Oral History Program Mckell Keeney Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 17 July 2019 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Mckell Keeney Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 17 July 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 Beyond Suffrage 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: Keeney, Mckell, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 17 July 2019, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Mckell Keeney Circa 2019 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Mckell Keeney, conducted on July 17, 2019, via telephone, by Lorrie Rands. In this interview, Mckell discusses her life, her memories, and the impact of the 19th Amendment. Mckell also discusses her grandmother, Bernice Gibbs Anderson, and her life and impact on the community. Raegan Baird, the audio technician, is also present during this interview. LR: Today is July 17, 2019. We are in the Stewart Library Special Collections talking with Mckell Keeney about her life and her grandmother, Bernice Gibbs Anderson, for the Women 2020 Project here at the Stewart Library. My name is Lorrie Rands, conducting the interview, and Raegan Baird is with me as well. Thank you again, Mckell, for your time, and let’s start with when and where were you born? MK: I was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1961, but I didn't grow up there. We moved away when I was about two years old, and I haven't lived in the state since then, but we visit. LR: Okay, so where did you move to when you were two? MK: We moved for my dad’s work first to Sumter, South Carolina, and then to Mountain Home, Idaho; Phoenix, Arizona; Palmdale, California, and then when I was ten years old, we ended up back in Phoenix, Arizona and I’ve pretty much been here ever since, in the Phoenix metro area. LR: Wow, what did your father do? MK: He wrote electronic manuals for electronic schools and sometimes was 2 contracted by the military. When we lived in Palmdale, California, he worked at Lockheed by Edwards Air Force Base. LR: Okay, it sounds like you moved a lot then before you were ten. What was that like, that constant moving? Did you ever feel a sense of place or community during that time? I know you were just a child, but... MK: I actually did. I didn’t really mind the moving because most of it was before I was five years old. When I was five years old we were in Palmdale, California, and we were there for five years. My aunt, uncle, and eight of my cousins lived in Palmdale so we had quite a connection to family. Before then, my parents were very, very social people, they made friends instantly wherever they went, so we were always over at people’s houses for dinner and they were over at our house for dinner. I never really minded the moving. LR: When you were in Palmdale, where did you go to school? MK: That’s a good question, I can’t remember the name of it off the top of my head. I know once upon a time, when I was back there, we went and drove by it and it didn’t really look familiar to me at all. I want to say it was called Tumbleweed but I’m not sure if that’s correct. I think they might have changed the name of the school. LR: Do you have any memories of going to school while you were in Palmdale? MK: I do, because when I was in kindergarten, my sister, who’s eight years older than I am, was in middle school and at that time the kindergarten was housed with the 3 middle school for some reason, in the same building next to the high school. So we actually rode the same school bus to and from school. LR: That’s bizarre. Okay, will you tell me what were your parents’ names? MK: Darrell Lewis Anderson. My father is the son of Bernice Gibbs Anderson, who we’re going to talk about later on. My mother is Delsa Marie, Shanks was her maiden name. It was the second marriage for both of them. My dad had been married before and had three daughters, and my mother had been married before and had a son and a daughter. They were divorced for a while before they met, and then they got married and had me. Later on we adopted my younger brother, who’s six years younger than I am. That's our family, kind of a blended family. LR: That's interesting. So was your father from Utah? MK: He was. He was born in a farmhouse in Corinne, which is not far from Promontory. Well, about as close as you can get, Promontory being in the middle of nowhere. LR: So how did your parents meet? Do you know? MK: They sang in a choir, or chorus, called Sacre Dulce, I think was the name. I don’t think it’s still in existence anymore but it was mostly single adults, I’m not even sure about that, but that’s how they met. I know there was at least one choir tour that they were on together. My dad had a gorgeous tenor voice. He was a soloist with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the Southern California Mormon Choir, and 4 with the Arizona Mormon Choir, so she pretty much fell in love with his voice and with him. So that’s how they met. LR: That's awesome. You're not quite the baby, but it sounds like you were almost raised as an only child? MK: Not really an only child. My brother and sister, who were nine years older and eight years older, lived with us. My younger brother lived with us until I left for school and to get married. So there were always other people around. Also, my parents were foster parents. When we were in Palmdale, California, we had probably ten different foster children, not all at the same time, but as needed, until they were able to reunite with their own family. Here in Phoenix, we had several foster siblings. I had a Swedish exchange sister in my junior-senior year in high school. Actually, it was my junior year and her senior year, something like that, and we’re still in touch. She lives in Sweden but she comes back to visit every few years. LR: I find that really cool. As you were growing up and your parents were fostering, it sounds like there was always children, what are some of your memories of growing up. MK: I had a good childhood. I didn't have really much trauma or stress. I'm kind of a loner by nature, an introvert, so I'm happy just going off in the corner to read a book. I don't mind a little chaos around me, I can still read my book and be happy and come into the family dinner and interact a little bit. So those are my memories. Music was a very big, very important, part of our family. While we 5 were in California, my mother and father sang with the Palmdale Chorale, it was called, not specific to any faith or religion, it was just a community chorus type of thing. Everywhere we went they were very involved with music. I was taking piano lessons at a young age and playing the organ for church when I was about fourteen years old. So very musical family, there’s always lots of music. When we would drive in our car trips to come up from Palmdale to Utah to visit both sets of my grandparents—my Grandma and Grandpa Shanks lived in Ogden, Utah at 800 Cross Street and my Grandma and Grandpa Anderson lived in Corinne . We would always stay overnight with my Ogden grandparents, we never stayed overnight in Corinne with my Anderson grandparents but we would go out to visit them. What I was going to tell you is that we would always sing certain car songs, I called them, because they were certain family songs that while we were traveling off and on we would all just break out in song and sing for a while to break the boredom or something. I have really good memories of that, and they’re songs that I taught my own children. LR: Well that’s cool. You said you were ten when you moved to Arizona, and you’ve been there ever since. What are some of your memories of just being in Arizona and growing up there? MK: Let’s see, I said I’m an introvert and so I didn’t have a lot of close friends in school, in high school or anything. I did have a few that I still stay in contact with, and I actually really like social media a lot. I majored in Communication at ASU when I went back to school a few years ago as a non-traditional student, and I 6 did marketing for the Mesa Arts Center as an intern, for Tempe Center for the Arts, and for Tempe Leadership, which is a local non-profit. I was in one of the leadership classes about eight years ago and then I was on the board for three years. My area is the communication chair for the board. My point in that is that’s the way I like to interact, it’s a little bit more removed. I love keeping up with people on Facebook. I know some people don’t like it at all but for me that works out really well. I don’t have to necessarily go see them or talk to them for a long time. It’s just a good way for me to keep up with people and I message them, I just don’t necessarily do a lot of the reunions and things like that. LR: That makes sense. Who were some of the women that you looked up to as a young girl? MK: Well, because music was something that I was really interested in as a vocalist, my first major in college was as a vocal performance major, but pop music was my area, so