Oral History Program Bert Smith Interviewed by Christine Jouffray 3 June 2015 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Bert Smith Interviewed by Christine Jouffray 3 June 2015 Copyright © 2015 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii 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. 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 Weber and Davis County Communities Oral History Collection includes interviews of citizens from several different walks of life. These interviews were conducted by Stewart Library personnel, Weber State University faculty and students, and other members of the community. The histories cover various topics and chronicle the personal everyday life experiences and other recollections regarding the history of the Weber and Davis County areas. ____________________________________ 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: Smith, Bert, an oral history by Christine Jouffray, 3 June 2015, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Bert Smith June 3, 2015 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Bert Smith. The interview was conducted on June 3, 2015, by Christine Jouffray, in Mr. Smith's office at his store. Bert is one of the founding partners of Smith and Edwards, an army surplus store founded in the 1950s in Ogden, Utah. He is 95 at the time of the interview. CJ: My name is Christine Jouffray; I am interviewing Bert Smith of Smith and Edwards. We are in his office today, June 3rd, 2015. I would like to start by thanking you for agreeing to do this interview. Could you start by telling a little bit about where you were born, when you were born, and about your parents? BS: Well, my parents came from some of the small communities north of us here. My father was in Fielding and my mother was in Mendon. Now, Mendon is in Cache Valley and Fielding is in the north end of this valley, just this side of Malad; that's up by Garland and that area. The people had done all of the homesteading around in valleys closer like Farmington, and Hooper, and all the areas around Ogden, out in Plain City and North Ogden and Liberty; it was all taken up. There was another generation coming on, and the people born in about the 1889's were starting to want to reach out and get land and go further north where there's more land. Of course that was the expansion over there, of the Mormons, who had started multiplying in the west. My mother had been trained as a schoolteacher. She went with her brothers out towards Holbrook. That's a little community north of Snowville, about twelve, fifteen miles; it would be west of Malad, twenty-five. So it's just across the border you might say. It's good fertile ground, but it's dry 1 land; there's no irrigation. This valley here, most of Tremonton and all that area, had been put under irrigation. My father was raised by a horseman - a great horseman in the early days of the pioneers - his name was Lot Smith. You see, there is a picture of him right up here, the one with a red beard. He was the one that drove Johnson's Army back; that was the army that was sent out here to annihilate the Mormons. False rumors about a Mormon rebellion were started in the east when people saw immigrants coming in from Europe. They thought maybe there was a big rebellion building and brewing in the west to go back east and get even for being driven out of their country. The Mormons were driven out, into the high mountain desert. This area here was known as the high mountain desert, and the old senators in the old days looked at this area as worthless; that nothing could be raised in the high mountain desert. The land up around Holbrook was really good ground, but it was dry land. They could only get a crop every other year. So they are all getting their homesteads out there, my father and all of his brothers went out there to homestead. That's where my mother and father met, was out there proving up on their homesteads. After they lived on the homestead for three years, they get a title to it, those 160 acres; a man and his wife, they get 320. That was quite a bit of ground, but of course people were thinking that they would get the hired man to get some, any of the children of age, up to whatever they figured the age of ownership was, 21 or 18, then they could file. And of course, usually their mother and their father, the whole family would file on some land. A head of household could, with a big family, take a pretty big chunk of land. They 2 bought the land, it was productive; they got the land cleared off but prices were so bad: wheat was only .35 cents a bushel. CJ: What year was this? BS: Oh, that was back, well my father was born in 1890 so it was between that time and when I was born. So anyway, they met, the guy from Fielding met the girl from Mendon who was a schoolteacher, and they got married. As people found out that they could not make a living on these little dry farms, they were too small to produce enough to make a good living, they started to move out and sell out if they could; land wasn't worth much. In the meantime, my dad decided, to go along with his dry farm, he'd put a store in at Holbrook. He had the Smith's grocery store, a multi-purpose lot like this. He had a butcher shop, groceries and pretty much everything. They thought they could sell stuff. There were so many people there; in that big migration, there were enough people who came from Malad to the Raft River, which would be over at Malta to the west. Anyway that's the beginning of my people. After the homesteading and general store, they migrated into the livestock business. He thought maybe groceries would be all right, but