Oral History Program Marcy Korgenski Interviewed by Charles Trentelman 15 November 2013 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Marcy Korgenski Interviewed by Charles Trentelman 15 November 2013 Copyright © 2013 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 Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial house flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. After World War II, the railroad business declined. Some government agencies and business related to the defense industry continued to gravitate to Ogden after the war—including the Internal Revenue Regional Center, the Marquardt Corporation, Boeing Corporation, Volvo-White Truck Corporation, Morton-Thiokol, and several other small operations. However, the economy became more service oriented, with small businesses developing that appealed to changing demographics, including the growing Hispanic population. ____________________________________ 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: Korgenski, Marcy, an oral history by Charles Trentelman, 15 November 2013, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Marcy Korgenski 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Marcy Korgenski, conducted November 15, 2013 by Charles Trentelman. Korgenski discusses her family, memories of 25th Street, and her experiences as a police officer in Ogden. MK: You missed a couple, we had a doctor that was a one hundred years old that died a few years ago, and Lindquist just died. CT: We’ve got plenty of history from John Lindquist. Yeah everybody’s got stuff on him. He has a complete history that he wrote about his time in the war and all kinds of good stuff. Just fascinating. So I understand that they we were just about to interview Jim Stazoski… MK: Oh, oh, Stavarkis. CT: Stavarkis, he went and died. MK: He would’ve been a good one. CT: He would have. I tell you it’s interesting I was digging though old stuff at work and I found a picture I had taken of Jim in his office up at the Adult Protective Services where he worked. MK: Is that where he worked? CT: That’s where he worked, yes. MK: I didn’t really realize that. CT: He had to take some kind of prize for the messiest office on the planet. It was beautiful. He had a computer screen completely covered with post-it notes. MK: Sometimes those people, they can find everything. CT: Yeah they can. 2 MK: One fun one might be Joe Chesser, he was a police officer with Ogden. He went around, gosh when was it? Probably in the 1990s, and he took pictures of everything. CT: Oh, yeah. Really? MK: Yeah he did. CT: Joe Chesser? MK: He lives in Roy now and he just retired. He retired probably twenty five-ish years and then went and worked for the county for like, well he just retired from the county. He was really interested in history. He kind of made himself a self-imposed historian so he took a lot of pictures. I think you’ll get a kick out of Steve Turner. He has a great memory about everything. He came on probably 1972 or 1973 or something like that. Turner will be fun to talk too. CT: He will. I look forward to that. So anyway, that thing’s on. MK: Oh it’s on okay. CT: Yes it’s recording. We are live. Now this is Marcy Korgenski, former deputy… MK: Assistant. CT: Assistant Chief of Ogden. Long time officer and we’re talking today about being a cop in Ogden. You were telling me first, and I got to find out about it. Your mom tended bar down there? MK: My grandmother did and then my mother did. CT: Okay now tell me, who was your grandmother? MK: My grandmother’s name was Merl Stevenson. She came from Preston, Idaho. She and my mother were both born just right outside of Preston. She came down 3 here with her husband, my grandmother did, to Ogden and never left. She ended up having three children and her husband. for whatever reason they split up, I don’t know why they did or anything. He was gone and I never did see him until I was much older. CT: This was your grandfather? MK: Yes. I thought of him like a, truly a wanderer type. For whatever reason my grandmother needed to have employment and so she ended up working at the club. I remember as about a ten year old girl we drove down there to pick her up from work. I do recall her being there, but I don’t know really anything else about that. She ended up later working in DDO and retired from DDO, but she did work down there for a while. CT: About what year would that have been if I may ask? MK: That was probably right around 1966, 1965, somewhere in 1967. I don’t know what years my mother worked there but probably after that. It could have been before that because I lived in California when my mother lived here in Utah. So she worked down there and she said that when they worked there they had to work the bar and the restaurant and that she was told by the employer, who I think was Pappis. Was it Harry Pappis or Henry Pappis? CT: It was one of them yeah. MK: I think it might be Harry; that if she were to serve anyone who was black that she would be fired. So she could never serve anyone who was black and that was on the north side of the street. I’ve heard that since then from other people, and that 4 was confirmed by another friend, who is black, who said she could never go to that side of the street. CT: Never go on that side of the street. It’s interesting I talked with a lady this morning who is 90, Colleen Lane. She lives over near Weber State and her mother used to work in Armstrong’s Sporting Goods, but she never heard about that racial divide on 25th Street. MK: Wow, is that right? CT: Yeah. Well if you know life is normal for you, life is normal. MK: Makes sense. CT: What’s going on is normal so you almost don’t take notice to those things. It’s like when Claude Armstrong told Marshall White, “There’s no racism around here.” Marshall set him straight very, very firmly. MK: Well none of the black people even lived above Washington Boulevard. They all lived on Lincoln, Grant and Wall Avenue, and down probably between 20th and maybe 36th, somewhere. They all lived west, nobody lived east of Washington. I don’t ever recall seeing anyone east of Washington that was black. CT: Do you think that was because of red lining? I know some of that was they owned those little houses, that’s where the porters and waiters lived. Was that red lining? Was that intentional? MK: I really don’t know. I couldn’t really answer that. CT: I remember when I came here in 1978 I was looking for a place to live and somebody who helps you find apartments told me definitely you don’t want to go 5 west of Washington. I’m like, why. That’s where I ended up, is in the Browning Apartments on Washington and 27th. MK: Oh you did? CT: Yeah. Cool place. MK: It’s a pretty building.I like the way they’ve redone it. CT: Yeah it looks nice again. It was kind of fading when I lived there, but it’s nice that its been redone. It’s a gorgeous building and it has a twin just up the street that actually looked a lot better than the one I was in because it was further east I guess. MK: A twin? CT: Yeah it’s just up the street. MK: Oh is it on 27th and Jefferson? CT: Yeah it’s on the south side of the street. MK: Southwest corner? CT: Yeah. MK: Oh yeah. That’s a nice building too. I didn’t realize that those were twins, but now that you say that, I do. CT: They were owned by the Browning family, I think. I guess that’s where it got the name Browning Apartments. Well Browning’s owned that house right behind the Browning Apartments, there’s a vacant lot there now. MK: