Oral History Program Caril Jennings Interviewed by Sarah Taylor 20 May 2019 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Caril Jennings Interviewed by Sarah Taylor 20 May 2019 Copyright © 2018 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 Women 2020 Project was initiated to examine the impact women have had on northern Utah. Weber State University explored and documented women past and present who have influenced the history of the community, the development of education, and are bringing the area forward for the next generation. The project looked at how the 19th Amendment gave women a voice and representation, and was the catalyst for the way women became involved in the progress of the local area. The project examines the 50 years (1870-1920) before the amendment, the decades to follow and how women are making history today. ____________________________________ 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: Jennings, Caril, an oral history by Sarah Taylor, 20 May 2019, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Caril Jennings Circa 2019 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Caril Jennings, conducted on May 20, 2019, in her home in Ogden, Utah, by Sarah Taylor. Caril discusses her life, her memories, and the impact of the 19th Amendment. Sarah B. Tooker, the video technician, is also present during this interview. ST: It’s Monday May 20, 2019. 10:15, we are at Caril Jennings’ house. Thank you for having us. I’m here with Caril Jennings and Sarah Tooker, who is operating the camera and a cat and a dog. I’m Sarah Taylor. Alright, so getting started, why don’t we start with where and when you were born? CJ: I was born in El Reno, Oklahoma in 1948, and I came to Utah in 1950 in my parents’ car. I have relatives in Oklahoma, but no childhood memories there. I grew up, essentially in Ogden and then Roy. I’ve lived a couple of other places, but this is where I come back to because this is my home. I love these mountains. When you look at them, there’s Ben Lomond and then there’s Mt. Ogden. That’s where we live, and everybody I know who loves living here has that same feeling. Yeah, that’s where I’m from. I consider this place my hometown. ST: Do you have any childhood memories that you especially loved about being here in Ogden? CJ: Oh, my parents were here, I loved that. It was my parents; it wouldn’t have mattered. Lorin Farr Park had a wonderful amusement park in the summer, and I really liked that. I even saw this Cisco kid and his pony, Diablo and I had an 2 autographed picture till I was 20. I don’t know what I did with it. That’s a fun memory. I was an okay student, but in the fifth grade I caught on fire. Two things, Ms. Hansen, made us sing every day and she had been a musical theater person at Weber, so she was the beautiful Doris Day looking soprano. Just listening to her was like having Cinderella as my school teacher. Then, after lunch at quiet time, she would have us listen to a radio station called KWHO. It was a precursor to KUER and they played classical music. We’d put our heads down on the desk and I'd hear classical music. I had never heard it before. My mom was listening to Frank Sinatra and The Ink Spots and “How much is that doggy in the window?” Silly songs. So she introduced that kind of stuff to me. That was when I learned to play the piano. The song books that she had us sing from was a Rogers and Hammerstein Songbook. Oklahoma! I was from Oklahoma, so of course I loved that song. And, “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.” All of these corny Roger and Hammerstein songs that were popular in the 1950s. I got that piano book, and I learned to play the piano. I also had a reading teacher who was a man. I had never had a male teacher and you got to go up and talk to him every day that you had a book. You did an oral report. When it came time to do the piano lessons, we’d go to the library and I’d max my card out and I’d come home and read all of those books. Six, seven, books. So, I go up and talk to Mr. Brady every day. Anyway, in the fifth grade something happened to me. Mr. Brady would listen to me talk about my books, and Ms. Hansen brought me music. Then after that, once I learned to 3 play piano, I played piano in church.—There was a bible song called “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam” and gosh, I wanted to shine—Then I got to junior high school, and got into choir. Choir was my entry level drug of art. Except, I took an art class too. I loved to draw and I loved to sing. When you sing together, it’s one thing to be a soloist, but to be in a harmony. Oh my god, I think when people first started making harmonic sounds together, they must have thought they were making magic because it is like magic. There’s nothing like it. I want lonely, heartbroken, abused, forgotten, neglected children to have as much art as a rich person whose parents provide for them, and the place to do that is in public schools and we aren’t doing that. I don’t know how we are doing it. There are opportunities out in the community and people talk about how art is important, and I think kids listen to that, so art is still a way to be rebellious. You’re not learning it in school, but you’re an artist someplace else. I think that’s why we have so many garage bands because there’s not all that much music in school. But, the arts in school are so important. I think we neglect it, but it’s a real skill. As I got older and lived in Roy, coming to Weber State was a step up to me. I heard my first symphony in 1963 at Ogden High School. Maurice Abravanel brought the Utah Symphony to Ogden High. That’s where they played because the Browning Center wasn’t built. But once the Browning Center was built, that became a new temple of the arts. The arts—that’s where I could see a symphony. 4 Oh, I have a fond, fond, fond memory of a music teacher in junior high school, out at Roy. I was in the choir, the swanky choir, you know, the select one. Utah Symphony used to come to Roy Junior High School. The Utah Symphony would come and visit us in the early 1960s because there was money from the Kennedy surge of art. Jackie Kennedy was a real influence for me because she said, “It doesn’t matter if your parents are blue collar or working class. This stuff is for everyone.” I believed her and I do believe it, even to this day that the arts aren’t relegated to people who can afford them. They are out there for all of us. When food and shelter isn’t enough for your happiness, sometimes art is a real consolation. Anyway, at my junior high school, the music teacher says, “I see how much you enjoy this. My wife and I would like to invite you to come with us to the symphony.” That was my first symphony with my junior high school teacher and his name was Mr. Pingree and he taught piano in Roy forever, but my parents couldn’t afford it. But we went to the symphony. It was the New World Symphony by Dvorak. And, honest to god, it was the New World. It was for me! All I had to do was get a ride to wherever it was. In that way, he changed my life and I owe that guy a lot because of that. What a wonderful gesture. He didn’t know me, I wasn’t his piano student. He just saw me beaming and said, “That girl needs to see the orchestra.” It was at the Ogden High School, which was a beautiful place. Oh, and in those days, we wore gloves when we went to the symphony. You dressed up like you went to church. It was 1963. 5 Anyway, everything just kept pointing to me, that, “Yes, you are welcome here. You are welcome here.” Singing led to theater in high school. I wanted to be smart, so I was really good in science and math. I thought I might be a geologist. But when I actually had a chance to go to school and audition for a play at Weber, it was all over. I was a theater student when I was there. Then I met my husband who was an art student and we’ve been married almost 50 years in September. People have this idea about Ogden being a redneck town a long time ago and it still is. But if you want to find refinement, there’s a steady stream of it through history and my history and how it’s just blossomed. Right now, there’s music everywhere, theater everywhere, dances, in all sorts of stages in Ogden. It used to be only once or twice a year and one of them was the Nutcracker and the other one was probably, “Giselle.” Sorry. Not that they aren’t lovely, but, you know, popular things. But modern dance troops are coming through. The Ogden Symphony Ballet is being revitalized. That’s a cool history. It’s all women, for about 70 or 75 years, and they’ve changed their name from Ogden Symphony Ballet to “Onstage Ogden.” They are branching out from the symphony and the ballet, and it’s new people. ST: One thing that was kind of interesting, you mentioned Jackie Kennedy and how she said something that kind of influenced you as a.... CJ: Yeah, I would talk about local artists but I would also talk about—Christmas time buy art from local artists, you know, give art. Support these folk people. But I also, from time to time, would write about why I think art is important. Especially 6 for young people. When Kennedy became president, you know his famous saying, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you could do for your country.” The same thing that I wanted to be a sunbeam, I wanted to do things for my country. So, I started doing the volunteer work with the church. The wives had things they did, and Jackie Kennedy’s mission was promoting the arts. I mean, the Kennedy Center is from her work, and the fact that Maurice Abravanel had money to go around to junior high schools was because she made money available to them. As a matter of fact, we were still being the beneficiary to that kind of money. When my husband and I were dating, the Ogden City school people would bring in famous contemporary artists to do arts in the school things. Because there was this money that paid them, it was worth their while. That’s how my husband ended up in California to get a job. He got a job at a Ford Foundation Art Institute because he met someone coming through here. A famous person who said, “You know, I’ll put in a good word for you if you wanted to apply for this place.” And it paid off—so that was in 1969. There was still this arts money in the pipeline, but her idea was arts were for everyone, and not just the privileged. The national endowment for the arts came under that, where it actually put government money into our cultural heritage. Make sure there was one, but both John F. and Jackie talked about how important the arts were. It was fertile ground. I understood the catharsis of singing songs together or writing something down on a piece of paper. At twelve years old, I was a conscious human being. I mean it made sense