Oral History Program Dena Serio Interviewed by Sarah Langsdon 8 October 2013 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Dena Serio Interviewed by Sarah Langsdon 8 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: Serio, Dena, an oral history by Sarah Langsdon, 8 October 2013, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Dena Serio October 8, 2013 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Dena Serio. The interview was conducted on October 8, 2013, by Sarah Langsdon. Dena talks about her husband, Leonard Serio—aka Len Allen—and her experiences with 25th Street and SL: This is Sarah Langsdon and we’re interviewing Dena Serio at her home in Ogden. It’s October 8th, 2013. Dena would you just tell us a little about where and when you were born? DS: Well actually, I was born here in Ogden at the old Dee hospital on what was it 24th and Harrison. That’s where I was born. SL: So you grew up here. Where did you attend school? DS: Well…I attended school all over the place. My mother and father were divorced when I was a year old or approximately. I’m not sure exactly sure and I so I lived with my mother and my grandmother in Farr West. My grandmother was Anna Daily. Daily was my mother’s maiden name and I lived with her part of the time. Some of the time I would go to Salt Lake and live with my father in Salt Lake. So I was a back and forth as a child. I lived all over everywhere. I mean my mom and my grandmother when as I got a little bit older. My grandmother’s sister and brother lived in California so they would go down and visit. And when they would go down and visit then I would go live with my father in Salt Lake and his wife, Norma. So it was kind of a back and forth thing all during school. I went to the Dee School when I was really little in kindergarten for a while. Then I went to Salt Lake and lived with my daddy. I went to a number of different schools, gosh I 2 can’t even remember the names of them all. And then came back to Ogden, went to 3rd grade at the Dee School. And gosh from there, it was just back and forth. We lived in Idaho, we lived in I lived in Preston, Weston, Franklin, just everywhere. And then when I was in high school, we moved to California and we lived out there. SL: When you came back where did you go to high school here? DS: I went to Ogden High School for my junior year. I went to junior high school in California. SL: So were you an only child then? DS: An only child, it was probably a good thing. SL: Yeah. I would say being bounced back and forth I could imagine. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about how Len, your husband, came to Ogden? DS: I was a junior in high school and I went on date on Christmas Eve with a friend that I had known, a high school friend and uh we went to dance over to the White City Ballroom on Christmas Eve. There were two couples of us and we kind of got bored with the whole thing and thought, “What else is fun to do on Christmas Eve?” One of the one of the guys said, “There’s a new radio announcer that came into Ogden and why don’t we go over and wish him a merry Christmas?” That was when KLO was in the Hotel Ben Lomond on the 7th floor of the hotel. They had a wing there. And so we said, “Hey that sounds like a fun thing to do.” So that’s so we went over to the hotel and rang the buzzer to get in. He came to the door and we said, “We’ve come to wish you a merry Christmas and spend some time at the radio station.” So he invited us in and we danced to the music in 3 the lobby for the rest of the evening. And Len was very nice and very personable to all four of us. He said, “Well whenever you want to come down and visit with me or I’ll play records for ya on the radio and so forth. Why either come down and see us or call on the phone.” At that time radio was the thing, you listened to all the disc jockeys at that point in time because we didn’t really have TV. So I listened to Len on the radio all the time and I would call him up and he would play records on the radio. You know, “This record is going out to Dena or her friends” and that was the way we would communicate. So he invited me to come down to the station and so I went down to the station and at that point he’d pull records and play them on the big 78’s on the on the turntables. At the end of the evening, after the four hour stint of playing records there was a pile of records there to be put away. And they all had to be put back in uh in a special place so they knew exactly where to pull them out from when you wanted a specific song. So I put them all back in the record in the shucks for him and we started dating. And that was from December to June. In June why Len asked me if I’d marry him and I said, “Yes.” So, on June 15th of 1948 we were married. SL: So how much older was Len? DS: Five years SL: So how did Len end up in Ogden? DS: Len was born in Dayton, Ohio and his family had moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And he spent his teen years and early college years in Milwaukee. And he and his friend, Joe Dorcy, both took radio and communications in college. And they decided when they got through with that in the trade magazine column, 4 I can’t remember the name of the magazine. Broadcasting I believe is what it was, it was Broadcasting magazine. Uh it had want ads in there for radio personnel in different places of the country. Len was looking through that and he said, “Oh, here’s one from Ogden, Utah. They need a radio announcer there. That sounds interesting. I’ve never been west.” So he put in his resume for Ogden, for KLO and they accepted it. And he came to Ogden in 1948. SL: In 1948? DS: In 1947 actually. SL: Okay. DS: He came on the train. Came down to the station there and at that point in time he thought, “Whoa!” When he got off the train there he thought he was going to go into a little western town with horses on the street and everything, but when he walked out of Union Station he found that 25th street