Oral History Program Jim Favero Interviewed by Lorrie Rands and Melissa Francis 25 October 2016 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Jim Favero Interviewed by Lorrie Rands and Melissa Francis 25 October 2016 Copyright © 2018 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 The World War II "All Out for Uncle Sam" oral history project contains interviews from veterans of the war, wives of soldiers, as well as individuals who were present during the war years. The interviews became the compelling background stories for the "All Out for Uncle Sam" exhibit. The project received funding from Utah Division of State History, Utah Humanities Council and Weber County RAMP. ____________________________________ 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: Favero, Jim, an oral history by Lorrie Rands and Melissa Francis, 25 October 2016, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Jim Favero circa 1940s Jim in Europe circa 1940s Jim outside the mess kitchen circa 1940s Jim in Europe circa 1940s Jim Favero 25 October 2016 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Jim Favero, conducted on October 25, 2016 in his home in Ogden, Utah, by Lorrie Rands and Melissa Francis. Jim discusses his life and his memories involving World War II. LR: It is October 25, 2016. We are in the home of Jim Favaro; is it Favero or Favaro? JF: It’s Favero. It’s the Italian. Favero in Italian is Faverro, and in English it’s Favero. LR: Okay. In the home of Jim Favero in Ogden, talking about his life and his World War II memories for the World War II Project we are doing at Weber State University. I am Lorrie Rand, conducting the interview, and Melissa Francis is on camera helping as well. Alright Jim, so I’m just going to start out with when and where you were born. JF: I was born in Roy, Utah, Weber County on October 8, 1916. LR: Okay. So you grew up in Roy? JF: No, after I was born, when I was two and a half, the folks bought a farm in Taylor. Part of the family still has a home there. LR: And where is Taylor? JF: Straight west of here, it’s right next to West Weber LR: So you grew up in Taylor. Did you grow up on a farm? JF: Born and raised on a farm. I was born in the horse and buggy days in Roy and we moved over to Taylor. All my growing up days I worked horses, followed horses up and down the rows in the field. LR: Did you have any brothers and sisters? 2 JF: I had twelve brothers. There were thirteen boys and one girl in the family. LR: Oh that poor girl. JF: No, she was the sixth of fourteen so for the older boys she was our little princess and to the younger boys she was a second mother. LR: Where did you fall in that? JF: I am the second to the oldest. LR: Oh wow. What was that like? Growing up with that many brothers and sisters? JF: I was like a third parent. All my days was helping mother, and helping take care of the kids. LR: Were you able to get any sort of formal education? JF: Well I, graduated from Weber High School in 1935, then went on over to Weber State. LR: And then you were drafted? JF: No, this was in 1935. I left the farm in 1938 and worked for JC Penney's for eighteen months, then went and worked for the Whole Shoe Company out of St. Louis. It was a leased department in the Emporium department store in Ogden, so I worked there for about six years until I was drafted. LR: Okay. Going back just a little bit, what were some of your experiences growing up during The Depression? JF: You’re way ahead of yourself. LR: I am? MF: A little bit. 3 JF: Let’s start how on the farm, all my days on the farm we grew row crops. By the time I was eight years old I was milking cows. Dad always had fifteen to twenty head of milk cows. Then the Depression came on, so people that lived on the farm were much better off than people in the city. People in the city were in breadlines, people on the farms raised their gardens, had their own beef, pork, chickens, turkeys, geese, ducks, everything that we had, and sheep. So people on the farms fared much better during the Depression than people in the city. LR: That’s what I was going for. I’m trying to make you younger than you are, sorry. So you were working at the Emporium when you were drafted, can you tell us about that? JF: I was the youngest manager the Whole Shoe Company had at the line. Marguerite and I were married on November 6, 1940, and the last day of November in 1942, I went home at eleven o’clock after we finished up at the store. I put my hand in the mailbox, and there was my draft card. I had to be to Bamberger Station at six am on Monday morning to go to Fort Douglas. They swore me into the Army December 2, 1942, and I told them that I was under a 50,000 dollar bond for the shoes, and they had to give me time off. I had to have a man come out from St. Louis and inventory me out of the store, because I was under a 50,000 dollar bond. So we did that on Thursday and Friday and part of Saturday. On Sunday, my family and friends helped us move out of our apartment, and we stored the furniture upstairs at my mother-in-law’s home, and it was there for over three years. 4 LR: Okay, your goods were stored at your parent’s home? JF: Yes, and when I left on December the 8th, I was gone for over three years, and all my time was spent in the mountains. What else do you want to know? LR: Well, you went back to Ft. Douglas on the 8th and you were sworn in… JF: They clothed me and shipped us to Camp Gruber, Oklahoma, in the 88th Infantry Division. Usually, all the inductees had five months of basic training, but I only had little better than five weeks because I was transferred to Camp Polk, Louisiana, to an outfit that had been on maneuvers for six months, and two weeks after that we shipped out to Oran, Algeria in Africa. We left the United States, from New York, on April 26th, 1943, and landed in Oran, Africa on May 14, 1943. We were on the water for fourteen days, and there were about ninety ships in our convoy going over to Oran, and in those fourteen days that passed by, we lost two ships. Every morning you’d have a burial at sea from one of the big ships. You know what the burial at sea is, right? They had a board go out with a flag over it and slipped the guy over into the ocean. Anyway, we didn’t know where we were going even until the last day. I was going to tell you, we were caught flat footed. We didn’t have ships, nothing, so in order to get boats and ships on the seas to get the guys moving, they had any ship that could float converted over to troop ships. The ship we were put on in New York was a banana boat that used to run from New York to Florida, and they converted that into a troopship, and it was overloaded about three times what it should have 5 been. So they gave us white cards, yellow cards, and pink cards, and every two hours, the guys that slept down in the deck had to shift up on deck, and rotate. Now, do you want to know some of the gory stuff in there? LR: Sure, go ahead. JF: I won’t tell you about myself, because I had troubles the first few days because of boat movement and that. LR: Were you seasick? JF: No, not seasick. I passed out up on deck, and I woke up in the hospital on the ship. That’s what the movement and sea did. About the fifth day out they wanted to know if we had any barbers on board ship, and we only had one barber in our company. I barbered in high school, I used to cut my friends hair, and I had a whole set of barber equipment I had brought with me. So I volunteered and the two of us went upstairs in the barber shop, where they had two chairs, and from about the fifth or the sixth day out we barbered the rest of the way. The ship was so small it only had about twelve stools and eighteen urinals for all those men, so the men sat in line twenty four hours a day to use the restroom. They also fed chow twenty four hours a day, in order to feed everybody. On the eighth day, they got ahold of some tainted hamburger or something, and the whole ship got sick with dysentery. Since we were in the barber shop and didn't eat with the company that day, we were the only two on the ship who didn't get sick. The ship had stairs about three feet wide with just the iron stairs and no back, and everybody was sick, they were vomiting in their 6 helmets and drooped over the side. For the rest of the trip over, they were mopping the ship up. Finally, about two hours before we landed in Oran, Africa, the ship captain got on the big horn and said, “Hear ye, hear ye, we’re going to dock in Oran, Africa in about two hours, and we need to be ready to get off the ship,” because this is where the Germans had pulled France air power and was bombing and strafing the port. They had big trucks to get us out of there, and I had two barracks bags and a rifle that I had to get out and get on the trucks. They took us seven miles north to St. Cloud, that’s where we set up camp. The first night we had trouble with the Germans bombing and strafing. Then we went against Rommel, the Desert Fox, in Africa. We went through Algiers up to Tunis and then back to St. Cloud and that’s where the 5th Army was activated. Mark W. Clark was the general in charge of the 5th Army. We had to make the amphibious landing at Salerno beachhead on September the 5th. LR: Do you have any experiences in Africa that you’d like to share? JF: No, not in Africa particularly. LR: Okay, so nothing memorable stands out? JF: It’s just natural, whatever’s happening. LR: Okay, fair enough. So when you landed at Salerno on September 5th 1943, it was a large amphibious landing? JF: Well, after the 5th Army was activated in Africa, and all our units were put in, we had ships that were gathered in the Mediterranean Sea, there were about ninety 7 ships. On our trip to Europe, we had numerous ships that guided us through the Mediterranean Sea, there were about 90 ships, ships that were carrying everything for the invasion. The First landing, Patton took Sicily, and moved through Sicily and over to the mainland of Italy. We landed on the arch of the boot and the English landed around down on the heel part. Then we had another landing up at our left. At this time the Germans were in full force and controlled the airspace, so they were bombing and strafing. We had our big battleships out in the ocean that were shooting over the top of us at the entrenchments, that’s where the Italian Army was with Hitler, and they were all dug in. Did you actually see “Saving Private Ryan”? LR: I did. JF: My son was with IBM for over twenty years and he worked with Spielberg who made the show. When Randy asked me how near it was to the real thing and how much of it wasn’t, the only thing that wasn’t real on the landing was, you know the jacks we used to play with - with the ball? They put those in to add something to it. The Germans didn’t know where we were going to land, so the beach was just beach, that’s all, just up against a mountain. The Germans were all dug in in trenches and machine guns and pillboxes and everything. So they struggled to know where we were going to have an amphibious landing like that. The only way to take an area is by force, everybody moves forward, you never move back. The thing is, that whether you take the beach or not, just power and force; it doesn’t matter if you get killed because they keep feeding in 8 and someone’s going to get through. They started shelling from out in the ocean with big ships the night before, and daybreak the next morning they start landing troops. I didn’t go in the first day I went on the second day at eleven o’clock, and it was a nice sunny day. We were on a big British troop ship, and when you’re landing like that you grab a silver bar and it throws you around and you go down a rope ladder on the side of the ship. Then, we called them ducks, they come around to the side, they held about forty five to fifty men. They needed the ducks because the big ships could only go in so far, and then the ducks could only go so far and when the ducks hit the dirt, the ramps go down, and you run out. You’ve seen that. LR: Yes. JF: I was in water up to here (my chest), with my rifle over my head. The minute that I hit the water I had to start pushing bodies out of the way, because of the last twenty four hours, and we pushed the bodies, and we got in close. You’ve seen in Private Ryan, the shore all bloody? We went through that, and there were bodies piled up one or two deep on the beach. There was enough of us that got through, that we went around the back and knocked some of the guns out to break the landing. There were more men lost on Salerno beachhead than there were at Normandy, because at the time when we landed in Salerno, the Germans controlled the air and everything. So they strafed and bombed, see. When they went into Normandy, the Americans were in control of the air, and 9 there were more men lost in Salerno than at Normandy, but people say, “Remember Normandy.” LR: Right. They do. JF: This was eighteen months before the Normandy landing. LR: So how long did it take you to establish the beachhead, to actually take control of the beach head? JF: Well, they were still landing on the third day. LR: So at least three days? So once you were on dry land, what did you do? JF: Well, Salerno is way South of Naples, so we started—this was when the Italians Army was still there, before they surrendered. We went into battle and just, natural war- we just tried moving north, because we were in the South, the tip of Italy. So everything from then on, we were moving north. LR: So are you still with the 88th Infantry Division at this time? JF: No, you’re not listening. When I was transferred from the 88th Division to New Orleans, I was put in an outfit that had been on maneuvers for six months. That’s why I went over so quick. So I went over with just a little over five weeks of basic training. LR: So what unit did you join when you went down to Louisiana? JF: The 269th Combat Engineers, that’s what we went overseas as. That’s what we were in Africa as. After the African campaign, they activated the 5th Army in Africa, and General Mark Clark was made general of the 5th Army. When we invaded the Salerno beachhead we were the 5th Army. 10 LR: Just to make sure I’m on the same page, your unit was a part of the 5th Army at that point when you invaded Salerno? JF: It was the 5th Army, and we were the 269th Combat Engineers and that was a battle outfit. LR: Okay, now we’re on the same page. So, you’re working your way North in Italy. What were some of your experiences as you were moving north? JF: Well, we invaded in September and it was one of the worst winters Italy had ever had. So in the middle to late November, the German Army and the American Army, everybody was bogged down in mud and snow. We were in a big olive orchard in the little town of Francolise and we stayed there from then to early March when the mud dried out and the big tanks and trucks could start moving again. When we started moving again, we started moving north. The Germans were retreating and every time they would retreat they would blow the bridges out and the roads and everything. Our engineer outfit was working right along with the infantry, sometimes ahead of the infantry, sometimes with the infantry. LR: What are some of the duties that you guys had as combat engineers? JF: Well, when you’re in battle, when the Germans shoot at you, you shoot back. When they retreated they blew everything up, and stole everything that the townspeople hadn’t taken