to me, and it just all conspired 7 with Mr. Pingree inviting me to see the orchestra, and Maurice Abravanel coming to my school. I mean, I’m telling you, I’m a working class child and got to see first class music in school, and they are not doing it now. Now they can ship kids, whole busloads up to the school to see things, and they do do that, but I don’t think they see the symphony. I don’t. And there’s nothing, to me, more powerful than the loud noise you get when you put all of those instruments together. That’s the overpowering thing about a jazz band. It’s that wall of brass noise, you know a little kid’s hearing that. They are impressed. I really encourage people to bring their kids to Jazz at the Station, especially if they are already taking music in school. They can see what it’s like, and you see these little kids and they know how to dance, and they can dance. I’m not telling them to stay in their seats; the place is big enough that the kids can dance. Being in front of stuff like that, being in front of painting, I don’t think you have to understand what you are looking at. I think, those live things going past your eyes tickling your brain does something. Figuring out how they did it or if it’s an abstract? What does it mean? You don’t have to know what it means. Look at the color. Look at that. That’s mostly what I’m asking for, just the attention of looking at something, absorbing it. It’s magic. When we first went into the kitchen and you said about the light. SBT: Yes. CJ: Everything is like that to me, and I think it’s like that to the rest but we start to edit what we are looking at because we can’t look at it all at once. Otherwise, we’d be autistic, you know? Unable to even express ourselves because we are so 8 overwhelmed. Growing up, learning to talk and looking at things is part of how we get socialized. I just love to pay attention to things, to look at things, and hear things. ST: I was curious as to how you got from high school into university or how you got became involved in the community and the arts and that kind of transition from you. From personal enjoyment to, “I want to spread this to every people.” CJ: This is a funny story. I told you earlier that Maurice Abravanel, who is famous for the Utah Symphony, had money during the Kennedy era to take the symphony around to places and came to Roy Jr. High School all three years that I was there. The first year, I'm in the seventh grade and I already love my music class. We are singing and I just loved that part and I had to learn to play the piano in fifth grade because I had a wonderful teacher. We sang in school. Anyway, Maurice Abravanel came to the school and did the symphony. We all stand up when it’s over and we are supposed to march back to our classes and I had heard in Sunday school that if someone does something nice, that you should tell them. So, my class gets up and marches this way and I go right up to the stage. I put my hand out and I said, "Thank you for bringing this music to my school." I mean, don’t ask me where that girl came from, but I felt compelled. It was just such a wonderful thing. He spent a few moments with me and he was so gracious. Then the next year it happened, I did exactly the same thing. Three years in a row, I went up afterwards and said something to the man. I realized at the time that he was bringing it to us and that was community outreach. I mean, I didn’t know that word, community outreach, but they were 9 bringing it to us rather than expecting us to go to the temples of art. So that’s 9th grade. 10, 11, 12th, I do the plays. My first year at Weber State, I’m in a play, in a little one act and I didn’t have any role, but I was a pretty girl. I was Our Lady of the Shadows. It was about this guy, he’s got a real daydream with a woman he’s never even talked to, and I was the woman, so I'm dressed up to be beautiful. I’m downstairs underneath the Browning Center stage, and here comes Maurice Abravanel because he’s ready to go on stage pretty soon for the orchestra because the orchestra is now playing in the Browning Center. Well he recognizes me. And not only that, he’s just delighted with how beautiful I am. And he just loves the fact that I’m in the theater, that I’m an artist. He was just effusive. I’m that little girl from Roy Junior High School and then the next night, our dress rehearsal night, he sends me a rose. Me. ST: That is so sweet. CJ: So Im thinking to myself, “Here is this great man, and he’s sharing this. He’s sharing this.” I’ve got these examples—Up until I came to work as a secretary in the performing arts department. I never had a job that was art centered. It was always from the business community. I was an accounts manager in a chemical company before I came to Weber. And I’d never got training for any of the jobs I ever had except for theater. And I would just show up at work and act like I knew what I was doing. Man, I’m a convincing enough person, and no one ever questioned. Ever. I was never even questioned about how I’ve done my job because I just act like I know what I’m doing. Theater brought that to me. But, 10 whenever I act like I know what I’m talking about, it also gets me the foot in the door when I go out and talk to people. Over the years, I do know what I’m talking about. ST: What other jobs, other than that the factory one that you were referencing, where you kind of had that attitude of, “I know what I’m doing and I can just…” . . . CJ: Well, that one. I’ll tell you how I got that job. So my kids go back to school. I’m nickel-and-diming jobs. I’ve got the Signpost is paying me to be a typesetter. That’s what they called it, even though it was still ink—wax paper on blue line. Then they were transitioning to the computer. From there, I went to work for a company that worked for the Forest Service and I typeset their technical papers with all their mathematical formulas and stuff. I didn’t know how to do that. I wasn’t a type person. I wasn’t an engineer, so I ended up being a typesetter just by doing it. By someone hiring me and because I was a good typist and because I was smart enough to know that if that sentence wasn’t right. So there’s that one. I worked in a factory that packed invoice/receipt printing. I was a waitress at Pizzano’s restaurant, our favorite restaurant. I was a medical transcriptionist at McKay-Dee Hospital without any experience, but I had worked in an audiologist office. I was his secretary, so I was familiar with a lot of medical jargon. Oh I forgot to mention, I’m smart. I had some good reading, writing, spelling skills. So I never had a medical transcription class, but I knew how to do it. I knew how to do it. That was a job I wasn’t trained for. This is how I got the job as the accounts manager at the chemical company. I was doing those part-time jobs. A friend of mine, an older lady 11 whose her part-time jobs were cleaning. She had several businesses and some houses. She could never go on a vacation because these people relied on her to keep them clean, and she was afraid that if she quit doing them, someone else would get the job. So I said, “Florence, listen, let me take this. Let me take over. I don’t want your job. You take this vacation and these people can pay me while you’re gone and your job is going to be here when you come back.” One of the places that I cleaned was this chemical company, and I’m cleaning, I’m cleaning, I’m cleaning, I’m cleaning, and I hear these men are tearing their hair out because they got this big bid and it’s due by this time, and they can’t figure out how to type. Because they normally send their correspondence to their home office in Montana, and then Montana sends it back. I’m listening to the three stooges and thinking, “Give me a break.” Then I finally said, “You guys, I can help you here.” So I helped them get their paperwork done and they got everything. Then they wanted me. They said, “Could we hire you?” I mean, that was out of the blue and I thought, “No, Florence is your cleaner.” And they said, “No, can we hire you to work in our office.” And I said, “Okay, but I’m not working for less than you pay Florence.” Because she was getting paid six bucks an hour, which in those days was big, to clean. Secretaries were making minimum wage, which was less than four dollars. So I told them, “Well I’m not going to do office work for less than cleaning.” And they thought six dollars an hour was great, so I worked part-time for them for quite a while. While I was doing all of these other jobs and going to school at Weber, one class at a time. Then they offered me a full-time job and gave me a whole 12 bunch more of responsibilities and I learned some more things. But I didn’t know how to be an accounts manager. Well, part of my job was collecting money. The deal was, if anybody ordered anything from us, I would see how much they owed us, and how far out it was then I would call them and say, “We can deliver this stuff to you do, but can we pick up a check for…” There would be this silence and then there’d be silence on my part because I know about drama. And sooner or later, they’d say, “Yeah.” So, the kind of stuff I learned about being on stage, worked for getting people to pay. It was pretty funny working for a business like that because I essentially am an environmentalist and I’m saying to them, “I don’t know about working for a chemical company,” and they said, “Well if you feel that way, we have part of the stuff we have to do is OSHA and we have to keep our materials and data sheets up to date and you could do that for us.” So, I ended up being an OSHA contact for a chemical company. What?! How did that happen? But, it’s the science and the chemistry and the engineering. That kind of language didn’t scare me. You know, the orderly part of keeping business. I could pay someone else. I don’t want to do it for myself, but money. The company got bought by a foreign company who I had just seen on 60 minutes for running single-hull oil tankers. They’re all double-hull now. But in those days, we were having oil spills all around the world for cheap low life companies registered in foreign ports, running terrible ships, and one of them was the company that had just bought us out. So I gave my three month notice, and I thought, “Sure, 13 I’d be able to come to work at Weber State.” In three months, not a single secretary’s job came open at all. At the end of three months, I had no job. Then I opened the show, “The 10,000 Years of Utah Artists.” That first week, I’m unemployed and it was great because the show was great and everything went well. I went out on Monday, to start looking for jobs and I got hired that same day to be a medical transcriptionist. I type. I passed the spelling test. Now, I said, I had worked in an audiologist’s