Oral History Program Joy Pettit and Gay Kershaw Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 2 October 2013 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Joy Pettit Gay Kershaw Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 2 October 2013 Copyright © 2013 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial 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: Pettit, Joy and Gay Kershaw, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 2 October 2013, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Gay Kershaw October 2, 2013 Joylene “Joy” Pettit October 2, 2013 Joylene Pettit and Gay Kershaw October 2, 2013 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Joy Pettit and Gay Kershaw. The interview was conducted on October 2, 2013, by Lorrie Rands in West Haven, Utah. Joy and Gay discuss their experiences with 25th Street. Rebekah Whitesides is on camera. LR: So, first of all, thank you so much for allowing us to come and do this, greatly appreciate it. It’s a lot of fun for us, too. Thank you. First off, we’ll start here with Gay and then we’ll move over. When and where were you born? GK: Right here in Ogden, Utah, at the Dee McKay Dee Hospital. LR: Okay. What year? GK: ‘32, 1932. LR: What were some of your—let’s do it this way, did you just live in Ogden? GK: Yeah, I lived in Ogden until I went to Ogden High School and went to Lewis Junior High and for elementary, it was Washington High and the first kindergarten and first grade. LR: Okay, and Joy? JP: Yeah, I was born in 1933 in the same hospital. Thomas D. Memorial. I’ve lived in Utah until, 1966 so I remember a lot of the things that happened during the ‘40s, during the war, the things that we talked about. LR: Well let’s kind of move there. I know I’m going to start with you Gay because I don’t know a lot. So as you were growing up where did you live in Ogden? GK: On Fowler Avenue between 28th Street and 29th Street. Between Quincy and Jackson. 2 LR: So did you ever have the opportunity too or were you ever allowed to go on 25th Street? GK: Oh yeah, we went down there all the time, sit in the cars and watch all the drunks. They’d come out with their guns and we’d take off. LR: So the drunks would come out with guns? GK: Yeah, guns or knives. LR: So were you ever scared? GK: Well, yes in a way. But we said if they’re going to get in a fight and kill somebody we didn’t want to see that so we’d just take off. LR: So would you do this when you were a little bit older? GK: I did it when I was in junior high and high school. LR: So were you ever allowed to go there when you were younger? GK: No, except my dad had an uncle that owned a bar. LR: Do you know which bar? GK: I don’t remember what the bar was. It was downstairs, like in a basement and I don’t remember exactly where it was, but it was kind of towards the end of the street. LR: Okay, so towards Wall? GK: Yeah. LR: Okay, do you remember what side of the street it was on? GK: It was on the right side. LR: So the north side? JP: Yeah, it’d be the north side. 3 LR: Okay, so Joy how about yourself? Go ahead and talk a little bit about your growing up years, some of your experiences. JP: Okay, we lived up on, my dad built our home up on 29th Street. It was 1051 29th street and there were very few homes up above us. The high school was built right after, right around that same time, and I could remember as a kid, you know, watching the football team. They had no area up there for them to play, and I’d watch the football team boys come down the lawn because they went all the way down to Monroe, practiced in the Monroe Park. Boy, they looked all big and husky. We were up there one time and this kid was running down and I thought, how did these boys get so little? Because to us they looked really big. I lived there all my life until I got married. In fact when my parents retired we lived up in that home for about ten years before we moved. We saw a lot of different things and, like you said, the things we did was go down on 25th Street and watch the drunks because it was fun, it was really, really fun to watch them and watch the people. I remember on the corner by where the courthouse is now there was a little old black lady, and she came down and she had been a school teacher and she’d hit some kid on the head with a book and had killed it. She went really crazy and she was always talking to herself and running up and down the street. I think the first bag lady or what I would consider she would look like, she had everything in a little thing you carried, you know, and our parents, I don’t know about Gay’s parents, but my grandma would tell me if you aren’t good we’ll take you down and let black Sadie grease your head and swallow you. 4 GK: I don’t remember my mother or dad ever saying anything like that to me. JP: So we were always scared because she was always right on a corner of 25th street, right there all the time. LR: Do you remember which corner? JP: On the left side, on the south side I