Well that’s where Clay Apartments were. CT: No those were further down. You know where the Browning Apartments are on 27th? 6 MK: Yes. CT: Okay, well immediately behind it there’s a little administrative building and then there’s the big vacant lot there now. MK: Okay I know exactly where you’re talking. CT: There was actually quite an elegant brick home there that was since demolished. MK: That professional looking building or administrative building or whatever that is. When I was a pretty new officer, probably the first year, I was working, they used to have after parties. Well they still have after parties, but there was an after party at that place. So there was a problem so we all drove up in our police cars. We all drove up from different areas and we were all parked in the middle of the street, it was a big melee. So we are in the middle of trying to get it all squared away, but somebody had gone and stabbed two of my tires. Flattened the tires on my car. Well I was still having to prove myself so all of the officers left, none of them would help me. I started trying to figure it out and one of the officers, Phil Coxey, he turned around. He snuck over and he helped me take care of my tires, fix my tires. It was really nice of him to do and I’ll never forget that. CT: Well you don’t normally carry two spares with you do you? MK: Right. CT: Okay, one tire I can see, but two that’s mean. MK: Well you know they didn’t like women in law enforcement very much at that time. It wasn’t the best, they had a couple they really liked and they had one they didn’t really like. So we just had to be tested. So that was part of it. CT: Welcome to life I guess. What year did you join? Did you come to Ogden? 7 MK: I started with Ogden City, well actually Weber County in 1978. I worked one year with, it was on planning commission of the office. Ogden City and Weber County had planning together, but I was employed by Weber County even though I did Ogden City planning. So, I worked in there for a year and then I went to traffic engineering in 1979. I worked from 1979 to 1982 in traffic engineering. During that time when I first started in there I knew that my job in traffic engineering wasn’t a job I wanted to do for the rest of my life. So I worked in the annex building, which is where the court building is now, right next to the Wonder Bread. The annex building also houses sheriff’s office and Ogden City used offices there. On the north side of that was the Elks Lodge, which was the old school. So I remember I didn’t really love my job and we worked upstairs and in the hallway on the north side were the Ogden City officers and the south side were the Weber County investigators. They always acted like they loved their jobs, so I thought, “That sounds interesting.” The office right on the north side there right next door, we shared a wall was where they had the reserve corps commander and that was Harold Pow. So I said to him one day, “Can I do that reserve officer thing?” He said, “Sure,” and so I went through the whole process and tried it. So I went through the process and it was 1979 in December that I became a reserve officer. So I was a reserve officer until I was hired in 1982. From 1979 to 1982 as a reserve officer still working for the city, I made friends with Tracy VanLeeuwen at that time, was her name. She and I became friends, we made a pact that if an opening came up with the Ogden Police Department that she and I would apply, because it was 8 pretty intimidating and there weren’t very many women. Women were just new into law enforcement so we made a pack that we would apply. So, the opening came and I said to her, “I can’t do it. I’m not going to apply. It’s too scary.” Not because of being out in the streets, but because I just didn’t think I would get in the police department. She said, “Well you promised.” CT: Oh good for her. MK: I said, “Yeah I did.” So, we both applied and both were hired. We both worked for years and retired. CT: Where’s Tracy now? MK: She married Will Cragen but she’s not married to him anymore. She lives in Roy. Her father is Dutch VanLeeuwen, the one that’s friends with Ron Ross. CT: Ron has mentioned Mr. VanLeeuwen to me as well. MK: Yeah he talked about him in our meeting I think. CT: Now is he related to Scotty VanLeeuwen? MK: There is some relation, but I don’t know what the connection is. So there was something else I was going to tell you along those lines, but I can’t remember what it was. Anyway so I actually hired in March of 1982. Tracy hired in January of 1982. I was number eight in the eligibility list and Tracy was number four on the eligibility list. CT: What were you doing then? What was your assignment? MK: Well, in Ogden City, and I’m sure many other police departments, when you hire on to the police department you immediately get the worst shift or something no one else wants. I worked patrol as a patrol officer and at that time we didn’t have 9 car per officer and the cars were terrible. They were green and white cars when they first came in. Then they moved to, oh I can’t remember what came first, I think it was the Easter egg cars, we called them the Easter egg cars. We all parked at the annex, and as a new rookie you’d get the worst car with the worst keys. They were always filthy and lot of junk in them. Nobody took care of the cars, plus police work is hard on cars anyway. We called them the Easter egg cars because the city bought the cars, they were Chrysler products and they didn’t want to paint them as police cars so all they did was stuck a decal on them and whatever color we got, we got. So we had every color of car. CT: I seem to remember that vaguely. MK: After that we got beige cars, but it looked pink. They were terrible too. We never had really good cars until now. CT: Wow really? MK: Cars were in bad shape what with the different administrations, cars were just such an expense. When Godfrey was in there as the mayor, he was very frugal and so those cars had 120,000 miles on them and we were still trying to eat. CT: You guys use them hard too. MK: Yeah, exactly. CT: You use those things hard. Yeah I remember there was even a while there, maybe they still are, but they actually had sponsored cars. MK: Right, because we had no money. So all the businesses pitched in and helped the police department. So we helped them by putting the sponsor on the car. CT: That’s sad. 10 MK: It is, it’s sad, but things are better now that way. I don’t think that those young officers really appreciate how hard it was for the cars and things. CT: Maybe not, I don’t know. Sure they’ve got plenty of things they complain about too. MK: It was really nice. Chris Zimmerman was the one who finally put the proposal together for car per officer and convinced them. So we ended up with car per officers, I can’t remember what yeah that was but its been quite a long time. CT: Its been a while, yeah. MK: Probably late 1980s maybe, mid 1980s. CT: So where was your beat then? MK: I worked graveyards. What happens is, at that time you would go into the annex where the briefing room was, and it’s still there. In the back room, it was in the back of the annex, and you go in up the spiral staircase in this crappy, little junky room. A sergeant would be in there and all the officers from the squad would be in there. You were assigned a shift, an area to work. So you’d get whatever area, one, two, three or four or five or six. Then it was eight areas later, seven or eight. At that time there were