Oral History Program David Prevedel Interviewed by Lorrie Rands and Brian Whitney 18 November 2014 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah David Prevedel Interviewed by Lorrie Rands and Brian Whitney 18 November 2014 Copyright © 2014 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 Immigrants at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories, photographs and artifacts related to the immigrant populations that helped shape the cultural and economic climate of Ogden. This project will expand the contributions made by Ogden’s immigrant populations: the Dutch, Italian and Greek immigrants who came to work on the railroad and the Japanese who arrived after World War II from the West Coast and from internment camps. ____________________________________ 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: Prevedel, David, an oral history by Lorrie Rands and Brian Whitney, 18 November 2014, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Dave Prevedel November 18, 2014 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with David Prevedel, conducted by Lorrie Rands and Brian Whitney on November 18, 2014. David Prevedel, a third generation Tyrolean, talks about his grandparents coming to Ogden from Northern Italy and Austria for a better life, and what they did to keep their Tyrolean heritage alive. BW: We are at the home of Dave Prevedel in Hooper, Utah, on November 18, 2014. The time is around 10:00 AM. We will be discussing the history of the Tyrolean immigration into Ogden. Conducting the interview is Brian Whitney and Lorrie Rands. Thanks for inviting us back to visit with you again. DP: Thank you. BW: Let’s just start with the beginning of the Tyrolean immigration into Ogden. Last time we spoke, we talked a lot about Rock Springs and whatnot, but let’s focus more on Ogden; when they arrived here, and what brought them here. DP: I guess I’m considered third generation, and all I have is the recollections and some conversations I had with my grandparents. They didn’t speak much English and I only have a rudimentary understanding of the Tyrolean dialect that they always spoke among themselves. I could understand it, but I could never speak it, so I could pick up on some conversations that they had. Of course, being young, I never asked many questions, so it’s just a lot on my observations and putting things together and conversations with other people. 2 To begin with, I think the reason they came to Ogden was for the hot springs. After coming from Tyrolia in Northern Italy, they were coal miners in Rock Springs. Based on the rheumatism they acquired from working in the mines, they sought hot springs to soak their bodies. I know they went to Lava Hot Springs, Idaho, and they came down here to North Ogden out by Smith and Edwards where there was a resort at the time, and that kind of exposed some of them to the Ogden area. Of course, they go back to Rock Springs and Superior, Wyoming, and tell the others, “You gotta come down and go to these hot springs and see the country down here.” So, I think that sort of enticed them to come down to Ogden. Back in the Tyrolean history, a lot of the elite made a pastime of soaking in hot springs, so they felt they had a little bit of elite status, plus their aching bodies with rheumatism from working in the wet coal mines, is what brought them down here. My grandfather Rauzi came down in 1914 with his brother, Mike. They purchased a farm out in West Warren way out on 12th Street, almost to Little Mountain. In 1914, I think they paid $3,000. One would stay and work on the farm for six months and the other would go back to Superior coal mining, and every six months they’d switch around. Finally, I believe it was about 1922, following WWI, my grandma Rauzi came to Wyoming and married, and they settled permanently out in West Warren. My grandfather Prevedel and his family came down and purchased a farm not too far from here, about four miles northeast, in 1929. 3 BW: You mentioned the elite back in Tyrolia. Can you talk a little more about social class differences among the Tyroleans out here in Ogden? DP: I don’t think there were social classes in Utah. I was speaking of the elite back in Tyrolia. One of the things they sought was soaking in hot springs, so here in America it just became a tradition of the common: “The elite would do it back in Tyrolia, we’ll just do it out here.” There were no social classes out here, I’m pretty sure. It was just how much one earned and saved. Back in the old country, there were definitely social classes. As usual with most immigrants, we all came from the lower class. BW: So, a farm in West Warren by 1914, just before World War I, and you said that Grandmother came over after World War I in 1922. Was it the war that encouraged her to leave and come out here? DP: Both of my grandmothers made contact with my grandfathers prior to World War I. It was the extreme poverty that prompted them to leave. You’ve got to remember that Austria was an enemy of the United States in World War I, so they shut off all immigration completely. It wasn’t until after the war that they opened immigration back up, that they could come and join their future husbands and get married. I think both of them got stuck in transit in the war. I don’t know how they got their visas to come after the war because then there was a tremendous amount of