office. They were all related to the fact that I could type. Then they were related to the fact that I was well read enough and had a big enough background and none of the things I ever did was very frightening to me. Yeah, those are some funny jobs, I’ve had. Oh, I was a carhop. Just missed this roller skate era, but there was a place called Rusty’s which was a famous drive-in. It’s where Wall and Riverdale Road meet and where Warrens is now. That used to be an atomic era place: a little tiny place with a great big long roof that looked like a 1950s kind of rocket ship. I mean, you know a car parking place where you could come up and, we’d come to the window and bring your food on a tray. That was my first job. And working for the internal revenue, I got that job because I passed the test. My ACT score actually got me the job at the internal revenue. So, I started working for the internal revenue the summer I got out of high school. It was seasonal but it worked really well for being a student. I could work and save money. It was the Vietnam Era. So when internal revenue would lay-off people, we’d go to work for the Defense Depot, and I’d do bills of lading for garbage cans going to Vietnam. You know, stuff like that. I did a 14 weeks’ worth for garbage cans going to Vietnam. It was funny. Because you look at how big a railroad car is, it’s a lot of garbage cans. And it put things into perspective. I would have been a secretary or a clerk if I hadn’t had a desire to do something else—have art in my life. If I had just been after money. At the Internal Revenue, they were, like I said, doing a switching over to computer from Microfiche. They were recruiting some people to send back east, and they recruited me to send me back to Washington D.C. and be well paid and be in a start-up for this computer stuff through them. I was just political enough that I saw the Internal Revenue as a device for enhancing the war effort. I could barely pay my taxes... I mean, philosophically. The only reason why I didn't not pay my taxes was because I would go to jail. Otherwise, I was philosophically opposed to what they were spending my money on. So, working for the Internal Revenue spooked me out. Well, after the Internal Revenue I worked at a place called Grand Central in their snack bar making burgers and sandwiches and caramel corn and stuff like. Oh, and I got married, more or less. SBT: I remember Grand Central. CJ: Yeah! Well I worked down there for them, and then we decided we were going to get married and Lee—my husband—went to California and got a job and came back to get me, rescued me from Grand Central. They were great to work for. I went to work for an estate planning service. I didn’t know anything about estate planning, didn’t work there for very long before I went to work for the journalism department at UCLA, as a secretary. But the job they gave me was to do the blue 15 line printing, typesetting, for their grad school newspaper. So, that’s the first place I learned how to do that kind of work. It was professional style at the time. And, when I talk about the blue line paper, you would lay out a page, and then photograph it, the blue line disappeared. But you used the blue line to line up your text and what you do is you type your text, and you would have your illustration and you would run it through this machine and put a light coat of wax on it and then you would put on the blue line paper. Then take a photograph of it and that was your printed page. That sounds really low tech, but it was an industry skill that someone taught me, and that I ended up using. That’s how I got my job at the Signpost. I just kept picking up these skills. They were all related to words on paper. I love words on paper, so I often think if I was only an artist, what art would it be, you know? If I could have any skill. I don’t know. I wish I could write a book. I wish I was very good at poetry. I wish I could sing. I love to act, but I never want to remember a script again in my life. I’ll do reader’s theater, but I’m never going to memorize because it’s just terrifying. Especially, my time of life. I’ve never been old before but I know my memorization skills are not increasing. So, I’ve had a whole bunch of funny jobs, and all of them had great confidence that I was doing it right. ST: It is a good sign. CJ: Yeah, because you know? I acted like I was. Anyway, yep, that’s me—Oh, I didn’t even touch on the art gallery, my first art exhibit. ST: Do you want to go back to that? We can. CJ: Well let me tell you this. 16 ST: When was it? CJ: In 1984-1985, I worked on the National Western Film Festival. That came from the theater department and it was a cooperative adventure with the Union Station. They were talking about cowboy movies, so I started working there. By way of that, I learned how to put things together. I put together their beautiful program. I was the archivist of everything that went into this festival, so I had these great skills. Then I got connected with the Myra Powell Gallery to be on their board because they wanted those skills. One of the first things I did was a costume show with Catherine Zublin, but I was a theater fan and I recognized her beautiful costumes. So I thought, “A costume show would be great.” That was the first one I organized there. I’m also being a geography, archeology, geography student and I get connected with the archeology people at Weber State and I have this vision that during archeology emphasis month. I would put together a show in the Myra Powell called, “10,000 years of Utah Artists.” And, if you could believe this, it was like 1990. I’m not a Ph.D., I’m not connected, but I had some friends who were connected. I had artifacts from Utah State University, the University of Utah, Weber State University, people’s private collections and a state archeologist lent us some things that you could no longer get now. We borrowed the old rock cases used for the Golden Spike Rock and Mineral Show. They were long glass cases with lights, so everything was protected, but we didn’t have any cabinets to put them on. They were up on saw horses, draped with black plastic, but it didn’t matter because what was happening was inside of those lighted cases. Then I made this really nice book about archeologists, the 17 art, and the people who lived here. I had a friend, who was taking an art class to be an archeological drafts person, make accurate drawings of the things. So, she made six or seven drawings that went into this book. It was pre-computer, and there was a cut and paste. But I was able to blue line wax it together and then take it to a print shop and they printed it and it looked really good. Union Station has that collection because that’s where I did it. But it was my first independent, stand alone, great piece of community work that would have never happened if I hadn’t said, “I want to do this.” That’s when I finally figured out that all I have to say is, “I want to do this” then start doing it and I’m not waiting for somebody to say, “Yes, you can.” I’m not waiting for approval. There was kind of autonomy that came to me after. I think it had a lot to do with being over 30, when I stopped being somebody’s daughter and somebody’s mother and somebody’s wife, I finally felt like me. And what I’m asking for is not a big deal. Why would anybody interfere with this? So it kind of gave me permission to do anything that I wanted, and essentially I’ve been doing that— anything I wanted. Every once in a while, it pays off for everybody and for some other people too. People say, “Oh you are so good to do this.” And I’m saying, “I’m doing this for me. This is the town I want to live in. I want this in my town.” I’m doing it for me. You know, this is my town, and I want to be a sunbeam, so I am. I just think of myself as a very ordinary person. I think my extraordinary skill is just my enthusiasm, my Tiggerness. Okay, next question. ST: Sometimes that’s what’s needed though, the enthusiasm. 18 CJ: Oh you know what, I do think we need it. Every cruise ship needs a cheerleader. I certainly understand the drama and tragedy of existence. I mean, I watch the news. We are going to hell in a handbasket, but we are going to have music, theater, and dance all the way out the door if I have anything to say about it. It’s such a privilege for me to be alive. I just want to be celebrating it all of the time. I don’t know how I got to be so lucky. Some of it is design. I hung out with the right people—loving, smart, talented, good people. I’ve just been really lucky not to have had any interference from any bad influences. Part of that wanting to be a good person was part of it. Long before I knew I had any desire to do something, I knew I wanted to be good. I don’t know where that comes from because my brothers and sisters don’t feel that way. Anyway, I thought it was important that you get this life and then you should do the right thing with it. And for me, the arts are the right thing. CJ: I have these examples in my head, and theater often is political, and I’ve been a serious political person, with outspoken opinions for a long time. Theater is another vehicle for some of those things. So I always saw that as community outreach. But when did I really get started with my kids? I started volunteering in the schools to do a play, or music, or visual art things. Then, it was The National Western Film Festival that really showed me how to do it as an intern. This is where I learned to work as an intern, you fill this role, you learn these things, keep record of it, put it in your portfolio and that was a turning point for me, to see that my skills were something valued. Words on paper were very important because we didn’t have the internet. Words on paper were how we kept a record. 