Oral History Program Wayne Jay Harris Interviewed by Sam & Kandice Harris 20 April 2019 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Wayne Jay Harris Interviewed by Sam & Kandice Harris 20 April 2019 Copyright © 2022 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 Weber and Davis County Communities Oral History Collection includes interviews of citizens from several different walks of life. These interviews were conducted by Stewart Library personnel, Weber State faculty and students, and other members of the community. The histories cover various topics and chronicle the personal everyday life experiences and other recollections regarding the history of the Weber and Davis County areas. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Harris, Wayne Jay, an oral history by Sam & Kandice Harris 20 April 2019, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Wayne Jay Harris Circa 1955 Wayne Jay Harris 20 April 2019 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Wayne J. Harris, conducted on April 20, 2019, by Sam Harris. Wayne discusses his life, his experiences, and his memories. Kandice Harris, the video technician, and Shirley Harris, Wayne’s wife, are also present during this interview. SH: Alright this is an interview for Wayne J. Harris. It is currently April 20, 2019 at about 3:30 in the afternoon. Currently on screen is Wayne J. Harris, speaking is Samuel David Harris. Behind the camera, is Kandice Harris. We may be joined by Shirley Harris, Wayne J Harris’ wife later on. We are doing this interview and we are going to ask that Wayne J. Harris start with what are your parent’s names? WH: My father’s name is Lawrence James Harris. My mother’s name is Irene Buckley Harris. Her maiden name was Buckley. My dad herded and tended a lot of sheep in his early days. My mother’s family also, her father was involved in the sheep. Taking care of sheep out in the wild and herding them. But they lived a lot of the time in Idaho—her parents. Right now, the cousins and those that are left are in Cokeville, Wyoming. That’s where they live and you might remember that one scary time at that school in Cokeville, Wyoming. When a fellow broke and he was going to blow up the place I think. Well some of the children remember that and I’ve heard them talk about it. Some of the children were around when that happened, some of the Buckleys. But my dad was born in Snowville, Utah and raised there. He went on a mission to the northwest states and served a full-time mission up there. When he came home—he was in Idaho 2 the upper part of Idaho at that time—he met his wife to be, but she was just a youngster. He thought, “No.” And he, a missionary. So nothing happened while they were on the mission—romantically. But it wasn’t too long after that, he happened to run into her in Logan. He was up there for some reason. She was too, they met and all of the sudden he says, “Wait a minute, she’s not bad.” From then on, they went out for some time, and I couldn’t even tell you how long. My dad and his dad bought the first property there in Pleasant View, a farm. They were going to go in together on it and as it turned out his dad passed away quick. He had appendicitis that burst and so he was probably sixty years when he passed away—early. My dad paid out that part that his father owned to grandma. But she lived there with us until she died. A lot of her furniture and stuff was in part of that house. But anyway, I remember those days. I remember when she passed away and I remember all of my dad’s siblings coming at different times picking up stuff they wanted. They just came and loaded it and then they went. Most of my cousins lived in town, except for the Buckleys. They were up in Cokeville as I told you. Early on, all we had was a little ’36 Ford pick-up that dad had bought. That was before I was born, but he bought it for $600, even brand new. But it was this very small little pick-up and we ran the farm with that. SH: And when were you born and how many brothers and sisters do you have? Where were you born in the line-up? WH: Insignificantly. Anyway, I was born in 1939, so like three years after dad bought that pick-up for $600. I had an older sister, Irma who has passed away now. 3 Laura, is still I think barely alive still. She’s about 90 and her husband is 92, yesterday I think it was. So Laura and then Edith, or Earl it was. My only brother came in the line. Then Edith, and then me and then Lola, my youngest. So there was six of us children in the family and my sister was the last. There were two that were born before they should have been. One was born fully developed, a young boy. And I was young still myself, but I saw him after he was born and perfectly developed but somehow the cord wrapped around him or something and he didn’t make it. Then later on, there was a little girl they called Marie, but she wasn’t all put together like he was. But my oldest sister took that little boy that didn’t make it, wrapped him up in baby blankets. She and I—I went with her for some reason she wanted me with her—we went back to the hospital, the McKay-Dee Hospital and took that little boy up to see my mother so she could see him. She got to see him and if people would have known that we were taking a dead person up the elevator in the hospital, I’m sure people would have wondered about us. But that’s what my sister did, she wanted my mother to see him. KH: Were you born at McKay-Dee Hospital too? WH: I was and those last two were buried in that cemetery that I think it is up east of the hospital. I’ve been to it, there’s a little graveyard where the babies that don’t make it are buried up there. I’ve been to that cemetery and seen the plots where they are. Had they not taken me there, I would’ve never known what became of them. But that’s where they are. Okay, as I told you my earliest recollection was all of the sudden I woke up a youngster. My older brothers and 4 sisters were heading down to our pasture to milk the cows and when I woke up I realized that they were leaving and I wanted to go. So I cried really bad. They took me with them and that was my first experience that I remember down there. KH: Did you grow up in Pleasant View? WH: I did grow up in Pleasant View. Back then, we knew everyone in the whole town. Members of the church or otherwise, it didn’t matter. KH: Were there a lot of non-members in Pleasant View? WH: Not a lot, but there were some. Our ward was an old ward. The old building, I remember the old building, it was like a couple of stories and then it had a basement and that’s where they had primary and they had the stage down there for when they had plays. My mother played all of the years that I remember. She was the piano player, she was an expert at that. She did learn to play the organ, she played that for a bit too. You walked up these stairs—it’s like the old tabernacle down here in Bountiful. You walk up these steep stairs and you go in and then there are places to sit around. But if you go straight up that’s where the pulpit and everything was. But they finally decided to replace that and I remember helping them. We actually took shovels and shoveled the shingles off. KH: How old were you? WH: I don’t remember, but I just remember that I helped tear the old building down and helped build the new one that’s there now. That’s right next to our other farm where Uncle Earl lived. It’s just east of that. Dad had sold one little piece there to Pulsiphers and then next to that was the farm and then Ryan Hart 5 Kowallis lived just north of the church. Dad sold that little piece to them and everything west of that to the next fence was our old farm, one of our old farms where Uncle Earl lived. SH: So how old was Uncle Earl when he kind of took over the other parts of the farm? WH: I can’t remember. There are so many things in between there. We bought that place, my dad right during the depression. He went into the bank and asked the manager for a loan to buy that place. The people previous had gone bankrupt there trying to make it there. It was like I say, a depression time so the guy said, “You’re out of here.” Almost laughed at him, they were not going to give him the loan. Dad got right to the door, just about to go out and the guy called him back and decided to give him the loan. So he went and bought that place. The other farm is the original farm where grandma passed away at. When they come down from Snowville, they went there first to that farm. That’s where your aunt Lola, my youngest sister—they built a place next door and some of their kids lived in the old house I think still. KH: Oh that’s great. WH: Yeah. But they still own a little bit of that property around there. Most of it has been sold and is all homes and things now. The pasture, it had a lot of subbing from old ben in the mountains up there. So you’d go down to the bottom end of it and you would wade above your ankles in mud because of the subbing from the mountains. But we still put our cattle in there and they ate the grass that was there. I rode horses in the summer. I don’t know…I’ll side step just a bit 6 because it’s kind of cute little story that happened. We were at the old place and Uncle Earl was getting hay from the hay stack and taking it and putting it in the place for the cows to eat, the stanchions. But we had sheep out there too. There was this old buck, and he was kind of mean old cuss. I happened to be up on the hay rack for some reason and I looked and I saw he was taking notions to take after my brother. He was going from the hay stack and back and forth and I said, “Hey, look out! That buck is going to get you.” Sure enough, here comes the buck. He backed way up and he came trotting in right at where my brother was heading for that hay stack. My brother looked back and saw him. He climbed as high as he could get and put the pitchfork under him and stood on it and the buck hit that hay stack right below. And I’m on the hay rack laughing my head off. A young kid that doesn’t know any better, but pretty serious stuff. You know, when they charge, they back way up and then they, boom! Go in. That’s the way he was doing. Oh my gosh, I don’t know, he must have charged him three or four times and I’m sitting there laughing. So anyway, that was one story that I wanted to tell you. Grandpa and Grandma Harris… I’m you’re grandpa aren’t I? Great Grandpa, my dad and mom, they used to have to come all of the way to Salt Lake temple to go to the temple. So they picked a Saturday and they went. They came down to Salt Lake and went to the temple and Uncle Earl had something else planned. He used to buy old cars. He went down to a place down on the old highway up there. A place called, “Dick’s” and he sold car parts off of old cars. But he would go down there early in the morning and people would come in to sell their old cars 7 that they didn’t want anymore. He would give them a bid and they would sell them to him and he’d take them home. So we had a lot of old cars up there. They would run, they were the old type. Automatics we didn’t have until later. They scared us, we were used to the old rod shift. Anyway, he could park these things on the hill, and start them with the clutch if they had a battery. Even if it wasn’t a good battery. Anyway, so he had several of these cars that would run that way and he had a lot of his friends come over that Saturday, once my parents left. They had what I called autorama or something. I was still a youngster. But they decided in that piece of property below the fruit trees, just above the barn there was a pretty good piece of open property where we raised hay or grain, either one depending on the year. They got those cars one on one end and one on the other and they would go for one another and they would want to clip on another. If my parents would have known that, they would have become unhinged, I’m sure. For sure. Oh my gosh, we were kind of afraid for them, but they did that for most of that day. They survived it, that’s the weird part, they made it through that. Anyway, that autorama. During this period, my dad bought us a small tractor that was like a Caterpillar only it was smaller. The tracks were only about so wide [showing a distance with hands] instead of like Caterpillars. He bought that and it was short. It didn’t have a steering wheel handles to guide it—brakes. He would pull a disc and other things through, in between the trees with that Caterpillar or cley trap they called it. I don’t know why but to me it was a little Caterpillar. Uncle Elmer had a garage over where he lived. In that garage, he would repair cars and tractors and he made things. He 8 made big rakes, big long rakes to roll rakes so they could bale hay up in Wyoming for the Wyoming relatives. He did a lot of things but he also, at this time, he decided that that little Caterpillar needed a blade on it. So he built one. Well it didn’t have, what’s it