with them. So the towns were destitute. We were stalemated from November to March until we started moving, but we just kept 11 moving north, back and forth across Italy, and just whatever happened, happened. LR: I’m trying to understand what some of your duties were. Would you help rebuild bridges to help get things across? JF: No, you missed the point. As we were moving we had to fight the Germans. Fight, fight. As the Germans moved they would blow up the bridges and they’d blow up the roads and anything to stop our movement. So the engineers had to rebuild bridges, they had to rebuild roads, whatever to move forward to get the equipment across. A lot of the times the engineers would ride with the infantry or ahead. The infantry were usually the leaders, but with combat engineers, our job was to build bridges and put roads back together. There’s a lot of mountains in Italy. When they go around the edge of a mountain, just like up Ogden Canyon here, they had to build. When they go around the edge or a rock cliff and blow the road out, we had to build the roads back up. We would crawl under cover of darkness to put in the bridge across the Garigliano River. All the rivers run west, and the old Apennine Highway, you heard that in history. The Apennine Highway was the main highway from Northern Italy to Southern Italy, so all the rivers run west, with the Apennine Highway. We were called up, under the cover of darkness, to put the Garigliano River Bridge back in. They had to put the road back in to get up to this olive orchard, and the German troops were right around us. That first night there, we were in this olive orchard and the Germans were shooting over our heads and 12 the twigs off the olive trees was falling on us because the Germans didn’t know we were down in that hollow. We were there for three weeks, the bridge was blown out three different times and we lost a lot of men there. It rained damn near all the time we were up there. We had the kitchens, see I was a mess cook and then the mess sergeant, so it was my job to feed them. In a company there’s three platoons and a couple of officers. But in the battalion we had two sets of combat engineers, consisting of three companies in the first battalion, and three companies in the second. A, B, and C in the first, and E and F and G were in the second. Our company, C company, was assigned to put the bridge back in. We’d get it just about ready, and the Germans, that’s when they had the air power and the bombs, they bombed the bridge out. It had been blown up twice before and we had it just about ready again. We had to take chow to them, so we took it out in five of these hotpots, and had it all laid out for the men to come in off the river to eat. I’ll be damned if the Germans didn’t come and strafe and bomb the thing again, and when they started, well, I dove under the truck but you still got mud and that from the bombs dropping in the river. Anyway we finally got the bridge in and then we moved out to another job, and we hadn’t been gone two hours when the Germans bombed the very area where we had the kitchen set up. Right where the kitchen was, you could put three or four trucks in it, and we hadn’t been out of there two hours. So they knew every movement we had. 13 LR: Yeah, it sounds like it. So at this point, when you are talking about the bridge, we’re in spring of 1944? JF: 1944 yes. LR: And this is around Naples, right? JF: We’re North of Naples, and get your maps out, you can see all the rivers. See where the Garigliano River is and everything. I got books here my son made that show them all. LR: So you’re up past Naples at this point, do you just continue to work your way up through Italy? JF: From the time we landed until the war was over we worked all the way up clear across Italy back and forth. We took their airports and everything so we could get our bombers in, so it was just a continual movement all the time. Now we built the longest Bailey bridge during the war. The British had a bridge, an iron bridge that was made in sixteen foot sections, and when we had to cross a river, there was no way other than that. They’d take a big cable and fasten it over here somewhere and run it across the river and fasten it on the other side and stretch it tight. They would put these boats in and attach it to the cable so you could see the cables stretched across here and the boats are attached floating. Then they would take the first section of the Bailey bridge and set it out on the first boat, and from one boat to another clear across the river, they’d put one or two tanks or big trucks on at a time to get over. It was an invention of the English, Bailey bridge they called it, and all big iron sections and use big pins to put it together. 14 LR: I think that’s cool. JF: We put up Bailey bridges several times, and then we had to reconstruct the other bridges and the roads. LR: The last time we were here, you said that from the time you landed until you went home you were never indoors. JF: No, never, out in the hills all the time. In tents, pup tents and sometimes other tents. LR: But not inside a building. JF: Never in a building. LR: This is going to seem like a strange question, but was that hard to get used to? JF: No, because you’re in the army and you did exactly what the army said. If they told you to do this or that, you did it. You always moved forward, never retreated or nothing. All our thing was to move, to move, to push. When we were in this town called Itri, it was up just north of Caserta, and we knocked the Germans out of it. The Germans knocked us back out again, and then we took it again, and ran it. I have a picture I took with a little camera I had, and this town of Caserta, or Itri, there were apartment buildings here, and the front of all the apartment buildings were blown off by changing hands three times there. It blew everything in the town flat. Before we moved on, my outfit had to help pick up the pieces of the Italians, the dead, and that. Finally, when we started moving, we started moving north. We took the bulldozers and cleared stuff out, and our infantry had moved up a little ahead of us. 15 When the engineers had moved out of this town after all this clean up and all the work that we had to do, we had a kitchen truck, and on the side here you could sit there and put your foot on the fender. We hadn’t had many meals, cause when we were in battle all the time you had to eat canned c-rations, stuff like that, cold food. So I’m sitting here on the side of this truck, because we had to go up a ways and stop, go up a ways and stop, changing hands three times. You can imagine how many bodies were around. So the truck stopped here and I’m eating corned beef hash out of a little can with a spoon, and there were dead Germans and American troops here. Off the side of the road, there was a guy, I think that he weighed maybe 250 pounds or something like that, and he had been cut in two with a machine gun. Part of his torso was laying here, and his guts and that were strung over to this part, and he was lying flat this way. After being there several days, bubbles were coming up through his clothes where he had been shot, and the flies were flying all around. so I was eating corned beef and I had a mouthful and I looked at that, I couldn’t spit it out, I couldn’t swallow, couldn’t throw it up or anything, just sat there like I was dumbfounded. To this day I can’t eat corned beef hash nor stew. There were things happening, every day was different. When you’re in battle you can’t tell what’s going to happen. This little town of Itri, some Italian people said that there were people down on the end of the row of apartment houses that was down here, so we brought the bulldozers or front end loaders in and dug it out. Sure enough, when we dug a hole that was coming out of the 16 side, here were six female people coming out, I judged from six to eight years old, up to an old lady, and they were crawling out of there just like animals after being down there for a week. They couldn’t talk and they couldn’t... other things had happened, I won’t tell you, but it was just horrible to see it. LR: You mentioned that just normal war things happening, just normal battle things, how would you describe those things? JF: Well, everybody had their rifles. At that time I was carrying a carbine rifle, but everybody had their rifle. You had to eat with your rifle on your shoulder, and we’d go for days and weeks without bathing or showering, or anything because there’s nowhere to shower. Every so often they would bring these shower trucks up and set up a tent, and let people run through and shower and change clothes, to try to keep clean. So you ask what happened? You can’t know what’s gonna happen. Maybe they turn a machine gun on you, maybe you use your rifle, maybe you hit someone; maybe someone’s hit and killed to the side of you. Just an ordinary battle, you couldn’t tell what was going to happen, something different every day. You could have been killed at any minute, just like when they moved our kitchen after we put the Gagliano bridge in, and the Germans knew we were in that olive orchard and bombed, and I’ll be damned if one of the bombs didn’t hit right where the kitchen was. We went back and forth. We were in Bologna, we were in everything, and when the war ended, we were up in Florence. After the war, we went up to Venice and Verona and all the Northern part and that. After the Americans got air 17 superiority that was one thing that helped end the war and made Normandy like it was. The reason in the first place they invaded Salerno was to draw German troops down from the North, to get them down there. The air corps bombed all the facilities that made gas, all the railroads, anything that had to do with the gasoline. All our air force concentrated on blowing up all their gasoline making plants all in the Balkans and Italy and everywhere. After we got up North, why if they had a big tank here and it ran out of gas, it just sat there, they had to get out and leave it. If it was an airplane or something like that burning gas it had to sit there. So all over Northern Italy there were parts of the German Army; tanks, machine guns, trucks, whatever, if it used gas, and it ran out of gas it had to stop. When we got up to Florence, Florence is quite a beautiful area, that’s where the Po River comes through it. So we crossed the Po River, part of Florence is on the north side, part on the south, and they had a big arch running across it. It was so wide and so big that they had stores in there, and when the Germans retreated, they blew it out. The Po River had started to go down, cause this was in May, and they started to pull stuff with horses, beautiful horses. They were dragging out a lot of the stuff with horses. So they crossed the Po River wherever they could, and a lot of the horses were in teams. This horse was shot and dead laying in the harness, and this horse was standing here. So they had our outfit unhook these horses and get them out of the river and leave the dead there, you know. But the horses that were alive, we had to get them out. LR: So when Mussolini surrendered, where was your unit? 18 JF: He didn’t surrender. The Italian Army surrendered, and that was only after about the first two or three weeks after the invasion. We were still somewhere around Naples at the time, no, we were further north from that, because we were only three miles out of Rome. I remember, we were about three miles out of Rome, and I never did get to see it. But the Italian Army surrendered, the Italian people got Mussolini, killed him, shot him, and hanged him up by the heels and his mistress up at the side of him. It was the Italian people that killed Mussolini, and until he joined Hitler, had done an awful lot of good for Italy. He was a hero in Italy, but when he joined Hitler, they called them the Brownshirts, but just as soon as they could, they surrendered. Just last night, on channel seven, they had this thing about all the prisoners that were in Utah, and I had never heard this before. There were over 371,000 prisoners in Utah, and some of the prisoners from Germany were staunch Nazis, and they controlled a lot of the other prisoners that were civilians that had been drafted that were never Nazis. They had hundreds and hundreds of Italian prisoners over here, and all the Germans, and the prisoners that wanted to work, they put them out in camps, because all the farmers in all America were short of labor and help. So whenever these prisoners wanted to get out of being confined, they put them in the camps and worked them. They helped harvest the crops, all kinds of factory work and everything else; they used the ones that wanted to work, the ones that were never really Nazis. Most of them were all happy to be captured, because they knew their bad days were over. I didn’t know 19 until last night that they took care of those prisoners and fed them the exact same that they did our army. So they were babied and pampered, and up at Bushnell Hospital in Brigham City, they had lots of Italian people up there, because the Bushnell hospital was the biggest of its kind in the US. Second Street was the biggest depot on account of the railroad, and they shipped stuff to every warzone in the world, wherever we were fighting. Utah played a tremendous part in that. But after the war was over, we were up around Florence and all of Northern Italy for a while, and then they recalled us and regrouped us in different areas up there, then loaded us on the USS General Stewart in Genoa, Italy to go over to Manilla. So after being over in Italy for three years, this huge convoy left Europe, of ninety something ships, going down to Panama and going through the Panama Canal down to Manilla for the invasion of Japan proper. We were on the USS General Stewart that was practically a brand new ship, so that was nice. Coming from Genoa, Italy down to Panama, we passed the Statue of Liberty at night, then we went further down, you could see the Norfolk, Virginia shore lights and that. We were out in the ocean, but we were there when they dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan. You know how the canal in Panama, you have to raise and lower it, and only so many ships could go in, and we were the fifth ship out to go into it when they dropped the second bomb. So after the second bomb they floated us around for a couple of weeks, and then they turned us around 20 back to New York, put us on thirty day recuperation period, and that was the first day off that I had had for three years. LR: On that first day off, what did you do? JF: Didn’t do anything. The first day off was traveling on the ship back to New York and the train coming back this way. LR: So you just sat on a train? JF: Well, they put us on the train, there was a whole hell of a bunch of us- a whole train load. LR: Were you able to come home and see your family? JF: Well what was crazy, and you might not know this, but during the war and after the war there were a hundred and five passenger trains that went through Ogden yards a day. There were a hundred and five, and they had all these tracks. Before the war I used to go to work down there, and I used go down there a lot of the times just to listen to them, and they’d holler “All Aboard,” you know and take the people to the tracks. They didn’t bring us to Salt Lake they brought us here first, then we had to go to Salt Lake. But