I guess when you say ‘look up to,’ I would be more like hoping that I would be able to record or perform a lot more. It just didn’t work out that way, so it would be more like the vocalists that I admired. So that’s my first thought, I’m sure there’s a better answer than that. LR: No, that’s great. Were you encouraged to pursue an education as you were growing up? MK: Yes and no. We were, I would say, lower middle class as far as income. My dad never made a lot of money so there was never any extra money for anything. I don’t think I went on an airplane flight until I was like seventeen or eighteen years 7 old. When we traveled, we would just always pack our own food. When we were at home, we were not on welfare really; although, I think there were some times that we had some church food that we could go get, or something like that, if our dad was in between jobs or something. For school, I never had lunch money in my bag, even in high school. I’d go with my friends that I had and just sit there and talk to them and pretend like, “Oh, I’m not hungry.” I know there are a lot of people in the world, a lot poorer than that. I work a lot with the refugees. I’m a JustServe director, which is a volunteer website to find volunteers for non-profits here in the metro areas. I’m very aware, more than I used to be, of the world conditions, for how blessed we are for what we have. So what I kind of thought was ‘poor’ growing up, always wearing hand-me-downs, it was actually a pretty comfortable existence. As I said, I had a happy childhood. It wasn’t like it was something that they put on me to worry about money or where the next meal’s coming from or anything. It was just that we didn’t have money for extras. So I’m actually one of the first generation college graduates. Technically my children are, because they graduated before I did, but neither of my parents had a college degree. It was important to them. My mom, at Logan High School, was the valedictorian if I’m remembering right, I’ll have to go look at her year book and check that. She got a scholarship through Pepsi, which would’ve been in—she was born in 1929, so that would’ve been about 1947. She got a scholarship and she used it at George Washington University ‘cause she and her first husband were living in D.C. I might be saying that university name wrong, I’ll 8 have to check that too. Anyway, she was quite the brainiac, my mother, but she’d married young at eighteen and didn’t have a degree and so it was still important. My dad was smart too, he just didn’t have any college degree either—but they didn’t plan ahead really for our education. I didn’t have a college saving fund or scholarship plan or anything, and I didn’t really know how important it was to get the grades in high school to be able to get scholarships and so that wasn’t something that I really tried to do at all. By the time I graduated high school, I wanted to go to BYU but I had no plan on how to do that. I had no funds really to do that. I actually got accepted and then I was like, “Oh, how do I do this?” They didn’t really have the means or the capability at that time to really help me figure it out, and so I went to Phoenix Community College for I think three semesters. I found out as an adult in my twenties I have ADD, not the hyper-active kind but the kind where it’s really hard to focus, like I’m very easily distracted. Twice I had honors English and got to the research paper part and didn’t finish it. I had plans to finish it and that was the only thing I needed to graduate from that, to get that class grade, and I didn’t finish it just because I didn’t really have the skills. So when I went back to ASU years later, I graduated in December 2013, less than four years ago. By that time I had figured out how to get through exams and assignments and things like that. I still have ADD, but I can manage it. LR: Right, that makes sense. Let’s see, said that you would go and visit with your both sets of grandparents here in Utah. What is your first memory of your grandmother, Bernice? 9 MK: My first memory is at their house in Corinne . We never really had conversations that I could remember, I mean, I’m sure she greeted me and hugged me and said goodbye, but she wasn’t around talking to the kids. She wasn’t the kind that would get down on the floor and play with the kids or say, “Come here, I’ll read you a story,” that wasn’t her. As my aunt has written, “Her typewriter was where she was the happiest.” She was a staff reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune and a local historian. She set herself up to be the local historian by just digging in and finding out and writing about it and interviewing all the old-timers. When she was in her early teens and in her twenties, she would start to say, “Okay, who’s still around from 1869?” when the railroads came together, “Who can I interview?” She went out and did it. That’s why the postmasters and everybody, when they would get letters or postcards or telegrams asking about Golden Spike or about Corinne , they would forward them on to her. That’s what resides in these archives in Tucson, it’s actually making me laugh pretty hard, some of these things that we see, some of the notes the postmaster would write. “I think this is for you, Bernice,” or “Can you please answer these people?” They would just pass it on to her to see if she knew the answer or find these answers for the people from around the world who would write in and ask about certain things. So my memories of her are just she was a cook, she was known to be a good cook, and we would play in their backyard. They had a tire swing. My grandpa grew these gorgeous flowers. I have more memories of him than her. He was more the type to interact with the grandchildren. He would grow these 10 gardens and I think it would be like half an acre or more of flowers in their backyard and side-yard that were like six feet tall. He had a green thumb that you couldn’t believe. It was beautiful stuff. I didn’t know very much about Bernice, my grandmother, until I started to research this past year about her. I’m finding out so much and I thought we didn’t have very much in common and it turns out we actually do. I’m a community activist—she was a community activist. I love to write—she loved to write. I’m like, “Oh, I wish I had known,” but by the time I was born she was sixty-one and she passed away when she was eighty-one. There were about twenty years, but people aged faster back then, or at least she did, than they do now. She was not in good health and I remember her sighing a lot, these great, big sighs, and just sitting there and not talking very much. After I graduated from high school she came down here to live with my parents for a little while before going back up to Brigham City. In retrospect, I wish I could go back and interview her now that I’ve graduated. I’m like, “I have questions that aren’t going to be in these archives.” But it’s too late now. At the time though, I did not know what a resource she would be, what a living history type of person, I guess is the way to say it. She was a pianist and an organist. She played the organ for church and I played the organ for church. I knew that, though, that she was a really good accompanist. So she had other interests besides the Golden Spike. LR: Right. Okay. I’m going to kind of go back to you for a minute. You went to community college for three semesters you said and never quite finished, and all this time you’re still in Arizona, correct? 11 MK: Yes. LR: Going on from there with your life, what happened? Did you get married? MK: Yes, I got married in 1984. Still married to the same man, and I have four children and four grandchildren; it’s a great life. I could have graduated from college in that time before we were married and I know a lot of people do it after they’re married too, but I just decided that I can learn as much by reading and researching. Of course this was long before the internet, but I did read a lot of books, my own independent library, and so my state of mind was like, “I think I can learn everything I need to know just by reading a lot and talking to people.” So that was how I filled my time until we started having children and then I was really involved in their lives. LR: Okay, were you an activist during this time? MK: I wouldn’t say I was an activist. I registered to vote when I was eighteen and I’ve always voted and always had an appreciation for the women who paved the way for that but it wasn’t something that I really spent time on or joined organizations about or anything like that. So as far as community activism, that started in the early 2000s, more when my kids were young teens, just because of things that were going on around here in our community that I got involved with. I’ve always been an environmentalist, Earth Day was always really important to me long before that was a thing. Like reusing bags and recycling and things. I wouldn’t really call that community activism, that was just something that