six areas. One was down at the southwest or the northwest part of town, it’s still down there; two was the northeast part of town; three was the middle west part of town; four was the east part of town; five was the north or the southwest part of town; and six was the southeast part of town. So four was always kind of the busiest. CT: Yeah it would be. 11 MK: So we’d get whatever we were assigned and we just got out and worked. Sometimes we just worked with four officers, and sometimes it slipped down to three. CT: Four officers for the whole shift or the whole city? MK: For the whole shift, for the whole city. CT: Good god. MK: People never knew that, and I’d heard stories that before my time they’d work the whole city with two officers at graveyard. When I first hired on we were on eight hour shifts, five days a week. Not long into it we went to four tens and Ogden City is still on four tens now. CT: So you’d start your shift about what time then? MK: So at that time I think it was seven to three maybe, and three to eleven. CT: Seven p.m. to Three a.m.? MK: Seven a.m. to well, it was to seven to three, three to eleven isn’t it? It was so long ago I don’t even really remember the shift, when it was or what it was exactly. CT: So basically working graveyards you came in close to midnight and get off work at about 8:00 in the morning? MK: Right. Then every quarter we would change shifts. So we’d go to a different spot. So we’d have the day shift, night shift, and then the graveyard shift, and sometimes there was a relief shift. I don’t really recall that very well. So we’d work graveyards or work afternoons or work days. Mostly at that time we got graveyards. Then you could pick your shifts too. CT: After you had a little seniority? 12 MK: Well every quarter when we didn’t change our shifts you could ask for it. If nobody was wanting it you could get it, you were at the end of the line. Seniority was important, but it was much less important until you could prove yourself to help get yourself that shift so it was kind of a combination of it. CT: Interesting, yeah. MK: So I just worked graveyards and afternoons and some day shifts on weekends. I liked weekend, but other people didn’t like weekends so that worked too. CT: What kind of crime were you dealing with back then? MK: Oh there was everything. You’d have car accidents and homicides and thefts and burglaries and auto thefts. CT: Most of it centered in the center of town usually? MK: Usually yes, but it still was everywhere. Mostly it was center of town. You’d get to know the crime families and you’d deal with them. CT: Who were the crime families then? I mean we got gangs now. MK: Some of the crime families are still here so if any of them are good I’d hate to you know. Jennings would be one. As you just recall maybe recently the one Jennings went into a church and shot at someone inside the church. We had a lot of trouble with the Jennings family. The Oncata family, and some others. CT: Mostly drugs? MK: Everything, usually some kind of theft related or drug related kind of thing. CT: So every shift was definitely an adventure then. MK: Just never knew. I remember my first day as a rail officer, as a reserve, it’s fun because you don’t have any of the worry of it. My very first day things changed 13 because then you’re responsible for everything and I remember I had a call out by North Street and it’s all different now. It was out somewhere out there, it was out north it was some cars racing. I tried to help the man and the complainant. He said, “You’re pretty new aren’t you?” I said, “No.” CT: Now you’re supposed to be honest Marcy. I doubt that you fooled him. He probably had more experience than you did. MK: I had three years as a reserve so that’s something. CT: Yeah you did know your way around. MK: I think Tracy had an auto accident PI which is called an injury accident, the very first day she was on. So that was a lot harder than my hardest thing. It’s fun though. CT: It would be tough to walk into something like that on the first day. MK: It was, but it doesn’t take long to get into the swing of things. CT: How much work did you do down in central part of town, especially 25th Street and those areas around there? MK: Well whenever we were bored, back then 25th Street was still pretty busy. It wasn’t a place people would go, most of the citizens of Ogden didn’t really go there. It was mostly bars and transients. CT: I remember 25th Street as mostly a place you didn’t much go to unless you were looking for a bar. MK: It was bars, it was a lot of homeless transient types and kind of the underbelly of society. They were still all down there when I hired on. In fact, you worked everywhere. So I worked there a lot, I worked everywhere a lot. The transients 14 were always there and I remember the stories right when I first came on that Mary Yuke had a café down there and she would feed all of the homeless guys and take their social security check at the first of the month and then she would feed them the whole month so they’d have food for the whole month. It was really good because they could eat. Then what the rumor was, and I don’t know if it’s really true or not, she really wouldn’t spend a lot of money on the food, and the quality of the food was pretty low. She was feeding them roadkill. CT: Roadkill is a little bit of a stretch I like to hope, I don’t know, I liked Mary, what can I say? MK: I didn’t ever really know her, but that was the rumor and that’s what all the officers thought. CT: Oh yeah? Huh, interesting. MK: Reverend Harris was down there selling his barbeque sauce at that time, and we heard that he made his barbeque sauce in a bathtub. So none of the cops would touch his food. CT: When I came here he was over on 27th Street. Then he moved and that was in 1978 when I started here. He had a little store on 27th Street and it was about two blocks west of Washington. MK: Right, I know exactly where you’re talking about. CT: Maybe it’s one block west, I forget exactly where. MK: I remember that. CT: I actually had his barbeque once or twice and lived. Then he moved to the corner of the Marion Hotel where Willie Moore has his barbershop now. 15 MK: Yeah I couldn’t remember when it was, but I knew it was somewhere on 25th Street. CT: Yeah, it was right where Willie Moore has his barbershop, because I’ve got a picture of him out front. Yeah, I’ve got pictures of him down there. Then he opened a place briefly on Washington and just west of 25th Street where that big, black building is now that the city used to be in for a while. Where the arts building is, it was just west of there. MK: West of there and Washington? CT: North of it, I’m directionally challenged I apologize. After that I don’t know, oh yeah then he went down to, was it Grant Avenue and about 30th? MK: Right. CT: He was on the east side of the street down there. I remember I interviewed him down there after he had been diagnosed with diabetes. I think he’d lost a leg at some point in time and he wasn’t taking good care of himself. MK: Right, well do you know when he’d lay down in the middle of the street and do all that? CT: Oh yeah. We covered that many times. MK: First the police department would try to get him out of there and later they just put barricades around him and let him stay. CT: Yeah, we even quit covering him when he did that for that same reason, because he was just doing it to try and get attention. I remember being down there one time, he blew a whistle, walked out