actually, as the people went broke, they left without paying their bills. So it left him with a store that was not paying, so he became a livestock dealer, buying hogs and cattle. CJ: Your father had this store, and how old were you? Were you born at that time? BS: I was born into the store, and in one of my little pictures I'm standing out in the middle of a road there which is the center of town, in diapers, a year old. I put under the caption, "I learned the store business the first year of my life" in front of 3 the store. That's just for funny bones; I have a funny bone, a man does. From then on, why it was horse-trading, buying and selling cattle and livestock. I've been raised around that type of thing, training horses so that they'd be gentle for people to ride and work. My father got to be quite a big dealer. He came down to the Ogden area here, bought a big feed lot and cattle and horse auction business in west Ogden. CJ: Was it the stockyards that opened in 1917 that brought him down? BS: Yes, that was the big market when I was four years old. We used to bring our hogs and cattle down by train. We'd drive them or haul them over to Malad and load them on boxcars and ship them to Ogden. This is only less than seventy-five miles. I guess now it'd only be about fifty miles, but the quickest way to get them there was to drive them. It was the big market: Ogden was the livestock center of the whole United States at one time. That's where they had the National Livestock Exposition, it was right here. In due time, I bought it; just because of the old days when I used to come down at four years old. I remember that, and I bought the whole stockyard and the old packinghouse. I'm just selling it off now in my older years as I'm cutting down. But I accumulated a lot of the things that I admired when I was a kid that had left the area. CJ: How long did you own the stockyards? From about what year to what year? BS: The end of the seventies I acquired the stockyards, and the packinghouse. CJ: And you've just started then to sell it off now? BS: Yeah, that's right. I'm cutting down, selling off extended places. I had a ranch in New Mexico at Santa Rosa. I had the ranch down by Hawthorne, Nevada. We 4 have a big ranch in Ruby Valley, that's near Elko. My brother and I still have that big ranch. I've got to trim down. I'll be selling that to him, so he and his sons-in-law can run it. I will finish distributing this to my immediate family. My grandson is running this (the store) now. CJ: When someone asks you where you grew up, what do you answer? Where did you grow up? BS: We moved down here when I was seven years old to Ogden, so, the first six or seven years was up in Holbrook. I went to school there: Holbrook and Malad; and then we got the feedlots in Ogden, West Ogden. I was raised and went to school in the Ogden area: the Wilson Lane School, and Weber High. CJ: You were born April 29, 1920, so you moved down here in 1927 when you were seven. What do you remember from the depression in the Ogden area? BS: I remember the depression very well. I was right in the middle of it so I had a real good taste of the depression. I always thought of my background - never to get caught in some kind of a depression without some kind of a backup; I was alert on that. My life has developed from that, from the practices of getting ready for bad times: store up for bad times, my life has been much on that. I never believed in getting in debt. I never borrowed money unless I knew I could pay it off in a short period. I would never buy a car, a house, or anything and pay interest. I've never paid interest on any car that I have ever owned, car, truck, any vehicle or household equipment; or anything that I've used for my own self. I've got enough money; I buy it. That has been my philosophy. One of the things that I told Glenn Beck when he came here to see me, I told him that if you make 5 it a practice to buy for one, sell for two, never get into debt, that you can become wealthy some day. Now, it needs some explaining, but that's the short version of how to get wealthy. To go along with that main idea; go to work. You have to work, there's no such thing as getting wealthy unless you learn how to work. And we've done just that. It's been hard work, and a lot of danger: dangerous things along the road. I've mentioned to people that in my life, I have lived all nine lives of a cat. I've been in all kinds of truck wrecks, run away trucks, gored by bulls. I've been in everything that could have taken my life out, but I've had a good feeling that I could rely on the Spirit that guides me. The Spirit has always guided me very well. CJ: Do you remember anything specifically about the Depression and Ogden? Are there certain visual memories that you have or things that happened that were related to Ogden in the Depression that you witnessed? BS: Yes, it was such a hard period. Like I mentioned before, the grain, back in the early days was selling so cheap. Coal was more expensive than the grain; so instead of buying coal, people would burn the grain to keep warm. Grain was only .35 cents for sixty pounds; sixty pounds of grain is what's called a bushel. As a result of that training I've acquired some big silos of grain, all air-conditioned, the latest type of conditioning that stores grain for thirty years or more without ever spoiling. CJ: Now when they were burning the grain, this was during the depression or this is when your dad started… 6 BS: That's during the depression. It wasn't because people didn't need the grain. People were starving in the cities, but they had no money. The bankers caused that depression. The