it was crazy. During the time before I left, my wife and I we set up a little code so she’d know where I was all the time, and we never did get caught. But how it worked, when I wrote her the letter, at the end of a word that she knew I knew how to spell I would put an extra letter, and through that letter I could tell her where I was. When we were down in the Panama, she got a letter from us, and I told her that I was down there waiting to go, and so she’d given up all hope of seeing me. So when we come out here, we 21 went through staging here in Ogden, and I’ll be damned- we were sitting here in the train and just about a car from where I was, I looked out there, about from me to you, there was a pole with a telephone hanging on it. I snuck out of that damned door and rang my home number- I’ll be damned if Marguerite was home, and she damn near fainted when she heard my voice. LR: I bet she loved that though. JF: So then they took us up to Salt Lake and kept us down there for a night and day and then she came up and got me. MF: So you talk about writing these letters to your wife. How often were you able to hear from your family back at home? JF: Well Marguerite wrote a letter almost every day. And my mother always used to write and my family did here and there. But sometimes I might get a bundle of six, eight, ten letters. It all depends on where you were and what you were doing, and when the postal people could catch up with you. But I wrote a letter almost, I wrote a lot. I wrote 458 letters back home to Marguerite during the time. She kept em all, and when I came home, I had heard what happened to the letters and stuff like that, when we moved into our place down there, we had a fireplace, and I told her to throw all those letters into the fireplace. After we burned them for a few weeks I realized I should have kept them because they were history. But I burned all of them. But since then, I’ve had some friends that gather all that stuff from the army and then they put them in packets and then sell them. I have a friend here that got into that, and she started buying packages of letters of the 22 soldiers and personal letters- the wives and family- that’s nobody’s business. She bought maybe three or four bundles of those over a period of a couple of years, and it started affecting her, and her husband made her quit buying them, because going into all of that stuff, she started being really upset about it. So, I have two thoughts- it’s terrible that I had all those burned. We burned all the letters she sent to me and all that I sent to her because I figured it was nobody’s business. I kept all my mother’s letters out here. But the miracle of the whole thing is that on that amphibious landing, you’re lucky if you’re alive after you take the beach. With all these hundreds and hundreds of fellows that were laying all over and floating on the water, I got through there without being hit. Now, why? Then when you’re thinking about all the thousands that didn’t get a chance to come home that’s buried somewhere, I’m lucky enough to come home and have a lovely family. There’s a lot of things, I have a lot of time to think. I don’t watch any kind of show ever since Marguerite passed away on January 25, 2009. I haven’t watched a show. I watch documentaries and stuff all the time, because the other stuff seems so foolish. LR: Well, let me ask you this- after the war, when you were finally able to come home, what did you and Marguerite do? JF: Well, see I was in the shoe business for years before. When I came home on this recuperation period for thirty days, first thing we did, we stayed in Salt Lake that first night and contacted her folks and my folks the next day. Then a shoe store in town that was called Rich’s, he found out some way that I was back. So I had 23 only been back three or four days on this recuperation period and he wanted me to come and see him. So I did, even when I was still in the army, I went down and worked in the store and sold shoes. So as soon as I got out of the service and got some of the clothes that I had, I started working. Marguerite was working at the Defense Depot of Ogden, on Second Street at that time. She and her sister were working a lot of evenings down there on Second Street. Anyway, just as soon as I got discharged, I went right to work, and I worked for that store for thirteen years until we got enough ahead that we were able to open our first shoe store. We had three stores and a leased Department when I retired. We opened our first store in 1958. It was a store that had been open for eighteen months and didn’t do good. So with my background and everything, the International Shoe Company had what they called the international shoe plan. They would hold 51% and give me 49%, give me ten years to pay it off. But I paid it off in six years, so, the shoe business was good to us. When I first came back from the service, I went to school because I was thinking of being a dentist or something, so I went over to Weber College for one quarter, and I couldn’t bat heads with the eighteen or twenty year old kids cause I was thirty years old. JF: Are you guys through asking questions? MF: I had a couple more questions about Marguerite. So you said she was working at Second Street, at the depot correct? JF: Yeah. 24 MF: What did you say she did there? JF: They had either forty nine or fifty warehouses out there. It was the biggest depot of its kind in the United States, and in each warehouse they would do one thing or another. Marguerite and her sister worked at this warehouse, they called em warehouses, this building. Their job was to handle bills of lading for shipping here and there, shipping in and shipping out. Bills of lading. MF: Yeah. So did she do that the whole duration of the war? JF: She didn’t go to work out there until about a year or so after I left. She was still working there when I came home and she worked out there for a while and then she quit. She was working at the Utah Tailoring Mills before, and she quit there and went out to Second Street. MF: So, do you think she felt like she was doing her part for the war? JF: Sure. Go back to when the Germans started moving across the Balkans and taking France and all the Balkans. Churchill wanted President Roosevelt to declare war on Germany. But President Roosevelt- we were very lucky to have him and the people that were in power at that time- President Roosevelt knew that if he declared war on Germany, that America would say “Why are you getting into this war? Why are you? We’re not involved!” So on December 7, the United States knew Japan was going to attack America- they knew it for two or three years but they didn’t know where. So when this sneak attack came, President Roosevelt declared war the next day. By waiting until we were attacked, it put all of America into one mind. That’s why we were able to 25 accomplish in five years what was accomplished, because we didn’t have a standing army, we didn’t have boats, we didn’t have airplanes or nothing, we were caught flat footed. When President Roosevelt went in in 1932, right at the height of the Depression, the first thing that Roosevelt did was do away with prohibition. Just think of the industry that that put in when the farmers started planting grain again, then they had to have the trucks to take it to breweries, then all the distribution-they put a whole industry of money back in circulation. That was the first thing he did. The second thing he did, you know what CC camps were, don’t you? There was over three million boys from sixteen to twenty four that, during the Depression, went through the CC camps. The day that President Roosevelt declared war, there was 258,000 CC men in camp, and the ones that were doing clerical work they turned them into officers and the others into soldiers. The next day they set the draft up and started drafting. That’s how fast they went to work. So that was the first standing army that we had was the CC camps, and the CC camps were run just the same as the army. It was an army thing, but it took over three million boys off the streets. MF: Those were the questions that I had. LR: Let me just say that I’m grateful for the time that you’ve given us, and the stories that you’ve shared with us. 26 JF: Well, you know, whatever you want that I know I’ll tell ya. Cause this is firsthand, this isn’t hearsay. Many, many other things that would be interesting, if you knew what to ask. LR: Well that’s the problem! I don’t know what to ask. But you answered all the questions that I had. MF: Was there anything that we didn’t cover that you want to share? JF: No, I just answer what you ask me. MF: Well if we think of some more questions can we get in touch with you again? JF: Sure, I don’t care. Long as I’m still alive. It’s not up to me now, you know. Page1 My Life, by Giacomo Favero (Jim) (dictated to Ted and Nancy K. Favero at his home in Ogden, Utah in the year 2010) The story begins in Coassolo, Torino, Piedmont, Italy, in the late 1890’s. My grandparents, Giovanni and Domenica Dellaca Favero-Pich, decided to make a new start in the USA. They left the “Old Country” behind and sailed across the ocean…from Havre, France, to New York on the ship named The La Touraine, arriving on 27 August 1899, well, not all of the family together. My grandpa Giovanni came first and brought two of their children, Tony and Maggie. They worked in the mines in Illinois for awhile before moving to Kemmerer, Wyoming, where they obtained work in the Diamondville Mine. About 3 years later they had earned enough money to send for two more children, Mike and Mary. They all worked together to bring the rest of the family and within a few more years their mother, Domenica, and Sam and my father, Giovanni, were able to join them. That’s how they did it, by working together to help each other. While they were living in Diamondville they all worked in the mines but since my dad was not old enough to be a mine worker he worked as a water boy. There were mules used in the mine but we don’t know if they were used to carry water, too. The mules were nearly blind from being in the dark so much. Coming to America and seeing the Statue of Liberty come into view was a new and exciting adventure, but it was not easy. It was the custom for those immigrating to America to be held at Ellis Island awaiting their turn to be checked out before being allowed into the country. Years later, when Marguerite and I visited there we looked down from the balcony and saw what reminded me of a stock yard, with small corral-like pens where people from different countries were kept until their turn to be inspected. If they didn’t pass inspection they were placed in another pen and sent back to their native country. It was probably during this time that my grandpa changed the surname, Favero-Pich, to Favero. In Kemmerer there was a big commissary owned by the mine and everyone who worked in the mines had to buy all their clothes, food, everything, in that commissary. As a travelling salesman selling shoes I visited there, and Mr. Sawaya took me down to the commissary to show me the foundation was still there. I also saw where dad and the family all lived. As time went on Grandpa Giovanni became increasingly concerned for the safety of his family as they worked in the mines. Mining is a dangerous occupation, especially in those days, so the family left Wyoming and moved to Utah where they were able to purchase ground west of Ogden, in Taylor, and try their hand at farming. During this period a man named Carl Rogers, who became my Aunt Maggie’s husband, also came to America, He was an orphan. He started working at the mine, but it was too hard a job for him, so he went into the saloon business. He later became Mayor of Kemmerer, Chief of Police, owned a hotel that is still there. I can remember going up there and how we sat and ate in a big long dining hall. Uncle Carl Rogers was a wealthy man. He was into everything. He even had a “stable of girls”. He bootlegged. Aunt Maggie didn’t want to live up there. Uncle Carl was kind of a black eye on her so they bought a two story house in Ogden, Utah, on Gramercy Avenue. She lived there most of the time. He and Maggie had 4 kids, Kate, Mary Jane, Mike, and Margaret. The kids all lived in Ogden with their mother. Sometimes she would go to Kemmerer or he would come down here and stay awhile. She used to tell him if he did not straighten up and get out of that business that Lord would afflict him some way… He went blind before he died. Page2 Uncle Carl’s son, Mike, attended Ogden High School and his dad was the only one who owned a big Hudson Mike would drive it to Ogden High School and all the girls would clamor after Mike because he was the only one who had a big Hudson. He started drinking because of the money and all and he was handsome about like Cary Grant. Q. What about dad’s brother, Mike, and some of the other brothers who had saloons in Ogden on 25th street? Uncle Mike was my father’s brother. He, too, was in the saloon business on 25th Street in Ogden, Utah. He owned a couple of big saloons and he and a bunch of guys got into the bootlegging business. Mother used to talk about Mike lighting cigars with money. Uncle Mike used to parade up and down 25th Street and hand out money to bums and he would pull out money and burn it. He was that kind of guy, smoked big cigars all the time and would not smoke anything but the ones that came out of Cuba. He was importing food, cheese and fine wine from Italy. He talked dad into helping them by hiding the booze in the sand on dad’s farm. They would have the booze in 50 gallon barrels and they needed to bury the barrels somewhere while they aged. One morning we went out to milk, and on our side by the corral, there was a big pile of dirt and we asked dad where that came from but he never would tell us. The owners came and got that later. Still Later on there was another pile of dirt and a big hole in the ground with a door in the hill and they had buried a big batch of booze there. Somehow, Mike and Carl Rogers and the guys who were in the bootlegging business got into some kind of an argument over money and different things so they turned them in to the police. The officers came out there and they knew right where to go. I was there when the big truck load of booze was found and taken away. what was crazy was that they told dad that because it was not his and he was just letting them store it on his property, he would not have to give his name. And dad said, “Oh, that’s all right, go ahead and report it the way it is.” Dad always told the truth, you know. In fact all of us kids were going to church and dad was going to church and that was when mother had all the kids at home….grandpa Daley was going to church. So when that article came out in the paper, Grandpa Daley got up and moved. Dad, he didn’t care. He said “they found it on my place. After they started cracking down on the saloon business he went broke and he died a broken man. He lost everything and so he went to drinking himself. One night he fell off the sidewalk and hit his head on the curb and died. That’s what killed him – the booze. At that time John and I were pretty good sized – High school, I think. We had our dogs, Brownie and Bozo, and they would go down in the still. It was just like a big cellar. They were yipping and barking and there were skunks down there. So here came Bozo dragging Brownie out and the skunk