 50s where around Christmas time all the mail got clogged up in Chicago. We didn’t finally end up getting stuff until February. GN: I don’t remember that. CT: It was huge because this was back before airplanes carried everything. They got so much Christmas mail that year I remember that everything got clogged up in Chicago and they just had mountains of mail they couldn’t move fast enough or something. GN: I didn’t have anything to do with that. There was a lot of mail trains that came through here. Couldn’t tell you how many, but I know when I would come in about 11:00 and I’d go home about 8:00 in the morning. There would be a couple of trains that we would work. CT: And that was your job? To pull the mail off in bags and put it in the other? GN: We would pull it off in bags and bring it into the terminal, the main sorting terminal. I guess they would open the bags and sort. CT: You didn’t sort the mail? GN: No I didn’t sort any mail. Just stack bags. CT: You were just muscle. GN: Just a dirty cold job. CT: What was the station like when you were working in it back then? GN: It was the most busy. Yeah activity here all twenty four hours a day seven days a week. People working every day, the little coffee shop down there was never closed. You could get a cup of coffee any time of the day or night. 9 CT: Where was it located? GN: In the corner down there where the Union Grill is. CT: Where the Union Grill is now? That was open then? GN: Yeah. There’s a picture of that in the library files. CT: So that wall there with windows that wasn’t there back then? GN: The grille is now where most of the dining room seating was, outside in those days. That’s where we would park those baggage wagons and the rail express wagons to get clothes out of them. CT: Would you say there were passengers coming through all the time? GN: Yes there were trains. The train hour was usually in the early morning or in the late afternoon. That was when the passenger trains all came through, but there were switch engines running up and down the tracks all the time switching. When the city of Los Angeles would come into town it would come into town and head north. Then they’d put a switch engine on the back of it when it was time for it leave. They’d pull it out to the Y which is out there where the railroad goes south. You had to uncouple and then the train would take off for Salt Lake. The reason they did that is so the switch engine had the air brakes. They controlled the brakes on the train. The trains going north used to go out onto Wall Avenue. The rails went out on Wall Avenue and they went out I guess two or three blocks then they headed north again. CT: You mentioned going up and down 25th Street. Now how old were you then? GN: During the 1940s I would have been about from twelve years old to eighteen. Then during the 1950s when I was working down here at night and sometimes 10 during the day 25th Street was the place where we would go to get something to eat or if you just wanted to see the action. CT: Now there was still a lot of action in the 1950s then? There was? GN: The late 1940s and early 1950s was when I remember it being active. Anybody with a driver’s license by then would come down and park and watch them throw the drunks out of the bars. CT: Did you ever run into Ward Armstrong down at Armstrong Sporting Goods? GN: Claude Armstrong was in the same class as I was in high school. CT: Yeah they told me some good stuff about watching guys bleed to death in the bar next door, that kind of thing. GN: I was on the Bamberger one day going to Salt Lake and it pulled up to Lincoln and 25th Street and there was a guy laying on the side of the street. He was bleeding through the mouth and I will never forget that, that’s in my mind. That’s a picture I’ll never forget. What bothered me the most was nobody was paying any attention to him. CT: Where was he laying? GN: On the side of the street on Lincoln Avenue and 25th. CT: Just lying there bleeding? GN: Just lying there bleeding. The motor man on the Bamberger, it didn’t seem to bother him a bit we just took off. CT: Okay, well Claude mentioned walking down the street once and watching a guy come out of the porter’s and waiter’s club over there with a knife stuck all the way through him. Leaning up against a lamp post dying right there. He said that kind 11 of took the thrill out of walking down the street down to the freight office after that. He tried not to do that anymore. GN: We didn’t walk up on the south side of 25th between Lincoln and Wall. We would walk up on the north side. CT: That was the black side of the street and this was the white side of the street. When did you