called, hydraulics then. So he had to put a little cable up. So he put one cable toward the middle and added a pulley and then there was a crank on it. You could crank it up or crank it down. My Uncle Elmer built that and put that on there. That changed a lot of things but just buying that tractor changed more. One day that place where they have that little autorama, up in that place, here came this great big cattle truck or animal truck—huge. He came up there and parked and they started loading all of our animals. One time I had 100 head of sheep there and a lot of cattle. All of the sudden dad had them load the horses even. Well, he didn’t need the horses anymore, he had that little Caterpillar. He could go where he wanted with that, you know? He sold the horses, sold all of the cows—except for about six. Somewhere in that number, was sheep. Of course, we had a chicken coop and we had our chickens. But I was still a young man then. Thinking back, I was a young man. I wondered about that, all of the sudden he was loading everything and away they went. But he didn’t need the horses. But we used to milk cows, you know the ones that were still milking. We would put the milk in a can and put it down in a ditch down in front of our place. Take a big milk can, put it in there to kind of keep it cool and the Cream O’ Weber guy—I don’t know if they still exist—they would come. They had a truck that would come and pick up those cans at all of the farms. They would take it Cream O’ Weber and make whatever they wanted out of it or just do 9 milk. Dad would get a check every so often because of that. Okay, Uncle Earl started going with this one girl, really pretty serious. Her last name was Taylor and she lived down in Taylorsville as it turns out. But we had to—this one year we had drifts of snow, bad. It would blow everything off of the fields and big drifts in the road. He called and said, “I can’t get home.” The next morning, my dad and I went down. He had worked for Ogden Ford Sales during that period and he bought two pick-ups. Three quarter ton and a half ton. SH: Was this your dad? WH: My dad. Shirley Harris: I’m sitting over here and he’s skipping a little bit. WH: I’m skipping from one thing to another, I’m sorry. KH: No it’s fine. WH: But we took the three quarter ton, it was a little better in the snow. It had a granny gear and it was all on the floor. The other one was one of the early automatics. It was very touchy, you had to be very careful how you touched the gas on that because it would jump off and go. But anyway, we took the big one down to this road that goes down to Taylorsville from that old highway, that old road. We didn’t go very far, dad and I. We walked down there a little ways and here is this great huge drift and so we walked up on top of that and we looked down and I mean we looked down. It was—there was nothing on the field but it was all right there and then there was a grater. A snow grater down at the bottom and there was another great big drift on the other side. He couldn’t have 10 gotten out of there. So there was no way Earl could have gotten home. So he had to stay that night at his girlfriends’—Beverly Taylor. KH: Do you remember what year that was? WH: Oh boy, I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t tell you. Well, it was probably, it was near the ’48-49 year. In that period, I think. Because that’s when he bought those pick-ups and it was new. They had to dig him out and later he came home. They later on did get married and they had David and Weston. [To Sam Harris] Do you know either one of them? SH: I don’t. WH: Weston is, I don’t know how to say it. He likes guys. Okay? You with me? We always called it gay. But anyway, David married a girl, Marta and they live in Manti, near the Manti temple. They’re active in the church and doing very well. Now where do I want to go? SH: My dad asked his brothers and sisters to send some of their questions that they had for you. One of the things that you touched on, they talked about a stream that ran between the two properties and you used to soak your feet on it to kind of just relax. WH: Well, there is more to the story than just that stream. We had a little creek that went over by the farm by the church. There’s a big hill up there and right on the edge there was a stream that went down. But I talked about the subbing from the mountains. Well that happened in those two farms, in both of them. He dug two drains. One on each farm. There was this water coming out, it was ice cold 11 because it came right out of the mountain. You could lay down and drink it. It would freeze your teeth, it was bad. But very good water, you know you couldn’t get any better on both farms. The one that we had on the original farm over there. We had—the farm went up and then it had an east orchard we called. It was just above the—and a peach orchard up there. They had to dig a drain up there and drain that. But that was another stream there it went into that stream and so both of them ran into the existing streams. We had this guy named—his last name was Gooch, I can’t remember. He decided he was going to get the rights to that water. The one on that right side, because they lived up the hill and he went into put a claim on it and something happened so he couldn’t get that. So my dad was happy about that. Because he dug the drain, he paid the money to get all of that done. Tell me the question again? Did I answer it? SH: They weren’t very specific, just that there used to be water running between the two properties and how you guys used to go soak your feet in it. WH: That’s probably it because it was ice cold. You could lay down and just take a drink right out of that. SH: So another thing that they brought up was putting out fires using gunny sacks. WH: Okay, right above the church we still had a little piece between Ryan Hart Kowallis that dad hadn’t sold and the church. The church had on their property an old swimming pool. It was just cement and it was so high all the way around and I guess they would baptize in there in the early days. I don’t know. But the old church, they had two outhouses that went up from it. The women’s was the 12 closest one and then the men’s and then that pool. That was usually full, but there were a lot of big maple trees. Big old huge trees around this on this property. But above it, there was this piece of property that we still owned—Dad did. That got caught on fire and that’s what we did. We wet gunny sacks and would hit that fire until we finally got it out. The only thing it could go to was the street on the other side. But we didn’t want it to go into the church or up to Kowallis. How it started? I don’t know if I even knew. But I do remember we hit it with wet gunny sacks and outed that fire. SH: How old would you say you were when that happened? WH: 10, 11, I don’t know. Because by the time I got 12, I thought I was grown up. KH: Sounds about right. WH: Because I went to a fellow, the last name was Williams and he had this old car. He says, “I’ll sell it to you.” I said, “Okay, how much?” “$15”, “Oh okay.” So I bought that car for $15 but it was one of the old clutch cars. SH: When you were 12? WH: Yeah, when I was 12. It had no muffler. You had to start it on the hill because the battery was not good. It had the clutch so I started and ran home and if I had been my dad, I would have kicked me out of there. But he was very very understanding and then they had that old car and I don’t even remember what happened to it. I didn’t even have a license of course. By the time I was old enough to get a license, I did buy another car. A nice little car from my brother-in- law, Edith’s husband. It was in pretty good shape. But I still didn’t have a 13 license. But Edith worked, my sister. So she would drive it to work. That’s the way we did. Then I still didn’t have the license, I did drive it. I drove it down Washington Boulevard down just up a ways from the city county building. A car full of girls came along and I had some other guys with me in that car. So we were yelling at the girls, you know how guys do? I wasn’t paying attention I was driving and all of the sudden I had a red light in front of me, a car in front of me and it stopped for the red light, and I didn’t stop. I banged him. I still had my foot on the gas. I must have banged him like two or three times. He got out, “What’s the deal?” Why did I keep banging him? Anyway, I told him I didn’t have a license. He agreed not to call the cops. I told him, “Give me” What it would take to fix his problems with his car and I would pay him. I gave him all of my information. My mother helped me work that out. That kind of banged up that poor car a little bit. My one buddy was up there in the front and it was a little coupe. Not many seats in there. He banged his knee on the dash when I hit that car. He seemed to survive it okay. But that was just one of the experiences we had. I don’t know where to go from there. KH: I have a question. WH: Go ahead. KH: Was the age to get a driver’s license still 16? WH: I think it was. KH: Okay. 14 WH: I was 16 but I still hadn’t gotten it. But, in our town there was only one store. The people who owned it were Barkers. That’s the name of the people. We didn’t buy much out of there. Mother baked bread mostly. But occasionally if we got behind, she helped on the farm. The day that they got married, they went to Logan. They got married in the Logan temple and they came home and went to work on that farm because Dad owned it then. Because my grandpa had passed away, Grandma was still there with us. So they came home from their wedding and went right to work on the farm. I tell ya, a lot different than people do now a days. KH: That’s for sure. WH: But anyway. The one—Oh! I was going to tell you about the store, we had owned by Barkers. It was right across from the church and they sold gasoline also. Guess how expensive it was in those days? KH: 20 cents. WH: 16 cents a gallon. KH: I was close. WH: You were very close. That’s what it was because I went in there to fill those cars up. That’s why I know. KH: Do you remember the name of the store? WH: Barker’s owned it. We just called it Barker’s Store as far as I remember. SH: So about the time, you were born in ’39. 15 WH: Yeah. SH: Do you remember anything about the war effort? WH: Yeah, I just remember my cousin, Verl, would always come over to our house and sit on the steps and read our newspaper which was the Standard Examiner—still back then. When you read about that, they would talk about the Japs—that’s what they called them. The Japs said this, the Japs did that, you know? And you remember there was a place out west that they built for the Japanese and they put them out there because they were afraid that they would get together with their people in Japan and hurt us. I’m sure that’s the reason they did that. A lot of people—they took them off of their own and put them out there. I can’t remember the name of the place. KH: Topaz. WH: Topaz, yep, that’s it. Anyway, I don’t remember all of the things, other than that stood out in my mind. You couldn’t do that nowadays. But they did then and they put it in the paper that way. The Japs did this, the Japs did that. We went in and did that, you know. It’s amazing that the Japanese joined in with Hitler though. That’s what got me. The second world war, it’s crazy. But the things that I remember about that was they—if I can find the word here, I wrote it down somewhere. You could only buy certain things, certain amounts of like sugar and even clothes and things like that. What do you call that? KH: Rationing. 