had Brownie by the throat and had him choked off. Bozo was kind of half Airdale and half some other breed of big dog, he dragged them both up out of that hole. Uncle Mike and Mary had 4 kids. Mother and dad lived in Roy and mother used to tell us all the time about Mike and Mary coming to visit. They would bring their family out to the farm to see us like they were visiting the poor people. They came often and mother would always have dinner ready for them. Dad was having trouble with his back and mother was milking about 18 head of cows and doing all the farm work and taking care of 2 kids. There was a well out in the yard where they kept the butter. She Page3 had new potatoes, and she went out and peeled all the potatoes. They would come out there but they would never help, they would just sit around. It seemed like Mike’s kids thought they were above us because we were the farmers, but we used to have a lot of fun playing together around the apple trees and that kind of stuff. Q..Do you remember other things about the Favero side? It was about the time Marguerite and I were going together that Uncle Tony died. He was young but he had something wrong with his back and he never did get better. It was about 1938. We went down on a Sunday to view him in the new house and Aunt Mable was in there crying and crying. All at once this woman came in and she just got up and bodily threw her out of the house. Just threw her out! She was a woman from West Weber who had had an argument with Aunt Mable. Aunt Mable had a mean streak in her! Moving from Roy to Kanesville – My oldest brother, Giovanni, Junior (John), was born in Taylor, Utah, on 8 November 1914 to Giovanni and Hazel Favero. They were living with my father’s parents, Giovanni and Domenica Favero, at the time. They stayed there for about 18 months and in March they moved to a farm in Roy, Utah. I was born in Roy on 8 October 1916. Frank was born there, too, on 15 August 1918. By the time the next baby boy, Bud, came along the folks had moved again, back to Taylor. I was 4 years old by then. What do you remember about early Christmases? In mother’s and dad’s bedroom they had carpet and under the carpet they put straw to make it warmer. They tacked it down around the sides so it was kind of bouncy. John’s and my bed was in the dining room – we slept two on a bed. We didn’t have a Christmas tree or anything so we hung our socks on the back of the chairs. We couldn’t wait for “Santy Clause” to come, so that next morning dad got up earlier and lit the pot bellied stove so it would be warm, and they hollered, “okay, you kids can get up”. So we got up to see what was in our stockings and I think we got three things. We got something like a pair of house slippers, a toy, some pencils and an orange. We were so tickled I can remember we ran into the bedroom to show grandma and grandpa what Santa Clause had left. The first memory I have of Frank is my mother setting me in an old wagon wheel and putting little Frank in my arms. It was a bright sunny morning in March. Frank was 7 months old when he died and I was 2 years older than he was - I was between 3 and 4 years old. Frank had diarrhea for several days and the Dr. was called in to treat him. He recommended they give Frank corn starch in his bottle. They did and it blocked his bowel so tight that it killed him. The house was not a small log cabin. The log cabin part was the big dining room and grandma and grandpa’s bedroom. Attached to that on the south side was a frame portion with a kitchen with a little room in the back. On the front was a porch. The house had 4 rooms, a porch, and a pantry. The south side was later torn off and the log portion made into 2 big rooms. That was before we got Burt. (a horse). The house was built in 1922 and that year Carl was born. I was 6 years old and I can remember moving into the house. Clarence Kingston’s brother was building the house. On the east of the old Page4 house was a big cellar. Where the old cellar was there was a big pile of lumber and 2 big Box Elder trees. When I was 6 years old I was playing on the lumber and stepped on a big nail that went clear through my foot and out the top. That was before I started school. We went to Taylor School. Mrs. Nina Hadley was my first grade teacher. I had Nina and Hazel Petersen too. There were four classes in the school, first and second grades; third and fourth; fifth and sixth; and seventh eighth and ninth together. We walked or rode the horse to school most of the time because we didn’t have a car. The first thing I remember about school was John coming home from school, walking across the yard to the house. Then when John was in 3rd grade we were walking along and Hy Petersen had an old truck he used to haul grain with and he came along and gave us a ride home. John fell off in the sandy road over by where the bridge was and got run over – right over his waist. That put him out of school for about a year, so that put him back and he and I want through school, all the years, together. It was a miracle that he lived. When we went to school we had troubles because we were half breads, dagos, wops, and because dad was not a member of the LDS Church and mom was. Every day when we went to school we would have to fight our way through. The other kids picked on us about every day. Well, it was John and I to begin with and we fought every day, but not at the same time. We were always fighting somebody. Then Bud came along and he was 4 years younger. When we went to school we were “wops”. There were the Petersen kids to the south of the school district but on the north end were the Sorenson’s and Nielson’s and that bunch. I went home many times with a big lip, but I got to the point where I could really thrash any of those guys they would put on me. Then they got so they would put two of them on me. They would have Roy Sorenson wrestle me and I got so that I could toss him around good. I wasn’t big, but I was a little wild cat. Mr. Watkins was our teacher for three or four years, (Carol Hurst’s Dad), and taught us three classes and all the subjects. That’s what’s wrong with my English today. When I was supposed to be learning English, we had English once a week. That was one disadvantage of that kind of school. When they opened West Weber and started sending kids there the parents were upset because they sent the kids too far away from home, but that was the best thing that ever happened. I never did go to West Weber, I went right from ninth grade into High School. That was during the years of 1932, 1933, 1934, 1935. It was the old Weber High out on Twelfth Street. Q..Any outstanding teacher or one you did or did not like? Nina, Hazel and Evelyn. Mrs. Rigby in the 2nd and 3rd grades was fantastic. We had so much trouble with the kids, they ran the teacher out that year and brought Mrs. Rigby in, and she stayed. Mrs. Lythgo was our 4th and 5th grade teacher. When I was in the sixth grade the teacher got sick for six weeks and they hired Miss Jeppson. We were on the same page in arithmetic. I learned more in six weeks than all the rest of the year. Q. What do you remember about our grandparents, Grandma and Grandpa Favero – (Giovanni and Domenica) When Grandma and Grandpa sold that place in Taylor, they moved to Ogden and lived on Childs Avenue. The house is still there. Grandpa had a “pacer” horse called Dale. Pacers are trained to trot fast. They milked the cows and dad used to separate the milk from the cream and every day grandpa Page5 would come out in the buggy and bring the cream back to town and they would make butter. Grandpa made butter and sold it and paid dad for the cream. I’ve got the old butter mold here that grandpa used to take all the cream. He did that for several years. With that old brown bay horse, Dale, he could come out there almost as fast as an automobile. After awhile they got rid of Dale as they were getting up in years. Grandpa got sick and was in bed for awhile. Once, when Grandma was 83 and came out home, she wanted to go from the house out to the barn so she went across the garden and climbed the garden fence. We thought that was quite a feat because she had right white hair and was 83 years old. Q..What about Grandpa Favero: The Favero’s were wonderful people. We would go to Sunday dinner and they would sit us all around the table and before they would eat, most of the time spaghetti, they had little glasses for the kids and we would have a little glass of wine. The bigger people got bigger glasses, but we had little glasses of wine. We used to call them Bung and Nona (in Italian, it means grandma and grandpa). Dad and mother lived with grandma and grandpa for about 18 months. That was where John was born. They were married in 1912 and John was born in 1914. That was in the old house that was there (Leland Hadley’s house) in Taylor. I was very young before they moved, so I got to know them after they moved into town. They bought the 40 acre farm when they moved from Wyoming, and it was heavy ground. They had two wagons and two teams and every winter they hauled sand from Sam Hadley’s hill onto that 40 acres. They would spread one wagon load along and then drive the other wagon down the tracks and dump it. That is how they covered the whole 40 acres with sand and that’s why it is the best farm in Taylor. It is the church farm now. Q. Why did they move from Roy? Dad lived with the folks in Roy because Uncle Sam was married and dad was the last one home so he was helping out on the farm. Then dad and mother bought the place over in Roy. The reason they moved from Roy (it was a lovely farm, today it is all houses) was that they wanted to be closer to grandma and grandpa. The Hessmark’s farm came up for sale so they bought it. East of the house was a big slough and dad scraped it and cleaned it all out. There were 2 more sloughs and the only good ground was on the west side of the ditch, the south end of the field, and the back of the hill. All that ground where Bud’s house sits was sand hill. We scraped up there for years and years. Ted: “I remember we scraped there. That was where Paul was scraping when the horses ran away with old Bally in the middle. He was fatally injured. (Jim) Bally’s mother was Queen and Dan’s mother was Nellie. Two colts were born the same year. We knew Bally was going to be born and I got up early that morning and there she was out in the pasture. I broke Dick and Bally and used them on the scraper up there…. Page6 Q..What can you tell us about Grandma and Grandpa Daley? (James and Mary Elizabeth) Well, if you want to see a picture of Grandma Daley, look at Jeanie, she is built just about like Grandma Daley. Grandma was a pretty little lady and Grandpa was a big man, he weighed around 225 pounds or more. Everybody in the county knew Jim Daley because he was a worker. He had the fattest horses, the fattest cows and the biggest hogs of anybody. He wouldn’t kill a hog unless they weighed around 700 to 800 pounds. Then when he killed them he would dress them out and let them hang for a couple of days with these old flour sacks over them so the flies wouldn’t get them and then many times, on lots of hogs, and he used a liquid hickory. I was down there and helped him. First he would rub course salt into the meat – just rub and rub into the meat and let it hang for a few days then add the liquid hickory. He would go through that process several times. He would have it all cut up into the hams and bacon. That’s why he let the hogs get so big, because he loved the big bacon slabs. And then we would put the salt and hickory on them and when they were cured Grandma would sew these sacks around them. Every summer when they got it cured they would put it down in the wheat bin so the flies couldn’t get to it. That way we would have pork the year ‘round. He might have a hundred pieces in that grain bin. He knew where each one was. It would be smoked ham and it was delicious. Grandpa Daley used to wear rubber boots with laces up the front, he very seldom wore shoes. He would wear those because he was in the water and out of the water and in the barn. He wore blue overalls and blue work shirts. He worked so hard that where the overall straps came down over the shoulders there would be white salt from perspiration. He would drink a lot of vinegar-aide. It had a lot of sugar in it. He said it was good for him. When he would take his shirts off there would be a big strip of salt down his back . He was such a good farmer that when he was irrigating he would take a scythe and clean all the ditches. They burn them now. He would clean them so the water would run. He milked 15 -20 head of cows, all the time. Where the horse barn stood he also had a cow barn and another shed out by the old barn where he had about 80 cows. That was on the other place, where Grandma was born. Grandma used to thin beets and hoe beets down there. When I came along I was kind of Grandpa’s favorite. He used to put me on the horse and we would ride the horse back and forth down there all the time. I helped him a lot and when we hauled hay he would have John and I on the wagon tromping hay and we’d ride from the barn to the field. He had a long 2 by 8 piece of board he put on the back end of the wagon. When we’d go out into the field and back he would just pull that board out wide enough to sit on and we would drive the wagon. In the spring when we would thin and hoe beets Grandpa would straddle two rows of beets and he would be hoeing 4 rows of beets with John on one side and me on the other side. Every once in a while we would feel a rap on our butt with the hoe handle. Grandpa would wop us if we missed a weed. Grandpa couldn’t allow a weed on his place. We were supposed to pull all the weeds out – and his place was immaculate. Everybody knew when he would haul hay or grain, and everybody would help. They would have two guys on one side and two on the wagon and Grandpa on the other side. Grandpa could throw more bundles than any two men together. That’s where I learned – I learned more from Grandpa Daley about gardening and working than I did from dad. I (Jim) have been to the place (in Italy) where dad lived and talked about. They would farm up here on the side of the hill and a lot of the top soil would wash down so in spring they would get a flat canvas about 6 by 6 and fill with bushels full of dirt and haul it back up to the top of the hill. Grandpa Daley was a hard man – he believed in hard work. He used to call Grandma “Blondie”. When we were harvesting beets he would expect his meals in the morning, at noon and at night, right on time. I Page7 can remember coming in there with a big load of beets and he would call to grandma, “Blondie, Blondie, bring them out a drink”. He was a tough guy, I’m telling you. He worked from the time it was light in the morning until it got dark at night. Grandma was a fantastic cook. I used to eat with them a lot, and Grandpa Daley loved celery. He would eat celery all the time. On the north of the house where those trees were, he called it his garden, he had an acre and he raised celery. He raised everything including fruit trees, berries, etc. He would eat celery with pepper and salt and to this day I have to have pepper and salt on my celery. He ate hearty and he worked hearty. Their children that were still home while I was there were Florence and Derwood. The others, George and Ross were already married, Grandpa Daley was a man who had a personality just