become aware of that? GN: When I turned sixteen and got a driver’s license I could borrow my dad’s car and carouse around downtown with it. CT: Before then you were down here still around 25th Street, weren’t you? GN: Maybe. CT: When did you become aware that that was the side of the street you didn’t go on? Was it just normal? GN: Oh I don’t think I ever was not aware of that. See my father was the superintendent of dining cars and he was the employer of most of the colored people in town. They were working as waiter’s and cooks in the dining cars. He had a good relationship with them. He knew Anna Belle and Billy Weakley. CT: Weakley yeah. GN: He could go over to the club and he could walk in there and they knew who he was. When he asked for he usually got. He’d say, “I want to know where this guy is because he’s supposed to go out on the train tonight.” So they would get that guy for him. CT: They could stay in the club, it wasn’t just a bar, they had rooms. GN: Yeah they could get a room. 12 CT: So that was just the way you were brought up then? Blacks over here and whites over here. GN: There was just no questioning it. When you drove up 25th Street and if I was the one who was driving the car or riding in the car you could tell that these people were all colored people and these were all white people. CT: That’s just the way it was too. GN: The facts of the matter. I never went into the porter’s and waiter’s club, but I know my father would go in there quite often. CT: Where did you go? GN: I didn’t frequent bars, I was too young to do that. I didn’t frequent any bars until I got in the army. That’s where I learned to have a beer. CT: What about restaurants? GN: The one I liked best was about four doors up 25th Street from Wall. I think it was a Chinese Cafe or Chinese cooking at least. I remember Ross and Jack up on 25th Street between Washington and Grant. That was a really nice place. CT: They had mashed potatoes or something like that that was good. GN: Yeah. Then there was a couple of places to eat along Washington Boulevard. I think there was a place called Keely’s. Then my father used to like to go to take us over to the Hotel Ben Lomond. They had a coffee shop and it was a good place to go to eat. CT: I always missed looking out at the window and not seeing the Healy Hotel. I’ve seen pictures of it and it would’ve been, you know, right over there. GN: It would be on the northeast corner. 13 CT: Yeah right over there. Right outside our windows here. I’m looking to see which would have been that restaurant You’ve got the Healy Hotel, 101 was state liquor store, 104 was the Healy Tavern and Burt’s Lunch, 106 was the Healy Barber Shop. Let’s see 108 was the Depot Drug store, 112 was the City Café. GN: That probably was it. CT: Think that was it? According to this, in 1951 they had a telephone there. Let’s see it doesn’t say who was running it. City Café, let’s see 122, 126 was the club, still there. 127 across the street was the porter’s and waiters. The Roosevelt Hotel was there then. Do you remember anything about the Roosevelt? GN: I just remember it had a lot of blue tile in front of it. CT: The second floor has a terrazzo floor. Which fascinates me and all of the lighting fixtures and everything are still right out of 1940s. Nothing has changed in that place in 50 years. It’s really interesting. I mean if you were to go in there you’d think you were 20 years old again. GN: I’d love to go in there. CT: It’s not a hotel anymore. It’s just single room occupants and guys just live there long term I think. Let’s see who ran the City Café? Childs, Christensen, a lot of chs in this thing. City Café, Charles Stamos manager according to this. What else along the street do you remember? Barry the tailor was there. GN: A little ways up was Morry’s Men Store. Murry Levi, he was a neighbor, lived across the street from us. He had men’s clothing. I’d been into Armstrong Sporting Goods store many times. Yellowstone Hotel, remember that pretty well. A friend of mine’s father owned that. 14 CT: Where was that located? GN: Grant and 25th Street on the west, northwest corner. It became, they had a Trailways depot in there. He serviced the Trailways buses in there. CT: What kind of a hotel was it? Was it a big hotel? GN: Transit hotel. It was fairly good size. I don’t know how many rooms but there were two or three floors. There were two sections of the hotel and the rooms were fairly decent. I don’t think they were own bathroom though, you had a common bathroom. CT: Common bathroom, kind of like the Marion did. I think they still do in fact. GN: They had, I think, restrooms and showers. I don’t remember them telling