Oral History Program Ken Woolstenhulme Interviewed by Tanner Flinders & Lorrie Rands 8 June 2016 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Ken Woolstenhulme Interviewed by Tanner Flinders & Lorrie Rands 8 June 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: Woolstenhulme, Ken, an oral history by Tanner Flinders & Lorrie Rands, 8 June 2016, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Ken Woolstenhulme June 8, 2016 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview of Ken Woolstenhulme, conducted on June 8, 2016, by Tanner Flinders and Lorrie Rands. Woolstenhulme discusses his life and experiences in rodeos as part of his induction into the Utah Cowboy Hall of Fame. TF: Today is June 8, 2016. I am Tanner Flinders with Lorrie Rands and we’re interviewing Kenneth Woolstenhulme. What is this place called? LR: Western Heritage Cowboy Museum. TF: In Union Station. First off, when and where were you born? KW: I was born in Oakley, Utah on the 30th day of November 1930. TF: What was it like growing up in Oakley? KW: Well, it was a time at the end of the depression when I grew up, we didn’t have a lot of material wealth, but we grew up on the farm. I started milking cows when I was six years old and helping my father and others in the hay field. We’d usually drive a team and wagon, and people would throw the hay on with a pitchfork. We’d haul it into the barn and then they’d put it up in the barn and we’d go back and get the other. That was in the summertime and it was just a great way to grow up, and it kept us out of trouble. TF: So what was it like growing up during the depression? KW: Well I don’t remember a lot about it other than I know that we didn’t have a lot of material wealth, but we had a great family. I was the oldest of eleven kids. My mother had eleven kids in thirteen years and I don’t remember when she didn’t 2 have diapers out on the clothes line. But we grew up and we’d create our own fun. After we got eight, nine, ten years old we’d chase all the stray cattle off the road and into the corral and we’d proceed to ride them. It seemed like cattle in those days grazed the highways, the backstreets, and that didn’t seem to bother people to have us run their cattle in and use them for practice. But we created a lot of memories, a lot of good friends, and neighbor kids. It’s too bad that these kids now-a-days don’t have some of those kind of experiences, it would keep them out of trouble. TF: What were your parents’ names? KW: My father’s name was Elmo and my mother’s name was Eva. TF: Were they from Oakley? KW: They were from Oakley. Yeah. TF: So, did you have any formal schooling or did you just kind of grow up on the farm? KW: I grew up on the farm. I started kindergarten when I was five years old and went through elementary school there in Kamas Valley. I started in Oakley and then we moved to junior high, and high school in Kamas. Now all of the schools are in Kamas; they consolidated to the point where everybody’s bused into Kamas and that’s where the schools are. TF: Did you attend a university? KW: I attended the University of Utah, and in fact there was two years that they got a rodeo team going and asked me to be on the rodeo team, and the sum total of members of that rodeo team was myself and a woman. I can’t even remember 3 her name. A guy by the name of Jeff Butler got it organized, and we spent a couple of Springs and Falls rodeoing for the University. But I only went one quarter, well two quarters. I went to the University, and then I got married in 1954, and I went to school for one year after I got married. Then I had to drop out and raise a family. LR: When did you really start this rodeo life; I mean was it growing up on the farm that you really got into it or was it later? KW: I think it was growing up on the farm that we got the desire to do it. We always had our favorite cowboys; in fact, every year for four or five years as we was growing up. Dad would always bring us to the Ogden Pioneer Days Rodeo. It wasn’t easy, but we’d milk cows, and then we’d go to the rodeo but did that for us for about four or five years when we was growing up, just young kids. I remember when Gene Autry was here and we always looked forward to pioneer days in Ogden. TF: So, how did you meet your wife? KW: I met my wife through the church, I’d just gotten home from a mission and we were at Stake Conference and she was there with her boyfriend at a fireside we had one night. I found out who she was and that she was from Park City, so I got a friend of mine who was a chasing girls over there to find out who she was and we started going together. We went together for about two and a half years before we got married. TF: Where did you go on a mission? 