Oral History Program Arlene Kennington Interviewed by Lorrie Rands & Tanner Flinders 27 May 2016 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Arlene Kennington Interviewed by Lorrie Rands & Tanner Flinders 27 May 2016 Copyright © 2016 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 Utah Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum honors men and women whose lives exemplify the independence and resilience of the people who settled Utah, and includes artists, champions, entertainers, musicians, ranchers, writers, and those persons, past and present, who have promoted the Western way of life. Each year, the inductees are interviewed about their lives and experiences living the Western way of life. ____________________________________ 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: Kennington, Arlene, an oral history by Lorrie Rands & Tanner Flinders, 27 May 2016, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Arlene Kennington May 27, 2016 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Arlene Kennington, conducted May 27, 2016 by Lorrie Rands and Tanner Flinders. Kennington discusses her husband, Don Kennington, and his life as part of his induction into the Utah Cowboy Hall of Fame. LR: Its May 27, 2016 we’re in the home of Arlene Kennington in Layton, Utah talking about Don Kennington, her husband. It’s around 10:00 AM and Tanner Flinders is doing the majority of the interview and I, Lorrie Rands, am backup. TF: Ok, so the first question would be when and where was your husband born? AK: He was born August 12, 1931. In his own words, he was born in a two-room log cabin on the Crow Creek in Eastern Idaho and he and his brothers grew up herding cattle the first twenty years of his life and that route went from like Montpelier, Idaho through thirty or so miles of into Wyoming. I don’t know whether you’re familiar with the system where ranchers were given so much time a year, so all the ranchers would put their cattle up in the mountains and they had to be identified with ear tags of whatever to keep them separate. When it got fall again they had to be herded down and given back to their ranchers. So that was a regular process and that was up in the hills, where they lived in the cabin most of the years of their life. They had no running water, it was a spring and they put their food in a box in the spring, their perishable ones, they milked their own cow, they had their own meat and the three boys played together. 2 One of my favorite poems is, “We brothers three” talking about romping through with their bare feet and jumping in the creek and swimming in the pond there. So because they lived up in the mountains, when school started it was fifteen miles or more over dirt road to get them to school so they would move down in the fall for the kids to go to school. He tells of one story when he was going to school, they only had one horse and three boys; he was the smallest of the three and so he was sitting on the back and he went to sleep and fell off and they just plugged along on the way to town. Finally they realized he wasn’t there and he was running trying to catch up and get back on. So that’s kind of the life that he lived. For twenty years, that’s what he did. The hard part about that was his mother moved twice a year and more often than not, it was with a horse and wagon. Don remembers it being muddy in the spring, a stormy day in the spring, his mother driving the horses and the mud would get stuck in the wheels. The kids would have to get out with a stick and take the mud out and put a block in there so they could get going, anyway, it’s quite a story. They got so they were very good at participating in the rodeos. Don was a good roper and a good rider. Quite often the Kennington brothers were the big show, well at least for the Kennington family, in Star Valley that was every summer during the Fourth of July and they always had a 24th of July celebration in the little town. The town that they lived in was Fairview, Wyoming which is part of Star Valley and it’s on the south end of the valley. Star Valley is just made up of several different little towns, if you’ve not been there, it’s a choice country 3 there right now, and well it always has been. The Kennington’s come from ancestors from England in the first place and then some of the very earliest settlers were the Kennington family in Star Valley. LR: Could I just ask, why would his mother move twice a year? AK: She had to move all the family up in the mountains, they lived in the mountains for that length of time and then there was no car so they would move down in the fall and the kids would go to school in the town in Fairview. LR: Ok. That makes more sense. AK: Yeah. That was twice a year. LR: So in the summertime they’d live up in the mountain and then in the winter they’d move down? AK: Yeah. One of the interesting stories about living up in the mountains and along Crow Creek, in those early days they did not have a highway up, it went through the mountains and our kids used to call it the back road, but it was a dirt road. If you ever want to read a good history, it’s about the Crow Creek road, because all of the mail and food and