guess. LR: Well there’s lots of, was it Wall, Lincoln, Grant? JP: Just down from Washington LR: Okay, so that would be Grant? JP: Right, yeah. So she was so funny. Well, we weren’t really, really scared of her because she was really a cute little lady and everything you know, but that’s what my grandma would always tell me. Let’s see my dad used to take me down on 25th Street when my mother tell him not too. He would leave me in this little shop and it was named Reuben’s. It’s a shoe store and it was where they fixed it, so cobbler. LR: A cobbler. JP: Yeah, a cobbler. He would let me sit in there and my dad would get his shoes polished and stuff and while we were there, then he would go next door to the bar to drink. Then he’d come back and one day we went down to go there, and I would always just like to go with him. He would always give me a quarter not to tell mother he went there then one day we went to go down there and Reuben’s Shop was closed, so daddy says, “I’m going to take you with me in the bar but you don’t tell your mother,” so he gave me another quarter. So I was in there and they had one of these little boards like this and you could punch things out and 5 you could win this big panda bear. I was looking at it and looking at it and dad was yacking and talking and I punched one of them out. He said, “Oh no, no, you can’t touch that you have to be 21 to do that.” He was all upset, “I told you to sit still and not do nothing.” But anyway I did, so daddy said I’ll pay for it, so he paid for it, it was like 10 cents, 10 cents to do it. So I won the teddy bear. So we get on the bus, we start to come home and he gives me another quarter so I won’t tell mother. I said, “Okay.” So we get home and I tell mother that Reuben gave me this teddy bear cause that’s what he told me to tell her. So she said, “Where did Reuben get a teddy bear like that?” “I don’t know he just gave it to me.” So she said, “I’ll give you a quarter if you’ll tell me what you did when you were gone.” So I made about a dollar and a half maybe telling my mother and dad, that’s how I worked them. He was such a nice man and in some of the books that I read they never mention that he was there and he’d been there for years. He spoke—I think maybe he was Italian, and he was a real nice, little, tiny man and he just fixed shoes for years. In fact, he was still before we left, I guess in 1966, I think it was still open. Then down the road on the other corner, down on almost past Kiesel the next street is Grant or Wall. It’s Wall isn’t it? GK: Yeah, I think it’s Wall. JP: Right on the corner is where Rose lived, and Rose was the lady of the night. She was a beautiful woman and you’d see her lots of times walking up and down the street always with an entourage, she had a bunch of people with her. One time we were in Samuel’s and that was right on Washington Boulevard there by the big hotel that’s now the bank, and she came in the store and my mother and all 6 the other ladies left. We all left, they left her in the store to shop by herself because she was, you know not a nice woman they said. People them days didn’t like the ladies of the night as they call them. She had a tiger, I forgot about that. And she’d take it up in her car and it’d sit in the back of her car and they’d ride up to Washington, up to Harrison where there was not much up there cause it was all just weeds and stuff and she’d let that tiger run loose and then bring it back and let it run around every day. She lived right there on Wall. Then there was the Porter’s and Waiter’s Club that was mostly black people who were Porter’s and Waiter’s on the bus, or on the trains. During the 1940’s that train station never stopped, I mean it was just constant trains coming in and out, in and out. All the tracks were full like now they’re empty but you know then they were just coming right behind each other all the time. There used to be a tunnel in that in the depot, but it’s not there anymore. It used to be in there and the tile was so beautiful, it was just full of soldiers and sailors. We didn’t get as many sailors as we did soldiers because Washington, state of Washington was on the coast so they took them that way. After the war was over we still seen a lot of them and Gloria’s dad worked for the railroad and he got drafted and they told him no he had an essential job he couldn’t go in the service because he was on the railroads. The railroads were just busy and full of people. There was trains coming and going. President Truman came here one year and I’m not sure what year it was. Whenever he was running for election, and everybody went down to the railroad to see him. He was standing on the back of the railroad train and he said, 7 “Welcome to everybody from Weber, Webber County,” Webber County, he said. It was really funny. It was just really neat to see a President you know. I think President Roosevelt came one time, but I don’t remember that. I remember dad saying that he did come. He was the only