16 WH: Rationing, yeah. They had rationing because they needed that stuff for the boys over there in the war. What I remember a lot was when we got clothes, we got hand-me-downs. We couldn’t afford to buy them because they were too expensive for us. So we would get hand me’s to somebody who grew out of their clothes, they would give them to us. The shoes were always too big. So we’d put newspaper in the toes and we would wear them anyway. That’s what we thought everybody did. I don’t know if they did, but we thought that was the way it was. The rationing didn’t hurt us as bad on the farm because we could raise grain on that one piece of property. They had some on that other property on the other farm. We raised a lot of our food. One time, we raised a garden with potatoes and carrots and different things and we had a cellar in our old house— the original. When we harvested them, we would put them down in the cellar for winter. So we raised it. We had our cattle for meat, we had our chickens for our eggs and meat. I don’t remember ever having a turkey for Thanksgiving. We had great Thanksgiving get togethers with a lot of the cousins. They would come to our house because we had the big living room, I guess. Well and grandma was still there for a while. One time, I remember in particular, dad was cultivating this little garden we had on the side of this one orchard. He had a little cultivator that one horse would pull. I was just quite young and he was stuck with me. That’s what I think because I don’t think he knew what to do with me. So he put me on the horse and he said, “Hold the reigns tight.” And I said, “Okay.” All of the sudden, I did hold those reigns tight and all of the sudden that horse started kicking every which way. Something aggravated that horse. He took that 17 cultivator and threw it over on it’s side. It got me off the horse. That horse ran through a couple of orchards, clear to end of our property, pulling that thing on the side. Because he had put it on the side, it saved a lot of the vegetables that would have been cut out. I think I pulled the horse down too tight and he got tired of that and that’s what caused that. Anyway, that was one thing that happened. I think I was just quite young. Dad was trying put me somewhere to get me out of the way. One time, when he was irrigating, he had me up there with him and I was just a youngster. I came up missing. He couldn’t find me. He got to looking around and he eventually found me, face down in a big ditch in the water. But I survived that. I don’t know why, but I’m here. Anyway, there must be a reason. KH: Was the farm purely just for your family? Or did you guys sell stuff to other people in town? Did you trade? WH: Yeah, they sold the milk to Cream O’Weber and we would shear the sheep and sell that. We would sometimes raise cattle and sell them. Different things like that but alongside of that, we had the fruit orchards which took care of a lot of it. I was always late getting back to school, probably a month or close to that or more because we had not only early fruit—starting with the cherries, apricots, and then the peaches and plums and pears and apples. We had it all. But we would have an early tree. With the cherries it was called, “Tartarian.” We had two on that original farm. We didn’t have any cherries on the other farm. With apricots and peaches that were there and hay. 18 SH: I’ll ask you a question though, one of the other things somebody had said that there was one time where you and your friend were at the library and somebody… WH: Oh…. Do we have to tell you that? We were sluffing school if you can believe it. KH: How old were you? WH: Well I was in high school. I think I was probably in my first year. WH: Me and two or three of my buddies, we all decided to sluff school. And you know what the funny thing was? We were doing school work in the city library. KH: Did you have to drive down to Ogden? Or was there one up in Pleasant View? WH: No, this was down in Ogden, The Ogden City Library. KH: Okay. WH: But I can’t remember, I think Dick Alkamah, my one friend had this old Ford that he drive and we rode in it down there. We got up in there. It was winter time or the end of winter, you know, kind of cool. We went up to the upstairs and we were studying away. My sister had told me about this guy that did these funny things. She had seen him going to the playhouse and he had a bald head and he would slap his head. Then he’d slap stuff down and laugh out loud, and right at the front of the playhouse he’d do all of these things. She told me about it, but I didn’t think too much about it. Well this same guy came clomping up the stairs to where we were. The first thing he did, was he got a bunch of funny papers, slap them down, and started laughing out loud at the funny papers, I guess. Whatever. He would slap his head and I knew right away what it was because 19 my sister had told me about him. So it tickled me, and I wondered what the other guys were thinking. Almost all of us burst right out laughing in that library just as loud—we couldn’t stop. We were crying and we had to crawl to those stairs and go down and got outside and that cool air kind of seemed to level things down. And I thought, “I’ll be alright now.” Oh, my one buddy, Gary Walker, he sat there at the same table and here we all are laughing out loud as hard as we can. We couldn’t stop ourselves. He sits there with a big wide smile on his face. That’s all he did and that made me laugh even more. But, oh my gosh, we went up there and I thought, “Oh okay, we are okay now.” We started laughing again. We had to crawl down those stairs. So embarrassing. But the poor librarian she just didn’t know what to do, I’m sure. KH: Where did you go to high school? WH: Weber and Weber at that time was in Ogden. It was a ways in Ogden. At that time, Weber County included everything around the city. It was all—I guess it still is Weber County—but we only had a few schools. Everybody, all of the kids way up east and way out west—Tooele and way out there. As far as south until we hit Davis. They all had to go to Weber. They had to bus them in. That’s the way it went. SH: And how about you? Did you have to bus in or did you have to walk? WH: We bussed. I remember standing at the bus stop and it was so cold my ears were stiff. They were freezing. Here are these little girls wearing dresses, bare legs. I felt so bad for them. But I went to North Ogden Elementary and then 20 Wahlquist Junior High and then to Weber High. Weber High now is built… do you know where it is? It’s in Pleasant View where I was raised. KH: Oh wow. I didn’t know that. WH: Yeah, it is there. But, in those early days, I talked about the farms and all of that going on—the cattle and stuff. But my parents worked at what was called 2nd street. Did you ever know about 2nd street? That was a Navy Supply Depot, closer up to us then of course, the bases that are down here now. It was closer up there. In fact, it was on the north end of Ogden almost. But it was called 2nd street because that’s where it began, I think. KH: What did they do there? WH: Well it was a navy supply. So my mother and father both worked there, besides doing the farm—the farms I should say. SM: Did they buy supplies for the Navy? Or did they sell surplus? WH: No they were buying supplies, it was war time. They were, what do you call them? They watched things. They were, what’s the word? Guards on the base. My mother, I know I was surprised to see that picture of her. She had guns and a holster and a dog that went with her. And my dad also was a guard there at 2nd street. KH: Did they work during the day and they farmed at night? Did they work year round? 21 WH: Dad did a lot of irrigating at night. I can’t remember whether it was him, but he was out irrigating at night and a long came one of those night animals. It had come up on him irrigating. It scared him so bad he stomped it to death. He would irrigate at night and work down there and then when he was off from down there, he would work on the farm and do different things. But I wanted to tell you about the Sheriff. I was telling you how Weber County went all the way around. Weber and all of the schools—everybody had to go to those schools at the north end. Well Mack Wade lived up near ole’ Ben. He was the highest up. He ran for Sheriff of Weber County that year and he won by a landslide. I remember that, oh he won. But he used to drive this big ole Packard. They don’t have those anymore. But they were popular there for a while and they were big heavy cars. So when he came down that street, down by our farm, he lived up above up there. You know who it was. He had all of these big aerials on it because they had a radio in there. But this big ole Packard he drove. But Mack Wade, he was of course a member of the ward there. But he was also the Sheriff, so if he saw me driving tractors and trucks and that and didn’t think anything of it because he knew we belonged to the farms over there. So our—I don’t’ know where to go first. But anyway, we had our stake dances Saturday nights, over in North Ogden, the town next to us. So my sister Edith and I took the red truck, the big three quarter ton. She drove us over and she met some guy there she kind of felt she liked. She wanted to go with him. So that left me to drive that truck home. I didn’t have a license. So I started driving home and guess who pulled me over? 22 KH: The Sherriff. WH: Yeah, Mack Wade. And he says, “Okay, it’s you. Alright, drive straight home.” I told him what happened with my sister going over there and all of the particulars. But anyway, it was interesting. KH: For the stake dances, was the age requirement 14 back then? WH: That was our stake over there in North Ogden. KH: Okay. Was anybody welcomed to go to the dances? Did you have to be a certain age to go to the dance? WH: They had somebody there who would check people in because they didn’t want a lot of drunks. Occasionally, that would happen. People would try to come in there drunk. KH: But how old did you have to be to go dancing? WH: I don’t know what the age was. Probably in junior high I guess. Yeah. But oh man, I wrote down so many things I can’t remember. KH: Did you do sports or clubs or anything in high school? WH: No, I started into football but the coach was not really interested in me because he had all of these people who were popular in sports—their sons. So I didn’t really count. After a while I gave up on it and got out there. Elementary I tried football. I tackled the coach. Papadikis was his name. He and Mordaunt were new teachers who had just graduated from school and they were teaching us in the elementary school there. In that day, we didn’t have much more than a 23 radio—the small radio. When I got home from school, we would put it on top of the fridge and we would all get around and listen to the programs on radio. We didn’t have T.V. Sky King and different programs. They had some programs that interested us kids. So we would all get around and listen on the radio. I think it wasn’t until I got married that we actually had a T.V.—a black and white even. But anyway. SH: So what about family trips? Do you remember going anywhere on vacation? WH: Yeah, we went up Sardine Canyon. You ever been up there? Up the canyon itself? KH: Probably not. WH: You would go right into what was called the dry lake area. My dad and his dad used to cut the hay in there when the lake wasn’t down there. KH: Oh so where Mantua is now. WH: That was part of their property back up there. KH: Oh wow. WH: But the Sardine Canyon used to cut back and forth down the canyon. We rode in the back of that little ’36 pick-up. We would look down there, it was a long ways down there. Believe me, I was glad when they made the cut through. But one year, Aunt Irma was going to Utah State to college. She became a teacher. So we were going up there to see here to take her some bottles of fruit and different things, you know. They had already made the cut through the Canyon. But that 24 year, ’48 and ’49 it was so bad. Cars were off the road along there, everywhere. But we had a radio in that. We did have a radio in that three-quarter ton. We didn’t have one in the little truck, but we were listening to it and they were telling about how bad the weather was where we were going. But we were right behind the snow plow in that heavier truck. So we did okay because we just happened to be right behind the snow plow. But there were cars off on every side and we heard on the radio that there were women having babies and stuff like that. It was quite an experience. But I’m glad that they had the cut through then. KH: Do you remember what year that was? WH: It was somewhere near the ’48, ’49, ’50. Early ‘50’s . But we went on up to Utah State to take that stuff to her. Anyway, back to it. I have so many notes, you wouldn’t believe. After the war, my mother and father were still working at 2nd street. As they were leaving, they could see these piles of boots and shoes and clothes and all kinds of things. They were burning them. Yeah. The average person couldn’t afford to buy them. But they were out there burning. I figured it was to keep the price high. That’s why they did that I think. I just wanted to tell you about one of our excursions to Crystal Springs. Did you ever hear of Crystal Springs? KH: I’ve been there. WH: But not in the day that I’ve heard of. In the day that I went there they had a big inside swimming pool. A huge one, really nice, we loved swimming there. But as 25 you drove in to that part, there was a two story thing and on the second story, they would hold dances and they also had roller skating up there sometimes. KH: Oh wow. WH: Yeah. But one of the things—and we went up there and they had all of that stuff. Now, they just have camping things and that little outside, there’s not anything there compared to what there was. But as a child, a young fellow, I don’t know how old I was, but that guy that owned that at that time, he came into our living room to talk to my dad. I happened to be in there, just the three of us. My dad just didn’t worry about me being in there because I was just a youngster I guess. But I heard