about like Bud. You could hear him cussing clear down at the church. He would be cussing the horses and the cows. He had three head of horses, sometimes four head. They were hitched together in three-horse hitches. They used double and single trees. Grandpa used to get colts every spring and one big black horse he called Nig that he worked with was one of those colts. Curn was kind of a dark red bay colt and he worked with Nig. Grandma Daley had a dream that if they castrated Curn that horse would die, so Grandpa did not have him castrated. He grew up and they broke him to work. In the barn they had him in the end stall inside the North door, (they called it Old Curn’s stall). There was an extra heavy halter on him fastened to chains hooked from each corner of the manger. They put old Nig next to him because they didn’t dare to put a mare next to him. Curn was a big horse and Grandpa would swear at him. He’d say, “You black hearted SOB”. Once when we were in the house eating dinner the horse was jerking and kicking and bucking around inside his stall. He was a working fool, that horse. They had him for years and years. Q. Q.. How did dad get into horses? R. Well, dad loved horses right from the day that they came to the farm so they bought two teams and worked them there. They used one on the wagon and the other on the buggy. He bought a buggy and a beautiful buggy horse. He was a good looking rascal, dad was, and he would go driving around there. Mother and Ethel Hunter were walking from Taylor School one day and dad came up behind them in his fancy horse and buggy and popped mom on the butt with his whip. That’s how he met her. They were married when she was 16. Q.. What about “Old Burt”? Let’s go back – when they went to Roy they had a nice team of horses over there. He bought a bally stallion, with a black mane and tail. His first stallion was a Shire in Roy. They had him in Taylor for several years. I don’t remember what happened to him. One day when we were out by the barn, dad was contacted by some Fowers and a group from Hooper that wanted to get a couple of stallions, so they brought these two stallions over from France or Belgium. One was a Belgian and one was a Percheron. Dad got into the association – there were about six of them and they had the two stallions. Dad took the Perch horse to run him for the company and someone down there in Hooper, had the Belgium. Dad used to run the Percheron, the Belgian horse, he took him around for stud services and after about 3 years he went sterile so they had to get rid of him.. After that dad bought Burt and he was the company horse at first, so dad took him and started running him and bought the company off. Burt weighed almost 2200 lbs at the time, almost a ton. Because he was travelling, us kids were big enough that we Page8 did all the farm work. I was fifteen or sixteen years old then. We did all the farm work and dad took the horse. I can remember Net, the grey mare. He always took the mare with him because Burt got along better with the mare than with the gelding. Q.. What do you mean “He used her with him?” For travelling around the county for breeding purposes. Well, dad would ride the saddle and lead the big stallion along the side of him until they built a large wooden trailer for him. I can remember Net because we used to keep her on the other side of the big ditch in the garden, and we had a bunch of apple trees there, and dad would say, “go get Net for me”, and I would go after her and she would run around and I couldn’t catch her. One day I was going to ride her and she ran around so I went up to the house and got the lariat rope and where she’d run under the grape vines I made a loop and tied the other end to the apple tree. I went to the other end of the garden and ran after her and she ran full speed right through my lariat rope. When she ran through it just popped her like a whip. Her head was here and her butt was here and it popped her clear around and threw her on her side. I thought I had killed her. It popped her so hard it tightened the noose around her neck so tight I had a hard time getting her loose in time to keep her from choking to death. I finally had to go over to the tree and pull on the rope to loosen the slip knot and get it off her neck . She just laid there and I thought maybe I had broken her neck or something – so finally I kicked her on the side of her back and she got up. When she got up she was shaking. After that when I went down to catch her she would stand in one spot and I could walk right up to her. She never ran from me again. Ted: They bred a lot of horses around and mother said that David O. McKay used to come down. That’s right. Dad ran Burt for seventeen years. All through Davis County, Box Elder County, Morgan and Weber Counties there were hardly any colts that weren’t black. He would breed as many as three mares a day. And boy, dad took good care of him. He fed him special feed and washed him off at night with Lysol. He was a beautiful black. His mane was clear down his shoulders. Ted: I remember the bridal used to hang down the basement and that thing was much bigger than the ones used on other horses. That horse had a huge head. He was gentle. When dad got him he built him a corral out of two by sixes and it was seven or eight feet high. He made it out of railroad ties and two by sixes. Old Burt would go in the log house and his manger was in the north east corner where there was a window. We could throw his feed to him through the window. He would go and crap in the northwest corner. He had a real manure pile and he would not crap nor wet anywhere but outside. So inside, where he ate and lay down, it was always dry and nice. We did not have water in the corral. It was forty feet wide and sixty feet long and every morning and night we would have to take him out to water him. Even the younger kids would go up there and open the gate. He would come over and put his head down and we would put his bridle on. We always used a bridle, not a halter. It had a chin strap on so when he would get a little bit fussy, like a stallion is, we would give it a jerk and he would settle right down. We would lead him from there clear down around the end of the barn and up to the big cement watering trough – that was where we would water him all the time. Just think about the breed bills at that time. If you bred him once, they called that the ”jump”, and that was ten dollars and if you bred him twice, that was twelve dollars. To guarantee a colt it was fifteen dollars. With a horse like that, he had a pedigree as long as your arm and he was “a Percheron”. Page9 At one time dad took his horse around where the Dee Event Center is and where the old Vondent family farm used to be. We used to go to school with the Vondent kids . They were poor just like us, and they could not always buy their lunch. We only wore one change of clothes a week. We had two sets of clothes. As soon as we got home from school or church we would put on our work clothes. Mr. Vondent didn’t have the money to pay dad for the breed bill, so he wanted dad to take ground where the Dee Events center is now. He wanted him to buy it for $2.50/acre to pay his breed bills. Part of the Vondent farm is still there – the old shed and barn are still there beside the fence. Q.. (Ted) Talk about Vick. I remember about Vick because I was about 4 and I have some of his toys. I have a little castle that belonged to him. He died when he was seven years old. At Hooper Days he won the prize for the biggest and fattest baby. One winter we all got sick. I remember it was the winter when we had Scarlet Fever and measles both in the house at the same time. When one of us would pick up a disease everybody else would get vaccinated. For the rest of the kids the vaccinations worked, but mine didn’t. The health department would always quarantine the house with a sign on the front door. No one could come in or out. I got everything that came along because the vaccinations didn’t work and I got sick so the house was quarantined. Dad never paid much attention to the yard or garden or anything, so John and I had hauled sod down from the pasture and sodded that area. We had a pretty nice little lawn and after the snow melted we would choose up sides and wrestle all the time. So we were there on the lawn having fun (we all had our big work shoes on) and somehow or other one of the boys, I don’t remember which one, flipped over and hit Vick’s leg with his heel. Within about two days his leg started swelling and he was complaining and crying about his leg hurting him all the time so we called Dr. Stranquist. He looked at him and took care of it but finally it was causing him so much trouble they took him into the hospital and lanced it and let the poison out of it. They lanced his leg down in front, but it would not heal. If I remember right, they operated on him three or four times, and even chipped away some of the bone in there. When it would not heal they used these radium rods in it to get rid of the proud flesh in there. They didn’t do the job, so they put maggots in there to clean it out. They finally got the proud flesh cured but the wound would not heal – it was just an open sore. It happened that the Mayo Brothers were here in Salt Lake at the hospital and they took him down to let them see it. He was six years old and he was in the hospital all that summer – I was still in school when Vick got sick and was in the hospital. I would go to school and then to the hospital to stay with Vick. They had a cot in his room for me so I could stay with Vick at the hospital at night. The Mayo brothers looked at his leg and they said there was poison of some kind in there and they should take his leg off above the knee. Vick was old enough that he said to mom and dad, “don’t let them take my leg off”. He died in April. What it did was it would not heal up and they said it turned to a tumor (Osteomyelitis*) and it went into his blood stream and went all through his body. What happened was it paralyzed his bladder. He couldn’t go so they put in a catheter and he had about a gallon of water in him and was bloated all up. After a week or ten days it moved from his bladder to his arm and he could not move it, and it swelled all up. Then it went into his face. When he would laugh or cry, one side of his face would not move. It was just stiff and his eye would stare. Then he got a great big swelling across his forehead and that was what killed him. And if they had had penicillin it would have killed it. Penicillin was a natural enemy to Osteomyelitis. It was Page10 not cancer, it was like a blood poisoning. They just didn’t have the medicine. When they discovered penicillin, just before the war broke out, it was too late for Vick. *NOTE: a simple explanation of Osteomyelitis found in the dictionary states: “an infection of the bone, usually caused by pus-forming microorganisms, as certain strains of streptococcus.” Ted : I remember Lloyd Hunter would bring grain for chickens and cows – he worked for a feed company. He drove for them for years. Lloyd Hunter was Aunt Annie’s boy. Lloyd would come over home quite a bit because of his Grandpa James B. Hunter who raised him just like his own boy. That’s Ethel’s father. Lloyd had a brown running horse and he would come to see mom and dad and get on that horse and go just a-whipping up the road. Uncle John Hunter and Aunt Annie had two children, Lloyd Elmer and Leone, and Aunt Annie would come over and help when mother gave birth. Babies were born at home then. After her first husband, John Hunter, died Annie married Henry Jensen. Uncle Ross and Uncle Derwood and Aunt Florence were still home so I knew them very well. Grandpa Daley’s first wife, Louisa (Lew-Iza) Jane Ward, was part Indian. James Eligahy Daley, was their first child. There was also a little girl, Louisa Elizabeth Daley. She was born in 1879 and died in 1880.. Louisa and grandpa (James Louis Daley) were married in 1877 in West Weber and she died in 1880 in Taylor. Grandpa Daley then married Mary Elizabeth Chatterton and they were blessed with twelve children, seven boys and five girls. (William Louis, Mary Jane, Annie Alemeda, Jennie Vilo, George Irvin, Frank Hyrum, Hazel Cleo, Ross, Shermon, Derwood Riley, John Victor, Florence Isabella, and “baby”. (the names in this family were found in a historical record kept by Hazel C Daley Favero which is now in possession of Nancy K. Favero) Q..What can you tell us about Grandpa and Grandma Daley and the Church. Were they religious? I wouldn’t say they weren’t religious, I can’t remember much about Grandma Daley going to church - but Grandpa was always too busy. His farm and his animals came first, and when he was around and outside, he used language about like Bud did, a lot of cuss words, but he was a good hearted, hard-working guy. As he got older he started going to church more. Q. ..What brought our dad into the church? The story of dad and mother is a real love story. When our dad, Giovanni Favero, first started going with Hazel Daley, our mother, he went to church with her every Sunday – they lived right there by the church. When they decided to get married he went to the bishop and wanted to be baptized but his whole family was against it because they were all staunch Catholics. Dad said if he was marrying a Mormon girl he wanted to be a Mormon. The Bishop said that John didn’t know enough about the church. Even though he had been going to church with Hazel for about two years, he thought John had better wait awhile until he knew more about the church. So dad said that was fine. Then as us kids came along, I don’t remember too much about it until we were in grade school, but mother couldn’t go because she always had two in diapers. Dad always took us to church. He made sure we went to church and mutual Page11 and everything else. As soon as their youngest child, Ned, was old enough, they both started going to church together and they went all the time. They were hardly ever apart. (aside: John was once asked what brought him into the church and he replied that he saw Hazel on her knees every night and eventually she “loved him into the church”. It was her sweet example that touched his heart.) Q…Didn’t some of the neighbors, Henry Anderson and some of the others influence them? Well, they knew Henry Anderson and Joe Anderson later in life and they were very, very dear friends to dad and they all went to church together. It wasn’t until later years when mother finally was able to go back to church. After the Bishop said that he should wait until he knew more about the church his folks were relieved, and he promised his folks he would wait until after they were gone and then he would join the church. So as soon as his folks died, in 1937, I was able to baptize him into the church. The whole family was against it excepting Uncle Sam. Dad married a Mormon girl and Uncle Sam, dad’s brother, married Annie Simpson, who was also a Mormon. Uncle Sam did not get baptized until later, but Alfred and Dewey Favero and Aunt Annie always went to church down in Hooper. Later dad was called to be a stake missionary and when I came back from the service I was called and joined the mission. We baptized Uncle Sam - Uncle Sam died a Mormon. When I was growing up it was my job to take care of the chickens, turkeys and pigs, and we always used to have six or seven sows. We used to always get one or two litter of pigs. We used