4 KW: I Went to Western Canada, and that included all of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and a chunk of Alaska. It was a big mission. I suppose now they have probably ten or twelve in that same area. The highlight of my mission was I spent ten months on two different Indian reservations, one at Rocky Mountain House, Alberta, the other one at what they called Eden Valley, South of Calgary. It was pretty country, in the Rockies, and we did our tracting on horseback. It was a great life. LR: Sounds like you were able to incorporate what you had learned on the farm when you were on your mission? KW: Yes. LR: That had to have been nice. KW: It was, it was great. LR: So, why did you start rodeoing? I know I asked you when, but why? KW: Well I guess the reason why was because it’s just something that we grew up as kids doing. They used to have a rodeo in Oakley, just an amateur rodeo every Fourth of July. As kids, eight, nine, ten years old, we’d ride calves during the rodeo and started that. Then I was one of a few others that organized what was known as the Rocky Mountain Rodeo Association. We had a pretty good organization going and we created a board of directors and everything. We’d approve the rodeos and then at the end of the year, they’d compile everything and the people who had won the most in any event was awarded. It used to be with a belt buckle when we started in 1958, and then by the time we quit we started giving saddles away to those who won an event. We did that, and then I 5 rodeod some in what they called the RCA, the Rodeo Cowboys Association. It’s PRCA now, but rodeod some there. My brother and I went together and we was pick up men for Bar T Rodeo and for Young & Young Rodeo. We did a lot of that. The last one I worked as a pick-up man was 1998 and at that time my wife and I went to Perth, Australia on a mission. We was over there until the first of July of 1999. TF: So you guys got married in the mid 50’s, and then were you rodeoing professionally? KW: Well, I don’t know if you’d call it professional, it was mainly with the Rocky Mountain Rodeo Association. I rodeod there until—in fact the last year that I won an event was 1972, so we was going for a long time. We started out in that organization when it came to being, it was about 1958, and then we went until 1972. LR: So you were president of the RMRA a few times? KW: A couple of times. LR: How did that come to be? KW: Well cowboys just voted you in. We’d have an annual banquet every year and make the awards for the winners and then we’d have elections and elect your president, vice president, and your event directors. It was great. We was able to hold down a job, work every day, plus on weekends, we’d go rodeoing. But I was never a day out of work. TF: What did you do for a living? 6 KW: Well, we farmed all of the time but I worked for Brooklawn Creamery, they had a cheese factory in Oakley, and I worked there until I went on my mission in 1951. When I came back they asked me to come back to work so I worked there until 1957. In 1957 I went to work for HiLand Dairy delivering dairy products in Morgan, Summit, and Wasatch counties. I worked there till 1971 and I was approached with the idea to fill the Postmaster job in Oakley. When I was delivering milk there the postmaster had his post office in the store and I was in there one day and he told me that he was going to retire and he wanted to know if I was interested in the job. I told him “Yeah, I would be.” He said “Well I’ll send your name in,” and I never did hear anything back from him. This was about March, I never heard anything back from him and I was at a schoolboard meeting. I was on the school board at the time, I was in a school board meeting, and we was having a budget hearing at the end of June and a knock come on the door. Superintendent went out and come back in and he said, “You’re wanted out there.” So I went out and this guy was standing there, he just flipped his deal out with a badge and I thought “what in the hell is going on here?” I didn’t know who he was. Anyways he introduced himself finally and he said, “We have a letter here that you sent us that you was interested in the postmaster job.” I said “Yeah I did, but I never heard anything so I gave up on it.” He said, “Well, do you want it?” I said, “Well if I can get it, sure I’ll take it.” He said, “You’ve got to start on July 1.” This was about the 28th of June. I said, “Look, I never quit a job in my life without giving people a couple of weeks’ notice.” 7 To make a long story short, they worked it out so that my wife could go in and work in the post office with the present postmaster and they’d give me two weeks to notify the dairy, which I did, then I took over in the middle of July. We sit there in the mouth of Weber Canyon, the upper Weber, and a lot of summer home development up there. Utah Power and Light has service to well over 2,000 homes above Oakley and Weber Canyon. But those people started renting post office boxes and it got to the point where we became a third class office instead of a fourth. A third class office can’t operate in another business, like the store. So they informed me they was going to have to move, well they moved right across the street on the corner from the store and so my wife and kids took care of the store and I went to the post office over across the street. That was in 1985 when we opened the new post office. I worked there until 1997 and I retired from the post office. When I was just out of high school, I started at the cheese factory. I graduated on Friday and went to work at the cheese factory Saturday morning at 6:00. We used to make a lot of cheese. We had three large vats, they’d call them, we’d store the milk and to start the process everyday you’d have the cheese in containers to make whatever sized cheese you wanted. I stayed there until I got the post office job, or stayed there until I got the HiLand job and then the post office. But all the while we was rodeoing every weekend. TF: So you were farming and making cheese and rodeoing? KW: Yes. TF: Did you have any free time? 8 KW: We always had, you make free time if you want. We always got along fine. But we