Oral History Program Susan Van Hooser Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 31 May 2019 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Susan Van Hooser Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 31 May 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: Van Hooser, Susan, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 31 May 2019, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Susie Van Hooser (right) and her husband, Dwane (left). Circa 2018 Susie Van Hooser 31 May 2019 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Susan Van Hooser, conducted on May 31, 2019, in her home in Ogden, Utah, by Lorrie Rands. Susan discusses her life, her memories, and the impact of the 19th Amendment. Charleesa Bird, the video technician, is also present during this interview. LR: Today is May 31, 2019, we are in the home of Susie Van Hooser in Ogden, Utah and we are here for the Women 2020 Exhibit that Weber State University’s doing. I am Lorrie Rands, conducting the interview, with Charleesa Bird. Thank you, Susie, for your time and your willingness to sit and do this, I am very grateful. So let’s just start with where and when you were born. SH: I was born in Marion, a very small town in southern Illinois where I was raised and went to elementary school. Very idyllic situation, where my grandfather owned a farm where we could go and play with the animals, the barn, and all that goes with it. We even had a horse that we could bring into town.We’d tie it to the basketball goal in the backyard so that all the neighborhood kids could ride this horse. Guess what his name was? Beauty. That’ll tell you what the time frame was. That was in the 1950s. I graduated from my hometown high school and went to college at Southern Illinois University, which was about fifteen miles away. I loved college, that’s where I met my husband and graduated with a degree in elementary education. My husband got a job with the U.S. Forest Service so we started our travels and our travels took us everywhere. We first started off as a young, married couple on what was known as Forest Survey. An organization charged 2 with going out, finding specific trees, measuring them, and checking their growth and their health. Well, that sounds like fun except we were sent to Louisiana. Well, in Louisiana: swamps, snakes, alligators and all of that. But it was really exciting because I had traveled a lot as a kid and living in my hometown, but to be on your own and out like that, it was just really a lot of fun. There were only two couples, ourselves and another young couple, but they had a baby and she decided she didn’t want to do it anymore. So we just traveled all the way through Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, southern Illinois, Tennessee. We just kind of roamed and it was fun ‘cause we moved eighteen times in two years. So we would move from one little town to another little town and it was fun, not only meeting the people but their culture and what the towns were like. We stayed in a little town called Broken Bow, Oklahoma and I was fascinated because the whole city really was centered around a Native American community. You’d go to the grocery or whatever—and I had never been around Native Americans, but that was what the town was all about was the tribe that lived there the whole time. Then Dwayne got called back to the New Orleans office and we moved back there and I had my first child Randy. I taught school down there and I taught during the time of Desegregation. That was probably the most interesting time, I guess, in history that I can relate to. I taught fifth grade, and at the time in our little neighborhood called Terrytown, which was just across the river. It was one tenth of a mile from New Orleans’ city limit and it was an all-white school. In the middle of that, nearly the last two years that I taught, they decided that they were being integrated. It was 3 one of the last schools in the nation to be integrated. They brought in fifty percent black children only into the fifth grade, and they did that because they knew that these children were going to go to a white middle school the next year, see, so they wanted to integrate them into society of the white teachers and whatever. In my mind, you don’t treat them any different than you do anybody else, and we were all anxious for them to come. I was very disturbed by the fact that they put a huge fence around our school, which we didn’t have before. They brought the state police. Brought the kids in on buses, they were scared to death. Not to say that we weren’t, but we just didn’t really know what was happening so we took the children that were in our classroom and just took them in with our other white students. There was no discussion about white or black, or nobody even mentioned it. So I was walking around the room trying to make the kids feel very comfortable about being in the classroom. There was one really, very small child but he was in the fifth grade, but smaller than the others, and I put my hand on his back to kind of comfort to let him know that I was there, and he turned around and looked at me and he said, “I ain’t never been touched by a white woman before,” and it just took my breath away. I thought, “Where have these children been?” So then you, as a teacher, you want to start from where they are and not from where you have been all this time. It wasn’t very long until we knew the children did not have enough education to even go along with the kids in the regular classroom, especially in reading and math. They knew some of the other sciences. So we divided the kids up into groups of their reading ability, and I 4 always loved the kids who couldn’t read so I took the lowest reading group because I thought that’s where I could probably do the best. I had one white child in the reading group and the rest were blacks. I had one boy in the classroom who was black and he said, “Mrs. Van Hooser, you don’t need to worry about anything. If somebody’s going to hurt you, I’ll take care of it.” In my mind