everything came down that back road. Then after World War II, they built the road that went around where you can get up to Jackson or wherever, that way. So that was his early years. He went to school, graduated from Star Valley High School in 1949 and then he and his brother went down to BYU and went to school there. He had done so much riding and rodeo competition that he had injured his back so he only went the fall semester and then he had to have back surgery and that was before we were married in 1951. The thing that was delightful about Don is he was talented and a fun, fun person 4 to be around. It was his sense of humor that really attracted me and so when he started performing, that was the big thing for him, he was a good onstage and a very, very talented man in all other ways. I don’t know whether you can see this or not, but he made this. TF: Oh, the table. LR: I was wondering. AK: Yes. LR: It has all your kids’ names on it. AK: He made one for every child in our family and one for his parents and my parents. LR: This one right here? AK: There. That’s supposed to be our family crest, which is prayer and the flag for the United States and love and peace and there was something on there for everything Kennington. All of these are his posterity. This are great-grandchildren. We just had our 72nd one this month. Over there, there are six children and their spouses. LR: So six children? AK: Yes. LR: How many grandchildren? AK: Thirty three, and seventy two great grandchildren. Well there’s going to be another one this month. TF: Wow. Lot of Kenningtons. LR: That’s fantastic. 5 AK: That picture in the middle is my parents and his parents and us when we were married. TF: So how did you two meet? AK: My good friend lived on a ranch. Well I was born in Cokeville, Wyoming and so it pulled in, for schools, some of the outside ranchers. My girlfriend lived on a ranch and I had gone out to visit her, and Don came with this friend. I didn’t know it, but the friend was going to go with my friend, Alice, and Don was supposed to go pick up another girl who lived south of Alice. I was there at Alice’s and so we sat and played canasta all night and then the next night he said, “I have a fight on Saturday, would you like to go with me to a boxing match in Star Valley?” They had a Star Valley boxing team, the school had a boxing team. I said, “Well I have to ask my parents before I can go to Star Valley with you, because they don’t know who you are.” So we stopped in Cokeville and got their approval to go to the boxing match and he won it and then they had a dance and he was such a good dancer. We had such a fun time dancing, so from that point on we double dated. We went all around Bear Lake, Fish Haven and all those places around Bear Lake used to have wonderful dances, and we were at the lake when he proposed to me and we were married that October, October of 1951. TF: He proposed at Bear Lake? AK: Yes, very romantic night. It was like a pier that you could walk out on and it was a moonlit night and the moon was over the water, it was just very romantic. LR: Perfect. AK: It was just perfect. 6 LR: Almost like the movie, “By the Light of the Silvery Moon,” with Doris Day. That’s what I’m envisioning. Sorry. AK: Yes, it was a very romantic evening and then he went back up and worked with his dad on the round up. Started the round up in the fall, and so I will always remember… I used to drive to Montpelier, I was going there to a meeting, but on the way he said, “I’ll be here at a certain time on this hill.” I can still see him up on this hill, well back off the road, on the horse waving. It was very romantic. Such a fun person. LR: When did he start boxing and why? AK: That’s a good question. Because he was the smallest of the three boys. He always felt like he couldn’t keep up with them. They were good at sports and he just never did, he was small and seemed to feel like he was uncomfortable in his own shoes so to speak. He decided to take up boxing because the coach, you probably don’t know him, Don Brimhall, he died just a little while ago at ninety five years. He moved down here eventually but they just hit it off and he really coached him right along through till he finally won the AAU championship, but he didn’t get that until after we were married. That’s another tall tale. I’ll tell it to you. There’s the road getting out of Star Valley and sometimes it would have snow slides and block the valley, so when they were going to go from Star Valley to Ogden for the boxing matches there was a slide and he couldn’t get there. That was his senior year in high school so he never did make it there. So when he came down here he started boxing and he worked out at, oh man I can’t remember where he worked, several gyms. One fellow, I can’t remember his 7 name either, coached him until he won the AAU championship. Then after AAU, you know after that there’s no place to go but professional so he boxed professionally. That’s a whole another history section in the book that I prepared, all of the fights that he won and lost. In fact if you go in and put that on the internet you’ll find I think his boxing record. It’s on there still. Wins and losses and