that guy offer to buy that farm. He told my dad, “If you let me buy this farm, you’ll never have to work another day in your life.” Dad turned him down. So I don’t know if he was planning on building a place right there in Pleasant View or what. One of the places that we were looking at, a gal was from Pleasant View and she asked me about the Craguns. There are lots of Cragun’s up in Pleasant View. There was us and across from us was Donny Cragun. Next to us was Earl Cragun and up from him on a little gravel road, was his dad Mormon Cragun before they died. His wife, before they died, and then next to Earl was Paul Cragun. Then down the hill, there were a few other Craguns that weren’t as closely knitted with that group. But that group came from Mormon Cragun. They had a piece of property out west in Pleasant View where they raised sour cherries. I worked for them, I tried everything as a youth. They called it, “The Good Earth.” It was out to the other end of town, this big piece of property kind of on the hill. I would pick these cherries and then I would go for 26 money and the guy would just reach in his pocket and give me a little change and that was it. But I remember the day, and this was ’48-’49, that period. When they made the required hourly wage 75 cents an hour. I thought, “Oh my gosh, that is so great. We’ll get rich.” And then around that same period, I heard about… I didn’t ever hear about my parents, but I heard about some other neighbors who worked down there at 2nd street. One of the government places. They were making $400 a month. I about fell off my chair. We would be rich, you know? And you couldn’t live on that nowadays. I want to skip back to that automatic shift, how that little pick-up was? We had to go across this one little ditch. I had to be so careful because it would jerk. Boy if you weren’t very careful on the gas… Well, that road going up to Mack’s, the Sheriff, a couple of people came down that road with one of the early automatic shifts and got into trouble. It wouldn’t work and it came shooting down the hill and it crashed and there were two people in it. It nearly killed them. So that was the early days. When we saw that and heard about that, we were so used to those manual things, we said, “That will never work, that’ll never work.” Well it’s everywhere now. Every car has an automatic. So things change and not in the way that you expect them to. So I just wanted to mention that one thing. My dad and mom went on a mission as parents in their latter years out in the west side of Florida. I don’t know if you are interested in this or not. When they got off their mission—they had an auto accident while there. My mother had—her knee was taken out in the auto accident so that hurt her pretty bad. But anyway, somebody got them a little 27 alligator, putting it in this little tub and gave it to them when they were leaving the mission. My dad got this great big long straw and put it down there and that little tiny alligator got about that close and munched on that. So he got rid of that alligator. KH: Oh I bet. WH: He was afraid to try and do anything with that. KH: Do you remember what time they went on their mission? WH: Well they were retired by then. I had married the first time, I was living in Virginia with Sue, my first wife. They came and stopped by on their way out. They went out and picked up my brother. He went on a mission after he divorced that first gal and hadn’t gotten married. My parents took care of those two boys. But he was on a mission in Nova Scotia, Canada, just over the border on the east side. They went out and picked him up, and they had a Volkswagen. They also had a Ford Falcon van type thing. For some reason, they left it with us. They rode with him back. But he kept saying, “You need to move back, you need to move back where we can help you if you need help.” Or this and that. When I married her, she had two older boys, which I adopted—Roy and Dave. Then, we had Mark and Robert Jeffery. We should have called him Jeff to begin with, but anyway. We would call him Robert Jeffery, and then Kimberly. My only daughter. We didn’t have Kimberly until we got back here. But we had Robert Jeffery and when we were coming back, we were still changing his diapers. It was like six weeks after he was born. We made our trek back here and started, and we 28 asked the doctor if it would be okay and he said, “I think you can do it.” So we had this big U-Haul trailer with all we could pack in it. We sold everything else and had a guy sell the house and he later sent us the money and you know. But that Falcon lost first gear over in West Virginia. I didn’t tell Sue because I knew she would want to go right back, you know. So I had to start in second gear, I think… and somehow we were able to do that until we got to Blair, Nebraska. We were right there on the line and there was that overpass and right on the other side of the coffee shop. But on the overpass, there is no place for walking or anything. Well we couldn’t go over it because I didn’t have enough gears to—you know, lower gears. There was a place down under this bridge, near some water there too. I parked the Falcon there. I started walking over that bridge, well when cars were coming on one side I’d have to get to the other side. I finally got over the bridge and a guy came out of that coffee shop and picked me up and I told him what had happened, and he took me into Blair Nebraska. A small town, and he said that they could fix the car there. So we were there for a part of the day there. It was a Saturday, it was a weekend actually and I didn’t know how I was going to pay for it. I had a credit card from Sears back there. They accepted that. KH: Well that’s good. WH: That worked out well. But they fixed it and it lasted—you know the trailer and everything on it was too much for it I think. I think that’s why the gear went out. Well, it went out again going into Cheyenne, Wyoming. Going up the hill. I had to pull it over to the side, blocked it with rocks, blocked the trailer and unhooked it 29 from there. I started out into second gear and went on into Cheyenne. I have a cousin, what’s the name of the town just up here, a gal’s name? It’s Wyoming. SH: I think of Evanston when you say that. WH: Yeah, but that’s not it. I want to say Grace but it’s not Grace. But anyway, that’s what her name was, my cousin. She lived in, what’s the town I said? SH: Cheyenne. WH: Cheyenne and he is the dentist there. So we went to her house and we called and my younger sister, her husband came with his car and pulled our trailer in for us. We were able to go from there, starting on second gear, and we came on in. SH: What year was that again? WH: I don’t know if I know. KH: What year was Robert Jeffery born? WH: I got it here somewhere, if I can get it out. But I don’t know right where. That’s the bad part. I have everybody’s birthdays, you know, but what month is he in, I don’t remember. I can’t see without these [glasses]. I even have you in here, that you were coming today and all of that. It seemed like it must have been June or July. Would it have been June that Robert Jeffery? Yep, there’s his birthday, May. Actually, May. He was born in ’68, so he was about six weeks old when we started our trek across. 30 SH: I want to back up just a little bit. So you were working on the farm, working with your dad and brother and keeping the property going and everything. What caused you to leave? WH: Okay. In my senior year of high school, you know, like I said, I thought I would try everything. I worked for the Cragun’s down there on the Good Earth, what they called it. So in my senior year, I decided—because my good buddy, Gary Walker, decided he was going up to his aunts and uncles up in Pleasant View, Idaho. Which is just west of Malad. Worked for people up there during the summer. So I decided, “I’m going too.” I wasn’t the only that went, several of our guys our age that were good friends, they went up too. They didn’t last as long as we did, but they did go. Toward the end of the year, getting toward school time, my folks came up to visit me and some of my family and they said, “Are you coming back for school?” And I said, “Well yeah, I think I will.” So I went out and finished my school year at Weber, ’57 was when that was, that year. About November of that year, Gary Walker, he was my friend, he joined the Navy and I thought, “Well I’m going to join the Navy too.” That was after we graduated. So we went to boot camp in San Diego California, both of us. We were in the same boot camp group. But after we graduated, I ended up being the honor man for some reason. It’s crazy. I guess because I stuck up for guys that were down, some of them. Our old CO he left us and we had somebody else, and so he didn’t know what all went on. He was shocked when he came back when we graduated from boot camp and I was the Honor Man. He was shocked. SH: Is the Honor Man like an official title? 31 WH: They just pick a guy. I don’t know. And they honor you at the graduation, you know. KH: Why the navy? Why not the army or the air force or something? WH: I don’t know. He picked that. I had a cousin that went in the navy too, Norman Mayhew. But we got out of boot camp and he got stationed. He got orders for the west coast on a destroyer. Well, I got promised to school, so I went to a boiler tender school in Pennsylvania. I was right next to the brig. You know what that is right? The bad guys. Well that’s where we had to go to eat was over in the brig. And I didn’t have all of my papers straight yet, so I didn’t go for the first little while until I got that straight. But, it was quite an experience to see. There was old guys that were in the Navy brig. It was crazy. If the fellow that was in charge of them, they had them at the table, if they did something that he didn’t like, they had to stop and leave everything there and go back to their quarters. He’d do that to them. Boy they were nasty and mean. But anyway, later on we went over there and we would over there. I can’t remember, we did something else over there because we were actually in a little place. Officer training school that was right next to the brig. I had to spend time there until it was time for me to go up in Pennsylvania—PA. Well this was all PA, but to the regular school that they had there. Oh so many things happened. Shirley Harris: [To Sam] You look like so much like your dad. WH: He sounded like him, his dad, on the phone too. I thought I was talking to your dad at first. 32 SH: I’ve been told that. WH: So then I went to that school and I got stationed and everybody told me at the school, they said, “Hope you don’t get Norfolk, Virginia.” Well when I got my orders, guess where I got? KH: Norfolk? WH: Norfolk, Virginia. I got on an old World War II ship, a repair ship. They had two or three of those they had kept in commission because they had the shops on them where they could repair things. We went out, well we would go to Cuba on our shake down cruises. When I got there, my ship, I was to report to board, the ship was on it’s way to Cuba, the first time, on a shakedown cruise. So they flew me in an air force plane backwards. The seats are all backwards in case you have to ditch in the water I guess—to Cuba, and then I had to be on the base down there until my ship came in. I had to work on the base there. I did custodial work, you know, whatever they had. KH: Was this in ’58-’59? WH: Somewhere in that neighborhood, yes. KH: So it was before the Cuban Missile Crisis? WH: Yeah. KH: Okay. WH: Because I’ll tell you about that after. Anyway, So I waited there and finally the ship came in and I went on board. What you have to do, you know? I ended up 33 in the boiler room. But while down there, they were nervous, a lot because Castro—just before I had gotten down there, they had captured a bunch of white hats. I was still a white hat, you know, I wasn’t wearing a chief’s cap yet, I never did. But anyway… KH: Was that ensign then? WH: No no, Ensigns wore the other cap too. KH: Okay. WH: But Castro had captured a bus load of white hats, which I was still a white hat, and so our navy had decided that nobody could go to Havana, except chiefs and above. The upper officers. They were still going into Cuba. But Castro had captured these white hats and I think that he finally let them go and stuff. But he pulled all kinds of things. Anyway, later on, they had to make places for the people that came from Cuba to work on the base, for them to live on the base because he would wait there at the gate and shoot them. He was a bad guy. But they had a party on the base that was out somewhere and they supplied all of the food of course and everything. I was talking about the tensions and this white hat started beating on this officer. They got into a fight. But that’s how the tensions were down there. They were really bad. Later on, of course, you know