prejudice against the Italians. Maybe their passports said “Austrian.” But they really shut down passports coming from that end of the world after World War I. 4 Anyway, they all made it. Of course, most of these were arranged marriages. I don’t know if my grandfather Rauzi had ever met his future wife, or how the arrangements were made. I knew my grandfather Prevedel remembered my grandmother when she was about ten years old when he left, and he took up some correspondence with her. I think when all the young men left to come work in the mines, then the women followed, whenever they could from the same towns. Everybody maintained communications and friends would say, “I know a girl you should get hooked up with.” That’s how most all of the marriages were arranged. BW: Let’s talk more about the farm. Was there a farming community? DP: They moved into the middle of the LDS Mormon communities. They didn’t homestead. The farms were already, mostly, there. In fact, I read articles where the Mormons actually helped them learn how to irrigate. It was quite a transition because they had no one here and in Superior/Rock Springs, they were in pretty close-knit communities. Everyone lived close to the stores and the meeting halls. If you wanted groceries, you went down to the grocery store. The payroll check came every week. When you move to a farm, you had crops, got paid once per year, very little social interaction because of the distance between farms. I think it was extremely difficult on the women. And then you couldn’t go shop—I know that those particularly out in West Warren, it was twelve miles to town—that was a long buggy trip. You had to come in with a horse and the buggy and pick up staples such as flour and sugar maybe just a couple times per year. So they were pretty self-sufficient; they had big gardens; they raised potatoes and 5 everything else they would need to sustain themselves—vegetables, and stuff like that. Everybody had a root cellar. That’s kind of a hut in the ground where you can put your vegetables so they wouldn’t freeze in the winter, or spoil, so you can store carrots and other types of crops in there. They soon figured out that they needed some cash crop, besides once a year off of alfalfa and sugar beets, so they all started dairies and raising chickens for eggs. As far as the dairies went, they just sold cream to begin with; they had separated from the milk, and the regular raw milk, they fed to pigs. They sold cream and eggs for their cash crops so they’d have a little bit of spending money, at least some income coming in monthly before the grow crops came in once per year. But it was a pretty isolated, self-sustaining life. Milking cows by hand, everybody had ten or twelve cows. I remember my grandma Prevedel quoting how hard it was for her in the cold to go out and milk cows. Her hands would freeze, and she wanted to go back to Superior where she had a nice house and friends. So, it was pretty tough. They were all Catholics, so—I think they were all human, but because they were Catholic, divorce was impossible, so they just stuck with it based on their religious beliefs, whether they were happy or not. You never heard much about that. Of course, if they were complaining or fighting among themselves, they did it in the Italian or Tyrolean dialect, so it’s hard to understand. I’m sure there was a few words none of us heard. LR: Did the dairy have a name, or was it just a side business? DP: Every farm had cows. Every farm had a dairy. 6 LR: So there wasn’t a community dairy. DP: No. Everybody had ten or twelve cows and later on they had a milk truck come around and the farmers would sell milk. They’d pick it up daily. There wasn’t refrigeration, so everyone had a little building that had a water trough that the cool water ran into. You put the milk in milk cans and put them in the water to keep them halfway cool until the refrigerated truck could come around and take them to the dairy. If you’ve never hefted a full can of milk, they were pretty heavy to move around. BW: Who were they selling the milk to? DP: Just the milk producers in Ogden. A lot of them sold to Cream of Weber and places like that. I think that’s been, in the history, one of the long-term milk producers. BW: Were there other Tyrolean-run businesses or was it mostly Dutch creameries, do you know? DP: Well, there were lot of Tyrolean businesses downtown Ogden, particularly in the hotels and some of the bars and stuff. It just depends on what they had picked up in Rock Springs and Superior as investments or side-businesses there. Not all of them were coal miners. Some of them went into merchandizing. Then, when they came down here, they kind of perpetuated. So, there was a downtown element of Tyroleans in Ogden. The majority of them went out to the farms. BW: Can you talk more about the downtown element? Do you have any information on what businesses there might have been? 7 DP: I really don’t have a lot of information on that. I know they were in to hotels, and I suspect they were in some of the bars. But I never grew up real familiar with any of the downtown ones. They weren’t part of the real inner circle. And then there were some Italians that came besides the Austrians, so most of my association growing up was with the rural farmers in those communities. BW: Does it seem like there was a blending between the Tyrolean and the Italian