what have you. But he was going to go back to buy a ranch with the boxing, he thought he could do it. He did a good job but its rough job and he finally just said, “I’m through, I’m not going to do that anymore.” I was quite surprised because the kids even watched him on TV box out of Salt Lake when they were little. They said “when he gets on you come and get me out of bed.” It was nine o’clock and so they watched their dad box on TV. When that got through he decided, we were living in Ogden city, he decided we needed to get a horse and do something with horses so we moved out to Harrisville and he started training horses for people. We had some property there and when you train a horse it’s not like a week, its months and so it’s a lot of time and you didn’t make a lot of money. People just can’t pay $50 a week, a month even sometimes. So anyway, then he decided he would go on to horseshoeing now. The story behind the horseshoeing, to start with, is when the boys were up in the mountains they had horses, they rode horses all the time up in the mountains when they were the kids and they had to shoe their own horses so that’s where he finally learned how to shoe, from his dad. They also trained horses up there. People would bring horses in for them to break because they 8 rode horses all day every day. We can’t imagine that but they did, rode horses all day. So they broke a lot of horses up there, and he decided that he would shoe horses and he started out and he charged $7 to shoe horses. Those were his first payments and that hardly paid for the shoes. There’s shoes, the nails, the equipment is really quite expensive. Another interesting part about that is he didn’t like just picking up his tools off the ground so he designed a carrier, a metal one, when he worked welding. I’ve got it all mixed up. When we married we moved down here and he went to work at Hill Field and that’s where he learned the metal work. So he would shoe horses after Hill Field every day. But this carrier he had, had a handle on it and it had little slots for every tool that he wanted to have and a place and then he had a pick-up truck that had, eventually he had a gas, what do you call it when it heated up? This is where I get lost, you’ve got to help me. LR: So his truck had… AK: He installed one in the back of his truck so he could heat the shoes. TF: Like a welding gun? LR: An acetylene torch? AK: It wasn’t a torch, it was a fire. LR: So almost like a furnace in a way? AK: Yeah, in a way. But it has a correct name. That’s why I have to look in my history to see what it is. LR: I’ve never heard of that. That’s kind of cool that he made that on his truck. 9 AK: You’re going to find, if you go through the Deseret News, not the Deseret the, but some in there too; but if you go in the Ogden Standard you’re going to find pictures of him shoeing and he was always a hit. One twenty-fourth of July they had the parades and the big show was supposedly going downtown, but he was shoeing horses at Bonneville, no, you go over 24th street and go south. There is a place there… Fort Buenaventura. TF: Fort Buenaventura, yeah. AK: He was shoeing horses there and he was the one that ended up on the front page instead of the parade and all of these I have put in his history, these things, pictures like that. He shod over 30,000 horses and worked as a Ferrier in his retirement. LR: In his retirement? AK: He would take a horse an hour apart and he shod horses in Nevada, Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah and the veterinarians would call on him, quite often in the middle of the night. One night I particularly remember, it was such a rainy night and they called and said this horse had gotten its foot caught in the fence and he had to put it to sleep, would he come right then and put the shoe on so he could get it bandaged up and healed. That happened quite often when he had to have corrective shoeing. That’s another big thing that’s exciting to see is he has a whole display of all the corrective shoes that he made. The other thing you probably need to know is that Weber College had him, what do they call it when they work out of the school? LR: Like Associate Professor? 10 AK: Well, yes, because they called him professor for I think seventeen years but I’m not sure. LR: Seventeen years? AK: Through Weber. I’ve got it somewhere. LR: When did he find time to do that? To teach at Weber? AK: They came to him. He would go to a place that had a ranch and Weber would advertise it, and well he had a lot of people come. Some are still shoeing and when he passed away, the interesting thing is a lot of these people came through the viewing and I knew their names because I kept all the records but I never did see them. Some of them put horseshoe nails down inside his casket. He was just a wonderful… and it was during this time that he was shoeing horses for the festival of the American west. There’s still a place there but it’s not like it used to be. They had an old wood stove there and they had people there that were making cookies and what have you and taking them around and so they brought him some cookies to eat. There was a little boy that brought them around and he said, “Go tell your mother that these are so hard I had to tack them on the horse’s feet.” He was just teasing him but that’s when he wrote his first poem. He wrote his first poem that was it, I can’t remember the name of it, but it’s in those books, anyway. TF: What year was that roughly? AK: I don’t know. See that brown book right there? LR: This one? AK: Does it say ‘one’? 