that the others couldn’t go into Havana either. Eventually... but after we returned from that shakedown cruise—I started right out with a shakedown cruise. We had all of the practicing’s: man overboard and all of the things you know, on the way. But anyway, when we got back, we started having to scrub some of our 34 tanks. We were going to have to carry water down there because Castro turned the water off to the base. KH: Oh. WH: Well, that didn’t last very long. You know why? He didn’t get the money from the water. So he finally turned it back on. I mean, if you don’t get the water, you don’t pay them. So that’s what happened, so we didn’t ever have to carry any water down there. But we thought we were going to have to. We were scrubbing up these tanks and we were going to have to put regular water and carry it down to the base. But, I’m going to skip over a lot of things and kind of to the end. They let me out a month early. Guess why? KH: Why? WH: Because they were going to go on another shakedown cruise and they didn’t want to have to fly me back. SH: I do have one story I want to ask about and this is one my dad told me about. The time you met the captain. WH: Huh? SH: The time you met the captain of the ship. WH: Oh I’ll tell you about that in a minute. Let me finish this. I’m skipping to when they let me out a month early. And guess what? And everybody says, “Oh, I hope that doesn’t happen to you.” Well I got orders. I’m out, but I’m not out. I said, “Okay.” But it wasn’t on that ship. It was for a destroyer. I said, “Okay, 35 where is it?” “It’s down in Cuba I think it was.” I said, “Well what should I do?” And they said, “Wait till it comes back and then you can prepare to board.” “Okay.” So I waited, well in the meantime they had the Bay of Pigs, which you are aware of? Where they were going to attack the island? But they didn’t prepare for it and they weren’t ready. So he repelled them of course. He kept them from coming onto the island to hurt them. He stopped whatever they were doing, they were going communist. Anyway, that fell through and I didn’t—but I thought I was going right in, like or not. You know, what do you do? Okay, now the thing you were asking me about, what was it? Oh yeah. I was on watch and they had this little gauge and they had a mark on it right about here—a water gauge. And it showed how much water was in the boiler. You know, I was in charge. I had taken over from the guy in front of me. But they had a blow down valve they would open up and they would do that every so often that they were supposed to do that and blow the bad stuff out. Then they would turn it off and it would go back to normal. Well this guy didn’t tell me he had the blow down valve open and I didn’t know. It was down on the next level and so I was watching that gauge and it just kept going down. And they said, “When it goes to there, you wrap it up. You don’t burn the boiler up, you wrap it up.” So I wrapped it up and we were dead in the water. Well of course the captain came down and everybody was down there. I had been in charge and later on that they found out that’s what the problem was. He—what was his name? I can’t think of his name, anyway, that guy forgot to tell me he had the 36 blow down valve on. It just sucked that out of there. But they had to crank the oil into there to start it and get it going again. KH: Oh no. WH: Yeah, they had people from the bridge down there cranking it. They had everybody down there sweating. It was something. Before that, I didn’t even know that they had the crank thing, but they did and they cranked and got those boilers going again and off we went. But I thought, “Boy, I’m in trouble now because I made that ship dead in the water.” Because I closed everything down because it went right down. So that’s what happened there. But because of that, we had to have some little classes about the systems and you know. They had to do something. When I was in Pennsylvania I would go to the church—the LDS church there and to their MIA and whatever. This one night I stayed too long, the busses only ran so late. So then I had to hitchhike back. I was still in school at that time going to boiler tender school. A couple of things happened. Anyway, I was thumbing and this guy came and ran and picked me up, you know. He didn’t talk, I couldn’t figure out what the heck. Later on I figured out that he was deaf. He was heading me back to the base. But he, I don’t know how to say this… he wrote a note and he said, “Big is your private part.” That’s what he said. And I was so mad, I knew he was gay then. I got out at the next stop light and I slammed that door and I was so mad that I marched away just like a woman would. I was so confused because I acted just like a woman would. Anyway, I had to hitchhike myself in late. I got in late, oh an hour or two. 37 They had to do something, they didn’t really want to do anything, but they had me sweep the floors to make up for it. What experiences, I tell ya. SH: So after you finished your tour with the repair ship and you were waiting for the destroyer to come in, is that when you first met, Sue? WH: No, actually I got orders while I was on the repair ship to go to Italy, or what’s the name of the town? The big… KH: Rome? WH: Not Rome. KH: Florence? WH: What did you say? KH: Venice? SH: I said Norfolk, I thought you were just going back. WH: No, a town over there. I was all involved with Sue by then. I did not want to go. Oh, Barcelona, Spain, it was. KH: There we go. WH: I would get on a ship that was going there. This black guy, I told him, I didn’t want to go but I had orders. And he said, “I want to go. Let’s go see the captain.” So we went up to see him—actually the commander and told him the story. This black guy went, he let me stay, so I stayed on the ship. KH: How long was your tour on the repair ship that was down in Cuba? 38 WH: How long were we in Cuba? SH: No, how long were you serving on the repair ship before you got orders to go to the destroyer? WH: I don’t know, the rest of my period—I went in ’57 and I had a four year stint but I got out a month early. So maybe that gives you an idea, I don’t know. Anyway, any other questions you have? SH: How did you met Sue? WH: Oh, Sue and I? I actually met another gal and was going with her, okay? Her name was Jackie Udy. She came from Rhode Island, okay. Our repair ship was going to go take a trip up there to Rhode Island, and I happened to tell Jackie about that. Well her mother and her uncle and aunt and a bunch of her relatives lived up there. They were Catholic of course, that’s what they are up there pretty much. But she told me, she made me promise, why she did that, I don’t know. But she made me promise that I would go to her mother’s house in Rhode Island and tell her the Joseph Smith story, sitting on the couch next to her, face-to-face. Probably one of the hardest things I ever did. But I did. I promised I would, so I did because she had joined the church. She had looked the church up and joined it in Virginia. The guy that she was kind of with at the time—with a guy that was a returned missionary, should have been doing better, and wasn’t. But she took after the good anyway if you can imagine. Anyway, I told that story to her and I also say the uncle and aunt and talked to them and they seemed to be interested. But the one boy, he was still in school, probably high school I think. 39 He also was in a Catholic group where they played basketball. I thought, “There is no chance that he would ever convert.” Well, as it turned out, her mother converted and so did the aunt and uncle and that boy eventually did too. He served a mission if you can believe it. But you never know what’s going to happen. But I just remembered Jackie made me promise that I would do that and then she’s the one—you were talking about meeting Sue. I kind of took fancy to her at the time. She said, “I have this girlfriend you need to meet.” We were in the chapel there at Norfolk. When I first got there they were in an old chapel in downtown that one of the—what do you call them? Protestants had used and sold to them. So the LDS used that. But they found a piece of property where they wanted to build a building up on what we called Little Creek Road. They had dug a hole, that’s as far as they had gotten. So all of the time that I was on this ship—most of the time we could go home at nights, unless we had duty. But I would go to church down at that old building to begin with and then they started building the new one. So I helped them and me and Brother Larsen was in charge of building the building. So I helped build that Norfolk Chapel. In those days, they would let you do that. One day, I think we were still down at the old chapel, her mother would invite the navy guys and the missionaries to her house and feed them. I came with the group that she invited me—Sue’s mother. So I didn’t really know Sue. But when I went there, on the way I met her uncle—yeah it would be her Uncle Jim. He knew about the LDS but he wasn’t currently active, he drank a lot because during the war he got a knee shot out and he had a lot of pain and problems. But anyway, I talked to him 40 and he was telling me about the LDS and stuff, we talked. Anyway, I went to this dinner and Sue was there. She was in the kitchen helping and she came around the corner and that was the first time I had ever saw her. I think I said something to her, I don’t remember. So that’s the first time I ever really met her. The funny part of it is that later on, she was going out with other guys and I was tending the boys. You believe that? And this one night, she went out and they came in early. I was there tending the boys. This guy was driving erratically he was drunk. She decided no more of that. It was from then on that we kind of started buddying up together. Roy was baptized by one of the older fellows back there. I baptized David later on. When we came back here… KH: How long did you and Sue date before you got married? WH: I’m thinking it was a year or so. But her sister lived—I almost thought of the name of the place. It was over through the trees and stuff on another street just a little ways from our chapel. They were on the edge of the water and she had all kinds of animals. She would put food out for them. The squirrels would come, the ducks would come. All sorts of animals would come over there. But they also took their drinking water from that same place. I thought that was strange. When Sue and I first got married, we lived in that place on Redwood Road out in Little Creek Road. It was up Redwood Road, it was called. Across from us were some people who were members of the church, Leavitts. They were all active in the church. But then there was this big long field and then there was a community and it was black people. They were still separated at that time, the blacks and the whites. After I got out, I worked for Metropolitan Life for a little 41 while. I wasn’t that good of a salesman I guess. So they helped me get onto what was Gordon’s Potato Chips. I served different areas, different days, and one was down in Church Street, which was the black part of town. I had one night, I got there kind of late, and I was being late getting stuff done. The proprietor of the place said, “I think you better leave this area, you better not be here when it get’s dark.” I got to thinking, “Maybe he’s right.” I got out of there because odd things happened at night down in the colored town down there. But the next time, after we moved back here, then we went to Virginia, we went to her sister’s place. She lived in another place, guess who lived next to her? A black fellow, a black family. It had changed, the bussing and all of that had taken place and all of that when they were trying to get their rights in Mississippi and all of that. Governor Wallace, I don’t know if you remember him, he was the Governor there and the blacks would lay down in the street trying to get their rights and stuff like that. So people would have to get around them somehow. He was going for Governor again and the newsman asked him, “What will you do if they lay down in the street again?” And he said, “We’ll run over them.” He didn’t even think twice about it. But as it turned out, somewhere along the way, he got shot. It paralyzed him, he got shot in his spine and you never did hear anymore about him. But he was so outspoken and what were the ones that wore the hoods? KH: The KKK? WH: The KKK’s back then were still going. It was still popular—and the burnings, they drug this one guy through town. I didn’t see it, but I heard about it—Dead. They 42 had killed him. They drug him through town and he hit a cord and it took his head off. Oh yeah. They were bad back then when I first went there. Her brother, Sue’s half-brother and half-sister, and she had an uncle there and he ran kind of place where they take care of older folks. But he had a lot of black people that worked for him and this is the way that they talked to them, “Boy do this! Boy do that!” I’m sitting there feeling really uncomfortable about it but I couldn’t say anything because I would be in trouble with them. KH: Were there a lot of protests in Virginia at where you guys were? WH: I didn’t really see them. But remember when John Kennedy got killed? That day, I was down in a colored town and that hurt them so bad. They were all for him, I can tell ya. A lot of them just closed up their shops and went home and mourned. I was at this one, and they were mourning and telling me about it. I didn’t dare say anything anywhere, I didn’t always like what Kennedy did. I said to myself, “Someday somebody is going to kill that man.” And they did. It didn’t happen the way I thought it would, but they did. What was his name? SH: I think it was Samuel Booth. KH: Who killed Kennedy? WH: No. KH: Lee Harvey Oswald. WH: Oswald, there you go. SH: Why am I thinking Booth? 