I thought, “Why would somebody hurt me?” But they’d had that happen in their school. When you start talking to these kids and finding out how their education began and whatever—well, it began in schools that were very substandard and it was generally right around these big—I’m trying to think of the word, where the children would stay with their parents and it was all public housing, you know, that kind of a thing. So I started working with the children and then I realized they didn’t even know the alphabet, and they didn’t know the word ‘the,’ ‘and,’ ‘but,’ you know just the basic ‘sight words’ as we call them. So I tried to, I started on them, and scientifically I’m thinking, “Okay, what don’t they hear? If I say ‘A,’ how do they not know what ‘A’ is or what it looks like?” So I contacted the speech teacher at school and I said, “Just come in and listen, tell me what you think is going on.” She came in and sat for two days with me and I said, “Here I’m trying to teach them phonics, the sound of ‘A’,” and she said, “They don’t hear it.” I said, “They don’t hear it?” She said, “No.” So, we’d have them close their eyes and I’d hit wood, “What does that sound like to you?” They had no idea. I’d hit glass and they had no idea what glass sounded like when you hit it. The sounds in their minds were not anything that they were used to or that they had been taught to 5 listen for and understand where the sound came from. Metal, glass, we did everything we could think of to try to get them to understand and then the issue came where we just had to do sight words. They just had to learn words that they knew and by writing them then they would learn them. I learned that really early on, and that was if we wrote a sentence, how it started, what the sounds were, what the letters were, to get them to understand a complete sentence from start to finish. A lot of the kids had never even had a textbook. I did question the kids once in a while and I’d say, “Tell me the kind of things your teacher did.” One little boy said, “Well, she always used to go get her hair done on Friday.” I said, “During school?” He said, “Oh yeah, she’d leave,” or somebody else they knew had gone to the bank or run to the grocery store. I’m thinking, “Who’s monitoring and watching what’s going on?” Well, I learned right there nobody was and nobody ever had been, because they were black children in a totally black school and nobody cared, and that’s basically what it came down to. Nobody cared. After that experience, every year, we added another grade. So the next year we had fifth and fourth, and then the next year, fifth, fourth, third, all the way down until it got to the first grade. When I left, by the time those first graders got up to the fifth grade, they knew as much and as well as the white children in the classroom. It was a total experience for everybody in the school, and we kept saying, “We need to write a book. We need to take all this down.” The other thing that was dramatic for me was food. I don’t know what I thought, but any rate you assume a child comes to school with food. Well, it 6 didn’t take us two days and we realized they came to school hungry and they came to school cold. First, we needed to feed them, then we need to make them warm and comfortable, and then they could learn. The teachers, we all came together and we brought cereal in and our principal bought milk and we bought orange juice and we brought in fruit. Believe it or not, some kids did not know the difference between an apple and an orange, they couldn’t tell by color, it was like it was so foreign to them. Our principal came in and he said, “Well, we’ve got to fix this first before we can get anything else done,” and so that’s what we did. We fed them in the morning for breakfast, but at lunch time—the first lunch they went to was just horrific. They were hungry ‘cause they hadn’t eaten on the weekend, and then you get to Monday and then they’d get to lunch, and they hadn’t had breakfast. And in the cafeteria they were used to stealing off other people’s plates, that was a normal thing to do, just to reach over, grab it or whatever. Then they had utensils and I kept thinking, “Somebody’s going to get really hurt here.” So we assured them, we sat them all down—there were five classes in fifth grade—and we told them, “You will eat, and you will eat as much as you need to eat. We’ll make sure that you have that so when you come to school you don’t have to fight over anything.” Well, it was a hot lunch and these kids weren’t used to that at all. Some of the foods, they’d never had. I said we started off from the very basics, I’d say from a three-year-old almost, and work with them to get them to feel very comfortable in the situation they were in. 7 They’d been bussed for forty-five minutes in the morning just to school and they did not know where they were going. The funny story that I always tell about the kids is, the little kids had got on the busses first, but our principal said, “Since the kids are so new, why don’t we let the fifth grade go on the busses first, the big kids,” ‘cause they were the most concerned about getting home. So I said, “Well, I’ll do the bus duty.” So what it was, you’d go outside in front and the busses come in, and they’re numbered and everything, and you would assume that they’d been on it. Well, my principal was standing in his office window looking at me, it was kind of a glass section where the kids would go out and get on. When the teachers told the kids in the classroom who were going to the bus to get up, because none of the other kids were bussed, they all lived in the neighborhood, those kids started running. I guess my mouth was probably this big because there was no way you were going to stop that many kids and I laughed so hard. I didn’t get knocked down but I swear my nylons were shredded down to my ankles where these kids were trying to get home, that’s all they wanted to do, was get home. We had to take them all off the bus, stand them out in the schoolyard to find out where they lived so they would