bankers have always had a law that they could take your money that you deposit. This is something that a lot of your people don't know. You deposit your money for safe keeping in a bank and the bank loans it back out, all that is in there in deposits, out to other people to use to go into business to buy things and pay back. The banks get ten, fifteen percent interest. Interest one time got up to eighteen percent; the low was around five percent. If you loan out the same money, ten, twelve times, it amounts to a lot of interest. That's what the banks had a law to do. They could take any money that was in deposit and loan it out - the same money that wasn't theirs - but they could loan it out twelve times. So I've been very careful not to get into business with the banks. I do business with them; we do big business with them. They are happy they have our business because we handle so much money, so they tolerate my philosophy. CJ: I bet they do. Ok, so you made it through the Depression and then did you get drafted or volunteer? BS: No, I got drafted. In high school I started buying cattle. I would go buy veal calves out at the farmers' and I would dress them. That would mean that I would kill them there at the farm, and I would drop the paunch and the first part of the insides out and just leave the heart, liver and lungs in the carcass. I'd load the carcasses in the back of my old Model A Ford and take them to the packinghouse, and the packinghouse would buy them from me; I would make a 7 few dollars. That's while I was going to school. I might lose, but I was learning when I lost. If you put your money in something and try to get it back; you're going to get an education. That is where you learn, when you take a chance and you lose. You learn how to take that chance again and make a profit. CJ: You got drafted then? You were doing that in high school? BS: During school, I went into the cattle hauling business. I got a truck, and went out three hundred miles in Nevada. All the cattle, from Grantsville to Southern Utah, or Southern Idaho, all those places, they would come to Ogden for market. The big Swift packing plant was here in Ogden, and Armor had one and everybody had a cattle or a sheep kill in Ogden: It was a big hub. A lot of hogs or cattle were shipped on to California, but they came and sold here in Ogden, and they were sent on. I've got off of the cherry tree again… CJ: You were hauling cattle. BS: Then I figured that if I'd go out in the areas where they had old cows: now what I mean by the old cows, they were getting too old to graze the tough grass in the winter. They cut the grass with their teeth on the bottom. They don't have any on the top. And they have to cut it like that, but if it's tough they can't get enough to maintain the body weight. So the rancher would sell them in the fall because they couldn't go out to the dry feed and make it and raise a calf. He couldn't bother to pay freight on these old cows, to bring them to town on the railroad because they were only bringing about two and half cents a pound at the market here. I have a paper here that shows the old time market, and old cows were bringing two and a half to three cents a pound. That doesn't leave much margin to buy them and 8 then sell them once you got them here, because of the expense of the three hundred mile haul. So a two hundred mile haul would leave you just a little more, just a little profit. But I was daring and young and I started hauling, driving long hours because the top speed the trucks could go was only forty-five miles an hour. I was making a good living at it during the '38 and '39 but then they called me in during the war, and said, "You can't have gas to haul cattle." And I said, "How will they get them in from these distances?" "They can put the cows on the train." I tried to explain, but they could see through it and would not allow it. And I said, "Well what do I do?" And he said "Well, you can go into the construction business, and do defense work." As I had a wife and one child (in '42) I had to do something; So, I went into the dump truck business. Instead of having one big cattle truck with a semi, I bought five dump trucks. I got five trucks towards the last; four was about the main number that I used all of the time. I was doing very well. I was surprised that I could make more money that way, hauling the gravel and aggregate for these big bases being put in: Clearfield, and Hill Field, and Utah General were all being built at that time. In fact, I own a square city block over at Utah General right now that I hauled gravel on, back in the days when I was doing that hauling. While I was doing very well in that and building up, President FDR drafted me; they had run out of men that were healthy enough to go fight. They went through all the healthy men; they had to get a lot of men to take back Iwo Jima. That was a terrible place to get back; it was a big rock and it was all caves, all dug in very deep. That's where they trained me in amphibious tanks. That tank would float, it would go under water and it would always rise to 9 the top when the big pumps would pump the water out if anything leaked in. If the pumps ever quit, why you'd go to the bottom. It wasn't a very safe outfit. When they'd dump you off at the unloading ramp of the ships, you'd go in with what soldiers you were carrying for a beach landing, and that's what my outfit was trained for. CJ: So you went into what? The marines or the army? BS: The marines, I was trained down at Lake Side in the San Diego area. When I got back from there, why I'd sold all my trucks, all I could get out of them. Some of them weren't