communities? DP: Not really. They spoke different dialects; they couldn’t understand each other. I think the whole word for everything on blending is tolerance—with the LDS communities—and it’s really different; take West Weber for instance: some of the kids growing up had a heck of a time. They got picked on—a lot of fights. My father grew up over here in Hooper and Kaysville. Very, very little animosity—just ingrained right in immediately. So, you can’t be generalist, it just kind of depended on what little community you’re in and the people that were there at the time. LR: You talked about how the women, when they were here in Hooper and West Warren, were so isolated from one another. Did they form any society in which they could get together and be social? Could you talk about that a little bit? DP: First of all, Sunday afternoon was visiting day. That was kind of a tradition; everybody went to visit somebody. And I know, even living out in West Warren, my grandpas Rauzi, they’d come clear to Hooper here to visit people or visit the Prevedels or the Torgheles. In fact, that’s how my father and mother met was their families visiting each other on Sundays. 8 And then they all got together and formed what is called The Friendly Club. The Friendly Club was a building on 12th Street. It was a former canning factory, and they redid that and made it into sort of a dance hall/meeting facility. Almost all of the Tyrolean wedding receptions were held there, and I can remember as a small child going to dances there and stuff like that. It served as the social center for many, many years. The building still stands. I think it’s a private residence now, but that was a big part of keeping everybody together. Then there was what they called Canyon Days, which is still perpetuated today. There’s one weekend reserved in, I believe it‘s July, that all the families go up to Ogden Canyon and meet at a reserved site. And that continued for a long, long, long time, so it all stayed together that way. BW: When did The Friendly Club start out? DP: I’d have to go back and look at the exact date, but maybe in—here it is right here, 1937. BW: And Canyon Days, do you know about when they started doing that? DP: Probably about the same time or a little before. BW: Should we talk about the impact of the Great Depression? DP: One story I hear is that my grandfather Rauzi lost his whole savings, about $275, when one of the Ogden banks failed during the Depression. Other than that, what I’ve read on Superior and Rock Springs was that there was no Depression because everyone was salaried and paid by the railroad—the mines and everything—and they were kind of on their own economy. They did pretty well up there in the Depression. And as far as down here, I think they were depressed to 9 begin with. When you’re self-sustaining, living off the land with a few cows, how is it going to affect you? Money was tight. There wasn’t much money going around, but nobody went hungry that way. And they didn’t have investments or anything other than a little bit of money in the bank. BW: We’ve discussed a little bit about Prohibition. There’s some interesting stories during that period. DP: Right. That has been really hard to get information on because no one wants to talk about it. But some of the ladies that I did interview, that first generation, talk about they were really scared, because there was something going on with the Ogden area and the Tyrolean community was apparently hiding bootlegged booze and whiskey coming out of Wyoming. The Feds would come down and they would poke long sticks through the haystacks trying to find stills hidden in the haystacks, or search the houses and go through the attics. They talk about being scared as little kids when the Feds came through their house. Of course, in those days I’m sure they didn’t have search warrants or anything: they just all showed up and started searching. So it was kind of traumatic for the young kids. My mother mentioned she couldn’t figure out why they were burying a car under the haystack. You gotta look at the situation: no one had much money. As a Tyrolean, you’re not going to go to the bank downtown Ogden and say, “Can I have a loan?” regardless of what collateral you had, and Depression was on and Prohibition was on. So I think there was probably a little bit of pay-off on the side that brought in secondary money, even if it was just hiding their trucks and their 10 booze and stuff until it could be retailed out. I don’t think anyone was drinking or heavy consuming the hard alcohol that way, it was strictly working as middlemen for storage. I don’t know. Nobody seemed to talk about it. It may have been dangerous to talk about. One word—the Mano Negra—the Black Hand, aka the Mafia. But you always hear the word Mano Negra, which is the Italian or Tyrolean for the Black Hand; you don’t know what kind of threats they put on people, but I suspect there was some money come out in the farms for assisting with that. A lot of them made their own wine, which, later on, wasn’t illegal. My grandparents, particularly Prevedel, always made their own wine. I can remember as a little kid putting on the boots in the big tubs and helping them stomp the grapes. And they always had big, wooden barrels that they kept down in the chicken coops where the wine was kept. Some of the families had stills— we didn’t. When you made the wine, it was put in huge wooden barrels. Well, the tap was in the middle, so the bottom half was residue from the grapes after fermentation and stuff like that. When that was all done, and they got the wine out of it, then you could distill the residue and make pure alcohol, and that was called grappa. And I can remember going visiting and whenever they’d have coffee, all the old men would always put grappa in their coffee. It probably didn’t taste too well. You had to mix it in the coffee. But that was a big tradition. It’s kind of funny. People don’t want to talk about it, especially today, many say, “I’m not going to talk about my family being in the alcohol business.” There’s a certain stigma there people don’t want to hear anymore. 