was live and vivacious. SL: So when he got here, where did he end up? DS: He stayed at the Hotel Ben Lomond. They had provided a room for him to have a room there which was really quite convenient for him because he could go to the station on the 7th floor and had his room downstairs in one of the rooms. And that’s where he lived. SL: So why the radio name Len Allen? DS: Well, when he and Joe started into the broadcasting field, they had their first interview down in New Orleans. And they had sent a resume down there to go into radio and they went down and talked to the manager of their station, both of them, they were interviewed, Joe Dorsey and Len, and the manager said, “You 5 don’t go by that wap name Serio”? And that was actually what he had said to Len. Joe said, “Oh, no, no, no, He goes by the name of Len Allen.” And he said, “Oh well that’s ok, fine, you two are both hired.” So they both went to work for this radio station in New Orleans. Len asked after they got the jobs and that and they were secured as being hired, Len said to him, “where did you come up with a name Allen from?” Joe said, “Well, I figured if that was going to be a problem that they wouldn’t hire you if your under that Serio name,” and Joe Dorsey was kind of a just an all American name, which was his real name, he said “I thought, first I thought of Jack Benny and Len Benny didn’t sound too good and I thought of Fred Allen and Len Allen, he just popped that out of his mouth and said Len Allen and he’s gone by that name ever since. SL: Can you tell us a little bit about Len’s radio career? DS: Well, other than him leaving where he started in New Orleans and then he went back home for a period of time and then as I said he got the, put his resume into Ogden, and came here and started. Actually, when he first started he was on in the evenings, he was on the night shift from four to midnight, at KLO. Then he moved from there to the morning program and had the morning program for literally, gosh, most of the time of him being in radio. SL: How long was he on the radio? DS: It was actually almost 60 years before he retired. SL: So a lot of changes at KLO during that time? 6 DS: Yes. They had quite a fifty-year celebration of his radio time at KLO. It was quite unique and we had everybody from all around the whole area came to the grand celebration that we had for him, for his fifty years in radio. That was wonderful and a lot of people visited with me, knew people from all over. It was just a really wonderful time. SL: Was he always at KLO… DS: Yes he did, for a period of time he did leave KLO and went to a station in Salt Lake and you know what? I can’t even remember the name of it. It was an FM station as I recall. He worked down there and then he came back to KLO and was there from then on. That was for a period of probably two years, maybe. And that was it. SL: Now did KLO have other stations DS: Well the Ben Lomond was the original place for the KLO, but the transmitter was out in Kanesville. Then after a period of time they kind of shuffled the station around. It went from the Ben Lomond to, they had it up on, their offices up on Harrison for a period of time. At one time it was even in the Eccles building downtown. Then out at the transmitter in Kanesville as well. They may have been in different places, but always KLO. I don’t even know now where they operate out of. I think it’s out of Salt Lake. SL: Talk about his morning roll call. DS: Oh my, he started, cause people would call in for requests, in the morning or whatever. He had a lot of people that went to work at Hill Field and IRS because they were all early, early morning people, a lot of those people went to work at 5 7 or 6 o’clock in the morning. He was very personable, and he knew a lot of people in town. When he’d have broadcasts and so forth, remotes, he’d say, “Hey, give me a call in the morning and I’ll play you a record, I’ll dedicate a record to you.” So all the people in the area would listen to him because he would give all of the information out about road conditions, how the weather was, what was going on in the community. It was just a great source for communications and what was going on in Ogden itself. He was active in a lot of different organizations and therefore seemed to just be able to filter that out into the community. If anybody wanted to know what was going on in Ogden they’d always turn on KLO and Len would always give them the information, or they’d call him up and he’d tell them on the phone, or people would call him and give him information and he would just spread the word. SL: What was his morning roll call? DS: The morning roll call was just a shout out, a good morning to all of the people that were listening to him. SL: Did he do that every morning? DS: Every morning. He would just say, “Good, roll call,” and then he would go on and say good morning to everybody. It was just a way to communicate with all of the people in the area. Len was very, very diverse in, I don’t know if there wasn’t a person practically in Ogden that had a radio that didn’t listen to Len, over the period of years. SL: Did he ever talk about a favorite interview or did you have a favorite interview he did? 8 DS: Not that I can really, well there were so many, and different people from officials in our state, our governors, all of the people in Congress even, he knew all of them. It was a “Hi, how are you, what’s going on?” Anytime Len would ever call for an interview or find out from any of our people in the government, they were very receptive to talking to Len about it. SL: Do you have some favorite memories of 25th Street or downtown Ogden? DS: Well, oh, there was a lot of stuff going on in 25th Street during the early years. I think when we were younger, when we were first married, for that first probably, what, during, in the ‘50s probably and maybe even into the early ‘60s, but there was 25th Street. There was a lot going on down there for