know what bus to get home on, and then the rest of the kids came very naturally. But every day for weeks, we had to walk them out very carefully because they didn’t care where they went, they weren’t going to stay in a white neighborhood. That was always really funny to me and then we had lots of jokes about it with the teachers. Then my husband was transferred to Washington D.C. and so we moved up there. It was a very good experience, I love politics and so it was something 8 you could see and do, you could actually be in it. One of the things my husband would do is he would walk over to the mall to see all the museums and he would find something that he thought the kids and I would like and then he’d call me and we’d do a picnic dinner, and while everybody was trying to get out of town we would go in town and then we had the place almost to ourselves. We had so many wonderful experiences there, the 4th of July on the Mall, watching a president being inaugurated, just all those kinds of things. My neighbor’s husband, I asked her, “Now what does he do?” She said, “Well, he’s kind of like President of the Marine Corps,” because I didn’t know. He was a chief of staff, and I didn’t know the name, not being in the military. So they took us to a lot of events in the city that we would not have been able to go because they had the clearance to get in. So it was a wonderful experience, it really was. Then we got news that we were coming to Utah, and I knew where it was on the map but I did not know a lot about it. Everybody thinks west is California. So we really got excited about taking that move because D.C. was at that time— if you think it’s crowded now, it was nothing when we were there, but it was still difficult to get around and you had limited access to things you wanted to do or whatever so we decided that we were going to come to Utah. My husband had been out here several months and he said, “You are just going to love it.” So we came out for a house hunt and ‘course I came and I just couldn’t get over it, I’m not kidding you. I was so impressed with the mountains, the cleanliness, the friendliness of the people, just everything about it was just like you’d like an idyllic town or neighborhood to move into. ‘Course when I moved here they had the 9 mall, not the mall, had the stores. So everybody would say, “Well, don’t you miss something or other back there?” “Well, no,” I mean, I didn’t shop there in the first place, like Lord and Taylor and some of those. So when we moved out here, I just thought it was a wonderful city. The downtown was so nice, and you had all these little stores and it was just great. Of course the mall came in and that was quite a citizen’s, I don’t want to call it a revolt, nobody really wanted it because I think they knew they wanted to have that same small hometown feeling. As I say, “Ogden is the only city.” Layton doesn’t have a downtown, Roy doesn’t have a downtown, and I go through Syracuse, West Haven and all these, and I think, “You know they’re nice bedroom communities but they don’t have a downtown,” and Ogden always has. When we came, 25th Street was in shambles practically. I had driven down there a couple times, I actually found a guy that could cut my hair and I’d go down and get my hair cut on 25th Street. Well, we just loved it. After my daughter Courtney, she was born in Virginia, we moved out here, and when she went to school then I went to school, then I could teach. I had a job at Taylor Elementary as a second grade teacher and I taught there twenty-one years. It was just wonderful. I mean, the families were wonderful, both-parent families, just a really good school and neighborhood. So I stayed there, like I said, until I retired in 2000 and I became the librarian the last three years. I went back and got a Library Media degree, and so I was the librarian in the school and I just absolutely loved it. I thought, “This will be so much simpler,” because it’s hard work with twenty-eight to thirty-eight kids but then I found that I had three 10 hundred and fifty or more. If you want to give them a treat, you’ve got to give it to everybody. So it was just kind of funny. A friend of mine, here in Ogden, was on the Landmarks Commission and she was a teacher with me and we both love antiques and old things and old houses and whatever. She said, “Nobody is standing up for your neighborhood or my district, would you be interested?” Not knowing, I’m thinking it’s just a little group that meets or whatever, had no idea. Then I went on the Landmarks Commission then realized that it really is a commission, which means you meet and you have all these extra things you have to do and guidelines to go by. I don’t want to say political, but it kind of was because you just needed to know all the ins and out of the community to find out, “Why do they want to tear this house down on this corner when it looks to me like it’s a fine house?” So when I was on that committee, I just loved it and I loved the people that were on it. Then I decided I wanted to be on the city council. Now I’d been retired awhile and so I said to my husband—I saw the notice in the paper and it said it had to be in by five o’clock the day that I read it—and I said, “You know, I’ve always wanted to do this,” and he said, “Doesn’t hurt you to try.” So I called down to the city and said, “What do I need? Were there a few forms or whatever,” so I went down and put my name in. Well, the next morning, in the paper there were like forty-two of us. I thought, “Oh, well Susie, forget this one.” Forty-two people!? I mean, we had doctors, lawyers, and as I say, “Indian Chiefs,” because everybody was really somebody. We went through the whole process of interviews and then you’d get the next ten people or whatever it happened to be. 11 I really believe the reason I got on the city council was because I was on the Landmarks Commission. I had a basic knowledge of how things worked and I think that was what did it. But we had professors of all kinds of things at Weber State and generals from the military, it went