sold, the wife had to sell them, and she got by on eighty-five dollars a month while I was gone. She didn't dip into the ten thousand dollars that we sold the trucks for; that's all I had. But out of ten thousand dollars, we've made hundreds of millions. That was a seed crop that we give her the credit for keeping intact. That put us all back in business, that little seed stock. If young people know that if they just have a little bit of chance, and they've got courage to take a dare, dare to try, dare to buy, dare to sell, learn by your mistakes; it's worth more than any education that you can have. If you draw on the power of the Spirit; got to have the right spirit or you won't get any help. But that's what happened, and while we were in Guam, we saw a lot of equipment being dumped off into the ocean when the war was over. They didn't want to maintain it over there: the trees grow up in it. We saw lots of big caterpillars driven into the ocean: jeeps, and trucks, and everything going in. Edwards was a boy from Ogden; he was about ten years older than me. We said, "We could sell that stuff if we had it home." Well, when we got home, there's no work. There were a lot of men 10 around without work because there were soldiers everyplace. We just went to the different bases and started buying armored cars, trailers, tarps, chain, things that farmers needed, and it was selling well. CJ: You did have a plan. You were thinking "I can resell this to a farmer," because you had that background. BS: Yeah, but I was trying to get back into the dump truck business because I had been doing well in that. I'd get a few dump trucks bought, unload them, and I'd just get back ready to go into the construction business again, why somebody would offer me a profit. Well, I was able to see a profit and I would sell and go buy some more. I kept doing that for about five times, and I could see that I was not going to get into the construction business if I keep selling that equipment. But I could see that I was getting into the selling business; so I become selling surplus man. Edwards, he came home, he didn't have any money at all, so he was working for me. But as we were growing along, I was able to buy this ranch and one day I said, "I'm going ranching, today you're a partner in the surplus business. I'm turning it over to you to run, as a partner and I'm going to go ranching." And I went with my family out to Ruby Valley, Nevada, that's near Elko or Wells, and put a good ranch together, one of the best ranches out there. It's still a pretty ranch now. If you put your heart into something, you can make it go; but things won't come to you if you aren't trying. CJ: How long did you ranch for? And how long did Edwards hold the business? BS: Well, Edwards died, I spoke at his funeral, and I think we were partners for about less than ten years. He went into other things. In fact he went into the gold 11 mining business for a while, when he sold all of his shares. He was able to make quite a little bit. He took the Sunset Army/Navy store, when that was over at Clearfield, or it was Sunset is where it was. I kept the big place out here and all the debt. We separated the stock and divided up that way. It was fair; it was even. Gift is a form I could tell you, but I don't think it would be necessary now. How do you divide something worth a lot of money, just in a couple of hours? CJ: It was decided in a couple of hours? BS: Well, I guess four hours. CJ: When I was reading the history on the website it talks about you having bought these naval buoys? BS: Yes. CJ: And that was the thing that set Edwards off to say, "No I don't agree with that," and that was what decided that there would be a separation. BS: Well, that story of the buoys... There were thirteen thousand, thirteen thousand three hundred and twenty of these buoys that are five feet in diameter, and weighed six hundred and forty pounds, and held four hundred and twenty gallons of liquid. They were tested for five thousand pounds pressure. It was five hundred pounds pressure. Did I say thousand? It's five hundred pounds pressure. They were tanks, very usable for pressure, like propane tanks, or ammonia tanks and they could be used to hold water. They were new inside; they were a useful thing. But the thing of it was to move that big of a pile. There were two piles, thirty feet high, by two hundred feet wide stacked, that'd be half a 12 block. There were three piles, two big piles, one shorter one. They took twelve years to haul. A fellow took a truck and a trailer, and every night after school he'd bring his kids, and they'd load a load of them and haul them over each night. The kids would go up and hook them on the stack and lift them down with the crane and roll them off. He was hauling them about as fast as we were selling them out here: he was hauling them from Clearfield. That went on for twelve years. CJ: That's a lot of buoys! BS: It was, and now, if we had them again, we could double the money that we made then. The ones we had sold for fifty dollars and seventy-five dollars, we're paying anybody who has them left over on the farm, we'll buy them back for a hundred dollars and resell them for two hundred. I had it figured out that the junk man couldn't afford to buy these to scrap. When you buy to scrap iron, you put it through the smelter; you have a size of eighteen inches wide and twenty inches the other direction and a three-foot cut and a five-foot cut. That's the only size they'll take to call it prepared. If you take that big round orange you might say, and try to cut it so that it fit, it was going to cost you so much to cut it up that the junkman