11 BW: Was the grape stomping kind of considered a festivity, or was it just individual families doing this? DP: Just individual families. That was a job to do every year just like everybody raised pigs; come fall, everybody butchered pork and made sausage. It was just one of those jobs that was on the list. In between hay crops and cutting corn, you squeezed it in when you could. But it’s another part of interesting history. BW: Let’s talk about what cultural things they kept here in Ogden. DP: Well, they obviously kept the language and—I call it ethnic cohesion—they kept together for groups clear through my generation. They always married—that first generation almost 80-90%—married within the Tyrolean heritage. I can just think of a couple that married outside of that. And they kept the foods. Some families kept song and dance, we never did that; I guess that’s why I’m not a good dancer today. They did keep close contact with the old country, they always communicated with family. Of course, very few of them ever went back; that’s the only way you had communication with the family was through letters and sending pictures back and forth. It’s kind of amazing, particularly with the mail-order brides, and it stuck together for two generations, where they just stuck together. Of course, that’s their language, they’d all grown up as friends in those small villages in Austria, so they just kept up the associations. BW: Let’s talk about the foods. It’s always a fun subject. DP: Our main foods that we brought forward—that we still bring forward today—is polenta, which is ground cornmeal baked up and stirred up, and then ravioli. 12 Those are two traditions we keep today. I think polenta originated back there in that it was cornmeal, it was cheap and, actually, if you had a complete diet of polenta, you developed deficiencies in your nutrition because it was a cheap food but it didn’t have the whole vitamin range—I don’t know what, iron, or something like that—if you ate it. So, I suspect there was some mineral deficiency just on that diet. But that tradition still holds. We brought it forward, and we have it at least every year for Thanksgiving and Christmas still. Preparation used to be quite tedious: they used to have great big pots. I can remember at Canyon Days, they’d cook polenta and they had huge cast iron pots, and they’d dump it in there and stir it with big sticks. The polenta stick was a piece of hardwood about two and a half feet long. There was two main functions of a polenta stick: stirring the polenta and then getting it out of a drawer and whacking the kids on the butt when they misbehaved. Everybody was threatened with the polenta stick. BW: Let’s talk a little bit about the assimilation into American culture. What types of things do you think they had to change or give up to become more Americanized? DP: I think the first generation kids here got Americanized immediately when they went to school. My mother couldn’t speak English at all until she went into the first grade, and I’m sure that was pretty typical of a lot of families. But after that, they just assimilated in very well. Like I say, some communities had a lot of fights among the kids later on, but by the time they got into high school they were all just American kids. The women worked in the canning factories, and the men— 13 the times were changing pretty fast from the thirties to the forties. The ten years in there when everybody grew up and the men all went off to war, so it was pretty quickly assimilated. And then following the war, that group pretty well married all within the Tyrolean community. There was still that cohesion until you get to my generation, then the cohesion really fell apart and I blame it on the blonde Mormon girls that married most of us. BW: I’d like to talk more about the involvement in World War II. How did that affect the Tyrolean community? DP: I was too young to remember what my grandparents—because I wasn’t born during World War II—but there had to be some type of thought, because their home country was then at war with the United States and considered an enemy. I know they had to register as foreign aliens if they weren’t citizens. There was that type of thing. The young men, of course, they were all citizens, so they all got drafted just like everyone else. The big impact was on the farms, with the war taking the young men. And that was right at the time when mechanization was coming in. We’re told a story where my father’s side—up until that time, they used work horses and horse teams to do all the farming—but at that time, they had to have trucks to haul sugar beets