to sell the little 8 week old pigs for wieners for eight bucks apiece. That was good money in those days. This one winter dad said we should breed in December so we will get pigs in February. We had six sows and we bred them and by golly they all started pigging in late February. It takes “three months, three weeks, three days, and three hours”. We took the horses out of the horse stalls and put the pigs in there and I’ll be d***** if the temperature didn’t go down to about zero. We took wash tubs and built fires in them. We even had to take the piglets into the house to try and keep them warm, but we lost most of them. Dad had good teams of horses. He had Queen and Nellie, both grey horses, and before that he had other good teams and good horses. Then the flies with encephalitis came around and we lost 8 head of horses that year. Dad was taking his horse to North Ogden to breed and they lost half a dozen horses up there. We ended up with two mares. One black we called Beauty, but she also died of encephalitis. Q. Were Grandma and Grandpa Daley still alive when dad bought the farm? No, Grandma Daley died and Grandpa stayed there for a little while. Where Carl and Gloria live now there were just two rooms and a little lean-to for the kitchen on the east side. Grandpa moved over there and Derwood moved to Idaho. Then Derwood and Aunt Pearl moved back down when Grandpa couldn’t farm anymore and took over the farm. That’s where most of their children were born. I used to go down three or four nights a week and stay with Grandpa in the little house. He had arthritis so bad that his hands looked like a chicken’s feet. They were all bent out of shape and he got so he couldn’t work. Finally Grandpa couldn’t stay in the little house by himself so he came over and lived with us for maybe six months or so. We have a picture of him sitting on the back porch with the kids standing all in Page12 back of him. After that he went and lived with Derwood for a little while, but he died shortly after that at the age of 68. Grandpa died in 1933, Grandma in 1929. Grandma was just a sweet little lady – she would just work, work, work. When I was 11 years old she wanted to go to Idaho to see her mother who lived up there, so she took me and we got on the train and went from Ogden to Idaho and stayed up there a couple of days. I slept with Grandma there. Going from Utah to Idaho was the first time I had slept on the train and the waiters were black men with towels on their arms and there were beautiful dishes and the best meals. I can remember going thru Cache Valley (it was January) with the deep snow and the smoke going out from the train, there was snow all along the sides of the roads. A few years later, when she got sick, she was sick for a few days and mother said one morning, Jim, get on the horse and go down and see how Grandma is. Well, when I got down there to see her Eva Hunter was there and Grandma and someone else. She was sitting up in bed in that front bedroom and when I went in the room Grandma was in the stages of dying, they thought. Eva Hunter started screaming and jumped on top of the bed and Grandma came back to life. She lived then for a few months and died later on. Ted: Uncle Derwood – how long did he run the farm until dad took over? Derwood was doing pretty good and ran it for four or five years and then he took sick. He was in the hospital – some kind of poisoning in his stomach. Aunt Pearl was sick first and then he got it. I went up to see him in the hospital and he was so darn sick they wouldn’t give him any water or anything to drink and he said, Jim run down outside and get me a little pebble to put under my tongue. So I got him a pebble and he left it there for two or three more days and just died. After he died, Aunt Pearl had the family there and tried to do the farm work and we went down and helped them a lot, but some crazy things happened. It seemed like it just went to pot, so Aunt Pearl seemed to go haywire. She had her sister Ruby there with her and they got into a lot of trouble. I can’t remember just exactly what happened, but we started running the farm and that was when dad bought the farm. Ted: What happened to the old house when Grandpa died? He rented it to Clarence Laws and he lived there for years. Ted: what made the Faveros move to Ogden? They just got old and moved to Ogden. Dad had moved to Roy and he just sold it. There used to be an old house. Ted: What kind of a guy was Grandpa? Did they talk a lot in Italian? He was just a normal kind of a man – just a Grandpa – they talked everything in Italian…they never did learn English. He could understand a few words, but they never used English. Page13 Ted: Could you understand them? No, just a few words. Mother learned to speak Italian during the time they lived with Faveros, but our folks always spoke in English because those who came from the old country wanted to be English. They wouldn’t speak their own language and so we never learned it. Ted: What about Grandma Favero? What kind of a lady was she? She was a housewife, she never worked outside that I know of, and when they were in Wyoming they took in laundry and ran a boarding house. She did laundry for miners and everything else. Ted: When they moved to Ogden, who lived in their house after they died? Our father’s sister, Aunt Mary Favero Colletti and her daughter, Minnie, lived in the north side and Grandma Favero lived in the south side The house was separated, with a common basement, but separate. The house is still there, it is leaning to one side now, but it is still there. Ted: When you were first on the farm, what crops did they raise? I recall it was mostly hay and grain, potatoes, tomatoes, beets, row crops. I remember going up and down those rows for hours with the horse. We had Babe’s colt, Brownie, a mare who had a long mane. After I had gone a few rounds I could lay the reins (lines on the haims) over her neck and when she got to the south end she would turn to the right and at the north end she would turn to the left. She could turn and go back the next row with out stepping on the potatoes or tomatoes. Ted: I heard stories that mother cultivated, too. I remember when I was old enough she would come out and help pick tomatoes. When mother was in Roy she would come out a help hoe beets, but after we got over home she didn’t come out much because we kids were old enough to help…she had little kids in the house. We started working at age seven or eight. Ted: Thinking back, after high school, can you think of some of the things, crazy things you did? When we were younger the road was just sand out in front of the house. For fun we would put a rope on the horse. John would ride on the horse with me in the wagon, or Bud, or even Carl, and visa-versa, and we would go up that road, just as fast as the horse could run. Sometimes the wagon would tip over and we would dig up the sand. We had a white mare we called “Old Nellie”. The three of us, John and Bud and I, would ride it to the Taylor school and there would be half a dozen horses tied up behind Swampy Hunter’s fence because everybody would ride their horses. We’d get as far as the front of where Maurice Barrett’s house is now. There was a ditch along the outside and as we would get close John couldn’t steer her, and she would play like she was dumb and go up on there and throw us off, nearly every day. We’d have to get back on and go to school. After Madeline came along we had a cart on two big wheels and a buckboard seat up on top. The cart was used to take hay to the horses during the day. Two of us sat up on the seat. Page14 John drove most of the time because he was the oldest. Under the seat we had a place for our feet. Bud, Carl and Madeline sat down there with their feet hanging over the back. Of course if the weather was good we would walk the three miles to school. Dad would give us just so long to get home and if we weren’t home he would give us the devil. “Get in the house and get your clothes changed and get a piece and get out.” There was always something to do. Note: “a Piece” meant a sandwich or some quick snack. Ted: Do you remember when dad got the first car? Yes, he bought the 1919 Ford. Straight out to the south of where the old house was, around the Box Elder trees, there used to be an old garage. The doors didn’t work so the doors were left open most the time. The old barn on the south side of the house is where he parked the car for years. At the same time we had a big implement barn made of railroad ties. Ted: How old do you think you were when they got that? Well, I was born in 1916 and it seemed that dad bought it new. Ted: Mother didn’t graduate from school did she? No, she went to the 8th or 9th grade….she was married at sixteen. Ted: When did you meet Marguerite? Did you meet her, in school? When did you start going together? The first time I ever saw Marguerite was when I took her sister, Rita, to graduation. When I went to pick her up, Marguerite and her mother were sitting on the back step and Marguerite had long curls and that was when I first saw her. I was five years older than Marguerite. The next time I took notice of her was at the Third Ward. They used to have the Sunday School Stake Board Meeting in the Third ward and Elizabeth Stuart Dee was in charge. Marguerite was old enough then that they brought her in to play the piano. Claude Jardine and I were in the Sunday School or Mutual or something and were at the meeting. I saw her there and I told Claude I was going to marry that girl. She was playing the piano. Ted: Were you out of High School then? Yes, I had already graduated in 1935 and she was still a senior in high school. Ted: After that did you work on the farm for awhile, or what did you do? After I got out of high school I worked most of the time in town. I had graduated in 1935 and that fall I started working at J.C. Penney’s. I worked there 18 months and then with Wohl Shoe Co out of St. Louis 7½ years before I went into the service. I was the youngest manager they had. I worked on the farm too, until almost 1940, because I was only working part time at Penney’s. When I started working for Wohl at the Emporium in Ogden, Marguerite was still in high school and after school she would take the bus and wait by the old Driver’s Drug store until I got off work. I would pick her up and take her home. Many times she and Carl would ride the bus to Taylor where she would help mother until I got home. Page15 The first car that John and I had was a 1932 convertible with a rumble seat in back. When John started “taking” (dating) Melba she lived at our home for a year or so in our front bedroom. After they got married and left home he kept the car. That left me without a car – I never did get my half of the car back. So then I bought this little grey 1937 Ford coup and that’s the one I drove. One time Aunt Annie was sick and grandma called up to the store and said, Jim when you get off work run around and see how Aunt Annie is because she isn’t too good. I came out of the back – I used to park in back in a parking lot and go out on Kiesel Ave. because it was a one-way street then. This night I came out the wrong way, on 24th . It just happened that Danny Moore, a policeman, was walking along and saw me and stopped me. He said, “Son, don’t you know that this is a one-way avenue?” I said, “well, sir, I am only going one way”. And that was the wrong thing to say. He gave me a ticket. I learned early not to say smart things to cops. I went around and saw Aunt Annie, and then went home. Marguerite: You worked in Penney’s when you sold me some shoes. Jim: Well, that was when I first got to know you. We got married November 6th, 1940. And then, once before you were big enough to hunt, Grandpa Daley had a 16 gauge shot gun and Johnny was gun crazy and liked to shoot the gun. When we were still in high school we had about sixty sheep. A pack of dogs killed 7 sheep in one night. One of the ewes had triplets and they got her. We saw the dogs out in the field and knew some of them. The next morning, just as it was barely light, dad came into our bedroom and said, hey, you guys, those dogs are out there after the sheep again. So John and I got up and ran out there in our pajamas. John had his 16 gauge shotgun and he was left handed and he was standing on the back porch loading the gun and when he snapped the gun up it went off. The barrel was about here on me and it hit me and bloodied my nose and skinned up my face. That south bedroom window still has Beebe holes where the shot hit it. Of course the dogs all took off, but later on we got some of them with twenty-twos. John loved to shoot so he would get between the pond and the moon, in the summer time or in the fall when the moon was big, and when the ducks were flying in we could shoot them at night. Paul and Ted went out and shot them the same way. We would wait until they all got lined up on the pond and then we would shoot them. We didn’t want to clean them so we would take them back and throw them to the pigs. Pigs loved those ducks. When I was working at the Emporium I was manager of the shoe department and Marguerite was working upstairs at the switchboard as a cashier. We got the Ford about then and Marguerite used to drive the car for me while I watched out the window for pheasants along the road. I had a long Bore twenty-two I bought from Elmer Heaps. I could shoot them as far as I could see them, and usually in the head. One night we went down the road and there in Prevedale’s pasture Marguerite saw a pheasant, about from here to Dean’s house (across the street from the kitchen window of Jim and Marguerite’s house). I shot it in the air and when I got over there, there were two big rooster pheasants sitting there and it went through both of them. I got two at the same time. Marguerite’s dad used to love to get in the car and go with me and I could shoot the d*** things as far as I could see them. Page16 In the early part of November we had been out home and had seen pheasant families out there and we thought they would be just about grown and sure enough when we got to the road they didn’t fly, but they got over in the pasture and I shot five of those great big roosters. One of them went in the air and over into the next pasture and here I was in my suit climbing over those barbed-wire fences. When I got out home you guys were all sitting down at the dinner table just about ready to eat and when I walked in there with those five roosters, dad hit the roof. He jumped up off his chair and said “Get those **%*$*%* roosters out of here . You are sure a fine example, all these young boys here and you are out poaching and bringing them out here”. I was going to clean them and he said “You aren’t going to clean them out here”. So I had to take them back to the apartment to clean them. He really hit the roof. He didn’t like guns anyway. In 1942 I was drafted into the armed services. As I said earler, I had been the manager of the shoe department for about 18 months and I was the youngest manager Wohl Shoe Company had. I had to have five, six, seven guys on the floor at all times because we fit all the shoes, just like we did later at our store. (Favero’s Shoes). Every Saturday night we had to write down all the sizes of the shoes we had sold that week for fill-ins and put the report in a big brown envelope to take to the post office so they would be in St Louis on Monday morning. They would fill the order