couldn't pay anything hardly to make money. Well, that’s how I sized up the people I was bidding against: it was the scrap men. All I had to do was outbid them and I did and bought them all. Well when I went back and Edwards said "How many did you buy?" I said, "I bought them all." He was sitting up at the desk, with his feet up on the desk. He jumped down, brought his feet down, jumped up and says, "Why boy, you're, you're too wild for me. Let's split this thing up." And I said, "Well that's your choice, then I get the second choice; I 13 keep the name." And I said "Now, we'll divide this thing while we're still the finest friends, and do it right now." It was late in the afternoon; must have been four o'clock, why from there to dusk we split both stores. We'd take a pile of merchandise and say, "Now I'll bid on it and you have the option to buy at my bid or sell it. You have on your clipboard the ones you buy, and I'll have a clipboard and the ones I buy." We went through the stores, and the yard: mountains of stuff. Edwards had the offer for what I would pay and he had his choice to buy or sell. We were totally honest with each other. One time I decided to check him out. I wouldn't cheat him, but I figured that this is a way to do business. He won't want to buy that big pile of iron, and haul it clear out to Sunset. So I low-balled it; he said, "I buy." My heart sank, and I said, "Ok." After we got through all with our buying and selling, I said to Edwards, "I knew that you knew that I was low balling you. But what will you take for that big pile?" He said, "Double what you bid," and I said, “I'll buy.” See how honest it was? We felt good about it. CJ: I'm surprised that it happened in such a short time. In four hours, you would think that it was weeks or months, when you look at today, how business is done. BS: We'd be looking up the prices of every little thing in the store and seeing what it was worth. It was the best judgment we have. "That pile's worth this," we both came out ok. CJ: How did it feel the next day, coming to the store thinking, "Ok, I'm alone now. This is it; this is just me and my decisions now." BS: Well, I had to hire people to run it after Edwards was gone. He was running it; I was ranching. So I started to get into trouble. I had people who work for me, a 14 couple got in a mutiny. The manager and the assistant-manager quit me, right in the middle of a work week, and I was out in Nevada. CJ: Wow. BS: I had to come in and I said, "You guys have mutinied without notice? That's terrible, terrible." They thought I'd offer some big fee to come back, and I said, "I don't ever want to have you come back to work for me again. You've cut your own rope there." I just asked the family. My son was in the John Deere business and I said let the John Deere business go and come run this thing. That was Big Jim, he died with cancer about two years ago. Then the other children, all of them, they were willing to come help. All of them didn't go to work here and help run this place. It all worked out fine; they all own their own homes now, all out of debt. They are all quite well to do. So, it doesn't matter how much you wished to be wealthy, to be comfortable is wealth to some. That is how I look at it. If you have a comfortable life, a good honest life, with your family that's loving, and kind to each other, that's the real payoff. CJ: I agree. What year did you start the store here? BS: Oh, this store was started 65 years ago? CJ: Around 1947 then? BS: It wasn't started in the forties, but in the fifties. CJ: The fifties, so it's been going sixty-five years. Do you come here every day? BS: Well, yes, not as early as some of the other people that work here have to. But, I come and go as I feel like it. CJ: That's what you can do after 65 years! 15 BS: Yeah, I'm ninety-five now. Let's see, I was twenty-four when I got out of the Navy. CJ: That's young. You had a lot packed into that early portion of your life. BS: Yes, what a great experience my education has been. We felt obligated to buy anything that was for sale; the government stuff was the best quality. Some of it we didn't know anything about: aircraft parts, airplane tires, the hospital equipment, but we'd buy it and we'd have to learn all about it so we could sell it. CJ: Really? BS: Because we bought everything-bought and sold everything. CJ: That's interesting. Were you ever involved in politics? Did you ever run for office? BS: Oh, yes, very, very deeply. That leads right into the ranching business. As a young rancher, I went into Elko, and decided to get my permits renewed to graze on the Forest Service land and on the Bureau of Land Management land. Well I didn't know anything about the Constitution at that time. I got to checking, and I asked the Bureau of Land Management about it, and to get all of my permits transferred over, they said, "Ok, but we have to take ten percent off." And I said "Ten percent off! This ranch has been sold three times before this sale. I already lost thirty percent of the permits. What are you talking about; sounds insane?" "No, we do that. That's the way it is." You sell the ranch, they got to take a ten percent cut. So I became quite, what do you call it? Revved up, and decided I was going to find out why. I went in to BYU and looked up somebody that I thought should know, Cleon Skousen. He had classes going on there, on the constitution. The old professor was quite a writer, and a great old fellow. I took courses and studied about the constitution. What the government had done was 16 that rough riding Teddy Roosevelt had taken a little quick short cut and he declared all of the land