11 LR: No, it just says, “Yarns and Rhymes of Cowboy Poets.’ AK: Ok, that’s it. Look and see when we made that one. It’s probably the first one in there. LR: 1988 is when it was copyrighted. Home Made Bread? AK: Yes, that’s it. LR: That’s the poem? AK: Yes. TF: You mentioned he went to BYU. Did he go there to study like metal working? AK: You know what, I should have finished what I was saying on that too. He boxed for BYU. They had a team. I’ve finally had to separate and put all the boxing experiences in one file and the other because they all got mixed in together. But at BYU he was on the boxing team, then when he came back and boxed in Ogden and when he quit then he started working with boys clubs and teaching them boxing. This says he took up horseshoeing in the early 1960’s and this is his words. LR: And yet he had been horseshoeing all of his life, so that’s kind of when he started doing it professionally? AK: Yes. As far as the horseshoeing was concerned, he sent a lot of articles to the national magazines and he was quoted quite often in the… well I can’t remember what they are. I have to go look at my history. LR: So he wrote his first poem in roughly 1988? AK: Well I’d say 1980’s. Look and see again, I usually try to put a date underneath it, but this is the first book, I might not have done that. 12 LR: There really isn’t a date. AK: Underneath the title. LR: No. Let me just double check again. No, there’s not. AK: It was in the 1980’s, early 1980’s. LR: So when did he start performing the poems. AK: Well he started with horseshoeing. He was a good entertainer while he horseshoed. He continued to shoe horses against the doctor’s wishes, and anyway he said, “That’s the only way, the easiest way, closest way for Don to participate in cowboy life and it gives him great satisfaction.” LR: It was hard on his body though to do that, wasn’t it? AK: His back. That’s what really got to him was the roughness of it all. LR: Keith mentioned there were times he’d come home and you literally had to cut his boots off him because of some of the injuries he’d sustained. AK: Well that’s stretching the truth a bit. LR: Ok. Isn’t that what Keith said? TF: Yeah, I remember he said, a couple times… LR: You’d have to cut his boots off. AK: I never did cut the boots. Most people perspire all down their back and their sides and everything and it was mostly his feet so he’s right, there was a problem there. I pulled them off but I didn’t cut them off. There’s a… what do they call it? Anyway you pull off his shoes and you put your heel in and then… LR: Like a boot horn? 13 AK: It’s a boot jack, yes. He used that but no, I never did cut, he’d of died before, he’s too tight to cut them off. He was careful with his money, he worked too hard for that. LR: That makes more sense. Kind of, do you mind? TF: Go ahead. LR: Kind of more of a personal question for you, what was it like living with this man who was… AK: He was never there. LR: Right, he was gone all the time. I mean you basically raised the kids on your own and what was that like for you? AK: I worked hard, let’s put it that way. I was just blessed to have good kids. Our kids were close, our first one was born in 1953 then we had a second daughter in 1955 and then 1956 we had twin boys. The oldest one was three and a half and Karlene was seventeen months old when we had the twins and it was busy. Then we waited three years and had a daughter Kaylene, and then we had Kory in 1962, so all of them were born within that nine years so they were close. We got a horse of our own and they rode, a lot of them rode in posse’s. Two of them at least, one girl and one boy, Keeth, he liked the horses. They liked to go up and help grandpa with haying and some really good memories up there on the ranch. What else did you ask me? LR: That was the question. You’ve answered it. Talking about his performing, it’s something he really tried to do after he retired right? AK: Let’s see. Well whenever… it would be from that point on… 14 LR: 1988? AK: Yes. LR: Had he retired by then? AK: Well he never did really retire. LR: Well from Hill. Did he retire from Hill? AK: Oh yes, he retired from Hill. LR: Ok. Because from what Keeth was saying, you guys traveled all over the country to perform. AK: We did. LR: Was that nice being able to go with him? AK: Well yes. I worked at IRS for all this time too. LR: Oh did you? In Ogden? AK: Well I worked for the national office, I was a computer programmer and my place of duty was in Ogden. National office paid for me and that meant quite a bit of traveling, and that was for me. Sometimes we’d just add on where I was like Washington DC, I was there quite a bit, or Atlanta, Florida, and I could add on. My flight there and back, didn’t care what day I left, so we paid for Don’s extra days and what have you and he’d