into the middle of the street. I think it was Elvis’s birthday or something like that. He walked out in the middle of the street 16 blowing a whistle, he took copies of the paper and laid them down in the middle of the street, and then one of your cars came along and parked right there in the intersection with him. The cop got out and took those traffic cones and put two around him and just left him there. We can wait here as long as you can and I’m sitting in the car. MK: I remember when I came on, I think I was still a reserve because I worked for the city so the dates are a little off. We had the Hare Krishnas here. Where the Creston Plaza is on the east, it was on the northeast corner of 20th and Grant. It was when it was still the old bus station. There was a building and it was kind of a yellowy tan building and the Hare Krishnas were all there. CT: Really? MK: Yeah, they lived there for a while and the gypsies were just down the street on 25th Street, a little ways, and just a few buildings down from Grant. The gypsies were there and I remember them, they would do fortune telling, but they probably did some other things too. CT: Yeah they moved from here to Oregon I remember reading about them in Life Magazine or something. MK: Is that where they went? CT: Yeah. MK: Because we were always worried, there was lots of things that they did but could never nail them very easily because identifying the gypsies were very tough. So there were police officers that were very friendly with the gypsies. CT: Oh yeah? 17 MK: It was Sergeant Smith, and I think that was in probably the 1960s. CT: What kind of stuff were they doing or did you think they were doing? MK: They used to do some fraud with housing. They’d buy houses somehow and then they would get the houses somehow in their names. It was kind of all over the state and it was some kind of a real estate fraud kind of a thing they did. CT: What other interesting characters, did you ever deal with Brother Dominic? MK: Oh I knew Dominic. We all knew him. CT: Wheelchair up and down the street there. MK: Yeah, he was crazy. I remember I would, every time the police were bored, because it’s either really something crazy going on or nothing going on or whatever. So whenever we were bored, back then 25th Street was so interesting, that we would drive up and down 25th Street. You could see when it was a quiet night, all the cops are going back and forth on 25th Street. I remember I would always go there. There was a big vacant field on the southwest corner of 25th and Lincoln. I would go to the alley back behind the buildings on the west end of that block and I would pull in behind there with my binoculars and watch the prostitutes walk up and down the street. They would go into the historic place, they worked out of the historic place and they would start at the historic place and walk up and down up to Lincoln. Then they would sit on the ledge at the Marion Bar. So I would just watch as people would come and they’d be picked up, and back and forth all the time. Jessie Nelson was running the bar and his son Tommy was the pimp that was running the prostitutes up and down that street all the time. They were mostly hooked on heroine at that time, and we 18 would watch those prostitutes just degrade. They’d come young, cute girls, then they would just degrade to really pathetic health and they looked horrible. Really pretty sad. CT: Kind of like those pictures you see of people on crank now where they show progression from a young beautiful lady to an old crone and this is her two years later. MK: That’s exactly what we saw. It was very difficult to get that shut down, but eventually an officer by the name of Milt Garrett did a drug operation and was able to shut that down. CT: What did he do? MK: He worked in narcotics at the time and I think he got an informant or something and was able to get inside. Got some drug buys from some of the people in there and that kind of thing. He was able to put together enough of a case that it shut them down. CT: Shut down the drug deal or the prostitution? MK: It shut down the prostitution and the drugging. The drug and prostitution out of the historic place, so it moved on. In fact we had one prostitute that worked with us, I worked with her. I had to be with her quite a bit, so I’d sit with her in a hotel room and that kind of thing. Took her to the airport to send her out of town when she done. As she was an informant we didn’t want her to get hurt or anything so we helped her get out of town. CT: What did she talk about when you were sitting talking with her? 19 MK: Well most of the time when we were in the hotel room she would be asleep because she was still high on heroine. She was having heroine issues and she’d take whatever she could so she was always high. She was very bright and she was very pretty. It was really sad, in fact she had a child by Tommy Nelson. I heard that she ended up clean off drugs. When I took her to the airport to put her on the plane, we were waiting for the plane, and couple of men came up and tried to talk to us. We laughed about it because we thought if they only knew who we were. CT: Where was she from? Was she a local girl? MK: I think she was. CT: That’s sad, so she’s still probably got a family around here then. MK: I asked her one night, she wasn’t with us that night she was still working the streets. I said, “So do you think you’ll get a John tonight?” She said, “I sure hope so.” I just couldn’t really comprehend that. CT: She needed the money I guess. That’s been one of the constants through history, women do that because they need the money. They don’t actually make a lot of money at it, but they never have and never will. It’s really sad when that’s the only way they can go. I just got done reading about the girls that worked for Belle London and same thing. They didn’t make a lot of money. MK: Right, I read that too. CT: I just finished that book on prostitution and polygamy in Utah, and the two had parallels, but it talks about Belle London in the stockade down in Salt Lake. It’s a fascinating book, it talks a lot about the roots of why it existed and why it did so 20 well. It boiled down to money. The landlords made good rent when there was a house in one of their buildings. MK: I bet they did. CT: I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if that was the same thing here in Ogden as it was in Salt Lake. You know you had houses operating in the open and bank buildings owned by the LDS church. Pay your rent on time, and there was a law on the books then and maybe it still is, that talked about how the landlord wasn’t legally responsible for what went on in their building. So they could say, “Well we don’t know anything about that, we just rented that to that lady and it’s a rooming house as far as we know,” and there you go. MK: When I came into the police department I remember there were still alleys behind the north side of the street. I used to drive up and down those alleys all the time and that was part of my job to check buildings. So I’d drive up and down those buildings and at that time there was still, what we called it, red light alley. We didn’t call it electric alley, we called it red light alley. At that time there were still some places where there were red lights up in the windows. I remember it because I thought it was red light alley and I thought, “Well I wonder if they’re red lights.” So I looked for the red lights and there were red lights. CT: Were there people