me if there were actually bathrooms in each one of the rooms like they do now. Across the street was the Greyhound Depot. There was a lot of bars. CT: Yeah you look up and down the street here you see a lot of listings for taverns and bars and things like that. GN: I don’t know if I should tell you this or not. We used to drive up the back alley at 25th Street and see if there were red lights CT: Well that was over on Electric Alley over there. GN: Yeah, Electric Alley. Drive up through there. And of course who could not remember the Rose Rooms on Grant. I never went in there. There’s a couple of interesting stories about that, but I’m not going to repeat them because I can’t verify that they really happened. Let’s see, what else do I remember? CT: Did you ever see Rose Davies and her ocelot I think is what it was? A cat she had. 15 GN: No. CT: She allegedly drove around town in a pretty fancy car and I’ve seen a picture of her with an ocelot I think is what it was. She was quite an attractive lady too. GN: I think she was. Washington Boulevard was a great street. It’s a shame that it’s not like it was then. CT: Yeah, everybody talks about Two Bit Street, but Washington Boulevard was where all the stores were. GN: That’s where the business was. Where the stores were, a really great place to come to. 25th Street was the rough end. Washington, and you didn’t go down to Washington unless you were dressed up because there was nice clothing stores. Clothing stores I really liked were Hoggans, Fred Nye, across the street was Bingham. My mother liked to shop at L. R. Samuel’s I think was the name of that store or Samuels. The Shoe Shine shop right off this little place up 25th Street or a little ways up Washington Boulevard from 25th. You could go in to get a shoe shine, really great. You don’t see that anymore except maybe at an airport. Of course, most of the shoes you don’t shine today. There was Kress and J.C. Penny’s. C. C. Anderson which later became another name, they changed the name to something else. I can’t remember. Armstrong Sporting Goods on lower 25th but on 24th Street was Kammeyer’s Sporting Goods. J.G. Reed was on the corner there. It had a great big horse, I remember that really well. CT: The horse was named “No newspaper dare prints anymore.” GN: That’s right, it is. 16 CT: For the record, and I have a newspaper to prove it, it’s called Old Nigger. GN: J. G. Reed had TV, the first TV’s and that was great to walk in there and watch a TV. That’s where my dad bought his first TV and that’s where I first saw TV, at the Reed Brothers. CT: What was on? GN: I can’t remember the shows. We used to like to watch Ed Sullivan and What’s my Line? The cowboy westerns, oh they were good. Growing up for me was the radio. Yeah it wasn’t until I was at Weber College before I saw my first TV show. World Series time was great with the TV. There were times I remember going down to Salt Lake City and watching the TV broadcast on the radio with some sort of a display outside I think one of the buildings. CT: Yeah you know I caught the tail end of that. They still played the World Series in the daytime back then. GN: Yeah those were great series when I was in the army. When we were in the army the soldering stopped during the World Series and we all gathered around the TV seated at the NCO club or at the dayroom or at the office of somebody. If we were lucky and you know somebody brought in a TV about this size we watched the TV. The army and soldiering stopped during the World Series. CT: I just remember when I was going to Judge High School. I think it was my freshman or sophomore year and we were going nuts trying to listen to the World Series and in between classes’ kids had transistor radios and they’d sneak an ear phone and give us an update on the scoring. That was when they still broadcast those things on the radio, people paid attention. I remember life 17 without a television set, that’s how old I am. We just had a radio. I listened to the Lone Ranger on the radio back in the early 1950s. GN: Lone Ranger and Superman and Captain Midnight or Tom Nicks. CT: Tom Nicks and Captain…. GN: Armstrong, Jack Armstrong. One of those broadcasts I’ll never forget was December 7, 1941. Come home from church and turned on the radio, which we always turned on and listening to the radio we heard, “We interrupt this broadcast for this special report.” From then on out whenever I hear the interrupt this broadcast for a special report I remember that day. CT: Really, all those years later? GN: That significantly changed everything that day. CT: The world changed. GN: It did. We learned how to get by with gas rationing, meat