19 You proved that we even did what we were doing, so I got that really good experience. Oh! I completely forgot about this! We SAVED the Egyptian Theater because part of the National Western Film Festival went on in the Egyptian Theater. Because I had a theater background, I house managed the old Egyptian Theater. Oh god, it was so good, and it was good for my kids, because they helped me sweep up the popcorn. Another one of these things where they were right there beside me. They did legitimate work. That’s where they learned community work and volunteer work is legitimate. Anyway, I got the spot of managing a big building. That increased my confidence. Then, because we were dealing with the Union Station, I met with the people at the Union Station. That’s how I got on with The Myra Powell Gallery. It turns out, I had friends who were there. But they just hadn’t seen me in the context of what I could do for them. But now, they could. I could be useful, and that’s good. I love to be useful. So, that’s how I went from being a student doing an internship. It focused all of my skills and made me realize that what I had was of value. It was more than just being a secretary. It was more than being a clerk. There was this creative and archival element to it. Keeping stories alive. Bringing history. Oh, I forgot to tell you about the newspaper in British Columbia. But that’s another story because I had some experience there. Every place along the way, I picked up some experience that finally, someone paid me for. But that internship by way of Weber State was how I got into the community stuff. Then I saw that there were places where I could get 20 involved with people in town without politics. I wasn’t running for mayor, I wasn’t running city council. I was just hoping to keep the theater open. So I have a great archive of what I call my "Egyptian Summer." I can’t wait for somebody to look at that one. So, I just kept hop skipping from one project to another, and that’s what ended up in my giant portfolio. It was hands down, something I might have had in a master’s in marketing. But, his portfolio was full of chain link fence, and mine was full of art. CJ: As a matter of fact, the way I got back to Weber State was one day my daughter got a scholarship to play in the orchestra while she was being a math and physics and geology major. She was probably 17 or 18. She came home from school one day, “Mom! Mom! Gale is quitting, you better apply for her job!” That was in September, and I got the job in December. I was doing medical transcription at McKay-Dee Hospital across the street, which was an interesting job. The long months of waiting, and it turns out that there was an African American woman who applied for the job, and there was some concern that they hire a white woman. So it had to go through the EEO and by the time it got through there, they said, “Oh yeah, you need to hire this woman.” Because I knew all of the chairmen of the department of music, theater, and dance, I didn’t have to start from scratch and it was so obvious that I was an adoring fan. Anyway, three months later, they hired me permanently during the Christmas break. 21 The person who was marketing the department couldn’t stand artists. I married an artist. My children are artists. I mean they do other things, but they’re artists, and she couldn’t stand the egos. She wasn’t even interested in their arts. She got the job because she was a marketing student. Not because she loved the arts, and she was there too long. She was just a cinder, a beam burned out. She was so burned out that the last six months that she was there, I did her job. She took some extended sick leave, and then used up all of her vacation. The way I had gotten my degree was doing one hour practicum marketing this dance, marketing that theater. A good deal of my final senior hours were practicum. That’s where my portfolio came from. When it was time to replace her, they were looking for a marketing person and everyone who applied, either sold chain link, or garage doors, or cars, or insurance. Here I come with my fat artsy portfolio and they already knew who I was. They knew I was a lunatic for art. I even said that I would do this job if they didn’t pay me, and they didn’t pay me very much. I retired on not much more than a secretary. I don’t care, I was rich. I am still rich because this stuff has made me my wealth. You know, of course my family and my children, but this is something that I’ve shared with my children and my husband, my husband is a painter. There’s an attic full of his paintings. And when I do the Basin and Range show, it’s landscaped and interesting looks at nature are on the wall. We are still art students on a long date. I like the fact that we haven’t outgrown it because when I think of the art students in any of the arts who I went to school with. Unless they got a job 22 teaching, hardly any of them actually worked as just strictly an artist. It wasn’t very many years out of school when most of the art students that we knew were no longer doing their art. They went to work for the Internal Revenue or Hill Air Force Base. Even if they got a job teaching, they stopped doing art because teaching is so overwhelming. Anyway, so art is something I have shared with my kids since they were born and could sit up at a high chair with paper and crayon. I just had to teach them not to chew crayons. But once they saw the power of drawing something on a piece of paper, it worked. ST: One thing that I was interested in was how you balanced multiple roles because you were doing a bunch of stuff in the community, you mentioned getting your degree, you mentioned raising your children, how was that? CJ: I’ll tell you how it was. My family was involved in it with me. My husband has been 100% supportive of me and anything I’ve ever wanted to do. When we were raising our children, I can’t say he did 50/50 but he probably did the same amount of laundry I did. Changed the same number of diapers. He cooks. As a matter of fact, when I met him he cooked better than I do. Our roles have changed. I didn’t go to work. Seriously, I didn’t go to work until my kids were school age. We didn’t have a lot, but I had the time to be the stay-at-home mom with my kids. It was an incredible luxury. We paid for it by not having stuff, but I had stuff. I had that time. When the kids went to school, I started working and going back to school myself. 23 My husband never had a discouraging word. He encouraged me entirely. How many women up there were facing opposition from their husbands, for being out of the home, for meeting other people, for growing while their husbands weren’t was quite shocking to me when I became the department secretary. There were stalking husbands who came to the department, where I felt compelled to call campus security. I don’t know how single women do it because I had the support of my best pal, my art buddy. I mean, we’re making this up. Then I dragged my kids into things from the beginning. If I was going to write about a concert while I was writing for the Signpost, I had babies strapped to my chest. It was cool, and they liked it. So, that’s the way I did it. It was not just for my own interest, but it was part of our family life. For the real support and love of it, the people that I live with, I’ve been very fortunate to have children who still like me and they’re in their 40’s. Children who actually kind of liked me when they were teenagers. Getting them involved in what I was doing was a good way for me to handle the kind of things they might have conflicted with me about, and it was safe because it was something outside of us that we could share, rather than me being a boss or having them say, “I’m doing this because I’m rebelling.” Anyway, that’s how I did it. This enchanted cottage environment made it all possible. The enchanted cottage part made life better for them. It was more interesting. Both of my children are musicians. My son sells computer things, but he’s a jazz musician and a performer at jazz ensembles, and he co-produces Jazz at the Station with me. Then my daughter teaches developmental math at Weber State, but she 24 plays the upright bass with Chamber Orchestra Ogden. So I’m marketing two programs that my children are still involved in. Coming to Weber, my first day at work they introduced me to a little tiny Apple because my department had decided everyone was getting computers. Up until then, faculty members did not all have computers. As a matter of fact, up until then they had typewriters. This is the early 1990s and my department just a year or two before had all been introduced to computers and they were on Apples. I’m so glad. I learned to do everything on this little bitty Apple. They had a student intern come in and be my teacher, just to introduce me how it worked. Once you get in and you know what you are doing then he would come back once a month and help me with Page Maker and, “Here’s how you do this. Here’s how you do that.” Weber enhanced my skills. They already knew who I was because, after this whole long thing of coming back to Weber, I ended up in the same department I started in. I had a long history, everyone—half the faculty members knew me from supporting their programs. It was like, “Welcome home,” or “Finally, I’m in the club.” While I was there, I got my degree. It took me 29 years to get my bachelor’s degree, and I graduated the same year as my daughter. My degree is in science, well anthropology, geography—computer geography, the GIS stuff and philosophy. There’s kind of a humanities in there. But, philosophy at Weber State is included in social science so my degree was in the social science. I got that while sitting at the desk being the secretary in the performing arts department. 25 After I got my degree, the dean, June, asked me, “Well now that you have your degree, what are you going to do?” And I said, “Well, I’m going to be the department of performing arts secretary.” And she said, “Well don’t you want to go on and do bigger things? Better paid things?” And I said, “Well I will think of it as the secretary of the performing arts department, like the secretary of defense,” and it made her laugh, but actually she stopped asking me because I wasn’t doing my degree because I was ambitious. I was doing my degree because I could. Then, suddenly I saw, when my daughter was going to graduate. She was getting ready to sign off on the final classes she had to take and I realized, “If I hurried up, I could graduate with her.” That’s why I finished it off because I wasn’t getting anything out of it, except I loved every single class that I took. Every single class I took introduced me to all of those people that I got to do my other things, you know? So it was like taking a ball to a park. People would come out and play. I was always an interested student, so the faculty members loved that. Anyway, Weber did that for me and enhanced my skills. CJ: But then, as soon as I became the marketing director, the first thing I did besides the Greek Festival is I started Jazz in the Sky Room. That was in January 1998. During the Heritage Festival 2019, I produced the first Heritage Jazz Festival—a nine hour day of local jazz musicians that ended with Joe McQueen and the city paid for the musicians because I had to nickel and dime to get musicians. I went from the Sky Room down to the Junction, which was an old cafeteria, and then they remodeled the building, so it went dark for one month and then Union 26 Station says, “Well why don’t you come down here while the Union Building is being fixed.” So, we went down there and I’ve never left because it’s just so cool, and it’s Union Station. I also started V-Day at Weber State. Jazz at the