on and on, just really “big wigs” as I’d say. I enjoyed that, and I was just on from August to December and then they had an election. I was on long enough. I don’t know how to put this—to say I was not happy with what I saw and I was not comfortable with the way things were being run. I felt like there was too many things on the inside and not enough things on the outside for people to see what was happening. So instead of running for city council, I ran for mayor. I had never run for office anywhere, whatever, and I thought, “Well, at least I can say what I think. If I were on the council I couldn’t.” So I ran for mayor and I did really well. Mr. Godfrey beat me by four hundred and forty-two votes, which means it was really two hundred and twenty-one votes because you split it in half. At any rate, it was a journey, one that I had never thought I’d ever take. I’ve met people I knew I would never know in Ogden, never have their acquaintance, learning the ins and outs of city government, how it does work, what the restrictions are. I always thought cities made money. Cities don’t make any money. Cities just get the money they get and have to provide a way to spend it for everybody in the community. It wasn’t really what I had thought it would be. The budgets are the hardest things you ever go through, and you spend, I want to say, six to eight months clarifying a budget, deciding what you can afford to do. Also, what I 12 enjoyed a lot was the fact that we could look ahead and say, “Okay, in five years this project needs to be done. Where are we going to find the money?” Well, we could store money for a period of time to go toward that project so in the end you had the money. But in five years, of course, it’s always more than it started out to be but at least you had a really good start on what you wanted to see happen. So that was very interesting to me. Then all the rules and regulations that people don’t know that the council is tied to. People always think, “Well, I’m just going to go and make this great, big change.” Well, that’s not how it works. Change takes a lot of time, it usually takes a resolution, everybody in the city has to agree, the council has to agree. Takes a lot of time to get those kinds of things changed, doesn’t happen overnight. So that part of it I just loved too. I really, really did. I didn’t get really involved in the state government. I knew who they were, we went out to lunch when the legislature starts. That was interesting too. But after I ran for mayor and I lost, then I had to wait another year before I could run for city council and that’s what I did. It took me a year to get over running for mayor, physically and mentally, and then I went in and won handily for the city council and I did it for four years. That is where really the work comes in and that’s what I loved. I just loved every minute of it. I did make sure that I had two things on my agenda. One of which I thought was most important was demolition by neglect, and nobody in Ogden had ever tackled that—and I was on the Weber County Heritage Foundation Board and had been president a couple of times— and what brought that to my mind was the Egyptian Theatre. It could have been demolished by neglect and, luckily, Weber County Heritage saved it by ladies 13 putting up the mortgages on their houses to hold that until the city and the county could come together to find the funds to buy it and restore it, and that’s when the conference center came in. We had another incidence out on 12th Street and it was a beautiful, old farmhouse. It would absolutely take work. It was on some beautiful property, but the developers wanted to tear it down and they wanted to put in apartments. We fought that as long as we could and they actually won out where they tore it down. No apartments have ever been built and it’s just this big vacant space on 12th Street. But there are a lot of homes that we get involved with in making sure that they know what the regulations are, what they have to stand by, and what they have to make sure has to happen. We do have one of the most beautiful historic districts, I think, anywhere. I mean, you could go to larger cities like St. Louis, like where I was close to. I mean, they were mega-mansions. But when you come into a town this size and you find out about the history of the families, where they built their houses, and why they built them there, then it’s more personal than just somebody else’s house. One of the things I found in learning the history of Ogden was that the Hoover Dam plans were made on Eccles Avenue. They called it Watermelon Park, there between Eccles and I don’t know what the streets are, 26th and 25th? Their wives had come out with them from the East and they were going to build this dam and the wives got down in Las Vegas and they said, “It’s too hot, we can’t live here,” you know, it was just unbearable. So they told their wives, “Okay, go get on the train and go as far north as you want to go to find a place 14 that you would like to live,” and they came all the way to Ogden and that’s why Ogden has a reputation for the trains and all that goes with it. But they built that Hoover Dam off of a pool table that was down in the basement, and so one of the family members, you know, a descendant of those members, own those homes in that area. So it’s just been fun to really get in it and see what your community’s about. I am not LDS and I have not had a minute of angst about that at all. We had been told by several people, “You don’t want to live out there, you got the Great Salt Lake on one side, the mountains on the other and you’re just hemmed in.” I’m thinking, “What planet did they come off of?” It’s the most beautiful scenery. So we both came in with our open minds and said, “You know, this is where we’re going to stay.” Dwayne had other opportunities but we didn’t want to move our children from here. I have family back east in Virginia but that wasn’t what we wanted either, so we made a commitment that this is where we’re gonna stay and have loved it ever