traveled nearly every weekend from May until October and sometimes November. We’d always have a finals rodeo at the end of the year, and to be able to get there you had to be top ten in each event. We had them many times here in Ogden at the old coliseum and out at the old stockyards a few times. But it was a great life. LR: So when you’d go on these weekend rodeos would it be a family affair, would you take your whole family with you? KW: Sometimes we would do that and other times we’d have to be back to work the next morning. So my brother and I traveled together and we’d just take off. I know the manager at the cheese factory one day, he got after us. He said, “What in the sam-hell would I do if you guys got hurt and didn’t show up to make cheese the next morning?” He had a point but we got along alright. We never, never had to stand him up. We flew to a couple of rodeos. A guy there in Park City had a plane and he would fly us. He’d get us back at two or three o’clock in the morning but we’d be to work at six. TF: How did you function at work? KW: We’d make good cheese. LR: So you were a member of the school board KW: For Sixteen years. LR: And you were Summit County Commissioner. KW: Two different times. The first time for six years and I had to resign in order to get the post office job, 1966 to 1971. Then when I came back from Australia there 9 was a group down in the court house that came after me to run for commission again, which I did. Had a primary election that I won and then I ran against a fella from Park City, beat him in a general election and that was a two year term. After that term I ran again and won and then it was two years and they changed the form of government from a three commissioners to a council, five member council plus they’d hire a manager and I didn’t want any part of that. I voted against it and wouldn’t run for it so I got out of that. LR: What made you want to run for county commissioner? KW: I didn’t have any axe to grind, just people wanted me to run and so I did. There was a lot of difference between 1966 and 1999. Park City started taking the county over and that’s about what they’ve done. My wife’s from Park City, old Park City is a great place. It’s alright now, there are some good people over there, but their way of life is a lot different than what I grew up with. TF: So you’re not into skiing? KW: No, didn’t have time to ski. Had to work. TF: So as postmaster, what were your duties? KW: My duties? Just to manage the post office, I was the only employee. We had one employee that would work on Saturdays only and then if I took time off, but that’s the only help we had at the post office. I would go over early in the morning, put up the mail and then I’d have to be there all day to do business transactions, selling stamps, money orders, and those kinds of things. But I had to be there eight hours a day. 10 LR: So you said that the post office was initially in the store, now did you and your wife purchase that store? KW: We did. LR: Then it became a place for your kids to… KW: Yeah, my kids, all five of them, was raised in there. They’d come to work after school, nights, and work till we’d close around seven, eight o’clock. In the summer time we’d keep it open longer, but it gave the kids something to do. LR: How many of your kids followed in your footsteps with rodeo? KW: Had one. LR: Just one? KW: Well, a couple of the girls did a little barrel racing but my second boy, Wade, he went through college on a rodeo scholarship up to Utah State and he’s now the principal of the high school at South Summit. His second boy graduates this year and he just completed the state high school rodeo finals and he ended up winning second in the steer wrestling and second in the tie down rope and so he gets to go to the national high school rodeo now. Wade went back there one year to the National Finals in Douglas, Wyoming, when he was a senior. But he’s the only one, the rest of them just grew up. My oldest boy right now is a business administrator for the Ogden City School District. They got him out of Logan two years ago, he was up at Logan but he served about sixteen years at South Summit, after he got out of college. Four of the five kids went on missions. They’ve stayed busy. LR: Sounds like it. 11 KW: But I haven’t had to worry much about them. TF: How did your wife feel about the rodeo lifestyle? Was she into it? KW: Well not until after she spent a couple of years with me. But she supported it, she stayed home a lot and worked at the store and we sold the store about eight years ago and he kept the name of it. So it’s still Ken’s Kash. LR: Let’s see, do you have any other stories that you’d like to share of just the rodeo? KW: Well I don’t know that there are stories, but during the course of time that I participated with the Rocky Mountain Rodeo Association I don’t know how many belt buckles I’ve won. They used to give us trophies, about three feet high. I got four or five of those and then in 1961 they started giving saddles away for event winners. I do know that I ended up winning fifteen saddles over the time. The last one I won was bareback riding in 1972 and after that I quit. LR: How old were you when you stopped rodeoing? KW: When I stopped? When I stopped picking up rodeos. LR: You did that for years. KW: I did. The last one I picked up was 1997, for Bar T Rodeo. LR: So, wow. That’s just blowing my mind that you did that for so long. KW: I quit rodeoing in, like