was important to me. I had my causes and things that were important, but I didn’t write to the 12 editors or speak out about them until probably the early 2000s. LR: Okay, so were you working or I hate to say just staying home? MK: Yes, I was, as the term goes, a stay-at-home mom most of those years, but I always was in a position to. I sang with Dickens’ Carolers, which is a Christmas-time caroling quartet that gets hired to go sing places. I’ve been in local cover bands for classic rock and things like that. It wasn’t a good living, I couldn’t have supported our family on it, but I’ve always stayed busy with music one way or another in community choirs and things like that, I’ve been in community musicals. I was in Oliver a few years ago, I was the housekeeper. So I’m always busy with lots of things. I always have lots of different things going on, probably too many things, but I don’t sit home very much. LR: Right. So you said that it was in the early 2000s that you really started to branch out and do things. Will you talk about that a little bit? MK: Yes. Our public school district, which is a K–8 primary school district, had a big curriculum change and decided for the middle schools, sixth, seventh, and eighth graders, they really cut back on music, band, choir, art and all these things that are very, very important to me. As I told you music was a really big part of our family and all my kids have been in these choir programs in middle school with this one particular teacher who’s just amazing. Her son is on Broadway and is just so talented and she is such a good teacher. To me that wasn’t acceptable, to cut the arts, and there were a bunch of us, especially the orchestra families, because orchestras were really going to be on the chopping block. We did a lot 13 of research and found the articles that show that’s actually the opposite of what schools should be doing, that these classes actually help students learn better in the other classes. Art should be integrated into the other curriculum instead of saying, “Oh this isn’t important, let’s get rid of these,” I’m not explaining it very well but there is a lot of research on this, that supports this. That’s when I started going to school board meetings and really speaking up and writing articles and organizing parents. We started a non-profit called, I want to say Kyrene Parent Network. We were very involved and we had people who ran for school board and people wanted me to run for school board, which I didn’t do. I still get people trying to get me to do that or to run for city council in Tempe. So that was kind of the start of it. Then I had this other network of friends. The Kyrene School District is quite large geographically, it’s not just South Tempe but also West Chandler and Ahwatukee, which is part of Phoenix. It all just runs together, one big metro area. I started meeting people, really good people, from all walks of life and just getting involved more with them and, as I said, then I applied for Tempe leadership. So I’ve just stayed very involved in the community since then. LR: During that time, how did you balance your home life with what you were doing outside of the home? MK: I’m a night owl. I stay up late. At the time, I didn’t need as much sleep as I need now so I kind of just burned the candle at both ends. I did the same thing when I went back to school, I no longer have children at home, but I did most of my ASU 14 degree online. So I could do my school work and a lot of the exams online, and that was late at night. They would be due at midnight and I would be there and get them in. I thought I was really bad at math growing up, it turns out I wasn’t, that was kind of a revelation, I’m like, “I don’t really like math still, but I’m actually a lot better at it.” My dad was really good at math and so was my uncle, so it was really interesting for me to see what comes down in the genes. Right now, the main thing I do is genetic genealogy with DNA for adoptees and for others with unknown parentage or misattributed parentage. I’ve done that full-time for three years. My younger brother was adopted, is how I got into it. Our mother passed away and our father previously passed away in 2013. He’d been very close with them and was feeling a little bit lost and I asked him if he was interested in finding his biological family, and just to see what we could find out about their medical history or anything. He said yes. He tried before and hadn’t had any luck and so I said, “Well, would you do a DNA test?” I’d started to see the TV shows about a long lost family and another one that showed how DNA could help people find families. So he did and I solved his case and then found out his biological mother was adopted herself in Dallas of 1933. Being a genealogist I was like, “Okay, I have to solve her case too then, even though she’s not alive, we have to find out the rest of his family line.” I just got hooked in solving mysteries and now I run a DNA special interest group here in Phoenix and I go to all the major conferences. CeCe Moore presents in San Diego called I4GG. I’ve been to SLIG, the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy has this big conference in January every year and Utah Genealogical 15 Association runs it. Two and a half years ago I went to CeCe’s DNA Bootcamp and then this last year I went to one with Angie Bush and Blaine Bettinger, who are the other leaders in the field worldwide. So that’s my passion, working on genealogy and helping people find the answers and closure to know what happened in the first chapter of their life. LR: That’s really cool. I’m curious since you’ve only recently gotten into the genealogy, how has being involved in that changed your perspective on things? MK: It’s changed a lot. People have this age-old question, “Is it nature or is it nurture?” as far as the way children turn out. From what I’ve seen so far, it’s both. Some people used to say, “Well, it doesn’t matter if you’re adopted or a foundling or donor conceived, the only thing that matters is the family that raises you and how you’re raised.” That does matter, it’s very important, but time and again I see that the DNA is very strong in people, not just in how they look but in how they act. I’ve met second cousins of mine that were both adopted separately in different parts of the country and on the phone they sound so much alike I have to stop and think, “Oh am I talking to Jon or am I talking to Scott?” It’s that strong and it’s so weird they’ve never met in person, but the way they phrase their sentences and the type of things they say, the words they choose are just so similar. It’s kind of freaky sometimes. As far as my connection with my grandmother, that’s changed my whole perspective of her too, because I found out we had all these things in common that I didn’t know, maybe even some of her personality. She wasn’t a really 16 charismatic, touchy-feely type of person and I’m not either. I didn’t like that about myself, I didn’t like it about her, but it’s kind of like an ah-ha moment when you realize that. So we have more in common than I thought and you know, it’s just “knowledge is power,” when you realize sometimes where traits might have come from then you can do what you need to do, if you need to try to manage them a little better or something. I started to tell you about the DNA because of what I was telling you about math ability, the ability that I realized I had that I didn’t ever think I had. I think even things like that are passed down, like a tendency to figure things out that way. LR: That makes sense. Speaking of your grandmother, why did you start researching her in the first place? MK: Well because of the sesquicentennial. When it was coming up, I heard about Spike 150—January this year, I was up there for SLIG as I was telling you, the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy, I was in Salt Lake for the week for that. I’d seen online that there was an exhibit at the state capitol that had just opened about the Transcontinental Railroad and there was a public reception, and so I arranged it so that I could get there. My friend and I took a Lyft there because we didn’t have a rental car, and we got there about forty-five minutes or so before it closed. We had missed the presentation part of it at the beginning, but I was able to meet Doug Foxley, who was the Commission Chair, or something like that, for Spike 150. I told them who I was, that my grandmother was Bernice Gibbs Anderson. I said, “Do you know what she did?” They started grabbing both my hands like, “We are so honored you are here,” and one of my cousins was there, so she was 17 another granddaughter, so they just said, “We’re just so honored you are here, and of course we know who she is. We can’t start a meeting without saying where would we be on this if Bernice hadn’t done what she did decades ago?” As far as getting the replica trains in place and all those things, getting into the National Park Service. For the sesquicentennial, it would’ve cost