since. There’s been so many fun community activities that we’ve done with Weber County Heritage. The one thing that I did when I was president was we restored the lime kiln up Weber Canyon. It had been brought to my committee’s attention for quite a while and then we decided, “Well, let’s just see what we can do with it, if anything can be done.” In our research, nobody knew who it belonged to or who the property belonged to. But it belonged to the Chamber of Commerce here, they didn’t even know they owned it. [laughs] So after speaking with them, we got permission to go in and work on that lime kiln. There were 15 three there and we were able to restore one, we used some of the rocks from the other two. It was so gratifying to me that we got a R.A.M.P. grant for thirty thousand dollars. I figured thirty thousand dollars would probably pay for a mason just to do that, because it was quite overwhelming, the size, the length of time it would take. So we just said, “Basically, this is what we are going to get done,” and if I ran into any roadblocks my committee, Weber County Heritage, was glad to put more money into it if we needed to. I didn’t know what the interior of that thing needed. Six hundred bricks had to be specially fired to do what they did inside, so I went out to some brick company that I’d seen and just walked in and asked them and they said, “Yes ma’am, we’d be glad to help you. We’d like to see that done.” Then it had to have a grate in the ceiling for the heat to come out and it was like ten feet across. It was a big piece. I went to someone who did the iron work and he said, “I’ll go up today and see what I can find out,” and he got really interested in it, not only it but its history. Next thing I know, he said, “When do you want it delivered?” So it just made it just so much easier, and I don’t know of any other community you could go to and ask that and people would so gratefully pass it on. People are always worried about their bottom line it seems, but not here necessarily. I mean, you do run up some roadblocks but people here are very generous with their time, their money, just with everything they do. I’m on the Ogden Pioneer Days Foundation and rodeo and the celebration. The Eccles Arts Center does, I think, Traces of the West. We do a big art show up there, and what we want to do is get some really famous artist to 16 come to Ogden and show their art during Pioneer Days and we keep it a month. We have had some amazing things come from all over the United States. There’s prize money, but for them, the artist, it’s not necessarily the prize as it is to have it shown locally. We do that and that lasts the whole month, it’s July the 5th because it comes just after the 4th and it’ll be there for a month, and we have some amazing artists that are nationally-renowned western artists. Then I do the museum down at Union Station, which is the Utah Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, and I was asked if I’d do it and I said, “Yeah, I think it’d be fun to do something like that,” not knowing really what the process was. The next year, they realized that the funds they had had to be spent immediately or they’d lose them, ‘cause they’d gotten a grant from the state. So we looked for a spot, the best spot would’ve been Union Station where it could be seen by the most, and didn’t require someone there 24/7. Then we started picking objects that we thought were really important to be in the museum. We had a ten year contract with the foundation at the time and bought some wonderful things that we knew were floating in Ogden and for sale but had gone through different hands that were probably not the best. One of which was Harm Perry’s saddle, the one he rode all the time in pioneer days, so we did acquire that. We’ve acquired a lot of other things, like Reed Brothers, who had been making saddles for over a hundred years here, cross-western wear stuff. It just runs the gamut, and the fun thing is people will call and say, “I’ve got this old saddle, you think you’d be interested?” I said, “Well, yeah. I’d like to see it, can you bring it down to the station?” I have people on my committee that know what 17 saddles are. So he said, “You don’t understand, it’s in my barn I’m too old to crawl up there, but if you’d like to have it, you can come out here and you can get it,” so we’ve made trips like that. We made a trip to Salt Lake and found one of the best woman’s side saddles that anybody has ever seen. So we get those kind of contributions, you know here or there. I had a guy come in and he had a piece of paper and it was folded—I would say he was sixty-five or seventy—and he had it folded and I was in the museum and he says, “Now, my mother told me that I needed to keep this because some day somebody would want it,” and so he handed it to me and I opened it up and it the very first paper program of Ogden Pioneer Days from 1934. Just a piece of paper. Well, what I had been doing when we moved here, I started collecting the Pioneer Days programs. My husband was chairman of Pioneer Days too and that’s how we got involved, was through the Elk’s Club. They needed somebody to do the parade and we lived in New Orleans so they thought, “Oh, you know all about parades.” [laughs] So that’s kind of how we got started with it. Then I did a lot of work with the Queens, Miss Rodeo of Utah, Ogden, and all of that, and then Dwayne went through chair, vice-chair, all of those, all the way down the line. I’m just going to tell you this ‘cause it’s so interesting. Dwayne had received an invitation to go down to the Church offices for this dinner, it was the dinner that was going to tell everybody, “This is what’s going to happen.” He had to go out of town and he said, “You need to go, and I think that you’ll just think this’ll be really something.” I said, “I don’t have to go alone, do I?” He said, “No, 18 you got two tickets,” so I asked my friend Connie Cox, who I’m good friends with. Now, she was a Catholic in school and I was the only non-Mormon and everybody else was LDS in the school. The