president we knew wasn’t he until Eisenhower got in? Was it Eisenhower? He was just elected but he died during ‘45 or, during the war anyway. LR: Well, Roosevelt did. JP: Yeah, Roosevelt did, uh huh. LR: Gay, let me ask you this. Did you ever have a chance to meet Rose or to see her on the street? GK: Yeah, I saw her, but I never talked to her, but I knew who she was. JP: None of us talked to her. LR: You knew who she was? Okay. Did you ever have an experience like Joy did? With Rose? GK: No. LR: But you did get to see her? GK: Yeah. LR: What were your impressions of her when you saw her? GK: Well, I thought she was crazy. JP: She was beautiful Gay GK: I know she was, but I thought in a way she was kind of crazy. LR: Because of what she did? GK: Yeah. 8 LR: Okay. I don’t know where you were heading with your statement. I don’t want you to feel like you can’t talk. JP: Yeah, come on talk, Gay. LR: If you have a thought just kind of chime in, because most of my questions I have because of the initial interview we did last week, so if you have anything to add, please just say Joy, quiet a minute. That brings me to your dad. Let me ask you this first. What did your parents do? GK: My dad worked for Boyle Furniture for, oh many years. He fixed stoves and refrigerators. Anything you can think of. LR: And where was that located? GK: Boyle Furniture. LR: Do you remember where it was located? GK: It was on Washington. LR: Okay, so it was up there in the main part of the city? GK: Yes. LR: Okay, and he did that for as long as you can remember? GK: Yeah. We used to go upstairs and watch the parades upstairs in there, Boyle’s Furniture. We’d sit in the window and watch the parade go by. LR: So the Days of 47 parade? GK: Yeah. LR: Were there any other parades that you were able to watch? GK: Yeah. LR: Do you remember what they were? 9 GK: Only parade they had, you know of the school was involved, see the kids all go by and when they had their different parades like for the 4th of July or whatever like that. LR: That’s kind of nice being able to sit and not have to worry about the crowds on the street. GK: No, no we can just go up. The people that owned Boyle’s Furniture, there was a house we lived on Adams Avenue and 28th Street and the people, the guy that owned it lived right next door to us. So I talked to them a lot and I took care of their kids, and their daughter’s kids. LR: Do you remember the name of the owners? GK: Can’t remember what their name was. LR: That’s okay. GK: He owned the Boyle Furniture store, he was the manager of it. LR: Um speaking of parades, you mentioned the one parade that you and your sister were in. JP: My girlfriend, yeah. LR: Oh, I apologize, thought it was your sister. JP: Yeah, in ‘45 we dressed up like pioneers and we rode with Hop Along Cassidy. LR: How did that come about? How did you get— JP: Well, my dad was friends with Harman Peery and he sponsored it so we got to ride. It was really neat. LR: So how was your dad and Harman Peery connected? 10 JP: Well, my dad was a Democrat and so was he, and so they were on a lot of committees together and then he was a personal friend of his. I didn’t pay that much attention to him because, you know, I was a kid and he was a grown up. We did go up sometimes to the meetings that they had up in Rainbow Gardens. He was really a nice, nice man. His wife and him, they always rode in the parades too. He kind of brought 25th Street to a head. He kind of worked it around so that it wasn’t such a bad of place that people thought. More people would go down there. It kind of was his way of, like you know they had liquor by the drink, and they had things that he would propose and stuff that would help 25th because it was really a metropolis all by itself because of all the troops and all the stuff coming in and out. All the people here, see the railroad came here first, course that was a long time ago, but then it never stopped being a railroad city, a railroad town really. He was really a nice man to me as a kid, he was a nice guy and his daughter and I sometimes would play together and she was a little older than I was, but they were nice people. Some people don’t think he was real nice, but that’s their opinion too. Maybe as years went by maybe he wasn’t, I don’t know. LR: So your impressions of him were that he was a good person? JP: I thought he was. I was a kid, course, you know you don’t know all the business angles when you’re a kid. So you, he just was someone if he saw me on the street or saw my dad he would say hello. He had a big affiliation with the police and fire department. My dad was a fireman for 50 years and he retired and my uncle, my dad’s brother was a policeman and he was there until he retired. So 11 there was a lot of affiliation with those three areas too. I just thought he was a nice person, a person who is kind of loud. He liked to yahoo and all that stuff all that time, ride his horse and stuff, but he was a nice man. My dad liked him real well and