so many more millions of dollars to do all those things in today’s money than when she did it. Not that it was easy when she did it. Anyway, there was a film crew from Utah State, from Logan. They were doing a documentary, so he made sure that they interviewed us. Our part got cut, it wasn’t in the documentary, but at that point I realized I already knew what she’d done for Golden Spike but I was looking around and there was really nothing about her at all in that exhibit, which is okay, it’s not all about her, but it’s just like I realized there was a lot of her story that wasn’t being told that needed to be told. Then I started looking to see what was available online, and some of it has been digitized but not very much. The majority of it, I believe, is down in Tucson in these archives, as far as her letters that she wrote to President Eisenhower and his letters back and things like that. So I just did as much as I could back in Phoenix to try to start interviewing my aunts that are still alive, they’re her daughter-in-laws, and anybody that might have more information. I have cousins who were twenty years older than I am, not quite twenty years but almost twenty years older than I am, so they knew her better than I did because they lived right there in Corinne. I started doing full-on interviews with my cousins. I’m like, “Tell me about this, tell me about that,” just trying to get it all 18 down so I could tell the stories. Then I started scanning the pictures that I had, and putting them on FamilySearch in the memory section under her name, Bernice Gertrude Gibbs with her maiden name. Previously, I think there was maybe one picture of her there, not a very flattering one but I found pictures I’d never seen before that were from when she was a teenager. I scanned those and put them up so other people could access them and same with my Ancestry tree, which was a public tree. I started putting a lot more of her photos and poetry and things like that there ‘cause she’s a published poet. I wanted people to be able to find these if they were interested. Not just our family, but other people who might be looking for information about her. I’m currently trying to find a place to put all these things I’m scanning down in Tucson but it’s 3,000 pieces; 3,000 letters and photos and lots of different things so I’m not sure yet what we’re going to do with all of that but we’ll figure out a place to store it online and house it so people can access it. LR: Right, that might be something to talk to my curator about too. MK: Okay. Yeah, that would be great. One of my sisters works at the Huntington Library Museum in California. Do you know where that is? In San Marino? LR: I don’t. MK: Okay, it’s where the original Pinkie and Blue Boy paintings are displayed. It’s just an amazing library for scholars. Mr. Huntington, one of the four railroad barons, it was his mansion and museum so there’s a railroad connection there. Anyway, she works in the library part-time and has been talking to the archivist there, 19 trying to drum up some interest in them helping to store some of this. All of the collection belongs to the National Park Service of the Golden Spike so it’s not like the actual documents would ever be anywhere unless they were loaned out for part of a display or exhibit. But as far as the digital version of them, once we scan them where are they all going to go? LR: Right, that makes sense. I will give you some information when we’re done about my curator. MK: Okay, that’ll be good. Yeah, it’s not my field so I don’t really know. But if you’d be able to give me some tips that’d be great. LR: Since we’re talking about your grandmother, you had mentioned that when she was a teenager she started interviewing people who were alive in 1869. Do you know why she was doing that? What her interest was? MK: In the Golden Spike? LR: Yes. MK: I do, because just looking at the timeline of her life—she was born in Denver but that was just a fluke. On her mother’s line, ancestors came to Utah in 1849, so she was like fifth-generation Utahn, if that’s the right term. But her mother married somebody whose family was living in Denver, Colorado, so that’s why her mother was there when she was born. But right away, her mother and her father split up and so her mother moved back to Salt Lake City and got a job as a maid in a hotel in Salt Lake and had her baby, Bernice, living with her for a short 20 time. Then they said, “No, you can’t do that. Your baby can’t live here,” so she asked her step-grandmother to raise her baby, her step-grandmother being Chestina Christensen Phillips Holley. Grandma Holley, as we called her, lived in Kaysville, Utah at the time and that’s kind of the ancestral home of Bernice’s ancestors. My three times great-grandfather, Edward Phillips, was the first permanent settler of Kaysville. If you go to the little Layton History Museum, it’s a satellite of Utah Daughters of Pioneers Museum, there’s photos of him on the wall. The museum director, he knows all about them more than I do. The first time I went to that library I told him, “I’m a descendant of both Robert Harris and Edward Phillips.” He said, “Oh, let me show you what we have. We’ve closed the Robert Harris exhibit.” All that stuff was back in storage so we didn’t get to see that, so she had this deep, deep tie to Utah. Chestina, her step-grandmother, was a widow at the time she was raising her. For the first five years she was a single-mom, substitute mom I guess, to Bernice, and then Chestina married a man called William Holley, and he had a ranch west of Corinne. At that time, when they got married, they moved with five-year- old Bernice to west Corinne and that is when her love affair, we’ll call it, with the Transcontinental Railroad began. Bill Holley would drive cattle up to Black Pine, Idaho, and Bernice would go with them on the cattle drives. There was one time when Grandma Holley and Bernice, right after they moved there when she was five, they were taking food or something to the men 21 on the cattle drive, I can’t remember exactly what they were taking, but they ended up leaving too late and so Grandma Holley said, “We’ll just camp here overnight,” and it was at the site of Promontory Summit. I read it in her oral interview, that’s when she first was aware, “This is where this important event happened and why is there nothing here really to commemorate it at all?” The concrete marker wasn’t even there yet, the obelisk that was put up around 1917 I think by Southern Pacific or one of the railroads. She rode her horse all over, and she was a tomboy I think in that she was raised as an only child by these step-grandparents and got to go on the cattle drives. She drove along the right of way to the railroad ‘cause the way into town went one direction on the railroad right of way and the way to the cattle drive went in the other direction, and so she knew it like the back of her hand. It was just like her stomping ground. She went to high school at Box Elder High School in Brigham City and got married young at eighteen and started having her children. Then at the age of twenty-six she wrote her first telegram or letter, I’m not sure yet which one, but in her history she says she was twenty-six and she sent off this telegram to Congress demanding that something be done to recognize the site to preserve it; that the artifacts were disappearing and that the buildings were disappearing and if something wasn't done there’d be nothing there, and how important it was as a National Historic Site. That’s when she started really writing about it and talking about it and trying to find who could do something about it. LR: So first of all, what year was she born in? 22 MK: 1900, and it’s almost like a happy accident that she ended up being right there in Corinne and around Promontory for all of this. She married, and she and my grandpa lived on a farm that was near Corinne and that’s where she lived the rest of her life. She would travel to Salt Lake a lot, I’ve got one that’s down in archives I found that’s got like all of her travel dates to Salt Lake, and her reimbursement from the newspaper was like five cents or something—I was just looking at that online last night on my things I’ve scanned—so she kept pretty good records of her travels and what she would do to try to build support for her cause to preserve the site. I guess you could say it was because her Grandma Holley married this man that lived by Corinne that she ended up there. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have had the big interest that she had. LR: You mentioned that earlier that she worked for the Salt Lake Tribune. MK: Yes. She was a staff reporter, CoC. LR: Okay, if you know, how did she come about to do that? MK: As far as I can tell she started writing articles for the local paper, the Brigham paper first. She would write about Corinne and she would write about other local sites of interest and she would write about Golden Spike. I’m not through all the archives yet, we’ve only made a small dent in them so far. I was down there for two days last month from 9 to 5 with five different people helping me from the Pima County Genealogical Society in Tucson. We had four scanners going and we got through about three boxes out of eighteen. The archivist down there, when I first talked to him, he’s like, “This is going to take you several research 23 trips.” And he was right, it will take several research trips. So as near as I can tell, from what we’d read in her letters so far and those archives start in the 1930s—there’s a lot in the 1940s and 1950s that she wrote letters back and forth to people—from what I can tell so far, she was a self-promoter in that she was very strategic in thinking, “What do I need to do to achieve this? I’m a woman and they’re not necessarily listening to me. I’m going to start, I’m going to join the Box Elder Chamber of Commerce,” which she did I believe in 1952. She was one of the first women that we know of that was in that Chamber of Commerce because it was a male-boys’ club before that. She’s thinking, “What do I need to do? I’m going to start this non-profit called Golden Spike Society,” which she did, and she was the president. Then she was the president later on of the National Golden Spike Association. They were two different non-profits she started. In many of these letters that we’re reading, in the 1950s I believe, there was somebody else who was the president who was male. I don’t know for sure, but my theory on that is that she thought people would listen to him more than they would to her, when he wrote letters to Congress. I think that she stepped back from being president and said, “Let’s have him be president and maybe I’ll be the ghostwriter and write these letters.” I’m sure he might’ve written his own letters, but they worked together to try achieve the goal of getting the preservation of the site and getting it recognized. There were other things like that, I think as far as her becoming staff reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune. I think she probably had it on her list of goals. 24 Like, “How do I need to let people know about this? I know some people in Salt Lake, I’m going to send down some samples of my work and I’m going to ask if I can work for them,” I believe it probably happened that way but I’m not sure yet until we get through more of the letters. LR: Okay, almost like a means to an end. MK: I think so. I think she was interested in these other things she wrote about. She was interested in Corinne and the other local sights besides Golden Spike. But it probably all snowballed in that she found out more about them as she found out more about Golden Spike. LR: I’m curious how supportive her husband was in all of what she was doing. MK: I think it waxed and waned because if you look at it if she wrote her first letter in 1926, which I don’t have an actual copy of that letter or telegram yet. I don’t know if it exists. It was 1957 I believe when the land, just a few acres, not very many, were bought by the federal government to try to start to preserve the site. Then it wasn’t until 1965 that I believe the park service came on board and I might be getting dates wrong. They’re not on top of my head today like they have been. She had said in a previous interview that there was thirty-eight years she worked on it. I think she was counting from 1926 until when it became the National Park Service site, which is shortly before the centennial, which would've been in 1969. If you think about that, like if I told my family when I was in my thirties, “Okay, so I have this important thing to do and it’s going to take me like forty years. I’m going to spend this many hours every day on it.” I mean, can’t imagine, right? 25 LR: Right. MK: With projects I’m like, “Oh I have this conference coming up that I need to get ready for, I have this exhibit I need to get ready for,” and you might burn the candle at both ends or really work on it for months or something or a year or two. But I can’t really imagine what it’s like for a family when this is their life’s passion for so many decades. From what I can tell so far in the letters, he didn’t not support it but he wasn’t there at everything she did. He would go to the anniversaries on May 10th at Promontory, and he would allow her to use the family funds. I don’t know how much yet but she’s written about it and my aunts have written that she sacrificed their family funds to get some of the things, like the trains for Corinne when they had the Corinne Train Museum, and trying to drum up support for it being turned in to get people to take a look at Promontory more. He would allow that because he knew how important it was to her, but it wasn’t like it was his passion too. Same with my uncles. My cousin tells me a story that makes me laugh. After my uncle was married and had kids of his own, she would go off on her trips to Salt Lake and would go there to talk to people, I don’t know who exactly, maybe the Chamber of Commerce there in Salt Lake and different people like that. Actually, the state representatives and senators who would be going back to Congress, ‘cause she knew the way to do this was through Congress. So she would come back and pull up to his driveway and he’d look out the window and see his mother there fresh from Salt Lake and say, “Oh, hell, she’s here to talk about the railroad again.” It was kind of just like the family joke that it was like all 26 she cares about, like that’s her most important thing, her cause. One story I’ve been told by my cousins is that my grandfather would not buy her a car with air-conditioning, once that became available, so in the summer when she would go to Salt Lake, she would wear her swimsuit under her dress, because everybody wore dresses back then, all the females I mean. So she would wear her swimsuit and take cold water bottles and pour them down inside her dress to keep herself cool on these long trips to Salt Lake from Corinne and back. That was her way of coping with the heat. LR: Well, that’s kind of ingenious. That’s one way to stay cool. Wow. So I know that she managed to get a little, what is it, like an obelisk-type thing put up there initially. MK: Okay, that wasn’t actually her I don’t think. That was when she was still a teenager. I think the railroad decided to put that up. She took care of it, she got a fence put around it and she got a registration paper box set up like a visitor’s sign-in type of thing. One thing we found down in the archives in Tucson is all those sign-in sheets. LR: Oh, that’s cool. MK: Maybe not all of them, but a lot of them. They’re sign-in sheets and they’re kind of hilarious in that you read them and people will say, in the 1950s, “I’m So-and-so, I’m from Sweden,” or, “I’m from wherever and this is the date.” Then there’s a comment which is optional and most of them are blank but there are things like, “Where are the trains?” Because in the 1950s there were no trains there. The 27 track hadn’t been rebuilt and so on. That had been taken down in World War II for the steel. I looked at the first page or two last time I was down there and I’m going down there again tomorrow. That’s one of the things I hope we’ll be able to do in the next two days is start to scan those because I think it’s just so interesting. If we could get it online and get it transcribed people could search for it by their family’s name. “My mom said she visited there. Is her name here? Did she make a comment?” So that’s one of the things she just tried to see, “What’s there right now and how can I preserve it until we can get something better on the site?” LR: Okay. So what was the first thing that she was instrumental in putting there? MK: She got the bronze plaque that was on the obelisk in the 1950s. But the National Park Service paid for it, I believe it says National Park Service on it. She started the reenactment in 1952. Here’s kind of the timeline: Daughters of the Utah Pioneers had a centennial in 1947 for Days of ‘47. From 1847 to 1947. There was a lady named Marie Jeppeson who decided, “Let’s write a script about the Golden Spike and do a reenactment,” I think in Salt Lake City, “for Days of ‘47.” She didn’t have all the details on the history so she was told to turn to Bernice to help her write the script and get the details right on how it went down in 1869 for the ‘wedding of the rails’ they called it. Who was there, what they said, and what happened. Were you there this year for the sesquicentennial? LR: I wasn’t at Promontory, but I was there at the Ogden Station with the Big Boy and the other one. 28 MK: Okay, I was just wondering if you were there, that’s where I met Sarah. So Marie Jeppeson got the information from Bernice as far as writing an historical, accurate script. To my knowledge, that’s in use now. It hasn’t really been changed, maybe updated a little bit. My grandma was really big on historical accuracy. She wanted the uniform of the telegraph operator to be the same as what it would’ve been in 1869. At one