operating those places? MK: Well I don’t know, I just saw red lights. CT: I know the police ran stings to arrest Johns and that. MK: They still do. CT: Still do? 21 MK: Oh yeah. CT: I just remember they did it then. I remember one time you actually had one that was a reporter from the Standard Examiner, agreed to play the Johns in one of those things. He got into trouble, he wasn’t supposed to do that. I think they docked him a week’s pay or something like that. Reporters aren’t supposed to do that, unless you get permission. He just went down there on his own volition, did that and I remember that was in the early to mid-1980s I think. That’s when you guys were really working hard to push that stuff out of there. Yeah, you put in a patrolman working the beat down there. MK: Well you got community policing. In fact, I was one of the first community policing officers and we tried to work 25th street. The city was trying to clean up 25th street so they could put in some legitimate, to do what they’ve done. They did a great job. It was really difficult though because we had so many homeless and so many services for homeless people in the area. They lived in the area and they lived all over. They lived under docks, I remember one of the homeless guys lived under a dock on 23rd and just west of Lincoln. The building is still there, it’s a daysaunt building. There was a dock there and I got a caller one day to go because there was somebody living under the dock, go take care of it. So I went over there and sure enough this guy crawled out from under that dock and he was exactly the same color as dirt. Everything about him was that dark, rich dirt color. So his name was Charlie Candle and I ended up later working the streets and getting to know him a little more, he was very intelligent. They would all go somewhere behind a building or under a bush somewhere and drink. They were 22 filthy, they would throw all their stuff around and they had no qualms about leaving anything behind or anything like that. I was always chasing those guys around when I worked down in that area. So I got to know him pretty well and he ended up dying on 25th street. CT: Really? MK: Yeah, it was Thanksgiving Day and he was walking up the street and he just died. I asked him, “Why are you like this? Why are you here?” He said, “I don’t want to talk about it,” and he wouldn’t talk about it. CT: Just didn’t want to talk about it huh? MK: Nope, but I said, “But Charlie you can’t live under that dock all winter.” He said, “Oh but I can,” but that was the winter he died. I remember in that empty lot, that vacant lot, one year the city put an ice skating rink in the lot and I went on a call because there were two transients sleeping in the ice skating rink. They were actually sleeping on the ice in the ice skating rink and that’s where they were bedded down for the night. CT: Wow. MK: I know, I said, “Isn’t that cold?” They said, “No,” they were fine. CT: Insulation I supposed. Cold goes down instead of up maybe I don’t know. It seems to me that they could find a better place. I remember they found the guy who had been murdered in that lot too. MK: Did they? CT: Yeah. 23 MK: Probably, I remember driving down 25th street. I was coming west on 25th street and I was right by Pancho’s on Lincoln, and a guy just came out in the street and he’d been stabbed and fell right in front of my car. So Pancho’s was a terrible place, but El Boracho was even worse. Nobody would let their backs be to the patrons in there. You never went in there alone, it was so dangerous. CT: Talked to one of the other officers who had been there. He says, “I was nervous going in there and I had a gun.” MK: It was really scary. Whenever we got a call there we were very careful. CT: Well Pancho’s too. MK: Right and Pancho’s too. CT: Just as bad, yeah. That’s why I never went into those places. MK: Pancho’s, it wasn’t quite as bad, but it was close. Then we had the club, one of the police officers, John Tanner, he ran the club. He owned the business and he ran the club. So it became a cop bar and the cops would go into the club and during that time the railroad still had Amtrak and John Madden when he would come into town, when he doesn’t like to fly. So he would come into town and every time he would walk in and go into the club and buy himself a beer and then leave. CT: John Madden was a sports announcer? MK: He was, he was the first sports announcer. I think he was a coach before that, but he was the first sports announcer who would write on the screen and circle it and do all those things. CT: Yeah I know the name, but I’m not a big sports person. That’s interesting. 24 MK: So he would come into the club. CT: Well the club has a long history, they used to cash checks for railroaders down there and charge them a nickel I think to cash their check. MK: The club has a really pretty bar too. It’s still in there I think. The Kokomo was still running then as it is now. It’s about the same. Star Noodle was open all those years and in my early years in the police force, all the cops would go in and eat at the Star Noodle because it was the only place open at night. They had the best ham fried rice in town. CT: Yeah it breaks my heart that that place isn’t open anymore. MK: Well there’s so many things, I can’t even think of everything. I can tell you though at that time when I hired on we wrote all of our police reports in pencil, by hand and pencil in the car. For a while we got these pens that would erase. So we’d all have these pens that would erase, but then those kind of went away so we always wrote our police reports in pencil. We had radios in the car, we had radios that we could wear, but right before that, the radios were still stationery in the car. Steve can tell you more about that, he lived that. We wrote all our reports by hand and you got pretty good at writing a report because you didn’t want to miss anything. I got good at writing real fast and knowing what the elements of a crime, were so you could write that report. Get it from the people, and write the report and get that information in and know what was important and what wasn’t. There’s so much information, you had to narrow it down. CT: Those reports were actually very good to get. I remember when I started there we’d go over to the police department in the basement of the union building and 25 they had a press room there and they’d give you this big stack of just copies of the reports. It wasn’t like it is now where you have to look at the heading and ask for a copy of the report, they just gave you the whole report right then and there. Now sometimes the spelling was, what I guess we call creative, but I didn’t care how you guys spelled. It was really great, you could see the whole life of the city in these reports. It was really fun to read through those. MK: That brings up a point. We were in the ground level of the municipal building at that time and patrol, that’s why everybody was in the annex there just wasn’t enough room. So the patrol would have their briefing in the annex building and there are a lot of stories about that. First I was going to tell you that the officers at that time didn’t have cellphones, they weren’t in existence yet, so if we needed to talk to the dispatcher or if she wanted to talk to us she would say, “Give me a number.” MK: So you’d go on your radio and drive up to, you knew where all the drive up phones were, because there were a lot of phones that you could drive up too, and then you