funny thing was she says, “What do we wear?” I said, “Well, I guess what we’d wear to church is all I know to wear.” So we got in and we had to go through all these places to show this card to know that we were really supposed to be up there, and we got in the elevator and went all the way up to the top of the building, the Church’s building I guess, on this end where you could see the whole city all the way around. It was breathtaking. And we walked in and the funny thing was Connie said to me, “They’re all looking at us,” and I said, “I know ‘cause we don’t know anybody and they’re wondering where we came from.” And so once I gave my name of who I was and everybody was very, very nice, couldn’t have been any nicer. At the time, I can’t think of her first name, but her last name was Smith and she was over the women’s organization. She came right over and greeted us, and we sat at a table where the president sat right there. Now, why we got up there I’ll never know, but I could touch him with my hand. So we sat through the whole service. The whole thing was just fabulous, the food was fabulous, and the flowers were these decorations that came all the way up the top ‘cause then you could see through to everybody. There were legislators there and whatever and it really was a magnificent thing to watch all this come together. They had prepared the food so that you had to pass it around, which you had to really look at your neighbor to make eye-contact, so that was very interesting. Then they did a play about, who was the last president? Hinckley. Wasn’t it? 19 LR: The last president, I think Monson was the last one. SH: Yeah, but it was Hinckley before that? LR: Yeah, before. SH: Okay, so we got that. I’m sure it was Hinckley. But any rate, his wife—she was so frail and he wasn’t. They both were up in age. So a group went together and did a play about his wife, about her coming over from Wyoming. She was in the group in Wyoming that they saved. Any rate, they took her from her seat next to him and put her up on stage and put her in a rocking chair, and so all this happened around her. It just gave you the goose bumps. So we watched the whole story and whatever. I watched him because he turned his chair around as I did too, to look at the stage and he never took his eyes off of her, not for one minute did that man take his eyes off her. We sat through all of that and it was wonderful. They did the declaration and the proclamation and all the things they had to do. The governor was there. It was just really a wonderful thing. And then we not thinking about it being such an experience, they took us over to introduce the two of them and everybody that was at that table, including Monson. I went to school the next day and I took my proclamation and stuff and I said, “Well, I can show them all this.” So I held it up and I said, “Look what Connie and I did last night,” and they said, “Well, where did you go?” So we all talked about it, and when they realized that I had actually been with the Prophet and sat next to him, I mean, they were in hysterics—I wouldn’t have ever imagined that—because they said they would never ever 20 have that chance to be that close to the Prophet. It was really amazing to think that we thought it was special, but to them it was—you really realized their religion and their faith and all of that. From that, nobody wanted to go down to be on the Sesquicentennial Committee for the state of Utah from Pioneer Days ‘cause you had to go to Salt Lake three or four times. So Dwayne said, “I’ll do it if nobody else wants to,” and they said, “Well, Dwayne go do it because we just don’t have the time.” So he was on the Sesquicentennial, and then we were with the Hinckleys quite often, along with some of the top legislators and Monson, ‘til they actually knew our names. That was amazing. So they had invited everybody to come down to where the wagon-train came across the valley or whatever, so we had these tickets and Dwayne said, “Well, we’ll just go park and we’ll just see how close we can get into to see,” ‘cause we didn’t know what they were. They were front row seats and I sat right next to Monson. But the thing that was so interesting, we’d hand them our ticket and they’d say, “Well, you got to go here,” we’d go another fifty rows and they’d say, “No, you got to go here,” and I kept saying, “Dwayne they’re wrong, they’re just not understanding this.” I got up there and our names were on the seats and they were right there. We witnessed that whole panorama and oh it was glorious, it really was. So being an outsider in Utah and having experienced all those things, I think you couldn’t ask for anything better. Who else would ever have that kind of an opportunity, or being at the right place at the right time? That’s basically what it is, you know. So it’s been a lot of fun and we’ve just always enjoyed it and 21 we’re still on the Pioneer Days committee and I think this is our thirty-third year. It’s one that I don’t ever want to give up, I may have to, but I don’t know. The museum is one another and the art show. Then I help with the hospitality. The hospitality is where people that have given money to Pioneer Days get to go in the log cabin and eat and then we serve a full meal. I got to the point where I can’t watch these people eat anymore or take more than they need, so I don’t do the food part. I help with the food and getting it there. I clean up and I get it ready for the next event. I’m out there by Saturday morning scrubbing dishes and trying to get stuff back to the people that brought them or left them and getting it all cleaned up and ready to go for the next event that evening. Then we go back to the rodeo every night. That’s what I do as far as the grunt work ‘cause I love it. And ‘course the museum, you have to be on that all the time. We work hard down there. We’ve got a good group of people that know what they’re doing. They know the history of cowboys and all of that stuff. I don’t have any of that knowledge and I just told them right up front, “You’re going to have to be telling me what it is we need to collect or what is it that you know we can get or what can we do.” So they’ve been just wonderful. Yeah, just wonderful. We’re both retired and that’s what we do, just run around after stuff. [laughs] See Dwayne’s seventy-eight and I’m seventy-six and we just keep thinking, it gets more tiring every year. It gets harder to do every year, to be on your toes like that. LR: Well, it’s keeping you young. 