Station is my biggie. Because Jazz is part of our heritage and it came from 25th Street when 25th Street had a bad reputation. It doesn’t give it the credit that it deserves for the way it changed things and this is my premise. I do Jazz at the Station second Wednesday of the month, a free hour of music all ages, easily accessible. I mean, I’m hitting all of the buttons about why it’s a good community event. But I do an art show and I’m working on the fourth iteration. It’s called, “Jazz from the Station: 25th Street Desegregation and All of That Jazz.” It essentially is the story about a woman, although we credit Joe McQueen. The woman’s name was Annabelle Weekly and she ran the Porter’s and Waiter’s Club. Her and her husband owned it, but she infused it with her community spirit and sense of joy. She was a dynamic woman. And when Joe McQueen came as a jazz musician, every African American came to the Porter’s and Waiter’s because it was a safe place. When Joe moved here in 1946 or whatever year it was, he met her because he came there to eat. They might have even rented a room when they first came. But he and his wife lived on 25th Street, upstairs and down two doors from the Porter’s and Waiter’s club. That’s like a half a block from Union Station and he did spend some time working for the railroad. But mostly, his connection was African-Americans who couldn’t find a place in Salt Lake, knew that there was a congenial place here, and it was worth the half-hour 27 train trip. I mean, the trains used to run regularly, so anybody after Joe was here for a little while. Anybody that had his number would say, “Hey, we are coming up.” Then Joe would get people together in the basement of her place. But it was her place, she’s the one that provided the open door. She had rooms upstairs. The Porter’s and Waiter’s club closed because Rock n’ Roll took over all the young people. No one likes Jazz. It’s okay if you say you don’t because very few people like it. I had to learn to like it. Once the club closed, she continued to run the hotel and the restaurant, and she rented her upstairs rooms to black students at Weber State, so she was sort of the black dormitory. But, I think there were plenty of young men then, my age now or older—who stayed there when they were students at Weber State. ST: Would you say she’s kind of an inspiration to you, tying into what you were trying to do with Jazz? CJ: Well, I discovered who she was, and nobody knew who she was. What’s with that? Joe gets famous because he’s the front man. He’s the guy bringing the music. But, she’s the place. I see some ways that’s the kind of person that I am. I make the place for something to happen and then other people come in and make that thing happen. Like V-day is an example. You get a dozen women together. Sometimes they don’t even know each other. I used to do some readings from a book called, The People Speak. Famous left-wing historian, whose name just escapes me, he’s taken these monologues from famous peoples of history and they play 28 together really well. It’s theater. You know, what someone was actually thinking at this time, so The People Speak¸ and depending on what the occasion was I’ve presented all women’s voices from that play at a women’s conference and then all the women who came to do the parts didn’t know each other till then, and my name’s not on it. It’s called, The People Speak. I got this smug satisfaction knowing that I ask people, “Do you want to come out and play?” And some people do. Some people do. And they are people who end up being my friends. I couldn’t have done the art stuff without them. I couldn’t have done the Greek Festival if all of my friends across campus weren’t willing to say, “This is how the Greeks talked about my…” This is the Greek antecedence of my discipline. That was really fun because one of the funnest things I had was Luke. He’s a computer science genius and visionary. But he talked about, Greek influences in computer science because they had apparently some little dial thing whose name escapes me. Anyway, I had some people racking their brain, “How can I tie my discipline into the Greek Festival?” I got that kind of satisfaction. No one is giving me money. I’m not getting a reward out of this. It’s not giving me status, except that recognition by these people that I like. And, I’m not a politician but a person who is out there teaching something. ST: What was your inspiration or driving force that led you to doing the Greek Festival? The idea occurred to you or what? CJ: I had a budget. Oh, oh! I know how the Greek Festival really started. We had a new faculty member that came to teach Latin. Actually, they hired his wife 29 because she was a very good development person, and he with his Ph.D. in Latin extra. But to me, it was like a real prize. They just parked him in Foreign Language while she was hanging around with all of the administration and donors. She was up there with all of the big guns, and they let him park in Foreign Language, and he had a degree in Latin and Greek and I thought, “I could use you, let’s do a Greek Festival and you could be the credential. You could be the respectable person that endorses this.” That was how it got started. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. But he was instrumental and then after a little while, he ended up being the Honors director. Of course, parking the Greek Festival with Honors was great. But I kept it in the performing arts. Every year, Weber State hosted the Classical Greek Theater Festival from the University of Utah. By the time I got there to market it, the people were not coming. A couple of years previously, one of the teachers was offended by Aristophanes and his 2,500 year old play called, “The Frogs.” If you are a fundamentalist, I don’t mean to offend you in any way, but she was so offended, she went to all of the schools and they stopped hosting, stopped bringing their students, and at the cheap rate that they were paying, that wasn’t enough to pay for what was going on. And I love Greek Festival—Greek Theater, I love it. It’s an acquired taste, just like Jazz but they have the term catharsis. That’s what art does for you. It helps you to release things. I buy one hundred percent. But, no one was coming to see the Greek Festival, so I had to do something to drive up interest. We had three or four people talk about the Greek stuff. Oh, the 30 anthropology club had Greek food. Over the years, the different things that we tied in were just a lot of fun. No one was getting anything from it. It didn’t look good on their resumes. You could talk to almost any person my age and there is some place in them that was enchanted by archeology and the Greeks and the Romans. You know, Hercules for crying out loud. So many of the creatures in our fairy tales. So, it wasn’t hard to get people to come out. It really wasn’t hard. That’s when I say some people are just waiting for someone to ask them to come out and play. You know, I’m a Tigger. I am. What’s really funny is basically I’m quite shy. I am. I’m a hermit now that I’m retired. Now that I don’t have to go out, I love to just be home. As much as I loved my job, I got homesick. Even for the eight hours or the ten hours, come on, be reasonable. Like I said, I don’t think I’m personally famous, but you’ve probably talked to a lot of people who were involved in one way or another in one of my projects. Oh, what I really forgot to tell you was for seven years, my husband, my family and I and pre-eminently my son, ran an art gallery on Washington Boulevard, called “Universe City”. That’s a big Archive that you guys have. It’s at least twelve artists a year for seven years, and I mean that many artists, at least 84 artists. Active artists in Ogden at that time, and some of them are still working, and many of them were students that are out teaching now. It’s a really good small-town archive of artists in Ogden that weren’t in the swanky places or the landscaped places. Kind of edgy people. Okay, so in the early, early 2000s there was first Friday Art Stroll stuff. But it wasn’t like it is now. We opened our gallery and we were one of the few private galleries. I mean, it wasn’t the Eccles 31 Center and Union Station and the Ogden City Arts. So, we were about ten years too early. ST: When you say the gallery, do you mean Myra Powell? CJ: Oh no, Universe City. We started that in 2004, so it’s ahead of what’s happening now. My son came home in 2004 and said, “Mom, I found this building. Let’s open an art gallery.” And I said, “Okay.” Yeah, and we ran it for seven years and met all of those artists. We made a point any time it was possible to be an activist group down there. We showed a lot of people of color in Ogden who don’t normally show up in galleries. There’s not that many of them, but man, if they were in Ogden, they got on our wall. One time, we had a skateboard show. The art on the skateboard was just as good as anything that’s on 25th or in a frame that went over your sofa. Once we had one of my costumes and makeup shows, so there were a lot of things and photos on the wall: exotic makeup, weird makeup, and tattoo art too. Some of that stuff is pretty amazing. So we were not like by New York styles were we edgy. But by Ogden, we were edgy. Lots of people would come in and say, “Well this doesn’t feel like Ogden. This feels like someplace else,” and we kind of thought about it being a doorway to being someplace else, talking about things we don’t normally talk about, or we don’t think about or look at. So, that was another kind of activism that I didn’t realize I was doing at the time. But it is. Once again, speaking out in my medium, which is artists. See, I don’t paint or dance. I work with artists. Artists are my medium. But I was able to just keep at it. I’m still doing it. That’s the thing that I think is cool. I retired six years 32 ago, I’m 70 years old. I’ve slowed down from marketing 140 shows a year. I only market twenty, but not a lot of 70-year-old people are marketing twenty shows a year. The person who’s marketing the College of Arts and Humanities probably doesn’t do twenty shows a year. She probably gets $60,000 a year. I bet she gets paid pretty well. My payment is we get to do it. Instead of having everybody else do it, I get to. First Friday Art Stroll was late, baby steps. There were eight galleries or something. Now it’s at every gallery and coffee shop and this Buskers and Bands at the bar. It’s exploded. But nevertheless, we had seven years of First Friday, where people would come from 25th Street—actually over to Washington. That’s when we had all of those other artists. And then, what I feel was when we got rid of that gallery, or when it failed—It kept draining us of money and it was a