he said he was the one that kind of tamed it down, but yet allowed it to go like it was. I’m sure that’s my definition of what 25th Street was because I mean, you know, we would drive down there. My dad and mother belonged to the Elk’s Club and it was down there where the new building is now. Where you get your licenses and stuff, down there for your birth certificates and stuff, on Kiesel. I don’t think when I was small that the bus depot was there because my mother had worked at a little restaurant on Washington down by the Egyptian theater, and there was a little place where you could buy tickets and stuff when she worked there as a waitress, when I was real small. So I don’t know exactly when the post office was built. GK: I don’t know. JP: I can’t remember, but I know it was in the 1940s sometimes because we would go visiting later it was there. We used to eat down at the Big Dragon. LR: Star Noodle? JP: Chinese restaurant and there was also another Chinese restaurant on that side, and then there was a barber shop that was down closer to the end and the lady was Japanese. She and her husband were Japanese and she got sent to the internment camps. He had gone to Washington and got on freighter and when he got on the freighter they went back to Japan on the freighter even though he was an American citizen. They wouldn’t let him come back home, so he had to spend 12 all of the 1940s in Japan. He later started working for Weber College, he was a janitor up there and my husband was a janitor up there in the first building that’s not there anymore, it was a long time ago. I was trying to visualize all the streets and all what was on there. We used to eat a lot of Kay’s Noodle. Remember Gay, we used to go to Kay’s Noodle? GK: Oh yeah, that was a good place. JP: On Kiesel, and that was where all the teenagers pretty well hung out, you know, to have a good meal. Then there was the theatre, Paramount Theater. GK: Yeah, Paramount Theatre. JP: Then remember when the gangs came in when we got a little older? There was a Paramount gang remember that came there? GK: Yeah. JP: So they closed the theatre. Do you remember eating in that Coney Island hot dog place with all the relish that was on the corner of Kiesel? GK: Oh yeah, yeah, I forgot about that. That was good food LR: Now I’ve heard about this hot dog place and I know Joy couldn’t remember the name of it. Maybe it was Coney Island hot dogs? JP: I think it was Coney Island, wasn’t it? GK: I think it was, that’s what it was, yeah. LR: Joy said it was the best hot dog she’d ever had. JP: Oh yes, they were that long and they were a quarter. GK: They were good. 13 LR: Now a days it’s not possible to buy a good hot dog in my opinion. So this must have been out there. JP: It was. It stayed there for a long time, didn’t it? Then it turned into a barbershop, I think, after a while. GK: Yeah. LR: So was this on Lincoln? JP: No it was on Kiesel. LR: It was Kiesel? Okay. JP: Cause you worked past that and we’d buy hot dogs to go to the movie. LR: So you mentioned this Paramount Gang? JP: It was just a bunch of kids in the 40s that I don’t know, they were just wild kids. Most of them were kids from another area and came in. It was kind of like, if you’ve seen West Side Story, it was kind of like that, but before that you know. LR: Would you agree? GK: Yeah JP: They’d grab the kids and take their money away from them and stuff like that. They’d stand out and smoke, which nobody smoked, you never saw people smoking on the street. They would get out there and smoke and drink and everything else. So like us, we wouldn’t go down there anymore. We would go to the Orpheum or the Egyptian. LR: Okay, so where was the Paramount? JP: It was on Kiesel. LR: Okay that was the one on Kiesel? 14 JP: Yep it was on Kiesel, but when you were a kid you could go up there in the afternoon right in the intermission, and they would give you toys and stuff. When I was talking to Gloria the other day she said she won a doll buggy once, and I won the cradle. Did you ever win anything? GK: No. I wasn’t that lucky. LR: So it wasn’t an every time you went that you won something? GK: Yeah. JP: Well you didn’t win something every time you went. It was just on your ticket, if your ticket was the right ticket drawn in one of those round things you know. And there were a lot of kids there that got lots of good things. I mean, they gave you little tricycles and bicycles, all kinds of good things, didn’t they? LR: Talking about give-a-ways, I know, Joy, you mentioned this last time. I’d love to get your take on it, on Washington Avenue, they’d have the spring opening, the stores? GK: Yeah. LR: And then they would have give-a-ways and stuff like that. Do you remember those times when they would? JP: Give you perfume. GK: Oh yeah. LR: Open up the stores. Do you recall what that was like? GK: Well, it was just a lot of fun going in there and collecting stuff. LR: So was it more of a beginning of the shopping season type thing? GK: Yeah, well