sure. And actually even Len would say good morning to the girls at the Rose’s room. He would say good morning, they were on his list of good morning call on the morning call and that was one of the rooms, what do they call them? SL: The brothels. DS: The brothels on 25th Street, yeah. I even went with him up to visit them. They were great. They were nice ladies, but had just their own thing. SL: When I talked to you before, you told me the story of the night when you guys decided to get married. You were at a coffee shop. Was it Ross and Jacks? DS: It was Ross and Jacks or Cranes Café, I’m not sure because it went from Ross and Jacks to Cranes, but it was at Cranes café on Washington Boulevard. At that point it was right next to where Glen Brother’s Music was, there on Washington Boulevard, between 25th and 26th Street on the east side of the street there. But yeah, we would go in there for coffee and the Crane boys were Vance and 9 Harold and I can’t remember the other one’s name right at this point in time—but we would go in there after the evening when he was working at night and have coffee and he said, “Yeah, you two, you’ve been going together for a while, why don’t you two just get married?” Len said, “That’s a good idea. Will you marry me?” No, actually, he asked me at my mother’s apartment when he come up. He said, “I’m tired of you dating all these other people, all these other guys in high school and college, will you marry me?” And I said, “Yes.” So, we had already gone down and got our license but we hadn’t got married. Len had it in his pocket and he always carried it around. We were talking to Vance, I think it was Vance Crane. Len pulled it out of his pocket and “Yeah, we got a marriage license, we just haven’t done anything about it yet. We haven’t figured it, we haven’t decided when to go.” And he said, “You two just need to get married.” And then, that’s when he said, “Yeah, let’s do that.” So we started calling the justice of the peace. He was talking to people who had got married the night before and they wanted an annulment. He said, “But if you’ll wait for about 20 minutes until I get through come on up and I’ll marry you.” So we went and went to his home, and we waited until he got through talking to the people that were there and went in and talked to him and he said, “Now you’re sure you want to get married? It’s kind of late in the evening.” And we said, “Yes we did.” So he said “OK.” And so he performed the ceremony right there and we had Vance and Lorna were our witnesses. They had come with us up there and he pronounced us man and wife at seven minutes to twelve midnight on the 15th of June, 1948. 10 SL: Did you, were you ever down at the KLO at the Ben Lomond other than when you were still dating, first dating, did you ever go down after you were married? DS: At the hotel? SL: At the hotel, or down to KLO? DS: Oh, yeah, I mean that is where the studios were, as far as that goes. I’d go down and spend time with him at the hotel when he was working a lot of the times, when we were first married. SL: What do you remember about the hotel or the stations? DS: Well the hotel had a coffee shop on the side of the hotel. We’d go, that’s where we’d always go in and have coffee a lot of times or have lunch or whatever there. And actually they had a little, to the side of the hotel, there was a little shop in there that a lady sold jewelry and little knick-knacks in the side there. KLO, upstairs was at, the 7th floor, where all of their advertising people, worked and sold commercials. They would also record and do all of that there. The Sons of the Pioneers were a group of guys that did westerns, singing. We had a small room there where they recorded their music there too. SL: All in the hotel? DS: All in that wing. There were a lot of interviews. There was the control room and a studio if groups or whatever would come in. They could interview them in larger groups rather than just being in the control room, because that is where all of the records and everything were. SL: Do you have anything else you’d like to share about Len, or life in Ogden? 11 DS: Gosh, a lot of things have happened in Ogden over a period of years. It’s been a good community to live in. All of our children were born and raised here. SL: I remember, the story you told me about Len when he had, was it a bleeding ulcer? DS: Yes, yes that. Len had a blood condition, he was a hemophiliac and so bleeding or cuts or anything, why he had a terrible time stopping the bleeding. When he was a kid his mother was very, very protective of him not getting out and really getting scuffled or out and about, he was kind of protected. She would not let him play ball and do all of the fun things that most boys do because of that problem. Len, when he was in JC’s he became president of the state JC’s—Utah JCs—traveling all over the state and doing a lot of different things. For a lot of other reasons too, he got ulcers—bleeding, stomach ulcers. We about lost him because of the hemorrhaging, his stomach hemorrhaging. He was in the hospital, St. Benedicts for a long period of time that they didn’t think that he would ever live. He ended up with people, at that point in time, who gave, donated blood, and he actually used so much blood during one period of time when he was at the hospital, they had to bring donors in to supply enough blood. He had 78 transfusions to keep him alive. Sister Stephanie could tell you a long story about all of that, more so than I. SL: I’ll have to ask her. DS: That would be an interesting; she could tell you a lot about the period of time that he was at the hospital. People used to try and sneak him in food; they didn’t think he was getting enough food to eat. I don’t know, there are so many different from 12 one time to another that, I’m sure that maybe another time I could tell you some more stories, or write them down and then relay them to you. SL: Sounds good, we can do that. Thank you so much Dena.