fantasy. We were essentially patronizing the artists just to give them a place on the wall. My husband and I were both working, and we didn’t go on cruises and we didn’t have extra vehicles but we had an art gallery. So, for seven years, I had a front room downtown. And at least once a month, First Friday I’d have hundreds of people. So I got to know a lot of people and then every month— besides having the First Friday—we would have at least one artist talk. But often, we were featuring people who had a point. When I did Basin and Range, which is a show that I’ve been doing since about 2005, 2006, the idea was politics. We were right across the street from city hall and they were gung ho about putting a ski lift, or a gondola, up to Malan’s Basin, which is the playground of Weber County. I was incensed to think it was 33 going to be a private ski resort facing west and 6,000 feet here. I mean, March skiing, and once it was private, it would be no longer the stomping ground of everybody. So as far as I’m concerned, anybody who can see this mountain, it belongs to them. It’s our sight shed. It’s our vision. It shouldn’t be dotted up so Basin and Range was, “Here’s all of these beautiful pieces of art about why we enjoy living here,” and “Do you know about the Basin and Range? They are geophysical provinces that geographers talk about and the Basin is the great basin and we are at the back edge of The Great Basin.” What a view! These are magic mountains, they run the wrong way. And not only that, they are just a great geology book because of the faults and the cliffs, and they glow at night because quartzite is translucent. I was really hot about being a geologist, so Basin and Range cultivates that. So in January, I would have four special events about why we need to keep this a green place. How are we going to do transportation here? What do we do about leave no trace? You know, just anybody that had anything to do with preserving our natural environment for our posterity. I’d focus and I’m still doing that. I did it, not this January 2018. The last time I did it was a year ago in January 2017 in the Myra Powell and on my way out of retirement at Weber State, I started doing their student gallery. I did two shows after I retired and then I took a break. But that’s a way that I politicize the art. Art brings you together. We agree that this is a wonderful place and then the topics are things that we need to be talking about if we are in the body politic. Because if we just let whoever is in there for the money get what they want, we are going to lose 34 that. I’m an old grandparent now, so I wanted to see things for my own kids, but now I have vested interest in having the stuff for my grandkids. Anyway, art as a vehicle for social commentary. I met a dancer once who had a dance class called that, and I told her, “I’m stealing this.” That was in 1992. I’ve used that figure of speech a lot. Well this is something, when I retired at Weber State, they retired Jazz at the Station. They weren’t interested in it at all. I thought I was pretty smart. Because I was doing a calendar in the spring when I was retiring, I made sure that Jazz at the Station was on the monthly arts and humanities calendar that the college printed out. So we were on the calendar for a year after I retired. I told him you can’t get rid of me this year or you’re going to have people calling every month asking, “What happened to Jazz at the Station?” I marketed it for free because I wanted to get marketed. I did the work, marketed it for a year, and in that year I told my audience “I can’t do this. I can’t pay the musicians, and Weber State is not supporting it any longer. What are we going to do?” And within a year, someone at the Union Station wrote me a R.A.M.P Grant and I took in matching from the audience. People sent me $100 check or gave me a $50 bill just because they wanted to see it going, and to me that was the kind of recognition you get when you have a Ph.D. That was real accreditation that people in the audience were willing to pay for something that was free. It’s like public television; it’s public jazz. Then, I wrote an Ogden City grant, and what I get to say when I’m marketing this is that all of the money that we collect, pays musicians. My son and I co-produce it 35 because we love jazz and want to make sure that it continues, and we can. Like you said, “I’ve got these skills. I don’t have to be working at the university. I could be up in my attic making a poster that looks just as good as if I was sitting at a desk.” I can send them directly to printing. I don’t even have to drive there. My daughter works there and she can bring my printing home. Then I also do the same stuff for Chamber Orchestra Ogden. I don’t do their posters because they have a person that likes to do the posters. But I do their booklet program with the notes and the artists and photographs and stuff. Oh, I'm going to brag about this Jazz at the Station. They cancelled me in May, because they were getting ready for the Heritage Festival. So, I lost my venue. When they started talking about what they were planning on doing for the Heritage Festival in a community meeting in January, I went and said, "Well if we are doing a Heritage of Ogden, I need to make sure that you have some jazz down there, and I have this art exhibit that I'd like to put up." Then I found out that they had this stage. Three days worth of stage and they had to fill it with stuff. I gave them a proposal. I said, "Why don’t you let me take a day, and I’ll fill it up with jazz and I could do the jazz festival." They said, “Yes.” I mean, this is the other thing I say, it never hurts to ask because someone might tell you yes. I like to ask for forgiveness after permission. But, I had to ask for this, and they said, "Yes." Not only that, it gave me a chance to display some of my Jazz at the Station propaganda, and honor the people who are bringing jazz to my community. Then, look at all of those students who were on stage. This is what was funny, and I’m not exaggerating. I will bet you seventy-five percent of those 36 kids came up to me personally. Personally! And thanked me for giving them the opportunity, and I’m thinking, “I want to thank you for performing for us.” It was just such a mutual admiration society. I couldn’t have had a better reward for a lifetime of bringing jazz in Ogden. Except that, they do the Heritage Festival every year. They want to have a Heritage Jazz Festival every year now. You know, it’s part of the Heritage Festival. I mean, it couldn’t be better. Unless, somebody would give me more money to bring in a big act, but that might happen. If the city buys into this, sooner or later, this is what I want to say, “Listen, you guys take over the afternoon and pay the big bucks and I’ll take care of the school stuff.” I think that might be the way it goes because I hate dealing with big money and paychecks and stuff. I hate that. Jazz at the Station money doesn’t usually pass over my hands at all. It goes through the Union Station Foundation because I don’t want to account for money. I don’t want to be responsible. I don’t want to be accused of misusing it. I just don’t want it. When I closed the gallery, I realized that I could do art exhibits on somebody else’s dime. So, I’ve had at least seven or eight art exhibits in somebody else’s place, including Weber State, since I retired the gallery. Same thing with music. I don’t have any connection with Weber State anymore, yet I do twelve jazz events and I help to promote four orchestra events. You know, that’s sixteen shows. Now, fifteen shows and a jazz festival. Yeah, yeah, I’m really proud of that. ST: You should be proud. CJ: I rethought about what jazz is, that first panel, because of Ryan. SBT: That is fantastic. 37 CJ: You know, I love it. SBT: This is fantastic. I’m very impressed. CJ: Anyway, I’ve been an asset to the arts in that way: a promoter. I had a very interesting conversation with Ryan Wash, who was the debate person at Weber State this year, with a winning team. I showed him my Jazz from Station because he’s African American and I’m a white woman. And I’m concerned about appropriating this story. But no one else is telling it. I had an in to jazz, so jazz is my entrance into that story. But I wanted him to take a look at it. I described myself as arts advocate, and by the time he got finished with the conversation, he says, “I think you need to reframe your vocabulary.” I thought he was talking about my project. He did, actually have another thing to say about. He said, “You’re not an advocate. That just means someone who nods their head and says yes. You’re an activist. I think you need to rethink how you talk about yourself. You’re more than an advocate. You’re an activist.” I’m thinking, “Man.” I mean he’s probably not 30, and he had a really good vision about this. Then I showed him my Jazz from the Station project, and he said, “Oh, I like this. I like this. But you completely neglected to say, ‘Why is jazz important? What does jazz mean to you? Where is the jazz in this?’ You see the people, you see the event, but why is jazz important to the American experience?” But that’s how I got to community stuff. And then, one just hop skip and a jump, being involved in the community. 