and sugar, we could only have so much sugar. We were fortunate my grandfather owned a flour mill, you know the Allo Wheat flour mill out there? So we never had to worry about getting all flour we wanted because he would make sure we had. At breakfast he made a breakfast cereal called All-o-wheat so we always had plenty. Which was kind of a coarse wheat, hot cereal. Which we ate so much of it, but during the war our world was different. The grocery stores didn’t have any candy and you know the grocery store my mother shopped at wasn’t any bigger than this room. CT: Yeah one of those little corner stores we used to have all around here. Yeah a lot of people forget Stimpson’s up there was the first supermarket in town. That was the big one. 18 GN: Yeah that was the big store. Then up the street was Bush’s Supermarket. I remember when that first opened up and they had a walk in freezer and you could rent a drawer in that freeze and I still have four of those drawers in my house because when they started selling freezers for the home that thing was the wonder, valuable. They tore out all those drawers and they were selling them on the street. CT: What kind of drawers are they? GN: They’re about this big and about this wide and about this high. There were two of them and I went down and bought four of them. You bought the drawer and then you bought the frame. So if you wanted two four drawers you bought four drawers and two frames. I still have them in the house, they’re really great storage units. CT: That’s a piece of history people don’t remember. GN: It had a lock and there was a key and when you rented that drawer you could go in there and you unlocked it and you went in there and you put your frozen meat in there or you took the frozen meat out. Course when the freezer became a part of the refrigerator and then it became a cabinet in the house. CT: There was no need for that anymore. GN: It was gone. CT: So you had to wait until the store was open before you could go get your hamburger for the day? GN: Well yeah. If you wanted any of the frozen food you had to wait until the store was open then you went down there and got it. During the war we didn’t buy a 19 lot. It was right after the war that you could go down to the meat packing plant and you could maybe get some meat that was packaged to be frozen. In those days they usually dipped them in wax. CT: Really? GN: Yeah, they would wrap it and then it would be in some sort of wax. CT: Oh it was wrapped up first and then dipped in wax to seal it? GN: Yeah to seal it up. I guess that prevented freezer burn, I don’t know. CT: Yeah I guess it would. GN: It had to be airtight. CT: Well you had to be airtight and that’s the thing. I often wondered how you guys survived without plastic wrap. GN: Wax paper. CT: Yeah wax paper, but even that’s not air tight. GN: In our life, you know, what you put on the table at night you ate. CT: You didn’t have leftovers. GN: There were no leftovers because if you had more than enough you ate it. If you had less than enough you went hungry. Going to the store was just for probably a day or two of food. Now Hugh’s Market up here on 26th Street just above Harrison, he used to deliver. My mother would call him on the phone and say, “I’d like a pound of hamburger, three pork chops, pound of sugar or five pounds of flour,” and he would be writing this down. Then some time that afternoon his truck would pull up to the house and it would come in boxes that she’d ordered. 20 Imagine that today. You walked into different stores where you can buy anything it’s amazing. You can buy anything from motor oil to angel food cake. CT: Well I’m old enough to remember when mom canned stuff in season because that’s all they had. So if you wanted this particular type of vegetable you either had it canned or you waited until it was in season. GN: In the fall every year we went to Idaho and got two sacks of potatoes and lasted the year. We drove down to Bountiful and bought a bushel of apples, and tomatoes we grew in the garden. We had a chicken coop in the backyard and once you could can that’s all we ate during the winter. CT: Now how did you preserve the potatoes all winter? GN: We have an area in our house that’s underneath the front porch that’s cold and it’s got a wooden floor or excuse me it’s got a dirt floor. It’s sealed off from the rest of the house and we’d put two 100 pound sacks of potatoes in there. It would be dark enough and cold enough so they wouldn’t start to mold. CT: Really? GN: Yeah. We had a coal furnace, coal burning furnace. In September we would go out to my grandfather’s mill and he had a coal yard. We’d load up a truck with at least two to three tons of coal and we’d bring it up to the house and we’d shovel every pound of coal into our house, into what we called the coal room. Filled that room up and we didn’t buy anything that heated. That was the heat for the rest of the winter. CT: You see those rooms now. People put their storage in them now. GN: That’s where my shop is today. 