22 SH: Yes it is. And on the 13th of July we do our induction to the Cowboy Hall of Fame. So that’s a big event for Pioneer Days too. LR: I have many questions so just bear with me. I’m going to go back though, to more of the beginning. You said that you were raised in southern Illinois in the little town of Marion, and your grandfather owned his farm and that’s where you lived. What was it like growing up on a farm? SH: We didn’t live on the farm, we lived in the city. My grandfather had a farm. In fact, the name of the little town it’s in is Spiller Town and that’s my maiden name so my ancestor founded this little community. My grandfather had a lot of acreage and a little coal mine on it and a big barn and all of that, and that’s kind of how that fell. He lived in town too, and he had a caretaker for all that. LR: Alright, that makes more sense. SH: Yeah, we were in town going to public school and whatever. LR: How many siblings did you have? SH: I have two. I have a brother and a sister. LR: And where do you fall? SH: I fall in the middle. LR: Right, you’re a middle child. Okay, and what were your parents’ names? SH: It was Clyde and Pauline Spiller. LR: Okay. Now were they from Illinois? 23 SH: They both were. They had emigrated in from the early days through Kentucky. My dad was seventeen years older than my mother. LR: Oh, wow. SH: Yeah, I mean, that’s a lot. My mother was a hairdresser and she had her little beauty shop. My dad did several different kinds of jobs that had to do with hauling coal or grain or whatever, that’s what he did. LR: So as you were growing up, who were some of the women that you looked up to? That you considered role models? SH: Oh my gosh. Mrs. Nyberg, which is a funny name, and she lived across the street and her house was quite dilapidated I’d say, but she was from Scotland. When we started growing up—my mom and dad knew her for years, and when she was living there she had a diary and she took information about everything we did every day, all three of us. She could tell us when we were sick, when we scuffed, anything. She was very, very interesting and a very bright woman. We’d go over in the afternoon and she’d sit down and she’d read us stories. I don’t even know what they were, kind of like Irish folktales and stuff like that. A sweet, tiny, little lady. LR: Okay, why do you think you looked up to her? SH: She was just very, very kind and very particular. She worked very, very hard at keeping herself afloat. I don’t know what other connection she had because I never knew—my parents never said anything about her and so I really didn’t know a whole lot about her. She was a really sweet lady, just really nice to all of 24 us, and I guess the fact that she knew everything. She’d call my mother even when we were in college and say, “Pauline, do you remember Susie had this or Tommy had the mumps?” She’d just go through that book every day and the sad thing is we never got it. We never got it. My friend Cathleen that lived around the corner, she wrote about her too, and Cathleen was trying to keep track of her and then Cathleen moved away. When she died, my parents were gone by then and we just never got it. It was the sweetest thing that she’d let us know about everything. LR: That’s interesting. SH: It is. How she just sat and did that all the time. LR: So I know you went to college, but were you encouraged to pursue an education as you were growing up? SH: Oh, absolutely, there was no question. We’d all go to school. I don’t think my parents knew how it was going to work out, whether we got scholarships or whatever, but that’s what I did. I got a teacher scholarship and then I got a private scholarship from high school and from that it was enough. I worked the summers and my summer money went to pay for my housing and whatever else I needed to have. My sweet dad would put five dollars into my checking account every week for spending money. Back then, it was in the early 1960s, that was about all they could afford. My brother had already graduated, we were in college together for one year and then he graduated, but it was the same thing for him. He was going into the military so that’s how he went to school. 25 My sister, when she got ready to go to school, she was seventeen and I was twenty-three and our parents were in a terrible car accident and they both died. Well, I say they both died, my father died instantly, my mother was in a shelter care home ‘cause she never knew anything. She just had turned fifty. She was in there for forty-five years and she died at ninety-four years of age. You could ask her if she knew who we were, she could never—I’d say, “Do you have children?” and my mother would say, “Yes, Tommy, Susie, Clyda,” and that’s all she could ever remember. She could remember any church hymn she ever sang, so we’d just sit at the piano and play music when we’d go back to see her. And that was the hardest thing I think of anything, was not being close enough to be with her, any of us to be with her. At the time, my sister’s boyfriend, his mother drove to my mother’s nursing home every week to check on her, every single week, just to go see that she was okay. But when she was first put in a nursing home it was an insane asylum, it’s what they called them then, that’s where they put her and it was the worst. I can’t even begin to tell you how terrible that was. They left her outside. They’d get somebody else to help dress her or whatever and they set her outside and nobody brought her in, and she didn’t know to go in. They tied her shoes so tight that it cut all the way through the tops of her feet and she had a