in; tractors were coming about. My dad was the oldest and he left for the army. Then, about ten years younger, was his younger brother who was about ten years old when he left, but he was the only one who could drive the machinery. The older men never learned how to drive it, and they talk about my uncle at ten years old had to stand up and drive the beet truck into the processing 14 place here in West Ogden with sugar beets, and he had to drive standing up so he could reach the pedals to drive the sugar beet truck. I’m sure farming was hard. That’s when they had the farm deferments, and they had to petition to get my dad out of the army and they needed to get him back on the farm so badly because they just couldn’t handle the machinery with one ten year old boy assisting my grandfather and his uncle. It was hard until he came back and could do the heavy work and stuff like that. We mentioned that they allowed one deferment per family. Some families like the DeGiorgios had to decide on which son went off to the military, so one could use the military deferment for farming. I don’t know how many families were split that way, but there were several of them. Some of them saw combat in World War II; actually went back to the European Theater for war. Just like any other time, there were challenges. BW: There is a POW camp here for Italians. Were there intermarriages after the war? DP: Yeah, I understand there were. I think there were Italian-German POWs here. They actually used those prisoners to work out on farms, because the men were gone in the Army, so they’d take the—I don’t think they were chain gangs, but they were under some type of guard—they’d go out and work on the farms from the DDO; the compound was out on the north end of DDO. My mother said she knew there were a couple of Italian girls who married them, and there were several girls from Ogden who married those former prisoners. There was some animosity, particularly my dad who was quite upset about it, because they’d let them come off the prison camp and go to different things in 15 Ogden on weekends. He was really upset that they’d let those prisoners of war come down and recreate in downtown Ogden while American boys were still fighting the war. My dad has some hard feelings over that. That’s a whole ‘nother story on Ogden, because when I grew up, I went to Weber High School, 12th Street and Washington Boulevard, so we had to drive by the DDO every day and there was barb-wire fence around the whole thing. Of course, it was a military compound, also. They had little guardhouses every so far along the line, so they patrolled the boundaries out there pretty well. DDO, and even Geneva Steel in Provo, were set here in Ogden or in the Intermountain area to be out of range from enemy bombers from the coast. You have to understand why they set those DDO up: it was a long ways for a bomber to come in, rather than put them on risk on the coast somewhere. And plus, the railroads where here. It’s all part of Ogden’s history. LR: So, your grandparents, having come from—it was Austria—during World War II, did they consider themselves as Austrians or did they see themselves as Italians? DP: Until the day they died, you’d never call them Italians. They were always Austrian. Because Italy, during the war, World War I, was on the United States’ side. Austria was the enemy in World War I when they split up, but there was an inter-country agreement before the war that if Italy would join with Great Britain and France, that they would give them that northern part of Italy when they won. That was worked out way before as a deal on who was on whose side. But they were very adamant that they were Austrian. 16 LR: So they felt like during World War II they weren’t Italians, so therefore they were on the right side? DP: I guess. It’s confusing; whose side are you on? BW: Did you get a sense from your parents and grandparents of patriotic pride in America as well as the old country? DP: I don’t know. I never remember them standing up for anything. I remember my grandpa Prevedel cussing Truman a lot. I don’t know what Truman ever did to him, but he cussed Truman quite a bit from what I could pick up from his dialect when he spoke. BW: When were you born? DP: I was born in 1945. BW: So, let’s talk about post-war and your memories growing up. How did they maintain connections, with the Tyrolean connection, while you were growing up? DP: While I was growing up—of course we always visited, we had friends my own age who were Tyroleans—we always visited, we always played together. Families were godparents and godfathers of those children across the line. I still have friends I grew up with that are Tyrolean. I remember the Friendly Club and Canyon days; that’s where I met everybody. It got very, very confusing to kids; they only spoke in their dialect. Grandma and Grandpa you could understand, but you understand we have nonni means grandparents, nonna means grandmother, nonno is grandfather. Of course, they used those terms—I could always get by that—but then when you got into aunts and uncles, where—I can’t remember what the word was—but it just depended on whether it ended in an 17 “o,” an “a,” or an “i,” but so did all the last surnames. So, when you’re getting these conversations they say, “Uncle so and so,” both of them would end in “o,” or aunts also, both of them would end in “i,” and you’re