43 KH: John Wilkes Booth killed Lincoln. WH: Lincoln. Yeah, now you’re getting it right. I remember the days when those people from that black community would come up—the gals would come up into our area and try to sell their services. “We will come clean your house. We’ll do this for so much.” And Aunt Marian, that was their half-sister’s name, she had Nellie. She didn’t live in that area, but where she was, she had hired a black gal to come to clean. Everyday before or the night before, she would clean the place spick and span before Nellie would get there and they would talk. KH: Oh nice. WH: Yeah. But I do remember the days, Black like me, the book and I read that and related to it because I had seen it. The poor blacks, they technically couldn’t— unless somebody let them, a white, sneak them… they couldn’t take a drink in the white fountain they had to go back to colored town to get it. Or the restroom, either one. It was really something. I remember driving down the one military highway, I think it was. They called it military highway because a lot of military stuff went down there during the war, you know? Anyway, what was I going to tell you? She had an aunt that owned a little store right there on military highway. That uncle, he would go over there a lot, the one that drank a lot. Jim was his name. Why was I thinking? Oh, it was about the sign. You know the big signs that you see on the side of the freeway or the streets? There was one that said, “You black’s better be in by sundown or else.” Yeah, that’s how bad they were towards the blacks. I was like, “Oh my gosh.” They put up signs like that. I just couldn’t believe it. But, I couldn’t do a lot about it either. I just didn’t participate 44 in it but I worked for her brother after I got out of the service for insulation place for a little bit. He had the blacks working for him and that’s the way he would talk to them, “Boy do this!” You know? Oh yeah. But you know what’s funny? The insulation that they used on the ships, you know what it was? KH: Asbestos? WH: Asbestos. When you took a—when you had a book, the navy book, one of the questions on it, “What is the best heat receptive?” To keep the heat away, it was asbestos. That was the answer. Of course, they had to take that out of all the old ships and they had to wear uniforms to do it and masks and everything and I was down on that ship and I had to change these things that went over the connections on some of those. Asbestos—I’d see it flying in air. I just tried to stay back from it but I didn’t know it was bad then. Later on we found out. When I went to work for him, he was an insulator. And he went to this chemical place and was insulating and it was with asbestos. I had all of those experiences and I had the doctor check me for it and I never had any sign of anything. KH: That’s good. WH: Can you believe that? Being around all of that all of that time? There’s a lot down in that boiler room. But anyway, so I have seen a lot in my life. KH: Yes, you have. WH: I went from—I remember when we were in elementary school, we went up to our playground and they had one of these things, the first radio things. I forget what 45 they are called, and they weren’t real radios, but they could pick up stuff with it. I don’t remember. Shirley Harris: Magnets? WH: No, no. They were only so big and you had to adjust them and stuff. We had that old radio about so big and so high. That’s all we could listen to when we came home from school. We did have running water but it was cold. We had a bathroom with a tub but if you wanted to have a shower, you had to start that stove that we cooked on. It had what we called a jacket on the back, hooked up to the water and it would heat the water to go in there. KH: Oh wow. WH: So we could get a warm bath. To flush the toilet, the tank is on the back now, not there. It was up on the ceiling and there was a chain you had to pull because they didn’t know how to get water pressure that could suck the water up. You would pull the chain and it would flush the toilet, in our old house, that’s the way it was. So we experienced a lot things. Since then of course, they do have regular water in there now. But back then, the kitchen sink had just cold tap water. We had an old washer that was a tub washer. It would agitate but it wouldn’t—you had to heat the water on the stove and put it in the tub and then we had wringer and it run. But that’s all we had. We had to fill it and after it was through, I had to drain it, take it out, and dump it outside. Yeah. So that’s how the washing went and we hung it on the line, we had clothesline back then we hung them on the line. 46 SH: So when you first moved back to Utah, where did you stay? Did you already have a house lined up? WH: No. We didn’t. Aunt Edith lived up on that same lane where Mack Wade lived. She owned a house—her and her husband owned a house there and we stayed in their basement for, I don’t know if we stayed there a week even. Not very long. I was intent on going to school. I thought I was going to go to BYU and so we got hooked up with a place we could rent down there and got out of there real quick. Shirley Harris: Was that in Provo? WH: It was in Provo. You know what’s funny? The darndest things happen. They had these big gallon cans buried in the ground with just the lid on top. And guess what was inside? Old horse harnesses. They were at that house. Somebody at some time had put them in there. But we rented that for a while and then I ended up getting a job with some professors that were down there. I used to remember what it was called. Anyway, we did the—now what’s that called? That highway that comes around there in Salt Lake. We test hold with them. SH: I-215? WH: Uh huh. But it wasn’t I-215 it was the one that comes around. It comes right below—well right below the freeway that goes east there. We were testing right there and there was an old goat eating on the hill there and took after this one guy. Furman and Rawlings is what it was called. They did test for the highways and they were professors from down at the BYU so I worked with them for a 47 while. We were doing test holds on this one place that went up and we tipped that machine over and the rig went right across the road. KH: What’s involved with test holding? WH: Well you drill down and they want to know what is at that depth. What is it? Is it sand? Is it gravel? Whatever it is. So you take test samples and then you take the test sampler on there and there’s a pounder that pounds it down in. Then they pull it up and they have a bottle that they put that in and send it down there to be tested. You know the church office building? The same people, tested the cement for that—Furman and Rawlings. Yeah. But anyway, we did that and we went up to test holes. We did tests where dams were leaking. They would put in dye and see where it would come through so they could fix them for farmers, up here in the east. We did a lot of that kind of stuff. I worked out at Kennecott and did some out there even. But Furman and Rawlings and we worked for them for a while and we were still doing these. I had to travel from there and get up way early and travel up and we would go do those and then we were working on the one up by the hill. Up by where the old lake used to come up to that point up there I’m thinking. Anyway, a guy came by and he said, “Why don’t you go to work up here? Move up here.” I said, “Well…” And that’s when I went to work for Betty Lewis and Gordon. They were in Ogden at the time, I think they went out of business now. Maybe or there is somebody else there. But I delivered bread for a while. KH: Were you living in Salt Lake while you were doing all of this? 48 WH: Yeah, it wasn’t very long but we did move up. And we moved up into Mountain Acres, just east of the Old Villa Theater if you knew where that was. Just above Highland drive, just east of Highland drive. KH: Okay, I know where that is. WH: We were right at the end of the city, just barely into the county. So that’s where we raised our children was there and her, likewise, [To Shirley] Didn’t ya? But we were like a home a part, between our two families. Raising our kids. SH: So when did you first start working for the schools doing their grounds keeping? WH: Let me think. I went to work for another outfit and I can’t remember what it was called, but it was in the city there. I had put in for a lot of different jobs and one of them was a school. The post office and everything. Even before I went into the service, I put in for that. They called me but it was too late, I was already joined up for two different ones. Anyway, several of them said, “Okay, come onto work.” And I got to looking at the one and I felt like the school was better than any of the other ones. So that’s where I went and that’s how I ended up with her and met her dad. He was the superintendent down there. So anyway, long story short that’s kind of it. Eddies bread, that’s what it was. Eddie’s bread. It was Betty Lewis back there. Your grandma Sue had problems, mental situations. Which I didn’t realize she had. She would have, what do you call it? Anxiety? Then also, the other with it. She a lot of times didn’t want to go out in public, you know stuff like that. Anyway, I was working with this Eddie’s bread and I hadn’t been there—I was still training I think. All of the sudden, you better 49 go home. Anxiety and anyways, she had two things that she was dealing with. When I married her, I didn’t know she had them. But I found out because this guy that was training me, he took over and they sent me home. She knew it was wrong, but she was thinking about putting the boys in the oven. WH: Stuff like that. Yeah. Anxiety and depression, those two. She fought those her whole life. But that’s when I kind of first knew about it. I didn’t really know that she had it. We did visit some cousins who just plain couldn’t go out in public, just young gals. Good looking gals. They couldn’t stand to go out in public, so it must have run in the family somewhat, I don’t know. KH: How long did you work for the school district? WH: 32 years. I would have continued on but she was having health problems, so I decided I needed to be with her. So went ahead and retired because I could with that much time in. I got full retirement. Yep, 32 years. Had things been different, I would have stayed longer. SH: So I guess that kind of brings us to some more painful memories. With Sue, what was your life like as her health declined? WH: Not too long after I retired was when she passed. She a lot of times would be in bed and she just had to stay there. I don’t know how to explain it. But this one evening at the old Cottonwood Hospital, do you remember the old Cottonwood Hospital? It’s now posh and it’s very modern. I coudn’t find my way around it. Back then, I could. This one evening, we were laying in the bed and all of the sudden she got this nose bleed and I mean, it was like turning on the tap. She 50 had this pan that she was catching it in. So I called the paramedics and they came. Somehow they stopped it. They said, “Do you want to go to the hospital?” and she didn’t want to go to the hospital. I guess it was about an hour or half-hour later, it started bleeding again. So we had to call them again and I said, “Yes, she is going to the hospital this time.” That’s where she went was the old Cottonwood Hospital. I remember it was different. She was down on another level and I was up there and I could see down there. They were working with her. But she was having those—where you gyrate? KH: Seizure? WH: Her whole body, like seizures. But they got her out of that somehow and they got control on the blood, you know? Ended up putting her in a regular room. So I thought, “Okay we are going to be good now.” And my son, Rob and his friend were there. You know how young guys are, they were playing around and she got after them a little