21 CT: You see those rooms and a lot of them still have the door on the outside. GN: I’ve still got the door. However, we replaced the little flap with Plexiglas window. CT: Oh okay so you could see in there now and get some light in the room yeah? GN: Get some light in there now. CT: Well do you want to go back to those days? GN: Not really. I think we have too much stuff to buy though. Our lifestyle is now either acquisition or thrill seeking. Our entertainment is to go to a mall. We used to just come downtown. CT: Get out and look around. GN: Walk around. CT: I know Ward and Claude were telling me that there were kids up and down 25th Street selling newspapers or shoeshines or whatever. Nobody ever bothered them, they were safe. Even on this horrible, terrible 25th Street. Everybody was out. You didn’t sit around the house watching TV all day. GN: As soon as we had breakfast we’d turn loose on the neighborhood and we wouldn’t go home at night until they called for dinner or they called for lunch. My mother didn’t worry about where we were at or what we were doing and now we live a block a half block away from Polk School. School starts in the morning and school ending in the afternoon is a massive traffic jam because there are very few kids that are walking to school. When I went to high school there was no parking lot. Now the drill field and all the beautiful green lawns are now parking lots. 22 CT: Yeah, that blows me away how many kids in high school have cars these days. When I went to high school some did, but not very many. GN: I don’t remember anybody having an automobile at my age during high school years except for one, I’m not going to mention his name. CT: Well it’s a brave new world Gene and I’m not entirely convinced it’s a better one either I’ll be honest with you. That’s just me. GN: I just can’t understand the fear that people have. Even the kids that walk to school their parents walk with them. I can’t understand the fear that everybody has that you’re not safe. Walk out the front door and you’re not safe. CT: Well all it took was one guy to kidnap one kid. GN: Yeah and it’s like the one Tylenol capsule got stuffed with something and now you can’t hardly get into half the package, most of the packages you can’t even get into them unless you got a knife. CT: It’s crazy how you react to those things because that sort of thing happened back then too. People just don’t react the same way. I don’t think it happens anymore now or any less, it’s just, people react differently. I don’t know it’s interesting. Well Gene I can only thank you sincerely. I’m running out of questions for you, but you’re fascinating. I wish I could plug into your brain and just download the 1950s you know. GN: They were great years I thought. The most significant thing is when Eisenhower created the interstate highway system he destroyed public transportation. He destroyed the railroads and he made it so everybody had to have a car. Everybody had to buy gas and now you turn 16 and you wonder how did I ever 23 get by without a car? I got grandkids now that just turned 16 and they got to have a car. So if you go anywhere today it’s a car. You’d come down here to this depot, you could buy a ticket to any city in the United States. Now the best you can do is Salt Lake City and you can buy airline fares to maybe ten or fifteen or twenty places and that’s it. CT: I sometimes think that they destroyed a lot, they made it so people didn’t have to travel with other people anymore. When they killed mass transit suddenly we became a nation of individual travelers. I think that destroyed a lot of the community. GN: Everybody moved out of the inner cities. The area that I live in now is all older residence. Today most of them are rentals. The people that built them are dead and their families that inherited them turned them into rental units. CT: Where do you live? GN: On Lake Street above Polk. Now next to me is a rental unit. CT: You’re not that far away from my brother then. He lives at 27th and Taylor. GN: Lake is where the high school is, the Catholic High School. I appreciate the high school being there because we get the snow plow really early. They’re always up that street and we’re very first on the garbage. I have the garbage can out by 6:30. CT: Well that’s good. 24