point, National Park Service or somebody came in and changed some of the costumes of the reenactors, and in the one oral history interview I read the transcript for that’s online, she said to them, “Well, that’s nice but it’s not the same as what it would’ve been.” I laughed out loud because it’s like, I’m a very literal person and it’s like exactly what I would’ve said to somebody, not tactful or anything but like black or white, “Here it is.” So to my knowledge, the reenactment that they did this year is basically the same as what Marie and Bernice worked on together back in 1947. I think somewhere in these archives there are their original notes from when they first did the script. I haven’t found it yet but I’m hoping it’s in there. Then there was kind of a lag for a few years, but in 1952 Bernice decided, “Let’s do the reenactment at Promontory,” and everyone said, “That’s crazy, no one’s going to come. It’s so far out there, no one is going to drive that far just for a reenactment.” But they did it and there hasn’t been a year they haven’t done it since then on the site. That was one of those things that she said, “If we do this, we’ll see how many people we can get,” and I’ve read varying reports on attendance. I think in 1969 for the centennial, in one report I read 20,000 but I don’t know how they really counted. Another one I think said 12,000. Some of the 29 pictures that I found in the archives from the 1950s, it looks like there are at least a thousand, maybe two-thousand people. These are the off-years, not like a big anniversary, but just like 1955, 1957, pictures like that. So people did come out from Corinne and Brigham City, Tremonton, and probably maybe Ogden, for the reenactment. She started a tradition of laying a wreath to honor the railroad workers, not just the Chinese workers but all of them. But specifically, she did want to honor the Chinese. I know a lot was said this year about, “We’re making up for the Chinese that we’ve never honored before.” but she said, as I was reading her interview, that she started laying a memorial wreath on the day of the anniversary, on May 10th, and also, she would go back on what was called Decoration Day or Memorial Day and she would lay another wreath at the site to remember them. She said, “One year, I was the only person there but it didn’t matter,” it was that important to her that they be honored. My cousin and I were asked to be part of the program this year too, when the National Guard laid down the wreath in honor of the workers. So we represented her family and then there were people representing the Chinese and Irish and all the different workers that lost their lives in building the railroad. LR: So 1952, the reenactments at Promontory started. When did she actually get more of the buildings? I’ve been to Promontory so I know… MK: The visitors’ center, I think the visitors’ center went up somewhere between 1965 and 1969. I believe it was around 1968 but I’ll have to double-check that date. 30 Some of the things were moved around. She wasn’t very happy. There was an old windmill there. I have a picture of her standing under it, looking up, and an original windmill was there. Somebody decided to take it down. She talked about that in one of the oral history interviews, that she didn’t know why they didn’t want to preserve all these things. Some of the things are lost forever just because someone didn’t have the foresight I think to say, “Let’s try to make it accurate as possible, or save as much as we can.” She wasn’t a professional historian, she wasn’t a professional archivist. All she knew about this is what she taught herself growing up or as an adult. But to her, she would have loved to have saved the site, everything that was there, instead of moving the monument. That obelisk was moved I think three times. It was in one spot originally and then they moved it near the visitors’ center and now it’s actually on the visitors’ center, so I think it’s been moved at least three times. If she had had her way it would've been exactly where it was first placed and nothing would’ve been moved from its place. Whatever was built for people to visit would’ve been built around it. LR: So the obelisk was something that the National Park Service did? MK: Not the National Park Service, the obelisk was actually the railroad. LR: The railroad. I’m sorry, now I’m getting my terms mixed up. My question is though, when did the National Park Service get involved and how did she make that happen? MK: They got involved in the late 1950s and she made that happen by getting in 31 touch with Robert Utley. Robert Utley was a National Park Service Chief Historian at the time or he became the Chief Historian for the National Park Service. He’s still alive and lives in Scottsdale, Arizona. He’s very hard of hearing and doesn’t do phone interviews, but he’ll email you back. He didn’t go to the reenactment this year or to the anniversary for the same reason, just because of his hearing I believe, but maybe I’m reading too much into that. Anyway, I did email him this year just to tell him the news, if he had heard that it had been elevated in status, so to speak, to a National Historical Park, instead of being a National Historic Site, which it was for so many years. He said, yes, he’d heard, and while he was Chief Historian he counts about five different National Parks or National Sites as “his” sites, that he helped come to pass. She had him come to visit since she wanted to plead her case to the National Park Service and so they sent him and said, “Okay, go check it out. See if this is worthy of being in the Park Service system.” He went there I believe in spring, there was still snow and slush on the ground and their truck got stuck in the mud and they couldn’t get out. He tells the story in his book about Custer, a published book you can find online, and he tells how he was there to check out the Golden Spike site and he had to ask my grandmother to get in the back of the truck to put the weight in it to be able to get traction to get out. He tells the story and says that she was a large woman, and when I talked to him again or emailed him, he messaged that again, “She was quite a large woman.” But it worked and they got out and then he did write then to his people he worked with and said, “Yes, this needs to be a Park Service site,” and not because of that incident but 32 because, after the visit she had taken him around. She was able to give the kind of tour that the Utah State Historian, I don’t know his name, but somebody had an article about him that he was giving tours recently this past few months, where people could go out and he would drive them along all the important sites on the old right of way for the railroad, on the railroad tracks. So she was able to do the same thing and said, “This is where this happened. This is where the Chinese camp was. This is where the Petroglyphs are.” Everything. She knew that site so well that she could show everybody that. She would invite people who were celebrities out. She invited John Wayne to come out and then he wrote her a telegram and said he couldn’t come down, but later he did come and she took him out and gave him a private tour of the site even though he missed the actual anniversary date that year. It was the same year that Truman was invited, I believe it was the centennial year in 1969. There was a man named Clyde Eddy, have you ever heard of him? LR: I’m not sure. MK: Okay, so Clyde Eddy was kind of an adventurer. He was a pharmacist by trade. He was born in Texas, but he was a pharmacist in New York. When he was a young child, he lived in Brigham City for a few years and so he had this connection to northern Utah in that way. One of the things he did as an adult was go down the Colorado River rapids with several other men and like a young brown bear cub. He was kind of like this adventurer trying to get attention. He just did crazy things, kind of reminds me of an Evel Knievel type of person. I don’t 33 know if that’s a good analogy. What we found in the archives in Tucson, is several letters from him to her and vice versa. She was trying to get him to help her publicize the site. She was strategic in like, “Who is in the news and who can help me to get the word out that something needs to be done about this?” He ended up passing away in the 1950s, so I think maybe he was very interested in helping her and wanted to help her, but I think he died before he could do very much about it. LR: So the actual site itself, how big is it? Having been there once with my children, I’m trying to imagine how big it is. You’re talking about the petroglyphs and all of this and I don’t recall ever noticing any of that when I was there. MK: Okay. The whole area itself? LR: Yes. MK: I couldn’t even show you the petroglyphs, I don’t know if they’re still there. It’s one of the things she was hoping would be preserved but I don’t know if they were. I think if we look on the Park Service site it’ll tell you the size of it. As I was saying, in 1957 