I said, 1972 was the last year, but I had to join the PRCA and get a card in order to work for the Bar T Rodeo. I stayed there and the last rodeo I picked up was in the Oakley Rodeo in 1997 before I went to Australia. LR: You talk about picked up, can you describe what that is. 12 KW: Well that’s where usually two men out in the arena on horseback pick cowboys up off of the bucking horses, corral the bulls and cattle, steer wrestling, calf roping. You have to have a good horse. LR: I’m glad you told me cause I was thinking something else. KW: Yeah, so when you see guys helping cowboys off the bucking horse after the whistles blown without killing him, that’s a pick-up man. LR: You did that for a long time. KW: Yeah. My biggest thrill I guess was being able to do the days of ’47 in Salt Lake in the old Delta Center. It was good. You always try to do the best that you can at the best places that you can be in. But it was good to be able to do that. LR: I’m gonna ask a hard question, I’m sorry but I’m still gonna ask. If you were to describe or maybe if you were to ask your children to describe what your legacy is, what do you think your children would say that your legacy is? KW: Well I don’t know. I think maybe public service. Like I said, I ran for school board, can’t even remember the year now, but it’s when I was working at the creamery in the cheese factory. The manager of the cheese factory, he was on the school board and I filed against him because people asked me to do it and I won and I spent sixteen years there. During that time they had the organization that included all the school boards in the state. They called it the Utah School Boards Association and they had officers, they had president, vice president, first vice president, second vice president, third vice president, and fourth. When you’re elected, you’re elected to the fourth and then you just move up each year. But sixteen years on the school board, I spent four years on the Utah School Boards 13 Association. Of course the last year I was there I was president of that organization. My dad served as mayor of Oakley for twenty three years and when he retired from that I had some of the people ask me to file for his job and so I did and I was elected mayor. I served for twelve years there and then all this other stuff. I’ve been kind of busy. LR: Yeah, you kind of have. Just looking at the things that you accomplished, mayor, county commissioner, on the school board for sixteen years, even being a president of the RMRA, and riding director and today you’re the rodeo committee director for Oakley. KW: I’m on the rodeo committee, yeah. LR: Do you think that it’s something that you’ll always do, always have a hand in public service? KW: I think so. I like to get involved I like to see things happen, and the best way to make things happen is to be involved. So I think I will for as long as I can, but I’m getting to the end though. Pretty quick. We have a good group, there’s another guy on the rodeo committee, Gerald Young, he and I are the two oldest on that committee, we’re the same age and he and his uncle had the Young & Young Rodeo. They were stock contractors for several years and they was members of the RMRA and we’d travel with them almost every week to a rodeo somewhere. But younger kids are coming up and on the committee, they’re starting to take over. But it’s time for us old moss bags to get out. LR: Well what do you hope to leave with the younger generation that’s moving up? 14 KW: Well I would hope that they would have some desire to serve and see things keep progressing. I would hope that they’ve got enough pride in the community to want to be involved and to do things the right way. We need to create things for this younger generation. I think that they’re good kids but they need to be directed. The biggest thing that I feel like I’ve been involved with since being mayor and on the rodeo committee is that several years ago, when I was mayor, there’s a fellow, an attorney in Salt Lake, Dwight King. He had seventy-eight acres of property that’s right on the edge of town just before you go out of town, going south towards Kamas. He called me up one day and he said, “Ken, I’m gonna sell my farm. I think the town ought to buy it. If you don’t, somebody’s gonna buy it and they’re gonna make a bunch of homes in there.” So, anyhow, we got the town board together, we held meetings with members of the town and we decided that yes, we wanted to try and buy it. So he sold it to us at a reasonable price but he said, “I don’t want you to go to the bank. I want to carry the contract on it. I want $2,000 an acre for it. I want the loan over twenty five years at eight percent interest. Eight percent back at that time was the going rate, of course it’s a lot less now, but to make a long story short, we ended up buying it. The highway goes through one corner of it. There’s thirteen acres on the south side and then the rest of it on the other side of the highway. We had a group that came and wanted to buy the thirteen acres and put a retirement home in there. So it worked out that we was able to sell them thirteen acres for substantially more than we gave for it and then the rest of it we have developed. 