yeah. 15 JP: They’d give little bottles of perfume. Remember the one by the Egyptian Theatre used to give us the little bottles and had a fountain and you could fill the little bottles with the perfume? Yeah, remember that? LR: So was that just at the beginning, in the spring? JP: Right in the beginning, and then they had a fall closing and you would go in the fall too. It was really fun, you could just walk up and down both sides of all the way down and all the way back up, just collecting stuff. That was so fun. GK: I forgot about that. JP: Remember that? GK: Yeah, I remember now. I forgot about that. LR: Now this is kind of not necessarily a nice story, but you talked about when the municipal building had the jail at the top. The story of— JP: Of one of the prisoners falling off? LR: Would you share that? JP: Yeah, my daughter and I were going down there and she wouldn’t go to school that day, she was just in the first grade, so anyway well I guess that was almost the 1950’s wasn’t it? GK: Yeah, I think it was. JP: She wanted to go with me, we had to pay our bills, you had to go in there and pay your light bills and your phones bills all that. You didn’t have checking accounts in those days. We’d just walked inside the door and we heard this great big ahhh, clunk, right behind us and just a splatter. It was this prisoner that had fell off the top of the— 16 GK: Roof. JP: Municipal Building. GK: Yeah. JP: She said she’d never sluff school again. She didn’t and now she teaches school. LR: Let’s kind of go back to 25th Street for a second. Gay, you’ve said a little bit about 25th Street. As you got older what do you remember about 25th Street? GK: How bad of a place it was. LR: Okay, and why do think it was a bad place? GK: Because there was too much crime going on and people just didn’t care. We started to just stay away from there. LR: So when do you think that started happening? That you just quit going? GK: I don’t know. It was somewhere when I was in the junior high. LR: So it was fun in the beginning to watch all the drunks and stuff. GK: Yeah, I thought so. LR: But then it got to a point where it just wasn’t worth it anymore? GK: Because they were going, those were all the drinking places. My dad’s cousin owned one of them, it was kind of on a corner, but you had to go downstairs in one of those buildings. Can’t remember what the name of the building was, but my dad, well his uncle founded it. Go down there with daddy and sit. He thought I was such a cute little girl they had to sit on the cupboard, I mean on the calendar, sit her here. LR: You’d go with your dad to the bar? 17 GK: Sometimes, not all the time, just once in a while. My dad, he did drink, but he didn’t drink a lot. He’d just go down there to visit his cousin and have a couple of drinks. LR: Were you ever worried or scared or were you okay because your dad was there? GK: Yeah, it was okay because my dad was there. LR: I assume you felt the same way. You felt safe because your dad was there? JP: Yes. GK: But there were a lot of creeps that were around there. You never knew what they were going to do or what they were going to say. But when we watched the drunks come out of the bars, just sitting there watching them because they were funny. They were okay as long as they didn’t pull a gun out or get a knife out, because you knew if they were going to do that then you knew there was going to be some fights. So that’s when we would take off, well bye. LR: Did you ever notice any of the prostitutes? Would they ever come down on the street? GK: Oh yeah, they did. LR: Okay, and could you always tell when she was a prostitute? GK: Sometimes and sometimes not. I don’t know. I can’t explain it, it was just their actions and so you knew that they were or you knew they weren’t, but 25th Street was really kind of a bad place, a bad street in Ogden. Then they had the Berthana skating rink up there and that’s where we all used to go down and go roller-skating all the time. LR: That was around the corner that was like on 26th? 18 JP: On 24th. GK: On 24th. LR: Oh, it was the other way? Okay I’m going, I’m pointing the right direction. JP: Yeah, you were. GK: But we used to go there all the time and go skating. JP: Oh yeah, roller-skating. LR: The white city as well? You’d go hang out at the White City? GK: It wasn’t in the White City. The White City was a dance hall. LR: So that was more— JP: That was the Berthana to where we skated. LR: Right, I brought up White City. GK: The Berthana skating rink, now it’s turned into a bar. The bottom part of it has, and they were talking about bringing the skating back, but they never have. So I don’t think they will now, but you never know. JP: It would be nice if they brought the Berthana back. It was beautiful. Used to go up flights and flights of stairs, I mean they went so far and a little landing, so far and a little landing wouldn’t they? It was beautiful up there. It had a big ball hanging up there like the discos, it was really