on Tuesday and the shoes would be back to the store on Thursday on the Railway Express. If we had fifteen or twenty cases we got all on one day, just like clockwork. We lived in the big red apartment building on 36th street. We lived in the west side and north-east corner. The last Saturday night in November of 1942 we got home about 11 pm, and I went up the stairs and reached into the mail box and there was my draft card. I had to be down at the Bamberger station Monday morning. I had lost three guys that worked for me that year to the army. Harold Moline got his draft card two weeks before mine. I gave them all two weeks off to get ready to go. Monday morning Marguerite took me down to the station and everybody thought I had come to ”kiss Harold goodby” and I said, “I’m going with you”. I got my draft card Saturday night, they swore me in on Monday morning, (December 2nd). I told them I had to have some time off because I was managing Wohl Shoe Company under a $40,000 bond, which was a lot of money at that time, so they said today is Monday and we will give you one week, until the 8th. I came home and on Tuesday morning I called Wohl Shoe. It was Thursday before they got a man out there. We inventoried Thursday night and part of Friday, and Saturday we got him all set up. On Sunday the brothers all came, and Claude Jardine, and helped me move all our furniture off to grandma’s attic. WORLD WAR II I left on 8 December 1942 and got back nearly three years later and I was discharged in October of 1945. I never had one day off. When they shipped me from Salt Lake to Camp Gruger, Oklahoma, they gave me five weeks basic training and shipped me to Camp Polk, Louisiana. We arrived the next day at Camp Leesville at 4:00 in the morning and they stripped us all down and inspected us for lice and everything else, those crazy people. It started getting light then and they had us all fall out and some guy was going up and down between those big tents, and I thought he was saying “three or four times” but what he was doing was delivering the Shreveport Times newspapers. They swore us out and gave us breakfast and put us in trucks and took us out to the boondocks to the Leesville 169th Commandeer outfit. They had been on maneuvers for six months. There must have been sixty or seventy of us and in order to fill in the ranks they had us count off A, B, C. I went into C Company. It was three o’clock in the afternoon and the sun in those big pines was hot. They had those big sixteen- foot tents like we had Page17 deer hunting. Sgt Johnson talked with a New York accent and he said, “OK, Youse can come in now, because youse is the last one. So I went in the tent, hands in my pockets and helmet on, and I slopped in there and there was this officer (Lt. Mo, Company commander) sitting in the corner at a table. He sat at the table working and all at once he looked up and said “*&% it soldier, don’t you know that when you come before an officer that you come to attention ?” And I just stood there and he said something else and I finally said “I don’t give a d*** what you are supposed to do, I have had it. I just got shipped out of Camp Gruber on a day’s notice , they woke me up at 4 o’clock in the morning and told me to get ready, you are going to be shipped out, and, (I don’t know what I said, a lot of stuff). Lt Mo sat there listening (he was a big Norwegian) and finally he says, “What’s your name”? I told him. He said, “Well, Favero, take off your helmet and come over here and sit down”. So I went over and sat down at the table and we had a long talk. He said,” you volunteered to come down here didn’t you” and I said “no! My friends’ mother died so he went home to see her and when he came back his wife and my wife came back to see us in Oklahoma and when they got there we were out on a 21 mile forced march and I didn’t have a chance to see her for two or three days and when I got back I have only seen her one or two nights! So Lt. Mo said, “Well, listen, we are going to be shipping out within two weeks or so – let’s get on the phone and call Oklahoma and have your wife come down here to Camp Polk.” So when Marguerite got down there he took me from the company to where the officers were staying each night in his command car. There was no place to stay but a little place about the size of a chicken coop, about eight by ten, with one cot in it and nowhere to eat. But, each morning he made sure that he took me back to the office in the command car. Then one morning when we were going back he said, “Favero, we are going to be shipped out from Maryland and so we are getting a group ready to go ahead and get the kitchens ready for when the battalion gets there. So we put Marguerite on a train and sent her home. Eight other guys and I were shipped on the train to Maryland. That was about the best I had been treated. We were there for about a week and then on April 26th we were loaded on the ship and sailed away. We arrived in Africa May 11th. Marguerite’s experience: (Her trip to visit Jim, in her own words). “Another other soldier’s wife and I went down to Oklahoma on the train. But they weren’t trains like they have now, they had brought them out of the junk yard, almost, and they were just straight chair cars and I was 4 months pregnant. We had quite a rough ride getting to Oklahoma but then we stayed with this lady who had opened up her house and made bedrooms for the wives of the soldiers to stay. I stayed there until Jim called me and told me he was leaving for Camp Polk and I would be able to go see him there before he shipped out. So this lady was so sweet and she made arrangements for the bus I would go on. It was in the middle of the night. It was 3:30 in the morning when I got to Louisiana. An older man was there with a taxi-cab - the old cars- and was so sweet to me and took me to this place where they had been having the wives stay and I got to see Jim just a couple of days. We lived in a little place like a chicken coop, with no facilities at all, and there was no place to eat and being pregnant I was sick every morning. The only place – it was near to the road – there were beer lounges, and stuff like that – we finally found a little place that gave us a goat burger (which wasn’t the thing) but anyway he got shipped out and I got my arrangements made and came home. I was home just two days and I had a miscarriage. I didn’t tell him then because he had already been shipped out. It was a little rough to take, and I never once heard from him, other than our letters, for three years later when he came home. We did keep in contact through our letters. We fixed up a code and I always knew where he was. He could tell me which direction he was from Africa. At the end of the sentence, on the end of the last word, he would misspell the word by adding a letter. I could go through the letter and find the misspelled word and I could spell out where he was.“ Page18 Jim: We landed in Oran, Africa at 4pm and before we left the ship they told us we were about to be bombed. We had our bags and everything we owned, and sure enough, they bombed the port. I thought I was going to die before I got out of there and onto the truck. The army had enough trucks that they took the whole regiment seven miles north to St. Cloud. That was the first night on foreign soil. Just about the time everybody got up there and they got the tents up and everything, it was the time of day when the sun is just right to cover the approach of incoming aircraft - at about 7 p.m. Just about the time we got organized we heard a roar. We didn’t know what it was but with the sun the way it was we couldn’t see them, and they started bombing and strafing everybody there. They went around there for about 30 minutes and after that they left. I stood there just frozen and then it registered what Sgt. Spear had said “We have only got time, five weeks to teach you “so and so’s” how to march, shoot and salute and, by God, we are going to do it”. They did, but one thing they said was when you are in combat you don’t stop to think, you react. All at once that hit me and I found a big pile of rock – sandstones - and I dove down between them. I got bloodied a little bit, but I didn’t get hurt. And then again at about 9:45 that night the Germans came again and dropped those incendiary bombs. The next morning, when it started getting light it was just a mess – that was my first night on foreign soil. Going from US to Africa took from 26 April to 11 May – fourteen days. We were on a converted banana boat and it was overloaded, so on the third day on the ship they gave us all cards - white, yellow or pink cards. Every three hours the guys on the deck would have to go to the lowest deck and the bottom guys would come to the middle and the middle to the top. Then every morning about 10 or 11 o’clock they would crowd everybody on deck for fire drill and we were stuffed like sardines in there. I guess the movement of the ship and all caused me that I could not urinate for three days. I went to sick call on ship and they gave me a pill or two. Then up on deck, sitting in the hot sun, I passed out and woke up in the ship’s hospital. They gave me more pills and then put a catheter in me – it was the first time I ever had a catheter. The next day they called for anybody on the ship that could barber. There was a little guy in our company who was a barber in civilian life. Jinko, that was the barber’s name. Now they had one barber and they called for anyone else who had barber tools and I volunteered so they took us up and we stayed right there in the barber shop. We had our shelter hats and blankets and we laid down up there and we never had to go back down. The ship was crowded so much and they only had 18 toilets for several thousand men so guys were lined up continually to go. There was a line all the time. Two or three nights after we were transferred to the barber shop, we didn’t go down to chow. They were feeding twenty-four hours a day. They had a long bar with a trough below and you put your tray on the bar and slid it along. The coffee would slosh over into the trough. We didn’t go down to the chow line because the navy personnel would come up and sell us apples for $1.00 each and sandwiches for $3.00. On about the third day that we were up there everybody on the ship got sick with dysentery from some bad hamburger. The steps were narrow and open-grated and the men could not get up or down to the toilets, because it was so crowded, so they were crapping in their helmets and throwing it over the side. That same night we had a storm come in and the ship was rocking and overloaded and too heavy so the water was coming up over the side and they thought the ship was going to sink. And there the guys were, throwing up over the side and the whole ship smelled like an out-house. The guys waiting to get up and down the steps – it was running down their legs and dripping onto the guys below. So after everybody got better, in a couple of days, they had to have a ship cleaning. We had several ships in a convoy and just about every morning they would have a burial off one of the ships. There would be just a few officers standing around, and a few men, and this board laying out Page19 over the side with someone laying on it covered with a flag and they would say a few words and just tip the board and the body would go “whoosh” right down into the water – buried at sea. We stayed the first five months in Africa and then we went up north to Algiers, almost to Tunesia, and then back to St. Cloud. When the war was over in Africa, they activated the 5th army – that’s where they brought General Mark Clark in to lead it. That was the activation of the 5th army. We moved into Italy – we landed on the second day. They loaded us in Iran onto a big British troupe ship and we were on it about five days. We were heading for the invasion. There were about one hundred ships in the Mediterranean. As those ships were unloading, the Germans on land were all dug in and entrenched. The sand on the beach was soft and anything heavy would bog down, so they would bring up a ship, with one of those big barges, to bring a big steel net to put on the shore line so the tanks could land. Each one of those big ships was carrying tanks and trucks. The big barges were going back and forth. You would see those big barges going in, and just like in Sgt Ryan, the smaller boats were going to each one of those big ships because the equipment was on those big ships. The big ships could only get just so close, they would have to stay out. Every so often one of the barges would take a hit and over would go the barge and everything on the barge, trucks, tanks, whatever they had would go in the water. It was about 11a.m. and they were unloading our big troupe ships as fast as they could. Each ship had like LSD’s (they called them ducks), to load the troupes into and they would haul about forty to fifty guys. There were end gates that would come down and open the side. There was a big ship over there about two hundred yards from us that was unloading and the guys were coming down the rope ladders and getting into the boat. They left the big ship and came in maybe fifty, seventy-five, one hundred yards in front of the ship and they took a direct hit. It was one of those great big German shells and the guys would just fly up in the air. Just at that time, our company was unloading and they had a railing up there for us to hold onto. I was standing and just as I was going to turn I saw that boat take the direct hit and those guys flying in the air so I had that in my mind. I had to turn around and I was carrying a rifle and a little combat bag. Then we went down that ladder to get on the boat and went in to the shore, and as that big end gate went down and hit the water I had my rifle up, and the water was up to my chest. The guys who had died during the landing the day before were still there in the water and you would have to go between them to get in to the shore, and the water was all pink from the dead guys floating in the water. When we got to the sand we had to go over the top of the dead ones on the beach. On the other side they were bringing in the big tanks and when they hit the beach, over the top of the dead soldiers they would drive. They had to, because the Germans were shooting at us. They had to keep moving. This was at Salerno, Italy. Ted: Were you fighting pretty heavy in Africa against the Germans? Well, this was Rommel, The Desert Fox, and he had pushed several British divisions out already, but when the Americans got in there we conquered him. We never did get right into the fighting because we were the engineers and so we were doing odd jobs. One night in Algiers, at the big docks they had a big oil tanker that got hit and was on fire. It was burning like crazy. One of those big tankers was beside it and the whole ship was hot and the water was just boiling. Ted: After you landed in Italy, when did you start cooking? I was assigned as a cook by Sgt Johnson when we were in Camp Gruber, Oklahoma, after we had that twenty-one mile forced march. After seven or eight 8 miles, at night they set up camp and we were just Page20 about ready to eat whatever they had when General Slone called to break camp and march again. We marched until almost midnight and I don’t know how far we went that night, but they had us break lines again and we were on an oiled road out in the boondocks. This was in