bit. Anyway, they finally told me—I had been up so long they said, “Why don’t you go home? You need your rest and you can come back tomorrow.” Well during the night they called me and she had ingested . It didn’t say on the death certificate, it just said ingested. I guess that she had started bleeding again in the night and ingested it into her lungs. She was still alive, they kept her alive because they didn’t see one of those [Do Not Resusitate forms]. We had one because they called and apologized because they kept her alive. But it turned out to be good for us. She was from then on in a coma, and it was not until the next day she came down and we went out. But it was your mother who told me, “I didn’t know, they didn’t explain to me.” They kept saying, 51 “You want to take the oxygen off?” And I’m sitting there, “No.” I was in tears. I couldn’t figure it out. Your mother had heard she had no brain waves left. I didn’t know that. Of course after that, that next day we had a family meeting and we were told about no brain waves and we decided that the right thing to do was to start taking her off of things. Because how can you live like that all of your life? What’s left? Well they were feeding her internally too. I had them take her off of that. Slowly, we would take her off of everything. Madison was with me for some reason. Everybody else was working, but she was off of her oxygen and still going for a while. It was about a quarter to 11 that day I think, or something like that. She finally passed away. Madison was a little girl and she was the only one with me that day. Everybody else had to work and they were busy. KH: When did she pass? What year? WH: Was August? September? Oh I got the obituary right here in my wallet. Too many pockets. But anyway, I carry that obituary, right there… glasses where are they? Okay, she passed away Thursday August 10, 2000. She was at the old Cottonwood Hospital and she is down in Elysian Gardens. Her mother passed away before that. She came out here too and they are both buried down there. There is a spot for me. If she’s not nice, I’ll end up there. Anyway, and we have one extra grave there. There is so much that happened. Her mother lived down on Hubbard Avenue with some other ladies. She got older and then she eventually passed away. When she passed away, there were some insurances and things and we were able to buy those lots. That’s why we bought them there. We couldn’t afford the others. You know, a lot of them bought up at the 52 one on Highland Drive and I would have like to have been up there, but Elysian is good. It’s just off of 13th just west of the Arm service Training Center there, or whatever it’s called. It’s on the right hand of the street as you go down. So we have a headstone there with my name on it. Just got to put the date and she’s got the same thing down where her first husband, down in… [To Shirley] What’s the name of the cemetery? Shirley Harris: Where I will be? WH: Yes. Remember that one? Mortuary on South Temple, or I think it’s South Temple, going up. Shirley Harris: It’s 106th South. WH: It’s the same name I think as that one. KH: That’s who my grandma went through. I’m trying to remember their name. I know who you are talking about but I don’t remember. WH: I hear you. Well wait till you get to my age. But anyway, we were pretty familiar with them. We had a fellow in our ward down there who worked there. He was a mortician. Bill Rimmasch, why do I remember those? KH: Was it Larkin Mortuary? WH: Larkin Mortuary. Wasatch Lawn up there and her funeral was there. I’m sorry. SH: That’s fine. So after grandma passed, what happened then for you? WH: Grandma Hill? Sue? SH: Yes. 53 WH: Well, you know, a lot of it is kind of blur. But, Rob and his family decided they wanted me out there. They were going to take me in. So I was out there for a day or two and I got antsy. I couldn’t stand it, I wanted to go home. There is something about it, you just have to be home. So I went back from there. A lot of things happened. Shirley is involved in some of it. The Olympics was coming to town around that time. 2002 was it? Anyway, her boy wanted to get some stuff that was sold by [To Shirley] Who was it? Shirley Harris: Melaluca WH: The name of the company was different. Anyway, they thought Kim worked for them or something. Shirley Harris: Kim wanted to buy some. WH: Okay, that’s what it was. Shirley Harris: The two of them were playing phone tag. Kim would call and talk to me and I’d call and talk to Kim. It went back and forth and… WH: So finally she ended up talking to me. I was still the bishop up there, and I organized the singles family home evening up there. So invited her to Family Home Evening. I wasn’t thinking of myself and her. Oh, what’s his name Shirley? Shirley Harris: Phil? WH: Not Phil. Anyway, another guy. His father had passed away when he was living there. He was alone at that time. I was thinking of him for her, isn’t that 54 interesting? I thought maybe if she came to family home evening he’d be there and they could get together. But because I was single, I organized a lot of single things at that time. I got some things going. KH: Yeah, we’ll pause. [Video pauses] [Video resumes] WH: Well I don’t know if I know the whole thing. But he was working for the mail terminal there in Ogden. SH: He being your father. WH: He being my father. They had those little racks, or little hay rack only they put mail stuff on there. Well it had a—what do you call it out front? That you had to guide it with? Handle. It wrenched his back. It switched and wrenched his back. So he ended up for some time up in a hospital up in Washington State. He was never able to get over his back problems either. But that happened while he did work for the mail terminal for a while there too—in Ogden. KH: How long did your dad farm? WH: Farm? As long as he lived. Pretty much. When we started going our different directions, things kind of went by the way. I don’t know. One weird experience—I shouldn’t tell you maybe. KH: No share. WH: My oldest sister, we had two rooms that were attached to the regular old house that were government buildings that were sold, and they bought them and put 55 them there. Anyway, the girls, my two oldest sisters were sleeping out there—I got another one I’ll tell you that I thought of. But anyway, Howell Holmes was the guy’s name. He took a shine to my oldest sister. Well he was one of these drunks and he came right out to there and tried to get in. Anyway, they reported it to us, the girls. Of course, they brought him in. She was really worried then, if he tried to get in there. Because you had to outside to get into the other part of the house. Howell Holmes, anyway, he wanted her to go with him. He was drunk as a skunk. Anyway, that’s when they were out in the first north room. What was the other one that I was thinking about? Well, now I forgot. KH: What was your oldest sister’s name? WH: Irma. KH: Okay. WH: Irma, Laura, Earl, Edith, then myself, and the Lola. SH: One of the things, your kids asked me to ask you about was blow snakes. WH: Yeah. You know how I told you about that little piece of property we still had in between the church and Ryan Hart Kowallis. Then there was that big cement pond there and I guess that they baptized there. I don’t know why they had it there. But there were the two outhouses next to the church. But coming down that lane, I remember seeing a big old snake wrapped around one of those trees. The darndest thing you ever did see. We had, in the earlier days, on the farm— the first farm. I told you we had water running in there, but we just had one of the blue sinks and we had it stabilized by 2X4’s. There was nothing under it other 56 than that. The water would run there and of course out the drain, out the side of the house, the way it went. What was I telling you about? SH: The blow snakes. WH: Oh the snakes. I came in from being up on the farm one day and that tap and all of that? There was a snake wrapped right around that. It was cool because snakes are not warm blooded like we are. They have to get into a place where they can keep their temperature down. So it was there at the sink where it was cool. You know, it just bugged me. Here’s this dang old snake here. Oh boy, oh I know! I wanted to just tell you a quick little side story. When I was a young kid and we had a fire going in on our cook stove. I was sitting there with a piece of wood, hitting it, trying to get it to go more. As I came up, it lit my hair on fire. KH: Oh no. WH: Yeah. I panicked, I wanted to run. But Laura, my sister, kept me from going anywhere and they were doing dishes there and she just put that around my head it was out. Just like that. But you know how kids are, they panic. Oh I wanted to run, I didn’t know what to do. Crazy. SH: I guess the other thing to ask you about was apparently there was a time where Brother Leavitt let you go all the way through priesthood? WH: Yes. Dang his hide. Yeah he used… as I told you they were right across the street from us. So he would pick me up a lot of times. I was running late one morning and I used to wet my whole head down, okay? Then I would comb it. Well I forgot to comb it. I noticed that he was kind of looking at me funny. I was 57 dressed otherwise, you know, fine. I went clear to priesthood and nobody said anything. Nobody. He never said a word, he just looked at me funny. I asked him later and he said, “I just thought you had a new hairdo.” I got into the restroom and saw myself in the mirror and I about passed out. I didn’t have comb, I had do it with my hands, whatever I could. So that one time, I forgot to even comb my hair, I tell ya. I would put it under the tap and wet it down, you know, and do that. That’s the way I went to priesthood. KH: That works. WH: I guess. Anyway, I was really kind of angry at him for not telling me. But anyway, I think that he thought that was going to be fun. But I wrote down here, and you don’t have to stay, about my dad’s bear stories. He was raised up there in… what did I say? KH: Snowville. Wasn’t it Snowville? WH: Snowville. Yeah, you got it right. But when he was a youngster, he carried this .22 rifle around with him and he usually had his dog with him, and he was in the canyon. He was coming around a corner and as he was coming around the corner, he could hear his dog yipping a lot. He came around to see what was going on, well here was this old bear on two legs. Looking right at him in his eyes. He said that when he saw that, he didn’t dare move. He just stared right back at that bear in his eyes. After quite a while the bear got tired of staring, I guess. And he got down, he kept an eye on him, but he got down and he wondered off into the forest. 58 KH: Oh gosh, that would be terrifying. WH: He had an experience, I’m telling ya. But they’re in Snowville on the south end on the mountainside. There’s a hole down here and one down on the other end and you can hear the air going through the whole thing. That’s what he said. There must be a cave through there or something is the only thing I can think. I’ve never been there to see. We did go up to where their old homestead was up on the hill. Some of the footings and all of that were still there. But everything else was gone. But during the winter they would move downtown and in the summer they worked up there. They had wheat farms, kind of like what Shirley’s people did up in Idaho. They were on a kind of side hill up there too. Her dad had the wheat farms there. He taught school in Thatcher, Idaho. Have you ever heard of Thatcher? I hadn’t either. It’s up further up somewhere. But my mother lived in a lot of places in Idaho. She lived on the Canadian border with Idaho and it had lots of trees there. They had gotten this piece of ground and they had to cut all of these trees down and clear the stumps out. It was hard stuff because there was a lot of forest there. My youngest sister and her husband has a piece of property, in another one of the towns that she lived in up there. Just as a place to go. But he is having a lot of health problems. Cancer and stuff. I don’t know how that’s all going to go down. But, we don’t know how it’s going to go down with us because when my blood sugar went down, they said the kidneys were being bothered by metformin. I had taken for years for diabetes and some other medicines. They took that all away from me. All of it. They said, “You’re not diabetic anymore.” But she is still taking a small one I think, but not 59 metformin, they took that away. You know, these doctors, they know that it irritates kidneys and things, why do they ever do it? I don’t know. Mytrozol that’s one I took for years. I finally got to see the side effects. I had been getting it through the mail, I don’t think they meant for it to come through. But I saw it, and one of them was this breakage in my back I have. That was one of the side effects. I