could sit in your car and talk on the phone. CT: You mean just pay phones? MK: Pay phones and so you’d give her a number and say, “Give me a call." You would go to the pay phone and she’d call it for you. So that’s how you talked to the dispatcher without having to talk on the radio. We were in the ground level of the municipal building, I remember when there were still doormen in the elevators of the municipal building, but they were gone by then. We did have a blind guy that worked in the coffee shop and we would always go down to the coffee shop. 26 CT: I remember that, yeah. MK: Yeah and he had a white lab and the lab always had a coat on. So he would put his finger in the cup and fill the coffee up until it touched his finger and that’s how he… CT: I remember that, I remember that, totally forgotten. MK: Yeah it was all in the basement. It was really good because everybody was in the same building so we all knew each other, we all knew what was going on and once everybody got separated then you’d lose touch with everything. It was really a better situation to have everybody together like that. CT: Yeah, better communications and better for morale, better for group cohesion and everything. MK: Well not only that, you’re not just in the cop world, you’re in the whole world and vice versa. That time the police department wasn’t locked or anything and so anyone could come in and I remember a lot of times a citizen would come in and we had two doors and an office. If we saw someone come we didn’t want to talk too we’d run out the back doors, they’d never see us. Merna is still around. She rides her bicycle and she’s the one with the iguana pictures. CT: Oh the one with the iguana? MK: In the “I Am Ogden book,” she always has been with Randy Bittle. They’ve always been together. They’ve complained about each other. He particularly complains about her, but she’s always been around. In those early years Debbie Youngberg was the secretary in detectives and Merna would come in with her stroller. She has her little child in this stroller and the child would have a bottle. 27 She’d have beer in the bottle for the baby. Debbie Youngberg would say to Merna, “Merna you can’t give your baby beer.” She said, “Why not? Why can’t a kid have a beer with her mom?” She just didn’t know. I heard a rumor that her parents were brother and sister and so she was never really you know. CT: She’s still around here. MK: She’s still around. She still rides her bike around. She’s getting pretty old now, but she and Randy are still together and they’re still around. Those two were taken away from her, she’s never been able to keep her children. She’s always been kind of a friend of the police department. She loves police officers, every time you’re anywhere in a uniform she would come and talk to you. Everybody knows Merna and one of our officers got involved in a terrible motorcycle accident, Jodie Sizemore and Merna and Randy brought a get well card to the police department. Anybody could walk in so we always had strangers walking in all the time, it was crazy, it’s hard to believe that now. CT: People with guns walk in much? MK: No not really, just anybody, and nobody thought a thing of it it’s just the way it was. CT: The way it was yeah. MK: Everybody smoked in the building, and all the officers, all the detectives would go on Friday and go drink. By noon on Friday everybody was kind of gone at the bar somewhere. Well at the annex there was a story one time, one of the officers was really mad at the other officer for whatever reason. There was a whole story, I’m sure Turner might remember. There was Dave Stevens and Rich Watkins 28 and they’re both dead now. Dave Stevens was a little tiny guy and Rich Watkins was a great big guy, he had been a USA football player. It was a football franchise that was trying to rival the NFL but didn’t make it. Anyway he was a great big guy and he was so mad at Dave Stevens that he hung him outside the window of the second floor of the annex building by his feet and hung him out there and held him there. Dave Stevens thought he was going to get dropped, but he pulled him back in. CT: Did race come up? Just in the general relations, I mean I know there was some of that when the Hi-Fi case happened. MK: That’s really before my time as a police officer. CT: Yeah, but what did you notice? MK: Well what I noticed with race is it just wasn’t an issue because we were dealing with all of the underbelly and the underworld of society. Everybody we dealt with, most people you dealt with as a police officer is involved in some kind of crime unless it’s a car accident or a burglary or something. For the most part the people are probably just criminal, they’re criminals. It didn’t matter what race they were because they were all the same. It didn’t matter if they were white or black or Hispanic or whatever they were, we didn’t care. I got a complaint one time, I think I was a sergeant maybe at that time, that there was some kind of a racial issue. The lieutenant asked me to write a letter to the lady that made the complaint who was black. So I really thought about what I wanted to write to her because in my opinion the Ogden Police Department, the police officers just didn’t care about race. It just wasn’t even an issue, in fact it was just the opposite. I wrote the letter 29 and said we took pride in being nonracial, that we were as far from being having any racial issues than anyplace I could even imagine. So I never saw racial issues in the police department, but I’m white, so like you said earlier, maybe there were issues and I didn’t know. But I never saw it, I never really did see it. We didn’t care. CT: A black officer may have a different story, he comes from a different place. MK: That’s probably true. We always tried to hire officers that were consistent with our community and for the most part we mostly hired white officers because we didn’t have anyone applying. Nobody wanted to apply to become police officers in Ogden. CT: Yeah we had that problem at the Standard Examiner too. I remember H. C. Massey who I do not care for. MK: He ran a bad situation. CT: He did, he was a crook. MK: He was crooked. CT: I remember him asking him why we didn’t have any black reporters at the Standard Examiner and I said, “Well because we can’t get any to apply. Do you have any kids here that want to work in their community and apply?” They said, “Well how much does it pay?” I told them and he said, “Well they can get a lot more than that somewhere else.” I say, “Well yeah that’s the problem.” I remember we had a kid did an internship with us once who was a Hispanic. His parents were migrant workers back when we had a lot of migrants coming around here and the kid he did an okay job. I mean he did a big feature on 30 migrants around here, the invisible population which they were and probably still are. I mean he was a good kid, but then again he wasn’t any Pulitzer Prize winner. I mean he was a young kid still in school. The next year we wanted to hire him back and we were bidding for him against the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Because let’s face it, newspapers are like everybody else; it’s not that he wasn’t that good, it’s that he was the right race. MK: Diversity is a big issue. CT: People are looking for tokens and I hate to say that, but it’s true. MK: Well I’m sure that’s why I was hired. We were hired for that reason because that was during the time of the quota or whatever it was. They had to have