February, and it was cold, one of the coldest winters they had back there. Anyway, they said to camp for the night so I took my shelter half and put that on the ground and put my blanket over me and we were so dead tired that we were just all over the ground and we fell asleep right there we were so tired. Next morning when the bugle blew and we woke up we were covered with snow. It was so cold. We had a cup of coffee and a boiled egg, or something like that, and a piece of some kind of bread, and then we went on the march again. So we were marching up and down hills and I looked around and there were three ambulances following us. I wondered what in the world the ambulances were for and I soon found out that some of the guys we were marching with couldn’t take it, so as we were marching and someone went down they would just put a tag on them and the ambulance would come along and pick them up. That was part of what we did for five weeks. I made up my mind then that I was going to get out of the infantry 88th Division. When I got back in camp I went to see the 1st Sergeant and I told him how I got drafted and everything and he said, I’ll tell you what, you guys were brought in here to fill up this camp to the numbers we were supposed to have and there is no chance for you to go to baker’s or cook’s school. You are in here to be a foot soldier. I said that is unfortunate because I had worked as a cook in a hotel at home and I’m one of a large family, etc. (Johnny had worked with Lamar Priest at the hotel Ben Lomond for awhile and I used to go up there and work with Johnny and I saw a lot of things they did.) About 4 O’clock in the morning the light went on and they said I had 30 minutes to get my clothes on and get over to the officers’ mess. When I went in the Mess Sergeant was an Italian out of New York who had a restaurant, and they introduced me, but nobody could say Giacomo so this Sergeant says, Giacomo! Your name is Favero? The guys who brought me over there turned around and left. The Sergeant told me the officers would be coming in soon and he was going to put me on the eggs and bacon. I hadn’t even seen one of those big grills before. They brought a case of eggs in and the bacon, so I acted like I knew what I was doing and I grabbed that bacon and slapped it on the grill, and I took the eggs and hit them and, whoosh, on the grill with one hit. After breakfast the sergeant told me, good job, and then he said we have to feed them lunch. Cooks are on 2pm to 2am and then you get time off the next day. So he said I am going to put you on the salad. Here came a guy with one of those big cases of lettuce so I sat it down and took a head and pulled the top off and there was a big vat to wash it and I pretended I knew what I was doing again. I grabbed those heads of lettuce, threw them in the vat, shook them off, and pulled the outside leaves off (I had seen Lamar do this at the Hotel). I took hold of them and where the crown is I whopped them and broke it loose. So I made the salad and after we got things cleaned up he came over to me and said, “ Favero, I want you to stay here in the mess hall. Don’t go out of the mess hall because if you do the MP’s will pick you up. Don’t you leave here until I come back”. So about 5pm he came back with a handful of papers and said, “ Favero, now you are a cook in the United States army. You are not in the infantry any more, you are a cook” It was about two weeks later when in the barracks the lights went on again and the whistle blew and he called my name out, and about 4 other guys that had Italian names, and gave us about forty-five minutes to get our things together because we were going to be shipped to Camp Polk. I was in the 169th Engineers and they had been on maneuvers for six months. I was in the 88th division and that’s where Harold Maline and Shaw were. Harold Maline was killed . The 88th division didn’t come over until the following year in September and General John M. Sloan was going to come over there. They put their barracks next to ours. John M. Sloan was going to show them how to win the war. He brought the 88th division up there and sent them to the front lines. The Germans surrounded them and just annihilated Page21 them. So Harold Maline was in that bunch and he got killed, and John M. Sloan was sent back to the United States and court marshaled for his actions. And that’s the thing, when you are in combat the average life span is about four minutes – that’s how long you will last. I was in charge of the condiments and things in the kitchen after they made me Mess Sergeant, a lot of the troops in our outfit who were shell-shocked were brought to our outfit. We had as many as six at a time and we found out that they would get well again a lot better there than if they sent them to Bushnell hospital. I was replacement cook when I went into the outfit. Then they made me a PFC, Corporal and Tech Sergeant and Staff Sergeant. I passed all eight of those people who were already in there. I passed the Mess Sergeant because of the way I worked and the way I cooked. The guys in our outfit would holler, “Who’s is on shift today, is Favero on shift?” And if I was on duty I would get a ”hurrah”! Commander Moe, Commanding officer of Company “C”, told me before we went over, “I am going to send you on this echelon and I am going to give you one word of advice. I want you to be a good soldier and do what you are supposed to do, but don’t try to be a hero because I want you to come back to your beautiful wife”. There was something else I have never told you. Until the psychologist talked to me, and until I had seen the movie, “Saving Private Ryan”, when we went in on the Salerno beach head and all those guys were killed, something happened to me so that I don’t remember anything until the third or fourth day. I don’t remember anything – I just remember being about a block into the beach, and all the stuff that was happening, but I can’t remember anything until we were seven or eight miles in and then everything came to me and I knew what I was doing. People would ask me if I ever shot anyone, and I don’t remember, but my rifle had been fired and my shell belt was practically empty – so I don’t know. When I came to myself and knew what I was doing I was in the middle of a tomato field surrounded by little cherry tomatoes - in Italy. This was going into November and getting late and it started storming. We spent the first winter in a big olive grove. We spent from November to March in the raining season. Nobody could move, we were bogged down so we spent the rainy season in the olive orchard. Just sitting there waiting. We had all the big tents, just like our cook tent and they arranged it so we could have double bunks, four to a tent with straw mattresses. We slept double decked for four months. Ted: Where did they bring the food in to you? Part of the food was coming in just like the rest of the stuff, and sometimes it would be delayed and we were issued c-rations, and would eat cold cans of c-rations. We never cooked there for two weeks or so. Most of our meals were cold. I can’t remember what we ate, some looked like graham crackers. But we ate anything we could get. Ted: Did you move on against the Germans and Italians? The Italians were against us, too, at first. The Germans had all those mountains trenched and all you could see was their living quarters the trenches were so deep, and they had tunnels all down in the mountains. We captured one that had two or three rooms down there and they had overstuffed chairs and everything. They were all in trenches that they had the Italians dig for them. You can see all those trenches in pictures I have. That was why it was so hard to get them out of there. That was why we went into Italy, to draw the Germans down out of the north to keep them away from where we were Page22 going to land in Normandy. From Salerno up to Genoa there were almost sixty tunnels through the mountains. We went back and forth all over there. I can remember the morning we into Verona, and then they gave us some time off in Venice. When we went to Italy to pick up Randy from his mission we went down to the other side of Naples and I tried to find where some of those pill boxes were. We found several of them – they left some of them there, but in 30 years they have rebuilt and even the casern has been changed Ted: You cooked for some officers. When we were in Franc Elise, General Clark and six of our troops and one other officer had a motor boat and they drove up and down the Mediterranean shore. They were trying to figure out where to have the troops land. Finally they decided to go in at Anzio Beachhead. For almost 3 weeks they were making these trips up and down. About three one morning I cooked hot cakes for them. General Clark and Moe especially liked hot cakes, so I made them for them when they would come back from one of those trips. Ted: Were they afraid of getting shot? Well, it was at night every time. They decided to land at Anzio, so that was where they went in. If they had known it was going to play out like it did, they would have had a lot more back-up and resources. When they went into Anzio they went in on flat land with big hills all around it. The Germans didn’t have a lot of people there. They were over in Italy, the other way. In the next four or five days, before we could get more supplies in, the Germans brought thousands of their troops and equipment from northern Italy and they were shooting down over the top of our troops. That’s why so many people were slaughtered. I have a picture of one of those big guns they mounted on railroad cars. They would hide the railroad cars in these tunnels. We had already landed and they didn’t even know it, but when they found out they brought in all those people and they had our troops pinned down for about six months. I was not in there, I was down south but the group that went up and invaded up there was the 5th army – a different army. I didn’t go into Anzio myself until later. The Germans killed thousands of people there. Had our troops got into Rome they could have cut off all that area between Naples and Rome. We were in Italy from September of 1943, until May of 1945, when the war was over. I was in the army for thirty-four months and in Italy for twenty-nine months and about five months in Africa. I was all over in Italy. We bivouacked in the courtyard of the Leaning Tower for a week and we stayed almost two weeks west of the big coliseum in Rome where they were going to hold the 1938 world fair. They had all those big buildings built in 1938 and they were still there. We kept pushing the Germans north. The Germans were all around us, shooting at us while we were in the olive orchards. We would go in those trees at night and wait until next morning to get set up. The branches were falling on us, but the Germans didn’t know we were there. We were down low and they didn’t know it but they were shooting into the trees above us - and we stayed hunkered down there. The next morning, the British Page23 10th corps was on the other side, in the area, and they came up and the Germans retreated. We stayed there because we were set up there to put in the bridge across the Garlian River on the old Apian Way highway – it is all on the maps – we were there for three weeks and it rained solid for the whole three weeks. We had the pup tents all in the olive trees and the cooks had dug out trenches in the side of the bank so we could get in there for safety. We were surrounded by trees. I had picked up athletes’ foot and had Marguerite send some medicine for them. She also sent my garments to me and I put them on and from that day on I really never got hurt. About four o’clock in the afternoon, I had gone to my tent to take care of my feet, and I put my garments on. We were cooking supper, and I was standing next to the center stove, and there was a fifteen-gallon boiler of hot water in the stove to my left. Suddenly the Germans came up over the mountains. They had already knocked out the bridge about three times. All at once, as I was standing there cooking, here came the German planes and strafed across the tent and hit the left stove. It ruined the stove, and the boiler of water started leaking and spouting steam and there I was right in the center. We had the side of the tent rolled up part way so we could get out, and when that happened we all took off and started running, and jumped across that thing and into the hole we had dug. Another guy jumped in on me and almost broke my ankle – I can still feel it – When we got back in there we could see what happened. It was a few days after that we had to repair the bridge again and I was taking chow out on this shift at twelve at night. There were two platoons working on it. We got the chow ready, and all the five- gallon containers on portable tables, and just as we got it lined up here came the Germans again. They hit that bridge and killed several of the guys. When that started happening I dove down under the truck in the mud. I was lucky again. We were building a solid bridge, not just on pontoons. We built the longest pontoon, British made, of the war. I have pictures of it and in the picture I am standing on it. Toward the end of the war we took one of those big German eighteen wheelers and made a kitchen out of it so it would be portable. We were out on the Poe River and the Germans had blown up all the oil supplies and reserves and had run out of gas, so there was equipment sitting around everywhere. They had even tried to move the equipment by horses. While were out on the Poe river they had these teams of horses hooked to all kind of things. The river was low so the horses would pull them across the river. Many of the horses were killed in the fray but there were some left alive, so our outfit unhooked them and brought them in. When the war was over, we were in a hay field and we had the horses in a roped-off area. We were given some time off. The morning after the war (we were there for about one week) we had breakfast all ready and nobody came so we started looking and there were guys passed out all over the hay field. We realized they had celebrated with booze the night before. We had a heck of a time trying to revive the guys. Two or three days later they had these German horses and they were trying to ride them. I was watching from about two-hundred yards away. I had my white flour-sack apron tied around me and two or three of us walked down to see the horses. Some guys were trying to ride, and I watched them awhile. They couldn’t get the horses to move. After awhile they said, Jim, you are an old farmer, can you ride these horses? I said, I don’t know…let me look at them for a minute. I saw one bay horse that looked pretty good and it had a bridle on so I took the reins and threw them up over one side and then the other, and got hold of the mane and flipped myself up on there. I sat there a minute and then kicked him a couple of times and got his attention, and then it was time to go, so I kicked him and let him go and I rode him up and down the field wide open, as fast as he could go. They asked me what I did and I told them you just have to know horses – just have to know what you are doing. Before we were through we had quite a few of them riding. It was really funny because they Page24 could not get the horses to move and when I got on this horse and got him all set we went up and down that hay field