come and join me. But then when I retired we both worked up at the family history center in Ogden and he bound books, another talent, and would review them for me. Then when I quit, he quit, all we did was travel. Plus even when we worked at the history center we took off a lot. We went to Durango, big shows in Durango, we did performing with Bar J 15 Wranglers in Jackson, it’s like a day to day thing. Wyoming, California, Montana, then when we went on tour, it finally got so we could go on tour. TF: How long did you guys work at the family history center? AK: He quit before I did. I was there ten years and he was there six. LR And it was just volunteer right? AK: Yes. LR: Do you want to ask the last question? TF: So, the last question might be difficult to answer, but what would you consider his legacy to be? AK: I think his legacy is the emotion that he felt in his poems. I think if you listen, like the Last Nail, he’s very tender and yet he can just be as funny as ever. We had a two story home and I remember him, one of his poems said, “I still remember the patter or the sound little feet running up the stairs,” and things like that. People say, “What does he do anyway?” I say, “Well first thing he does not read, he performs. He could sense the audience. He loved his family, he loved his church, and he loved his poetry. When people would say, “What does he do,” I’d say, “He can have you laughing and crying all in ten minutes,” which is what he could do. He did a lot of programs for church for one thing. One of the general authorities came and said it was just pleasant to have a good clean program. He influenced those people who were getting a little bit on the, well I just call it risqué and he never ever did that. Did Keeth tell you that sometimes five of them performed, like they did for some Senators, whatever it was over in Bear Lake, Utah. As far as the church, they 16 have cattle, they have ranches all over and so when they’d get together and have a big meeting in Salt Lake then they would call our family to come and do them. That’s a lot of Christmas programs, a lot of businesses that were having—in fact the sheep growers, they asked him into the, well cattle ranchers think they’re better than the sheep herders. They’d say, “Why would we want a cowboy for sheep herders?” All of the tours we went on, he performed all over. That meant he was in Europe and what have you. I know Elko, are you familiar with Elko at all? TF: Nevada? AK: It’s the big place for poetry. Well he was one of the earliest ones to start there and the last one he did there was a twenty year reunion of all those who had performed and it was just exciting to have them say, “The next will be Don Kennington,” and everybody would whistle and sing and clap. I’d think, “I just can’t believe this, it’s just wonderful.” It was just exciting. Heber City, they always put him on, and that’s still a big affair, Heber City. A lot of Idaho shows, they always put him in there last. Several places in Idaho several places in Wyoming. We got to see some pretty country. LR: Are there any other stories that you’d like to share about him before we turn the camera off? AK: There was one I was thinking of, I remember one fellow, for sure, that Don kind of patterned himself after, or whatever they call it. Don wanted to be like him. LR: Like his mentor? 17 AK: Yes, and that’s what he was, was a mentor for so many people and it wasn’t just the older people who loved him because of his life and because he was older, but the younger people did too. I’ll tell you one story, there’s a school in Ogden and it’s a good thing I don’t know the name, but the kids they didn’t come from wealthy homes, let’s put it that way, which didn’t matter except when they said he was going to be their entertainment. The kids were sitting with their feet over the backs of each other’s seat and kind of talking and Don, one of the poems was a rap and its “I was shoeing this horse just nailing away, working at the end of a long, long day.” Those kids put their feet down and started clicking and he had them right there where he wanted them. LR: Wow. That’s saying a lot considering we’re talking about elementary school kid’s right? AK: Yes, or junior high. LR: Even better, junior high. AK: They used to have tall tales and they called them liars so they had liar contests and he won several of those. The one I’m thinking about now is, he was in an elementary school and the poem he gave was something about, let’s see, how was it? They were herding horses and the cattle were bouncing in a desert or something, I don’t remember, but after he finished the poem one kid said, “How did you feed them?” and he said, “Well they had put it on a pogo-stick.” LR: That quick. Wow. 18 AK: We were at a show in Cokeville, Wyoming and he was right in the middle of the poem and one of the radiators popped and he went, “Ah, they missed me,” and went right on. TF: Sounds like he was a natural performer. AK: He was. He was a natural performer. Just a good man. LR: Thank you so much for your willingness to talk about Don and share some awesome and amazing stories. This has just been fantastic for us. Thank you. AK: Thank you for inviting me.