a certain amount of us. Lucky for me. CT: Well lucky for them I’d like to think. MK: Thank you. CT: Lucky for Ogden because you did a good job for this town, you did. MK: I worked in almost every department. I never did SWAT and I never did traffic, but I did everything else. CT: Did you ever get down to Union Station? MK: I have never been in the basement, but I would go down there. I spent so much time on 25th street when I had that beat that I got some award and some of the merchants came and watched me get my award. I didn’t invite them, they just showed up. So that was nice. I worked down at the mall, when there was a mall, got to know all the businesses down there. I worked in narcotics for five years. In fact Steve Turner was the sergeant of narcotics or he may have been the 31 lieutenant. I can’t remember if he was the sergeant or the lieutenant at the time, but anyway he got me into narcotics so I worked there for five years and that was an eye opener. I had no idea, I thought I knew a little bit about the community. Until you work in narcotics you have no idea how many drugs are in town, anywhere, any block, and how many businesses are not really good businesses because there’s just so many drugs going in and out of the businesses. That was a real eye opener, I had no clue, it’s just overwhelming. So I worked that for five years and then I did community policing in uniform again, patrol work. Oh and I was in detectives after I was in narcotics, I was in detectives for a while and that’s when I worked in intelligence for a little while too. Dave Wheeloff and I wrote a grant and started the gang unit. We didn’t even know anything about gangs but we started seeing a problem and that was the early 1990s. We wrote the first grant I think it was 1992. We didn’t even really know what we were writing, but we knew there was a problem so we wrote that grant. That was a good legacy because that gang unit is still in place and I started the annual gang conference, and then I ended up working in gangs. Then I was a sergeant over the gang unit and later I was the lieutenant, that part of the gang unit was my responsibility. Then as assistant chief I had the division that the gang unit was in, so a good portion of my career was involved with gangs and gang unit and that kind of thing. I worked in investigations and I found out that when I stepped over the line to help people sometimes I would say, “I really shouldn’t do this but I’m going to do this extra thing for you. I really shouldn’t but I 32 want too. I want to do something extra for you.” Every single time that was the person that would call and complain and I don’t know why. CT: They’d complain? MK: Yeah they didn’t get enough or I didn’t do enough or something. That didn’t happen too often but whenever I would start to go to do something extra I would think about that and say, “Well I better not.” I remember at that time we would take drunks home, I remember taking the alcohol out of the car that was involved in an accident or something like that or towed. It was inventoried and towed and I’d give the alcohol to the tow truck driver. Things are different now. You’d never do that now. CT: I would hope not. At least don’t give it to him until after he’s got your car safe. Yeah it’s a different world now. MK: We never worked partners in our cars. We were always alone and we didn’t have cages in our cars until recently. CT: Really? MK: No we didn’t have cages so we would always drive in the car and put our prisoner in the right front and then if we had another prisoner we’d put it in the right rear and then have the officers sit behind you because you never wanted a prisoner behind you. So you’d always have to handcuff them, you see people handcuff in the front, but always handcuff in the back it’s safer. CT: There are some limber guys can get those handcuffs around through again. MK: I was always very careful when you have someone in your car with you. Then I kept a can of Lysol spray in my car because most of those people were dirty so 33 I’d always spray my car down and my gloves down and everything after they’d get out of my car, with Lysol. They were dirty and you don’t want to get lice. I remember we got in a fight at the American Legion at 27th and Wall. We always knew gambling was going down there but we never caught them. There were always calls down there, and we always sent more than one because it was so scary down there you know to get in a fight down at the American Legion at 27th and Wall. I remember we went in one night and we did this big operation to check IDs. So Danielle Grale was on patrol and I was out with her and we were all working together and there was a very large Samoan woman. So you wanted to start kind of small and work up, but Danielle doesn’t start small, she starts big. She went right for that Samoan girl and asked for her ID and she didn’t want to give it. So the Samoan girl punched me and the next thing I know all the officers are going and the Samoan girls, and all the officers go right in front of me and fall down on the floor in front of me. The fight was on. So we ended up taking here to jail. CT: I would hope so. MK: We pepper sprayed her later and the fire department came and washed her down. Pepper spray was pretty new then. I remember we had Smith and Wessons with revolvers and we transitioned over to the Glocks. That was difficult for all the officers to transition because we were so accustom to the revolvers that the Glocks, we were afraid we were going to shoot ourselves. Took a long time, in fact a lot of times the officers wouldn’t have them cocked ready to go so they wouldn’t just shoot. You’d have to rack it before you shot it. So they really 34 had to come down on all the officers to make sure they had all of their weapons ready to shoot because they were so intimidated by them they’d think they would shoot themselves. CT: So you’re supposed to keep the thing cocked? MK: Well it’s not cocked, it has a safety and the trigger. There’s two ways that you can have your Glock, you can have your Glock so that you can’t pull the trigger and if something happens you can’t pull the trigger you’re dead. So you’d have to have it racked and so you could pull that trigger. If you didn’t have it racked you can’t pull the trigger. CT: Did it have a little safety switch right here? MK: There’s no safety switch on the Glock. CT: Oh really? MK: I have it, my Glock I can show it to you. The trigger is like this and its middle thing is the safety. So you have to put your finger around it and you can’t shoot it unless your finger is all the way around it and you’re actually pulling that trigger. CT: That’s interesting, I’ve never heard of that before. I thought they had a little safety on the side. MK: A lot of them do, but not the Glock. That’s why the Glock is so nice because you didn’t have to worry about a safety because your safety was right in your trigger. CT: Right in part of the trigger, huh. MK: Then it had a lot more bullets so the Glock was a great change for us. Back then you could still carry batons, I mean we still carry batons but we could choke 35 people out. We could use a choke hold and choke people out and now I don’t think they’re doing that anymore. CT: I don’t think they allow that. Too many people died. MK: I never knew anyone who died from it. I liked having that tool frankly. CT: Well I heard about some of those that you get them and it chokes out their carotid artery or something. MK: Right and they just