going, “Wait a minute, who is she?” I actually had to go back through the genealogy to find out people I’d known for years, how I was related to them, because I could never get the Latin connection between the “o’s” and the “i’s” and the “a’s.” BW: So, you said Canyon Days are still going, but the Friendly Club ended? About when? DP: Oh, gosh. I was gone to college and work, so it must have ended in the sixties. BW: Why do you think it ended? DP: I think it just diffused. Lost interest. There was some controversial thing; they were humans. A bunch of them dropped out because, just on investments for putting pillars in the middle of the dance floor, some got mad and pulled out. Wait a minute: you haven’t got anything better to argue about? I think they just kind of felt it was kind of a joint investment that didn’t work out. Canyon Days wasn’t much of an investment, so it stayed together. BW: So, the 1960s: this is the third generation and it sounds like there’s more of assimilation. DP: Right. And, first, that’s when all of the original immigrants started passing away. They were all getting on their sixties and seventies and eighties by then. The family came here in the 1920s and ‘30s. So, it was starting to kind of segregate. Of course, the kids all knew English. That’s what really held the first two generations together was the language. 18 BW: Then in the sixties, you had all these blonde Mormon girls— DP: They did it to us. In fact, it’s kind of funny. I don’t know any Tyrolean men my age who married back into the local Tyrolean community. The first generation did almost 100%, the second generation did about zero. BW: In what ways do you think that your parents tried to encourage a connection with your Tyrolean heritage? DP: I don’t know if it was more just through encouragement or just through association. Their friends, as they visited, and they were our godparents, we just kind of went along with them. I don’t think they really recognized a need to do that. The forties and fifties was a different generation, different problems. Everybody was getting jobs; I can say this—within, particularly my grandparents—education was very low on their list. It was a very low priority. It was more important to stay home from school to work in the fields like my parents had to do. Even the caste system, if you go back to Tyrolia, everything was done for the oldest son or for the sons. All of the money in the family was spent on buying land for the sons; the daughters never got anything. My grandfather Rauzi never had any sons, he just had one daughter, so she got the inheritance when he passed on. The Prevedel farm here, they had four children, two girls and two boys, and the boys got everything as the inheritance, and the girls didn’t get anything from my grandfather just carrying over their tradition from the old country. So, you have a lot of value systems passed on that way that are just real 19 subtle until you think about them and say, “Wait a minute, that’s the old way.” They carried those beliefs forward. I really regret not asking more questions, but when you’re a ten year old kid, you don’t know to ask questions and you don’t have a common language. It’s hard for them to understand what you’re saying. We didn’t have a lot of—we were really close to our grandparents and love them—but as far as dialogue and talking about things, it was just bits and pieces here and there. It was hard to pick up on things, and that’s one regret I have is not getting more. I do have a few notes from my mother and my aunts when they wrote down half a page of notes when they talked to their parents, and they thought, “Well, we better write some of this down.” So, we’re fortunate to have a few paragraphs like that. BW: Growing up, did you think of yourself as more of an American, Tyrolean, or Austrian? DP: No, I was just one of the kids. They often say you are who your friends are, so I have a lot of friends here and I was about the only Catholic in town, the rest were all LDS, but I went to Mutual and I played basketball with them, so they just invited me right in the LDS community. So, my friends and I were just real close. I still maintain contact with them today. I guess that’s why I came out—you are who your friends are—and that’s why I’m not in jail, I guess. BW: What about your parents? Growing up, do you think they would have considered themselves American or Tyrolean or both? DP: I think they were 100% American, because none of them ever met their grandparents. The only tie they had was back through their parents, and I know 20 their friends in these communities, they were real staunch. They were American. They were assimilated very, very fast, as is the history of America. BW: Your grandparents might have felt a little differently. DP: Yeah, they may have felt a little bit differently. They maintained that they were Tyrolean. And my grandpa Rauzi, talking to my mother, he didn’t trust the government. He was always worried about his income tax forms having errors on them and stuff like that. It all kind of goes back that way. But it was a big change. I think marriage was a change. I look back when they were at Rock Springs and Superior—if you were placed back there as an immigrant, 17 to 19 years old and you were away from your parents for good at that age—and that was not a good atmosphere back there with all the bars and the mining