beautiful. GK: It was fun to go up there they even had dances up there. My dad worked for Boyle Furniture and they had a party up on that floor and what they did, they took the middle floor and the adults got in the middle and they would dance. The kids would get on roller-skates and roller-skate around. My cousins, one of my dad’s brother owned, had or had something to do with the skating thing. We told him 19 we’d go in there and other kids would come in when we were having a family go, and my cousins and I say no, you can’t go in, you got to stay out. The kids, we’d make the kids mad because they couldn’t come in. This is a family deal, this is a family thing going on. LR: So you could actually rent that top level out for special functions and stuff? GK: Yeah. LR: Somehow I missed that, but that makes sense. Kind of going back, you talked about the Porter’s and Waiter’s Club, when you talked about what was her name? Black Sadie. You mentioned last time that there wasn’t really a lot of black people in Ogden, but there were quite a few. You saw more on 25th Street than anywhere else? JP: Just off 25th Street. They were down further, closer to Wall Avenue that’s where their churches were most of them. But you never saw them in school, you know they never came to school. We never had any black people in our school did we? GK: Yeah. JP: Then I was thinking too, when she was talking there, when you were talking about going down to the Berthana and having dances and everything, it seemed like 24th Street, we used 24th Street if we went anywhere. We didn’t get off on 25th Street, so that was not where you got off because you know it was down there. You never saw any women down there for any reason except the prostitutes that walked. I mean there was no women that ever walked down there. You never saw anybody that you would know like your school teacher or your lawyer or 20 somebody. It was only just the prostitutes that did go down there, only women you saw. One thing about Harman Perry, he brought an ordinance in that you couldn’t spit in the street or on the sidewalks anymore because people would chew tobacco and then they’d spit in the street. So he cleaned the street up that way. Then around the corner behind the bars, that’s where the ladies had their apartments, most of them. Some of them lived in the apartments that are there still, but they had one where you could go down right there and take Kiesel and go this way. You can see the balconies where they used to sit and they were there. LR: Looked like you were going to say something. GK: No, I was just agreeing with what she was just saying. JP: Yeah, we used to do that didn’t we, Gay? We’d drive around there. GK: Yeah, we did. LR: I really shouldn’t say this, but I feel like we are having a conversation instead of an interview so you made me think. I don’t know if you guys ever did this, but there was a woman we talked to yesterday who would drive that back part of what they called Electric Alley. They used to watch the ladies. Would you ever do that? JP: No, I think we just drove by and seen them, didn’t we? We didn’t dare get anywhere too close, sometimes when we got older. LR: I know you were going, uh no, no, no. 21 JP: Yeah, you just didn’t go down there, when you rode the bus anywhere. 25th Street was really the street you’d get off to see everything more or less. But we always went to 24th Street first cause Grant’s and Chris’s and Woerst was all down there. You didn’t see very many women. Now they had a beautiful hotel there, remember that? That big old beautiful hotel that had the gold railings and everything there. That’s where the people that got off the train stayed right there, most of them. LR: Was that the one on Wall Avenue and 25th? JP: Right on the corner, right across from the— LR: Do you remember the name of it? JP: I don’t remember the name of it. GK: The Dee? LR: It wasn’t the Broom Hotel it was the Healy. Was it the Healy? JP: It could’ve been, it could’ve been. It was right on the corner, and it was the most beautiful thing. It had big windows and was just looked like something you’d see in the movies. GK: It sure was a pretty place. JP: And the women that got off the train, that’s the first place they went. They never went any further. So you never really saw any women down there walking unless they were there for a reason. It was always kind of funny you could see children every once in a while, you know, like us with our dads and stuff, but you never saw our mothers or anybody down there. Like I say, Rose was on the very corner 22 down there by it too, but that was the most beautiful hotel. I don’t know why they ever tore it down or maybe it fell down. GK: I don’t know either, it was beautiful and it was beautiful inside, real pretty on the outside. JP: Just like the movies. LR: So did you have a chance to go inside the hotel? GK: No, never. JP: We went in the lobby a couple of times, but they’d shoo us kids out. They didn’t want kids in there. It was