15 We have an indoor arena, an outdoor arena, we have RV hookups on the north side of the arena, we have three softball fields just in a circle, and four soccer fields, and we have the landscape. It’s pretty. We have our rodeo over there, over the Fourth of July now, four days. Then the indoor arena is used all winter, people riding horses, team roping, that’s a big thing now. They had a big team roping competition last Saturday over there. Man alive, you couldn’t believe the horse trailers and stuff that come. But that thing has really turned out, and it isn’t homes now, it’s just open and we have a nice building for receptions and parties. In fact, here a couple of months ago they held a funeral in it. We have a four day rodeo PRCA approved and five years ago, right after we got that completed, we got a plaque from the PRCA at the national finals that recognized Oakley as the best outdoor rodeo in America. LR: That’s awesome. KW: So we’ve got to be proud of what’s happened there. LR: A lot of that is because of you. KW: Well, a lot of people were involved, it isn’t just me. I can’t take credit. I ran into Dwight King’s son here two years ago and he had been up on a Saturday and Saturday. You can’t believe the kids playing soccer and baseball and softball. He happened to drive up through there one day and I ran into him in Salt Lake and he said, “Ken, I would love to have seen my dad looking down on that place today.” It was just, all kids and all colors, and it’s just something that’s pretty special. So, the people in town have been good. We have great water, we have a 16 bottling plant there at the source. They’re bottling water and selling it. We have an up to date sewer plant, the town has done well. LR: I think that whether you want to take credit for it or not, that complex that you’ve helped create is part of your legacy. KW: You know I’d like it to be, but… LR: I think it is. KW: It’s just fortunate that we had the opportunity to acquire the property. But it’s right on the edge of town, in fact we have homes that border the property line. LR: Is there any other story that you’d like to share before we are off camera? KW: I don’t know, it’s just a great place to raise kids. It’s a great, great community. The towns grown a lot. When I was growing up as a kid, there were 200 people if you counted everybody, but today now you’re looking at 1500 people in town and most of them are good people, but there aren’t many natives around anymore. You go to church and two thirds of the people there are all new people. We used to be one ward and now we have two wards in town. When I grew up I served as a counselor to two different bishops for about eleven years and then when the last bishop was released I got called as bishop. I spent six years as bishop, so it’s been about twenty three years all together, but we started to grow and we petitioned the church for a new building. We needed a new stake house too so we built a new building over in what they call Marion. It’s a community between Oakley and Kamas, a couple of miles out of town. Some of the people was upset cause we moved it out of town, but the old building, the old church house, we bought when I was mayor. When the church moved us over to 17 the new building they went to the town and tried to get them to buy it, the old one. But the town fathers at that time, that included my dad, felt that they pretty well paid for the building which in those days they did. Now it’s taken out of the church fund to build them. But anyhow, the church tried to sell that building to the town. The town wouldn’t buy it, they wanted too much money for it. They didn’t want a lot, $50,000. So the church sold it to some guy down in West Jordan. He was a carpenter and he made survey stakes. He just piled that recreation room, you wouldn’t believe; you’d think I’m lying to you. But he had banana boxes of just short pieces that he’d make survey stakes out of, he had them stacked clear to the ceiling of the recreation room of that building. Anyhow, he got goofy and his wife had diabetes real bad, she finally kicked the bucket and… so then he sold it to his brother in law. Now I’m mayor and his brother in law wants to sell it so I said “How much you want for it?” He said “I want $72,000.” I said, “Well that’s a lot more than Lawrence gave for it when he bought it from the church. Why so much?” He said “that’s what I want, if you’re interested or if you’re not, I don’t care.” So I said “If that’s what you gotta have.” We had a town meeting and we all agreed that we ought to buy it so we did buy it. We refurbished it, the people in town, we all went together and worked our tails off and now we have a city hall. We have the town offices all in that building and for a long time until we moved the rodeo arena, it was just right across the street from the old rodeo arena which of course now has been torn down. So we’ve been busy. It’s been fun. 18 LR: Well I want to thank you for your time. For your willingness to come and talk to us and just share with us your life story. Appreciate it. KW: Well I appreciate being able to… one thing that we did when we was rodeoing, Louis Fields was just in high school when we was going pretty good. He trailed along with us and he started riding bare back horses with us just in high school. Of course then he went to college and that’s where he got hooked up with Sean Davis and he got where he is today. The high school rodeo gave a thousand dollar scholarship away. They titled it the First Annual Louis Field Scholarship. But Louis was a good kid. LR: I’ve heard his name a lot. KW: Yeah, he died with cancer here just a few months ago. A lot of those people up there have been involved with this.