that hadn't been taken up under Homestead Act was federally owned land. He didn't stop to go read his own constitution book. It says in there, in this book, that absolutely no land can be owned by the federal government. The states are sovereign, the fifty sovereign states, and the fifty sovereign states are united together as the United States, which makes our country: the only one in the world. Besides that it's one nation under God. It's the only Christian nation on the face of the earth, something in its favor; but we are losing it. With that in mind, I found page seven (opening his The United States Constitution booklet), paragraph one eight seventeen, it says that it's absolutely wrong for the federal government to own land, other than: Forts, docks, arsenals or needful buildings, and the seat of government which is ten miles square. That's all they can own, and nothing else, I mean it's clear. I can show you in the civil law: it still went sour. I knew right then that somebody was cheating somebody. Started right from old Teddy Roosevelt, down to his nephew, and the other nephew; those Roosevelts are crooked from the oven. You can even put that in the interview; I might even go kick his headstone if I wanted. What I'm trying to get at here is that the land is still owned by the counties, as a tax base to that county. CJ: Right BS: And the county is a tax base to the state, that's the way our system was set down. Now that we send all our money into the income tax, the federal government may drizzle some back and claim that they are giving us money so 17 that they can make us subservient. They withhold the oil and they withhold the minerals and the water. I've been fighting this politically for all fifty some years; we are making a lot of headway. I'm one of the members of the American Land Council, which wants to get the lands back. The Bureau of Land Management is a land-selling agency; they have the name to sell land, and not to own land. But they picked a birthday and had a birth in nineteen seventy-four. This book is a sacred book. It tells the real story, from God. It's inspired; and so is the Bible, and so is the Book of Mormon. The Bible is inspired as far as it is translated correctly. This one is inspired, (holding up the US Constitution booklet) because it was translated correctly; and so was the Book of Mormon. So that's the story of which side do you want to be on? The one that's done correctly. CJ: In your political involvement, what were the channels that you use? BS: Well, my main organization is the National Center for Constitutional Studies; that's to teach the constitution, the backup arm to that is the National Federal Lands Conference. The federal land has no authority; the Conference, we can tell you why. I've been telling you that. CJ: Right BS: So, we have the proof, we have the law, and it's just a matter of time. In fact right now you can read in the newspapers, in fact, I'll give you one of these magazines (hands me Range magazine, fall 2014). It gives you the story of the showdown in Southern Nevada a year ago, when Bundy was… they come in with the armored tanks or the helicopters with the cannons on the helicopters. CJ: Yeah. 18 BS: And three or four hundred cars with BLM guys in them. They were going to kill anybody that crossed the line. Locked, they used the old Boston lockdown, which is not in this book (holds up the US Constitution booklet) that lockdown. You have to deal through a decent law. They locked down the desert. This guy Bundy was the last cattleman in business in Southern Nevada. The others had all gone, forced them out of business. Bundy says, "I won't pay grazing rights where you don't own the land. I'll pay them to the county." And the county was too dismal to have taken it. If they would have taken it, it would be in escrow or in trust. CJ: Right BS: They would hold it there until somebody proves they owned it. But they were too dismal to do that. Harry Reid has his fingers mixed up in it, and he finally got a little taste of his crooked work too. CJ: Do you know Bundy? BS: Yes! Very well, he's one of my very good friends. He's a hero: he's the man that led those people onto this line, onto where this lockdown was. He said, "Hold here, we are going to pray before we cross this line." He said, "This'll be dangerous folks," there's thirteen hundred people there and he said, "This is going to be dangerous; they might do what they say they are going to do. You better think about that, but we are going to pray that their hearts will be softened and we can solve this in the proper way." As they went across that line, Mrs. Bundy came right up to the store and told me this story with her own mouth, she said the most beautiful feeling you've ever felt came over the crowd. They were strong; they knew everything would be all right. They walked across there with 19 such power in their hearts that people started leaving, wouldn't shoot at them. They had the spots, there were snipers up there, spots were on the people; they had the helicopters. They could have taken down a big two story building in just seconds, and they didn't do a thing, they just melted away and they've never been back in six months. They haven't been back, not a one of them. We know they are not going to stay away forever. But Bundy, they've charged him millions of dollars, he's just a plain old desert cowboy that stood up and pushed back. If you want to kill me, give me liberty or give me death: he was the Patrick Henry. That's the kind of guy we want. We got a way to come back, but it will not be by man's choices; there's too much evil in the world. God has got to have a hand. 20