they got some of the acreage but not very much and then later on they bought a lot more of the acreage. So in square-miles or acres, I don’t know exactly off the top of my head how big it is. But the touring site, if you go on like a Promontory Trail they call it, covers quite a bit of land. I’ve got right here, this driving tour guidebook. I got a new one this year when I was up there. You can see where the visitors’ center is and then it shows you the Transcontinental grade and it has a scale with miles. I could figure it out 34 and let you know a little more accurate how much is actually in the Park Service division. It’s probably peripheral, there’s probably additional area around it. It’s not necessarily part of the National Park Service land but part of the history. Oh I see now, if I look at the back of this there’s an east tour too, so going the other way, the Central Pacific Way. The visitors’ center is kind of in the middle, and then one train came from the west and one came from the east and they met there. So the visitors’ center is near where the actual golden spike was driven, but there are other historic sites going each direction for miles. LR: Oh, okay. I did not know that. MK: Usually you don’t just drive along the grade, along the railway. There are only certain times of the year that you’re allowed to do that, and they did that this year for a while, an auto-tour was available so I’ve heard. LR: Okay, that’s kind of cool. You mentioned when she started doing the reenactments in 1952, I’m curious how she actually got the trains out there? MK: Okay, I’m not to the point in my research of knowing the details on that. One of my cousins told me that she bought old trains, or she raised funds to buy old trains maybe through the Box Elder Chamber of Commerce. I’m not sure yet. Then they tried to make them look like they thought Jupiter and the 119 would’ve looked back then, but they weren’t the accurate trains so some people criticize that I believe. But again, it was her means to the end of the goal, just, “People want to see trains here? Let’s put some trains here,” whatever they could come up with. 35 Once they got into the National Park Service, from what I’ve heard, the Park Service promised that they would get replica trains there, because they couldn't get the original trains anymore, they had been scrapped for metal years ago. Nobody knew how important this was going to be to the national history I guess. So those trains were in service for years after 1869, and then when they got too old they were taken apart and scrapped, so getting the original trains was not an option. Getting the replica trains was part of their deal I guess, or their agreement, that they were going to bring in these replicas for the reenactments and for the visitors’ center so people would have something cool to go there for, besides just being at the actual site. It didn’t happen until, if I’m remembering right, the 1970s. I talked to a different National Park historian just about two weeks ago, a man named Paul Hedren. The reason I called him was because I read that he was the person who wrote the tour guide that I was looking at and just telling you about, as far as going along the railroad tracks. So I looked online and found out that he was the historian at Golden Spike for about five years, from the late 1970s to around 1984. I found his information and called him and he lives in North Dakota. He was very helpful and the most interesting thing he told me was that he used Bernice’s story as inspiration for the local people there in North Dakota who were just very discouraged because of their historic site, Fort Union. They’d been promised certain things that the National Park Service and government would provide for the site, and it wasn’t coming through. He said, “It can be done. This is what this lady did in Utah for the Golden Spike,” and so he 36 told them some of what she did and how she got the National Park Service to come through and get the replica trains on site eventually. They got inspired by the story and I think he said they raised one and a half billion. They raised billions and they also got the Park Service to come through on their promise to Fort Union to get everything they needed. That was kind of cool because I’d never heard that before, to know that it expanded beyond Utah. He was able to use her story to tell other people to know what they could do. The first historian that I told you about, Bob Utley, who wrote what Bernice did for Golden Spike was a splendid lesson in elementary civics, just what she did to lobby and campaign. I asked him—once we were in contact I emailed, and this is probably, this was years ago before I was really as interested as I am now—“Tell me, who else was it besides my grandma who did all this for Golden Spike? Who worked with her?” He said, “Nope, it was all her. She was the one that was obsessed with it and wouldn’t let go and wouldn’t give up.” LR: That’s just crazy that one person can do that much. MK: Right? I know they did school lessons this year for Spike 150, and I haven’t seen the lessons, but I don’t think there’s anything in there about her. It would’ve been a good addition to say one person can accomplish a lot if they’re so determined and stubborn that they’re not going to give up. LR: Right. I know that you’re still doing a lot of this research but I’m thinking about Bernice, I’m wondering how much inspiration came from women receiving the right to vote? Because she was born in 1900, so she was twenty-years-old when 37 the Nineteenth Amendment was passed. I don’t know if you know the answer to this. MK: I don’t know the answer, but I did find a copy of her voting card. I want to say she was like a precinct chair for the democratic party in the area. LR: My question is how much do you think the Nineteenth Amendment had an effect on her activism, on her passion for getting this done? MK: Okay. I don’t know exactly but it seems like it probably helped a lot because she was not afraid to get in there and just doing whatever needed to be done. It didn’t matter what gender she was, she was just like, “This needs to be done so I’m going to do it,” driving to Salt Lake, or getting to vote in the local precinct, for voting and elections. That’s about all I can think of without going through the letters more and finding out more. LR: Yeah, I was kind of asking a question that you might not be able to answer, and I knew that. So are there any other stories that you can think of that you know about, right off the top of your head, that would be a good addition to this? MK: Let’s see, in some of the letters we’ve read, she just would ask for whatever she thought was needed for the reenactments or for the anniversaries. She wrote to the Utah Game and Fish Department, asking for an elk for the celebration. That really struck one of my friends who was helping me scan as kind of unusual, funny, and sweet. “We really need an elk and we can’t afford one, so please send us an elk for the dinner.” Sometimes she would want to give up, she would say, “If I’m the only one who cares about this, I don’t know what else I can do.” 38 She wrote to one of the congress members and she told them, “Well, you know, you didn’t come to the reenactment, you’re not supporting a bill for this, and so I give up. That’s it, I give up,” and then she went on to tell them about all the things they had done at the reenactment and some of their other activities and so they wrote back probably something like, “My dear Bernice, as I can tell from the tone of your letter, you actually have not given up.” He was kind of being sarcastic about it, but it was just kind of interesting, the back and forth we’re reading in the letters. Sometimes she’d be discouraged but then she’d get right back on and say, “Okay, we’ll try this,” and she’ll try another tactic. LR: Right. I wonder if she’d have had more success, or if things would’ve gone quicker, if she’d been a man pushing this? MK: Oh, that’s an interesting thought. I haven’t thought about that. I don’t know. The only thing I’d thought about when I started noticing this man’s name was that he was the president of the Golden Spike. I had thought in my mind that she had always been president, not that there was ever anybody else until she retired from it. As I told you, my thought about that was, “Okay, I’ll bet this was because she thought he would get further than she would with some people.” LR: That was just a curious thought. When she finally retired, do you know how old she was? MK: It would’ve been in her seventies, probably her mid-seventies. LR: Okay, geez. She just kept going. 