38 And here I am. This is a culmination of cut and paste, and my interest in history and my desire to share what I love and encourage other people to do it. It’s just not magic. It’s one plus one plus one plus one plus one plus one. I’ve lived long enough where I can recognize that I’ve been useful, and I wish I would have given myself more credit in a way of being kinder, you know? Because I’m not out saving the world, people are still starving. In my newspaper in British Columbia that I haven’t talked about, I put in this picture once. There was a lot of pictures. It said, “The world’s loneliness exceeds its hunger.” I was a young person and understood that. Our heartache out in the world is bigger than even starving practically. That’s where art to me is. Part of the sustaining thing, and has content but it doesn’t have material form unless it’s in an instrument or stage. But otherwise, the art is what we are bringing to it. Once again, when I was talking to people coming into the Browning Center, if you have kids at home, encourage any kind of art that they do to express themselves because having some sort of expression when you are going through the angst of being a teenager, having some way to counsel yourself, soothe yourself, express yourself, it’s just so vital in the kind of society we live in where we are just assaulted. By noise, by violence, by well anything that assaults you. It’s out there and the volume is really cranked up. It’s just loud. I was lucky enough to grow up when I had some time to myself. Well I had television, but I had plenty of time without T.V. Books were good, but mostly just 39 being out and playing. It’s a different place, so I think young people now, especially need to have a way to express themselves. ST: That was actually going to be my question. Would you say that art is made more important now than maybe what you remember growing up? What were your thoughts, and the answer can be no. Would you say it’s the same? Or different? CJ: Oh well, gosh, Well, you know there’s I have my way of looking at things. There are plenty of people who share my interests and my philosophy and everything. But obviously people who allot money for education don’t recognize the value of it. Yet, they want us to be creative when we are out in the business world, and they think that if you play on a sports team you’re going to learn teamwork and sportsmanship. I saw that if you play in an orchestra or if you are in a play, you’re going to learn teamwork. You know, you’re not out to win, you’re out to do your best. There’s a difference between competitive sport and teamwork. The feeling that you get when you work with someone on an art project. I don’t care how old you are, if you are in the orchestra and it’s a beautiful concert, it’s your pride multiplied by every kid that’s sitting in one of those chairs. It’s just multiplied wealth. The same thing with theater. The people on stage are important but so are the people who are pulling the curtains and so are the people who make the scenery and so are the people who did the costumes. And when you have a cast party, you’re celebrating that entire thing and that’s teamwork. The arts are things that you can do after you are too old to play football or basketball. An art that you have, you can keep as long as you have an interest in 40 it. I still write poems, I still write like when I first understood that writing could be expressive. What I think is cool is, I don’t have credentials. I’m not a papered person. All of my triumphs have been under the radar of academic quality or recognition. I’m essentially a working-class girl from Roy and yet, in my old age, my friends are physicists and historians, and performing artists and I’ve had a lifetime so crammed with music, theater, dance, visual arts… that was my vision. When I was a kid, that’s what I wanted to have. You know what, I never lost sight. I’m also a good poster child for volunteering because when I finally got the marketing job at Weber State, my portfolio was entirely volunteer work, but it was professional quality because I had been working at it. I was a Signpost typesetter and, from there, I went to writing their performing arts things when I had young children. So I learned their technology and that made me eligible for some other jobs out in the world when it first started becoming computerized. Then, by the time I got to Weber State as a department secretary, I had a cute little Mac and its predecessor of InDesign was Page Maker. Page Maker can make an idiot look intelligent because you put those pretty words on a page, and they make it look good. And you have to redo and start—and that was a mimeograph machine in old Page Maker. Then my skills exploded. I’m not a direct artist, but I can cut and paste with the best of them. So, that’s what my records are. I cut and paste things and then people’s names are mentioned in them. 41 I’ve always loved cut and paste. I love to paste even. It used to be minty school paste. It smelled good too. It smelled like wintergreen. But anyway, cut and paste was great. Then when I got to do Page Maker and really do computerized cut and paste, god, all of those itchy talented things I wanted to do, I could do. That was one of the things that I was going to show you before you left, flip through some of these pages. I’m overwhelmed at the stuff they put out. I was raising kids and I had a job and stuff. It just happened to be the kind of thing that I enjoyed doing. It’s a different kind of scrapbooking, but it’s scrapbooking. SBT: Yes, it sounds like it’s very empowering to you. To be able to do it digitally because now you’re able to expand. CJ: Oh yeah... SBT: You don’t have to go and take a fine arts class to figure out how to do this. You can do it on Photoshop. CJ: You know, that’s once again, just stuff where I can sit in my own home. I grew up as a grocer’s daughter in Roy in the 1950s and now I have a phone in my pocket that’s more powerful than the computers they used to send the rockets to the moon. It’s plugged in right now and charging. ST: What has living through that transition been like? I’m curious. CJ: Well I never expected to be this old. I did expect to be out in space. When I was six, I had a snit fight with my mother about going to Mars and she says, “Honey, we’re not going to Mars.” And I said, “Well Buck Rogers is on Mars.” “Buck Rogers is a television show.” “No he is not.” Six, I had a crisis that we weren’t in 42 space yet but I fully expected to be. And Star Trek makes sense to me. I don’t know why we don’t have that communicator right there already? That kind of technology is cool to see, because I’ve read about it and expected it to come. Have you ever seen a movie called “The Time Machine” H.G. Wells wrote it in the 1880s? Well, in the movie they made in the 1950s or early 1960s, they come to this place that used to be the future. There’s these discs and a guy figures out, “There’s a message on here.” So, what he does is he sticks them up and spins them on their ends. What I’ve seen from the book and from the movie is that’s how we do our computers now—a spinning disc. But we do it like a player instead of a top. So I expected this stuff, I just don’t think I expected that it would accessible to me. I didn’t imagine that I would have access to it. I could imagine that the scientists and the engineers were going to make my life modern and all that kind of stuff. And all I’d have to do is like step into it like a pair of shoes or a car. I’d have to build the car, but anyway. My grandmother Roblyer was born in 1889 and my great-grandma Witte, my mother’s mother—grandma—was born in 1889 and they knew about steam engines, locomotives, they knew about that. But not cars. Certainly not airplanes. And my grandma was one of the first grandmas that would be flying in a plane across the country. But I thought that I would be flying, you know? I just certainly didn’t know what I was in for because I thought I’d be at the moon. So that kind of technology is fun. As soon as I had the skill, I started to volunteer. And I volunteered to type the program for church. ST: When was this roughly? 43 CJ: Oh I was probably eleven or twelve when we took typing in junior high school. I had magic fingers. The kind of Tigger stuff came out of my fingers for typing. Anyway, I would do that then I’d print them on a wax mimeograph sheets and you’d put them in a drum that’s full of alcohol and you turn out your pages. They are ugly and they smell bad. So that’s where I started out. Then, when I went to work at the internal revenue, they were just starting to go to a computer. They were building the computer and we were still doing microfiche. But the next step was the computer and I got out of the internal revenue by then and went to California. But when I came back to an office to work, a typewriter, they had a thing called The Selectric and you could backspace to correct your mistakes because it had whiteout tape. Anyway, so that was pretty cool, but when I came to Weber, I had never used a computer for anything other than inventory and billing. You know, just punch in the numbers and certainly not putting words on paper. ST: Okay. That was good. I think that's most of my questions that I could think of. [To Sarah B. Tooker] Do you have any that you can think of? SBT: Yes. So your parents’ names, your husband's name, and your children's names please. CJ: Oh, my parents’. My mother is still alive. Bette Roblyer, B-E--T-T-E, R-O-B-L-Y-E- R. She is still alive, she is 88. She will be 89 in December. My dad, Wayne Thomas Roblyer was a famous grocer in town. Everybody used to know who I was because I was Wayne's daughter. My husband is LeRoy Jennings and he is the artist. My daughter is Cristine Jennings Lewis, and she is a math teacher at 44 Weber State. Benjamin Jennings is my son and the co-producer at Jazz at the Station, and he is a sales rep for Netgear. His territory is Canada. SBT: Oh wow. CJ: Which is cool for him because he was born in Canada. And he has dual citizenship. And anyway, that’s my family. SBT: Awesome. CJ: And then oh! My daughter lives right next door with my two grandkids. SBT: Oh that’s nice. CJ: Elanor will be eleven next month, in June. Just a couple of weeks. And Aldus just turned eight. We’ve been the childcare while the parents are working. My husband retired before I did, so he got to be the grandparent to Eleanor for a couple of years before I retired, and then, for Aldus. I retired in 2013, but the last couple of years I was working—actually, from 2009... 2013, I got off work at 2:30 in the afternoon. Because I would come to work at 5. I made arrangements with my boss to do this. I would come to work at 5 and leave at 2:30 to pick my granddaughter up when she got out of school at Lehner Children’s School. Then we’d catch the bus home so from 2:30 on, when she was home, I got to be part of the grandparent thing there too. When she was in preschool, we were on campus together; we could go over sometimes and have lunch. My mother-in-law, my husband’s mother, Carrie Jennings was known for a long time as the voice of Weber State because she was the switchboard operator. When you called Weber, she was the one that answered the phone, and she went from answering the phone, to answering a bank of the switchboard 45 with the plugs, and then she was there when they went over to a more automated system. Then when they got rid of that system entirely and they built the first information booth down at that front of the campus, she was the first person that was a part in that. She retired from that building, but my mother-in-law for a couple of generations was a famous person at Weber. Her name is Carrie Jennings, and I am Caril Jennings and my daughter is Cristine Jennings; she’s married now. But we were CJ, CJ, CJ at Weber for many, many years. SBT: That’s awesome. CJ: And now, my daughter is working there so we've been on campus. We have a deep connection. SBT: So, part of the reason we are doing this is because we are celebrating women getting the right to vote in the United States next year. CJ: Yeah. SBT: How do you think that that influenced history? How did it influence you growing up, the women that you knew? Did it change