beautiful and the Ben Lomond was really pretty then too. LR: That was a walk though. You had to walk all the way up 25th Street to get to Ben Lomond. JP: Yeah, all the way. So they got most of the business, it was beautiful. It was beautiful and my momma told me one time that when she lived here in, since she was about 19, she said that when the trains would come in during the 1930s that the women with their umbrellas and stuff would walk across the street to that beautiful hotel. I would think, oh gee, that would be so pretty, but it was a beautiful place. GK: My mother’s dad was a police officer during then, and us kids kept after my grandpa to take us up there and let us see all the people in jail. LR: Would he? GK: Yeah he did, but he warned us, “Now don’t go close to the cages.” He’d always call them cages, stay away from them. You’d see all the ones that were in their 23 cages and there was this one I’ve never forgot, because I thought, well she shouldn’t be here, she should be in the nut house. She was sitting in a rocking chair in her cage, and she played like she thought she was knitting or crocheting because she didn’t have anything in her hands, and she was making the motions and we thought how stupid. LR: How old were you do you think? GK: I was about 12 or 13 and my grandpa took us up there. He was a police officer for 35 or 45 years. LR: Do you remember his name? I should hope you remember your grandpa’s name. GK: Yeah, his name was grandpa Marlin. He was my mother’s dad. LR: Grandpa Marlin, so his last name or was that his last name? GK: Yeah, that was his last name, but he lived down on 12th Street. We had a lot of relatives down on 12th Street. LR: So would he work on 25th Street at all or did he was his beat somewhere else in the city? GK: He was all over different places, if there was somebody that wasn’t doing what he was supposed to be doing and he’d arrest them and take them up there. I don’t know where they found this idiot at, but it was so funny sitting there in this chair and she was rocking and she was going. LR: Wow, thank you for sharing that. That was a great story. Darn, I’ve pretty much, we’ve talked about everything that I have. So let me end with this, my brain is not working today I swear. Oh my gosh. JP: Ours work on demand. 24 LR: Oh okay, and I usually ask this question. So as Ogden has changed, 25th Street’s changed. Do you think they have turned 25th Street into something that is good or do you think it’s still the way it was? What are your impressions of it now? GK: Well I don’t think it’s as bad as it is, but they still have bad things that go on sometimes, but I don’t go down 25th Street. LR: So you still don’t go there at all? Okay. JP: We go there quite a bit now because it’s better. They’ve opened, they’ve torn down a lot of the old buildings too. I think they could make it like is it someplace back south they found underneath their city they found tunnels. Well there are tunnels under 25th Street all over during prohibition they had tunnels built under. I think that maybe that would be a very good thing for visitors to come see, you know. They show up those buildings and some of them didn’t go all the way because my dad took me down there one time and we saw them, and they were kind of like made out of the formations of the buildings. They could do something like that like you know make it so people could go down and have lunch or something. LR: So open up the tunnels and allow them to be visited? JP: Open up the tunnels and let people go in that’s what they did, was it in St. Louis or somewhere? Back east anyway. GK: They had tunnels under the Ben Lomond Hotel. JP: Yeah, they still do. LR: Now there’s lots of rumors of tunnels. I’ve heard a lot of people say they have been in them, but now they’re all cemented over. 25 GK: I never went down there, but that’s what I heard. They were all cemented over. JP: Probably some of them were unsafe because some of them were just big enough for a couple of people to crawl through during the prohibition era. Dad told me one time, he said they could make a mint with this if they would make a little city for you to go down in because there are so many. Not as many on this side as there is on the left side if you’re looking down, but the on the right side is where most of the tunnels are. LR: So on the south side? JP: Yeah, it was really kind of scary down there for a little kid, but daddy thought they were neat. One of the guys that owned it, I think their name was Harrig, and we went down in his bar just to see what was down there. GK: Oh, about the building I was saying, Boyle Furniture, the guy that owned it was McBoyle. LR: McBoyle? Okay that makes sense. JP: I think they’re trying to put shops in there and make it kind of cute and kind of like Park City type thing you know. That’s getting to look nice and it’ll just, maybe it will one day, it won’t be no 25th Street like we had it down there. GK: Maybe, I hope not. JP: I guess most of the people that lived here then were mostly LDS because they didn’t open the states up. They didn’t invite a lot of people in here, so that was really a bad place for us. Our parents didn’t like us as much if we went down there and watched them, but we didn’t tell them, did we? GK: No, we never told them. We were perfect little angels and we didn’t say nothing. 