and the bootlegging. I think nurturing—they were so poor in the old country and had so many kids in the family—I think there was very little nurturing, or knowing how to become parents. So, I think when they did get married and had kids, there was a real deficiency on how to raise kids socially. They provided for them, but what did they know about being parents? And a lot of that passed down; just, like, they didn’t have high values for education. It took a while to get over all of that, of how to be a parent. I really wonder sometimes just how all that was affected. BW: You said you grew up Catholic. How important was that to your family? DP: To my grandmother Prevedel, extremely important. And, to some, my mother and stuff like that—you know, they always believed people should be baptized and go and get communion and stuff, which they made me do. The Rauzis were never really religious. But my grandma Pevedel, holy cow, she went in her later years 21 to church every day. But my grandfather Rauzi, he had really bad experiences back in the old country because the priest served as the town mayor, the school principal. They ran the whole government system, and he had some bad run-ins with the priest. So, I don’t think he had much feelings for the church from his experiences growing up. And my grandpa Prevedel, he joined the Masons in Rock Springs, and then they excommunicated him, so I’m sure he didn’t think there was much. For the record, they didn’t have a welfare system on the mining and stuff like that. My reading shows that the reason they joined the Masons was to provide for welfare for the widows and children of miners who had been killed in the mines. I think the Masons at that time were associated with welfare. I went down to Camp Floyd a couple of weeks ago. You know, in 1858, the soldiers formed a Mason group to help impoverished wagon trains coming across from Salt Lake heading into California. So, even in the 1850s, the Masons were working on a welfare system type. I think that’s why they joined the Masons was to work on that welfare. But it created animosity because I know when my grandpa Prevedel died in the early ‘60s, the church wouldn’t perform services at his funeral because he had been a Mason, and there was a bunch of controversy in the family over that. BW: How important do you think it was to the Tyrolean community outside of your family? The Catholic connection. DP: Very. Every wedding was at St. Joseph’s church in Ogden. There were just traditions. First and second generation, they were Catholic. 22 BW: There was a downtown Tyrolean presence pre-World War II, is that correct? DP: And probably through World War II. BW: What about growing up, do you recall— DP: I don’t recall. Very, very little recall. I don’t recall many associations at all. I think they got assimilated also. BW: It would be great to learn more about what business were there. We’ve asked this before and I would like to ask it again. Your mother gave a great answer to it and I’d like to hear your answer of what you feel the legacy here in Ogden is from the Tyrolean community. DP: The legacy is, we’re spread out all over, but a lot of the professions and business people—you go back and just look at the Ogden phone book—there are hundreds and hundreds of descendants that are Tyrolean that are in business and professional and even federal workers, even—my daughter—rodeo queens. Everything else. Cowboys. Everything’s just spread out, and they’ve gone into many of the fields here. A lot of the educators. BW: When was your daughter rodeo queen? DP: Oh gosh, ten years ago. She was Miss Rodeo Utah. Even my junior high principal was a Rauzi. He was a second cousin at the Roy Junior High. Boy, that was tough being Tyrolean going to a Tyrolean principal. I dare say or do anything. BW: He was a little stricter on you? DP: Through both ends. Don’t embarrass the family. 23 BW: Going back to World War I era and pre-World War I. How many Tyroleans do you think were out here, roughly? DP: I got their names out of the Friendly Club book that I put in here. And that was a voluntary contribution to the Tyrolean book. Because I know in Superior/Rock Springs, by the 1920s and ‘30s, there was three to four hundred. But it looks like that there’s about fifty members that I could just grab off-hand, so the ones who voluntary contributed to the Friendly Club Book. BW: And that was about what period? The fifty names were— DP: 1920s through the ‘30s. BW: And then the descendants off of that, any clue as to post-World War II, how many descendants there might have been? DP: If everybody had four or five kids, that’s all I can tell you: it’s just population dynamics. There wasn’t much more immigration at that time. BW: You said Canyon Days is still going on. When is the last time you’ve been to one? DP: About three years ago. BW: And roughly how many people do you think were there? If you had to guess? DP: Oh, there’s generally forty, fifty, sixty people in that. BW: I think we’re going to go ahead and wrap it up there unless you have anything else that you want to add. DP: I just appreciate the opportunity. I don’t know if it’s called responsibility, but I feel that there is some need to perpetuate this story that has gone on just in the name 24 of my grandparents and the other Tyroleans. I appreciate the opportunity to participate in the work you are doing on this.