took that and showed it to Dr. Harmon, our family care doctor. “Oh well, you know…” they make excuses for it, I tell yeah. It just makes you wonder though, doesn’t it. Did you have more questions you say? KH: Oh yeah, so growing up on the farm, did you and your siblings have specific chores? Like you were in charge of milking the cows or was it everybody did everything? WH: We pretty much did everything. Mother worked on the farm and she would do what she could to feed us and whatever too. She was that kind of lady, and yet, she played for the primary all the years she was living. Before that, she played for another church because they were a ways from the LDS church for a while. A special lady. I remember when my sisters would help milk the cows. I remember more when my brother and I would. I walked into the barn and something hits me in the face, and I’m wondering, “What the heck?” He had been squirting me from the cow. But I caught him once. Boys will be boys, and he had never smoked before. I tried it once but I caught him in the barn doing it. I walked in after he was in there and he about burned himself to death trying to put that cigarette in his pocket so I wouldn’t see it. But I knew what was going one, I never did say anything, but I knew. You know, these things come and go. 60 KH: Was there much of a rivalry between Pleasant View and North Ogden as there is today? WH: Not that I remember. All that I remember in early days, there near where the one store is and the ballpark is now. That was just an open field and they would go there and they would have horse pulls and different carnival type things when I was younger. As I got older, they didn’t do that so much anymore. They went more into baseball and I remember catching a high fly ball there. Tucker was the name of the guy and he went wild. He didn’t think that I could catch it. It was way up there and it finally came down and I caught it. I don’t know, but yeah, they had a lot of carnival type stuff. Trucks trying to pull big stumps. They tried different stuff like carnival type stuff. They had a big bonfire and they would roast potatoes in the tinfoil. That was really good, good stuff. KH: Did you go to Ogden very often? Or was that a special occasion thing? WH: Well I went to school over there and in elementary. Like say, our stake was in North Ogden and so we had to go over there for any special thing. Rivalries, there wasn’t too much, we were pretty much to ourselves. Pole Patch, you ever hear of that? Up that road, going to toward Mac Wade, the sheriff. But before you get to his place, there’s a road that’s pave just going across and there were a few families that lived up there. They called that Pole Patch up there. I don’t know. KH: What would happen at Pole Patch? 61 WH: I don’t know, I didn’t go up there very often. Our farm over where Uncle Earl lived we would go up above there where Chuggs and different ones. They had a home there and then there was a gully and nothing in there. We used to think that we found Indian graveyards there and stuff like that. We’d find arrowheads even on our old farm. We had one year that was a flood year, really bad and it made a big ditch. Over on that farm, it made one down the side. Dad had that little caterpillar thing and he filled all of those in. After that big flood, I saw a lot more flint around there—black flint, you know like you’d see with arrowheads. I’d find a bunch. But I don’t’ know where the Indians—the Ute Tribe, where did they go? Uintahs, I guess? I think eventually. There were some south. I know kind of where they would live up in parts of Idaho up there. But I got to tell you, one thing I did while I was working up in Idaho… they sent me down to this one place to work in the sugar beets. I can’t remember if I was unloading them or loading them in this place. But it was all alone there except a stream of water. I got thirsty and so I dropped down and took a drink out of that water and it just about killed me. I could hardly breathe. I think what happened is that they put poison in there to get rid of the growth of algae in there. KH: Yikes. WH: But I didn’t know it. I think that’s what happened. Somehow I survived that too, here I am. KH: Goodness, you seem to have had a lot of close calls. 62 WH: Yeah. That was kind of close. It could have killed me. But it was a hot day, you know? I just thought, “Oh I’ll drop down here and get a drink out of that stream.” Oh boy, it choked me off, I thought I was not going to be able to breathe. But eventually it cleared up. But Ipson’s I don’t know if they are still up there in Pleasant View or Idaho. They had feed lots. They had about 1,000 head of cattle go out of there each year. You know, to be chopped up. Go to the butcher. It’s interesting the things that happened. I think I talked your hind legs off. KH: I’m not done yet. SH: She has more questions. WH: Go ahead. KH: In high school, in your teenage years, what were the types of things that you would do with your friends to hang out? WH: You don’t want to know. KH: Well then I do. WH: I don’t know. Well that one time in that library—that we talked about—we were sluffing. We didn’t do that often. But my teacher almost caught me that time when I was leaving town. One night, the junior high—Wahlquist Jr. High. It must have been Halloween town or something like that because pumpkins and everything were everywhere. We went up on the hill side there and this guy had… oh they couldn’t sell the watermelon. They had so many. He had 63 pumpkins and we put them in the car. My cousin Jay, a good fellow, was driving this time. He decided—well here comes the bus. They had a big dance and everything down at Wahlquist Jr. Well here comes the bus bringing kids back home. We were going the other down from town. Well we thought, “we will just throw on over and hit the side of the bus.” Well we logged it. I actually didn’t do it myself. One buddy lobbed one over and instead of hitting the side of the bus it went right through the windshield. Glass got in the driver’s eye. He had to pull over, and I don’t know at all, he was from the town there. Ferrin. My mother told me about it because she was in Relief Society and she heard about it. But he was able to get all of the glass out successfully and he was okay. But we pulled pranks like that. Oh I tell ya. You know you’ve heard of stretching this thing across the road and it’s got a dummy on it and a car comes a long and you straighten it out and here it is right in front of him? We pulled stuff like that. I tell ya. I remember Halloween, the people right there by the church they would always bring you in. They wanted you to perform or do something. I didn’t know what to perform. They would always give you hot chocolate. They were really nice. Their name was Ferrin, too. But I remember we jumped across this ditch. We were Halloweening as kids and guess what was right on the other side? Clothes line. It hit me right there. It just about took me out. I tell you what, oh my gosh. The darndest things happened to us. You know, one other thing—there are so many things. One time, the cows ended up not in the pasture where they were supposed to be. So I had to figure out where they were in town. I didn’t know where to go. I just went all over town, driving all over to try to find ‘em. It 64 was fall, and some of the fruit was just beautiful. It was just a really nice fall. I found him up where these apples trees, and they had all kinds of beautiful apples on them. It was the experimental farm. That’s where they were, how they got out and up there, I don’t know. But that’s where I found them, it was crazy. KH: How did you get them back to pasture? WH: Well, we just herded them back. That’s the way we did it. We had to watch them after we got rid of most of our sheep. We still had a few, and these herds of sheep would come through our town. So we really had to watch them so they didn’t get mixed with them. My dad was really good at that. I don’t know how he ever could tell, but he did. Sometimes they would get in there and he’d get them out of there. But one time, I used to go up and gather the eggs from the chickens and I was quite a young guy. This one rooster was a mean ole cuss. Danged if he didn’t attack on the face. He did a number on my face. That was really a neat experience. Did I tell you? We never had Thanksgiving dinner with Turkey? Yeah. We had those mean ole roosters. Crazy. KH: I have one more question and then we can be done. WH: Oh yeah, are you sure you are through? KH: I don’t know but… it’s probably a good stopping point. After marrying Sue and she had her two boys, was it a big adjustment going from being single to being an instant family? WH: You know what’s funny? I adjusted to it fairly good I guess. But I didn’t seem to have a lot of problems. I remember when we were 703 Meads Road off of Little 65 Creek Road there. This one kid from up the way, was kind of a bully and he was bullying the oldest son. Instead of me acting like I felt sorry for him, I said, “Stand up to him. Sock him right in the face.” Yeah. Whether that’s adjusting right or not, I don’t know. But I did tell him that and he did. The kid backed off of him from then on. You know, you got to stand up for yourself, and he wouldn’t do that. One time, they were playing ball over there at Leavitts, anyway at a ball field. David got in the way. Anyway, Roy—they pitched him a ball and cracked at it and it hit David in the head. He had black eyes down here. Oh man. We thought, he was going to kill before they were raised. SH: I guess I have one more question now hearing this. What brought you to the decision to legally adopt Roy and David? Because you were married to their mother and raising them as your kids, why go through the legal way? WH: Well when we got back here, they were Beerninks, that was their last name. They were going to school and they felt out of place not being called Harris like the rest. You know? So we felt like, “Yeah, they aughta have that same name and have that same right.” So we went ahead and adopted. We didn’t know if we would be able to because Ken, he was a womanizer. He ended up marrying her best friend. After he left her, and had a baby with her. Just about the same time, your dad came along. When we were still in Norfolk, we were looking at that, doing that. The Catholic church came down and checked it all out and everything, you know? They wanted him to get them. That’s the way it is. But when we… we visited them one time. We went to their place and he has this whole family with this other lady. You know what his comment was to me when 66 we left? “Well take care of them for me.” That ground against the grain to me. I didn’t say anything, but I just didn’t like it one bit. He was in radio communications, is what he did. But his parents, they came out and visited us a few times and we took them out to the Kennecott Copper Mine. Different things like downtown, like Temple Square. They were great people. I really liked them. He had one brother that came and stayed with us in their old neighborhood. He was a minister, he brought his daughter and they stayed with us. So I guess we were okay with them because they seemed nice. What can you do? But Ken, well he felt guilty I’m sure. You know, what do you do when you are in a situation like that? I don’t know because I haven’t been there. But Shirley remembers the old days and the old neighborhood. Your dad doing that on the bike. Shirley Harris: That was funny, that was so funny. I just laughed all of the rest of the day. I just couldn’t believe that he could do that. WH: He was straight out and it decided to go back. Shirley Harris: He stuck out this way and… WH: And then he meant to do that. SH: And then there was one request that you play Hokie Pokie for us. WH: Do I have to? SH: If you can. You said you were going to get rid of it. WH: There’s an old mic right here. SH: Well we can move that. 67 WH: Okay. Okay you poor guys. KH: Do you want me to record the Hokie Pokie? SH: I think you need to record the Hokie Pokie. WH: I’ll try. SH: I’ll move this mic, do you want it right on the piano or I guess we will move it over here. WH: You can put it wherever you want but I got to move these off of there. This is the tablet that your dad bought. [Wayne plays the Hokie Pokie on the piano] KH: We will just end by saying, “Thank you for your time.” WH: Oh thank you for coming, you guys I felt bad that we kept you so long. KH: Don’t feel bad at all, it was a delight. Wayne Jay Harris Joined the United States Navy on 19 November 1957. Graduated from Naval Boot Camp on 24 January 1958. Took leave on 31 January 1958 and left home for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on 16 February 1958. Took leave again on 30 August 1958. Wayne left for Norfolk, Virginia on 13 September 1958. Took leave on 18 September 1959 and returned Norfolk, Virginia on 7 October 1959.