pass out. It’s pretty nice to have that tool frankly. CT: What part did you like the best? If that’s a fair question and it probably isn’t. MK: I have to say that the early years were tough, but also exhilarating. As a female you’re a little bit different in law enforcement and so you have to figure all that out. First of all I was tiny, I didn’t realize how small I was, I was a 116 pounds when I hired on. I realize how bad it must have for the other officers to think of me as a backup or anything like that. So there were issues like that. There was another woman who was here and she was getting ready for retirement, she had her 20. We were talking and we talked about it’s kind of lonely being a female in law enforcement because the men, it’s not macho for them to hang out with you. If they do hang out with you they may be looked down upon a little bit because it’s not macho or they think you’re having an affair. So you really are kind of sometimes lonely. So she always thought it was just her. She didn’t recognize that it was just females in general. It’s not anything anybody’s trying to do, it’s just the way it is. The other thing about being a female in law enforcement is you never feel quite equal. That’s not anyone’s fault, but you’re really not quite equal, you’re different. So you have to come to terms with it because if you let that eat 36 at you then your self-esteem and everything is just gone. As a female in law enforcement you have to get past that. How I did it is I just said well everybody has somebody bigger than them and stronger than them and so you just have to deal with it. Another thing, I did a number of officer involved shooting investigations when I was a training lieutenant and what I found is, it’s remarkable how fast and how good that those officers make a decision and how tragic it’s for their lives. They’re never the same after they shoot someone, or they have a near death experience, it’s just different. It’s a really traumatic time in their lives and it’s really hard. I couldn’t have done any of it without something else, everything was subsequent to something else that happened. So I have to say that the whole thing, I’m just so lucky that I got that opportunity. In the first place, I was so lucky that I worked where I worked and I could get the opportunity to get hired on and that I made a pact with Tracy, that I actually got the job. I have to say that I felt very proud when I became sergeant lieutenant and assisted shooter. Also that I had the very good opportunity to be the police chief had I not decided that I needed to go be with my family. To have done so well in the police department makes me proud and fortunate that I was able to get there. I think part of my favorite is even though I was a woman in law enforcement the guys are pretty special. CT: I think anybody that does that job is pretty special really. MK: You really have to rely on each other even though we complain. It really did feel like a family. It’s little moments I think more than anything, like sometimes you’re 37 in the middle of a night and you’re not doing anything, so we’d park door to door, window to window and talk. They still do that. So talking or having some little coffee things or trying to work through some of the harder things to happen like when children are abused or things like that, those are really hard to see. CT: Those have to be tough to deal with. MK: Yeah. CT: Just as a reporter, I fortunately always got that invisible wall between you and that stuff. You can say, “Well I’m just a reporter I’m just taking notes trying not to get involved.” You guys you had to have that emotional wall there and at the same time you had to deal with it. MK: I remember when I went on my first, it wasn’t even my dead body, but it was a call that I could’ve gone on. I remember I was so nervous about seeing a dead body, I drove up in front of the house and I sat there for a while and then I just left. I just couldn’t face it yet. I went on my first autopsy and I went in there and I was really nervous to see this autopsy. It was a transient that had fallen in a ditch over by 12th and Grant. He had fallen face down in that ditch and he suffocated, I mean he drowned. I remember staying in the hall and waiting to go in. This cute lady in her 60s or so with a cute little dress on she just walked right in the room and walked in and came back out. I thought if that little cute lady can do that I can do this, so I went in. I found my best way for me was just like you. If I thought about the technical aspect of it or the crime part of it or anything and just kept my mind off, “Oh that’s a fourteen year old boy that will never have a good life, he’s dead now he never gets to get married or have children.” Those were hard. 38 CT: That would be hard, yeah. MK: I think the hard thing is in the tragedy of broken lives that didn’t have to be that way. Parents who never took care of their kids. I would go on calls and almost every house in law enforcement calls are dirty. So it was pretty rare to go into a clean house. Some were filthy. CT: Especially if there are drugs involved. They just don’t take of them. MK: Most people don’t have jobs or anything so I would go in these filthy houses with these little kids. There are so much of it out there that you can’t not turn them all in. You can’t. So I started telling those people that I’m going to come back in two hours and if that house wasn’t clean I would contact Division of Public Services. I would come back and they’d clean their house. So I started doing things like that because I just couldn’t stand to see nothing being done. I’m trying to think of things that are really memory things though. That’s not the same. CT: That’s pretty good. MK: The officers would do pranks all the time on each other. Spotlight king was still around and he was a porter on the railroad and he lived in town. He got a signature from every movie star that came through. He was also a bootlegger and he also wore a diamond ring. One of the officers in the early days, he would get alcohol for, I think he might have been called a captain or assistant, I don’t know what he was at that time. Anyway in those very early years, he would give him gifts of alcohol. So spotlight was really entertaining so the officers made friends with him. They would go visit him once in a while. 39 CT: I wish I would’ve gotten to know him because I know he was around when I started here. When did he die? MK: Probably in the 1990s. He made such good friends with one of the officers that that officer thought he was going to get that diamond ring, he wanted it. Come to find out it was a cubic zirconium. It never was a diamond ring. CT: Well you know, it’s important to put on a good show. Oh geez so this is fun. Sit down and write out some more stories and we can do a second session. This has been really, really fun and I’m in your debt. MK: No, it’s fun for me because I get to be a part of our little history. CT: That’s the thing. You’re part of history here. MK: I spent a lot of time on 25th street and when I did that tour that you gave me some information for, I wish I would’ve known more of that thing because I’ve been in almost all of those buildings and the basements, everywhere. If I would’ve known more of that history I probably would’ve looked at everything a little bit differently. CT: Maybe we should take a walk up and down the street and you could talk about the various buildings. I think that would be fun to do. MK: Okay.