39 MK: Yeah, I found a letter in my dad’s things, it was actually from her to my dad when we were living in California, I think, or we were living here in Arizona. She said, “They invited me back for the reenactment, and I didn’t want to go, but they wouldn’t take no for an answer,” because even after she retired as president, they still tried to have her come and speak. She was always the speaker, every year, about it. It wasn’t because she wanted the spotlight, she didn’t really. It was because she didn’t trust anybody else really to get the details right, I think is what it was. She knew the most about it kind of thing. The letter went on to say, “I shouldn’t have gone, it was a mistake to go. Now I’m worn out,” so she was already winding down with her health and kind of not feeling very good. I know they tried to keep her involved and keep her going out there and have her be an honorary member and different things. She was made an honorary lifetime member of the Utah Historical Association or whatever it’s called. I made what I call an ancestor trading card, with one of her photos on the front and then information on the back, like a timeline. I never got any printed but I sent out the digital version to my cousin, so I can send you that. LR: That would be great, we’re actually thinking of doing trading cards as part of the exhibit. MK: Oh, that’d be cool. I need to update it a little because at the time I did them, a few months ago in April, the information I had that I thought was accurate was that her father had abandoned her mother, but then I read something else she wrote that said that her mother left Denver to come back to her family in Utah because 40 of their religious differences. I need to change that because I don’t want to be giving out any information that I’m not sure is accurate. I’m not sure which the true story is, so. LR: Well, that makes sense. I just have a couple more questions. What do you think your grandmother’s legacy is, as you look back and research her life? MK: Well, I think that Golden Spike is there and that they were able to get so many people to hear about it this year is her legacy. I don’t believe that they would’ve been able to bring so many people if they hadn’t already had the visitors’ center there, and already had the Park Service involved on site, and all the rangers and all of that. But then there’s also her family. She had six children who lived to adulthood, one of them died as a baby, and about twenty grandchildren. She has lots of great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren and they’re just now learning the story. A lot of them don’t live in Utah or they haven’t, you know, they haven’t really heard much about this. So I think that’s kind of important, that they know that you can get involved in your community in different ways, and she did that and got involved in her community and helped preserve history not just for Golden Spike, but for other sites and other small towns in the middle of Utah. So in that way, she was an example. LR: How do you think researching her and learning about her has impacted your life? MK: Well it’s made me more aware of personality traits and ones that can be viewed as helpful, I guess, or ones that are maybe a cautionary tale. She was very emotional and she was sometimes a little blunt, and so I don’t know if that’s right 41 or wrong, it’s just the way she was. You could say, “Well, maybe this would’ve happened faster if she had a different personality?” You get more flies with honey type of thing, you know, with being as blunt as she was sometimes. But who’s to say? I mean, we don’t really know. Maybe this is the way it had to be done. When we were down in Tucson for the first research trip, those five women that were helping me for two days, they said as it was going on, “She was awesome. She was amazing,” because as they’re scanning they’re reading books and reading stuff to each other it was interesting to me to see her through their eyes. ‘Cause to me, I was thinking, “Oh, you know, maybe this could’ve been done differently.” They’re like, “No, this is the way it needed to happen,” is what they were seeing from everything so far. LR: Wow, that’s kind of cool. A question I’ve been asking all the women we’ve interviewed is—and maybe it’s something that you could think of in terms of your grandmother, how she would perceive it—but what does the term ‘women’s work,’ what does that mean to you? MK: When I hear it I kind of think of housework and cooking and cleaning and things like that, and raising kids. I do have something in writing from my grandpa, her husband, about this. He wrote in his autobiography, his life sketch of himself, he wrote that she helped him by far more out in the field than he ever helped her in the house. So she kind of did it both. There weren’t a lot of nearby restaurants or anything and they probably didn’t have the finances to go out to eat, so she not only did all this but she was also cooking three meals a day for her family and doing what housework she did. She probably wasn't the best housekeeper in the 42 world but she kept house, she cooked, and she helped him out on the farm ‘cause he was a farmer. My one aunt said in the biography she did of her mother, Bernice, “She was happiest at her typewriter,” and so that was her happy place, to be writing and getting the articles ready for the newspapers and writing her poetry and writing about history and writing about Golden Spike. I think she did what “women’s work,” quote unquote, she needed to do to keep up the house and take care of her kids, but it wasn’t by any means her whole life. She had this other part of her that she thought was important, something that needed to be done in the world that she was like, “No one else is going to do it, I’m going to do it.” I think if somebody else had been willing to do it she would’ve been okay, “I’ll help you, let me know. Let’s work together,” but when nobody else was really wanting to do it. She just felt like, “This has to be done and so I’m going to do it.” That’s what I’m reading in the letters. LR: So what does that term mean to you? MK: What does women’s work mean to me? I think that phrase is kind of going to go away. I don’t think it’s going to be so much of a thing. As we’ve already discussed, I was a stay-at-home mom and I was happy as a part-time musician and part-time writer, those were the things I did. But I know that there are other women, a lot of other women, who want to work full-time and that’s great for them. They don't have to feel like they have a specific type of ‘women’s work,’ a stereotype, that they don’t have to fit in any type of mold. 43 LR: Right, right. That’s cool. Thank you for answering that. So my final question, unless you have another story or something else you’d like to share? MK: Can’t think of one right now. LR: Okay, so this is a question that we’ve asked everyone we’ve interviewed for this project. How do you think women receiving the right to vote shaped or influenced history, your community, and you personally? MK: Okay. So for history, I think it changed who was in office over the years because women don’t always pick the same candidates that men would pick, especially as more women run for office. I don’t feel like because you’re a woman you have to vote for a woman. I believe in voting for the best candidate, whatever the gender. But it’s just given more options for those women who want to run for office and so I think history’s changed a lot because of that. As far as in the community, same thing. I have really good friends who serve on the city council and who currently and formerly served on school boards with the high school board and the K–8 boards and I admire that a lot and I campaign for them in their offices. What was the last one? LR: You personally. MK: Oh, for me personally? I can’t imagine, because I grew up being able to vote as soon as I turned eighteen. I can’t imagine not being able to vote, but if I look at it and think, “What would it be like?” I would feel very oppressed I think. If we were in a world where right now only men could vote, it would just feel not fair and I would be fighting to get the right. So I guess it’s freedom that we have the right. I 44 feel freedom right now and just gratitude. LR: I wonder what your grandmother would say about how she would answer that question, having been alive for that. MK: Oh yeah, I’m not sure. It would be interesting. I don’t know how Utah keeps its voting registration records but maybe there’s a way I could try to look up and see exactly when she registered. Maybe she was like one of the first in line to register right when it was allowed. LR: It’s just a thought I had. Thank you so much for your willingness to talk and to share and I know you’re still just scratching the surface of your grandmother’s life and all of her papers and stuff, so when you actually have this biography written—to have a copy of it in our archives with this oral history interview. Something to keep in mind. MK: I would love that. I can tell you that she wrote several books for the Daughters of Utah Pioneers. I don’t know if any are still for sale or in print but I found copies of the originals. Some of them were about Golden Spike and some of them were about Corinne and different topics so I’m just trying to round it all up and get it into one place. LR: Right, which makes sense. Thank you again.