26 JP: You just didn’t see any women down 25th Street at all. LR: I just remember something about the cobbler Rueben’s. Do you remember where his shop was located? JP: Well, I was trying to think of that because the first bar, the very first bar that you start at, it was right in there. It was just a little small shotgun-type building, it was just a small one. But the bank building, I don’t know whether it was sitting right near where the bank’s parking lot is or whether it was still right next to that first building because they’ve taken some of the buildings out. I wasn’t here when they tore the building down we moved to Texas. It was right there at the start, it was the first one before the bars started. LR: So was it closer to Wall or closer to Washington? JP: It was closer to Washington. Yeah, closer to Washington. So it may have been that the bank took that place, it’s that big blue bank that’s down there, and daddy when he worked at the fire department he used, they used to run next door to the fire department was this place that they had the old fire engines and the stuffed horses remember? GK: Oh yes. JP: When we would go down there when we were kids he would buy us ice cream from Brown’s across the street. Yeah, it was so neat, then when the new fire department was built behind it which was now the old fire department. They tore them down that’s when daddy went, right after that daddy retired. I wasn’t here when a lot of the remodeling was being done. 27 GK: We used to go to the police station and play ping pong with the fire station. We played ping pong with all the firemen. LR: Was that common for the kids to do? JP: Yeah. GK: Yeah, most especially us. JP: Especially us. LR: So now this fire department was located? JP: It was right on, is it Grant or Wall? I can’t remember what street it is. It’s right where the bakery is right where the Elks Club is now. The Elks Club is over there, but then Brown’s is still there, Brown’s Ice Cream is still there, but it’s something else now. Now the bakery is closed too, but it was right across the street from there. You used to get an ice cream cone with three dips like they do now for like 20 cents. GK: We used to go to Farr’s Ice Cream on Sunday and dad would lay down on the floor this is Sunday. He says, “Well if you kids can get me down off of this floor I will take you down and we will get you an ice cream cone.” So here he was and us kids struggling to pull him off the floor, and finally we’d get him up and then he was laughing the whole time. When he got home and got him up he says, “Okay, I give up,” and he’d take us down there to Farr’s Ice Cream. My mother was related to all those people there, and we’d go down there and there used to be a drive in where you would just drive in and somebody would come out and say what do you want and they’d take your order, go in and get it and then bring it back out. Or you could go inside if you wanted. I always liked vanilla ice cream, 28 but when I was little I couldn’t say vanilla, so mother and dad said I wanted vanilla and so this one time when the gal comes out and she says, “I don’t have to ask you what you want, you want one of those white kinds,” cause that’s what I used to say, I couldn’t say vanilla ice cream. LR: That’s great. So what was your mother’s maiden name? GK: Marlin. LR: Well, of course it was because that was your grandfathers. GK: Yeah, her name was Elma and my dad’s name was Jasper, he was from Morgan. Both my mom and dad are gone. LR: Do you have questions? RW: No I think we covered it. LR: I appreciate you guys, this has been great. You guys have some amazing stories. RW: You feed off of each other. JP: Constantly talking. LR: There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s been fantastic. I appreciate your time and your willingness to share. JP: It’s been nice remembering all those things, it really has. GK: Us kids, one time on the 4th of July, we were out in front of our house with all the neighbors and we were kids, and we lived up on Fowler Avenue that I told you about. We were lighting sparklers across the street there’s just a plain field, dry as dry could be and we threw some sparklers over there that wasn’t quite out and all of a sudden, boom, this big fire and somebody, nobody called the police, I mean not the police, I mean the fire department. Well when the fire department 29 came they says, “How did this field start getting fire?” “We don’t know some car passed by and they must have threw out a cigarette.” LR: Sometimes as a kid it’s almost easier to just—it wasn’t me. GK: That’s what we did and they took our story. LR: I wonder if they knew.