roles of women that you knew? CJ: Well, I think the day we got the vote was August 26th. I can’t remember, but my birthday is August 27th. So, the fact that we got to vote someplace close to my birthday was pretty cool. But, I grew up in the 1950s and it was amazing to me that it had to be special for women to be able to vote. That didn’t make any sense to me that women couldn't vote. So I’m on this wave of people who ended up doing women’s lib, and women barely older than me were some of the ones that started to make all of that noise. What it showed to me was, even though we had the right to vote—I’ve never not voted. Ever. As soon as I was old enough to 46 vote, I’ve voted in every single election. Even the midterms, even the local ones because I take that seriously. When you read my pamphlet about Jazz and Democracy, that's my involvement in the community, my voice to make things happen, and I grew up in a culture where women weren’t encouraged to have a voice. Even though we had the vote. Women remained silent and let their husbands do the talking for them. I wasn’t buying it. As a matter of fact, my dad, bless his heart, told me, “You know, you’re going to have to get an office to take care of because what poor man is going to have to have a household with you.” And I know he was right. I wasn’t going to be that wife. Right about that time was the stepford wives. I was surrounded by women who wanted to be stepford wives. The manicure and the hair and all of that. I’ve never had the manicure and the hair. Because I wasn’t being a woman, I'm too busy being a person. I never identified myself as being specifically a woman, unless we are talking about women’s rights. Otherwise, I’m a person. The fact that we would split our society into one more privileged than the other, made absolutely no sense to this head. Especially when I always thought that I was at least as qualified as any guy I ever met. I have no idea where that excerpt came from. I have no idea. Because it wasn’t encouraged at home, my stubbornness is just astounding to them. How would I ever fit in? I don’t know, I still don’t fit in but I’m having a wonderful time. So, the fact that women did not have a right to vote, made no sense to me whatsoever, it was a no brainer. The 47 fact that we are once again—looking out for women’s autonomy, I can’t believe we are having the same conversation. I’ve never had an abortion. My senior year of high school, abortion was the topic in debate, and I was a debater in my little box of file cards of pros and cons because we were talking about it then. That was 1966, Roe vs. Wade, I mean I understand where it comes from. I just don’t understand why men have anything to say about it. It’s none of their damn business. It’s none of their business. We are still treating women in this case as second class citizens. And the thing that encourages me, okay, Pelosi is a little older than I am, there aren’t a lot of women about my age in government, but this whole new rush of young women coming into government is just thrilling to me. And to me, I think it will make a difference because while women were talking in the 1970s and 1980s it was always, “Oh, isn’t that cute.” Now, they’re saying, “Wow.” Don’t ask me that question, the answer is terrible. You know, when AOC, when she’s asking people about why is this drug $2,000 or $8,000 here and it’s 8 bucks in Australia. Because they’ve got so many men there going through for one thing or another. These young women are not silent, and they are not trying to be cunning. They’re not trying to smile their way in. They’re calling shit on this stuff, and that’s an empowerment. This is the second wave or even the third wave of feminism. That other discussion that is the way you look like, what you wear, is something else. The fact that women’s voices are in there and asking questions like that is encouraging to me. And it’s just, I wait for all of those old white men to die. The scary thing is there’s plenty of young ones that are coming up. But at 48 least there are more women standing up to them. Yeah, get out of the way. If women hold up half of the sky—No, women are holding up the sky because the men are doing something else with their egos and women are trying to keep it together. What irritates me when I see women who aren’t doing that, who are buying into the white man’s business, economy instead of looking out after others. I think, this is a stereotype, but I think women are more inclined to work after human issues about children, security, health, education. The more women are talking about that, the better off we are. I mean, we are currently in a blow back, I think. The progresses that were made in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s even just this recently is five years ago. They are trying to roll it back. They are trying to roll it back but it’s not going to last. It’s like keeping the tides currently out but it’s coming back and I think it’s going—women are going to be enabling. There’s a woman running for mayor right now in Ogden: Angela Castillo. Young people are more open minded about everything. Gay and Lesbian issues, abortion, socialism, they are more open minded and I think if we just got out of their way or encouraged them a little bit, it might save our lives. Or save our world as we know it. I have a lot of faith because I’m a parent, I have to. I have faith that we will be able to save some part of the world that we can live on for my grandkids and great-grandkids. But I think women are going to be pulling more weight and are allowed to pull more weight. Women have always been able to do things. Now enabling them to put that intelligence, and skill, and vision into the futures. It’s the only way we are going to pull ourselves out of this fire. We all have to 49 work. It’s going to take us all, and I don’t understand why women weren’t allowed to vote. SBT: Great words to live by. CJ: The only reason they were not allowed to vote is because men were short sighted and didn’t want to share power. SBT: Well thank you very much! ST: Yeah, is there anything else you want to add or something? CJ: I’m going to show you a couple of other things. Archives is my safe destination for all of the stuff … Why should my progeny be saddled with that kind of stuff? It means something to them that their mom did it, but all of the names in it don’t mean anything. What else that gets to me, was respect. Oh my god, you don’t know how nice that is. I wasn’t just making waste paper all of my life. Oh, when you’re finished recording me, before you go out the door, I want to show you this. Just some of the stuff that’s going to be heading your way. Not anytime soon because I don’t want to die. When I’m dead, you guys can have them. SBT: Geez CJ: It’s not worth murdering me over. ST: We appreciate the material and are willing to wait. SBT: Yeah. CJ: But, since I’m retired, I’ve just been putting all of my papers together. My entire life, starting in junior high school, I started putting things in three ring binders. My first one, was at half sized sheets because I used to take paper with me all of the time to write. So, my early diaries are half sized sheets, but my later diaries are 50 three ring binders because I thought it was just an ingenious way to make a book because you could insert pages here, take pages out, and then by the time I retired, I had like forty-eight boxes, apple boxes, file boxes, and then I gave, oh gosh, twenty boxes to archives at university at least, and I can’t remember what else I put up there. And then a book that I sent down to Union Station on the National Western Film Festival. I’ve got a couple of samples of Weber Reads and I stored it with Kathryn MacKay at Weber State. I have a scrapbook of that, although I think most of it’s up in the Archives. I’m weeding through all of those things. I’m now reduced to eight crates of paper upstairs that are date sorted, and what I’ve been trying to do is pull out the subjects to keep things together. What will be left is just what play I’ve went to, who I went to that concert with, some thought I had about politics. Do you know Anaïs Nin? She was a diarist from the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, in Paris. She knew all of the expatriate Americans. She essentially knew everyone. She wasn’t famous; she wasn’t rich. If you find out about her, she also wrote erotica. That’s how she paid for her apartment. But, she was famous for knowing everyone. And I had this funny feeling, when I was a young adult and I saw who she was, one of these days, people will want to read my books because I know who they are now. ST: Totally be like that. CJ: Yeah, so you know, that’s kind of how I feel about the Universe City things. No gory details but just people in Ogden who have been artists. Plus, any of these other things I’ve had, you know. Do you have any other questions? You’re probably getting tired of this. 51 SBT: We are good. ST: We’re good. We can start wrapping up if you would like. CJ: I’ve had the greatest time thinking about my life because I can see it in little pieces. I could see the big things. I think that Universe City was a big thing and Jazz at the Station was a big thing. But I see all of these other little things that I’ve been doing, and I don’t know. I think I’m ordinary. I said the other day to Lee, “I’m a character.” And he says, “You certainly are.” I’m one of those old ladies in a mystery that ends up dead with the clothes line or something. “Now why would anyone want to murder her?” You know, the character that you could see in the background in some funny T.V. show. I mean, not an American one, one that belonged out in an English garden or some place. But one thing led to another. I’ve had the best time seeing my life as a longer arc instead of just pop, pop, pop. I like to see the fact that I’m still that same kid that I was when I first heard or saw stuff that I liked it. You know, lots of people aren’t interested in paintings. I love the fact that someone would paint or make something. I love that people would practice and play a song for me. If I think of what human beings do, music is probably the most magical. Because you don’t need anything. A voice, or something to pound on for a rhythm and you are making an art. I like to think that human beings are meant for that kind of stuff rather than the horrible things that we see on the news. When I used to give people like new employees the tour of the Browning Center, I used to say, “You know, if you want 52 to know what we are doing wrong, you can watch the news. If you want to know what people are doing right, pay attention to the arts. CJ: I think I’ve talked about everything haven’t I? SBT: It’s been wonderful. CJ: Thank you. ST: This was great.