sunstroke and then that worsened the whole mental thing. So it was really—I don’t know what else you can say, you can just imagine. I was always more worried that she’d get raped or something, you know, you think about those kind of places. Then it was during Nixon, when they said you cannot keep people confined in an institution like that unless they are 26 mentally ill and she didn’t qualify. That’s why all these nursing homes started popping up, where people can go in and stay, and she lived in three and then the fourth one was a dream. It was a real nice facility, but they took really good care of her. They’d call us and tell us how she was or we could call and you couldn’t talk to her but they’d just say, “Yeah, she’s doing fine,” or whatever. Then she got pneumonia and that’s what happens. Just terrible, ‘cause it drug on so long. I don’t know which would have been worse or better. But as kids, we didn’t want her to die and we would’ve done anything. It was a good catholic hospital and they certainly were going to maintain her. They revived her three times, see so that brain loss every single time. I don’t know what they would’ve done. I don’t know if they could’ve even saved her now ‘cause everything’s always so different. She sang in the choir. When I was a kid, I sang with her and so we knew all the same songs from choir in church and she just loved it when I’d come. Then every time you’d leave you’d think, “Well, this could be the last time,” but she was very healthy, really quite healthy, but just lost so much weight. So that happened and then Dwayne’s dad died the next year and we had a death of every living family member like every year for about ten years. It was really one of those awful things, but you know, you just go through it. LR: Right, you just do. So back then there weren’t a lot of opportunities for women beyond three specific jobs. SH: Right, you were going to be a teacher, you were going to be a housewife, or you were going to be a nurse. 27 LR: So you obviously chose to, SH: Be a teacher. LR: Did you ever want to do anything besides that? I mean, did you have other aspirations? SH: No, I mean, not really. There just weren’t any other opportunities but if you got a college degree back then you could at least take care of yourself. That’s one of the things my mother said to me, “I don’t care what you decide you’re going to do, but you need a job so you can always take care of yourself. You don’t need to have to depend on a man.” I mean, I thought that was pretty remarkable. It wasn’t one of those things, “We’re going to make you,” but it was always expected. My sister then finished school too, she finally got her degree and she’s a teacher in Virginia. LR: I just think that’s really cool. You said you met your husband at college. What year was that and when did you get married? SH: It was 1960, that’s the year I graduated, and I was a freshman. He was in a fraternity and I’d pledged a sorority, and we were just walking this path back to what they called Thompson Woods, that’s where they had all the Greeks, and I’d met him there. It was kind of love at first sight, he’ll tell you. I just get amazed ‘cause it was just one of those things that you hadn’t expected when you were dating other people and when you know you know. Dwayne had a cousin that got married and they went to college and they had two kids and they struggled and struggled and struggled, not only to feed the kids but to get their education. It 28 was hard, I mean, really hard on them. We both were smart enough and we said, “Hey, wait a minute. If we just stay where we are and then get married after we graduate, we’re sure we graduate.” That was okay ‘cause Dwayne stayed to get a Master of Forestry and so he just decided to stay on. I think our parents knew too. I mean, we were never engaged until about the last year, but they knew we were never apart. So that was good. LR: Awesome. Let’s see, you’ve answered all my other questions that I had written down. But I’m curious, when you were teaching in Louisiana, was it in New Orleans? SH: No, it was in Jefferson Parish. New Orleans has this big bridge and you go over the bridge and that’s Jefferson Parish right there. It wasn’t very far away. LR: Okay. You were talking about how you were trying to learn the ins and outs of these students that had just been integrated into the school, was that a common practice with the teachers or was that just something that you did? SH: No, we all took a really high interest in those kids, and everybody was watching. I mean, even at that you just felt like it was your obligation to bring this forward, but then you had to figure out how you were going to do it because there was nobody there championing you on and saying, “We think this would work or that would work.” We had to go to a conference and all these ladies from Boston came down, but Boston schools were not integrated at the time, and they were down there going to tell us what we were going to do. All of us sat there and we just felt like they all had a teacup attached to their fingers, it was that kind of a 29 crowd. We walked away saying, “Well, that didn’t help at all, but we spent a Saturday on it.” Then the next year, we got two black teachers, Mr. Dumas and Mrs. Sirrells. Mrs. Sirrells was quite a heavy black lady, very educated. I mean, you could tell she was. And so was Dumas, that’s what we called him. Mr. Dumas had taught in the upper grades and I remember having one little boy that I was just really concerned about and I said, “So Dumas, how did they discipline him? Somebody had to have before I got him,” and he said, “Susie, they’d take these kids into the bathroom with a belt, that’s how it was handled.” I said, “Well, I’m not going to do that so do you have any other suggestions?” Well, the little boy would work for anything, a piece of candy, it didn’t matter what it was. So we had to implement something for everybody ‘cause you couldn’t just give it to one. So the next thing you know you’re handing out tickets a, “This is good,” or a piece of candy, “If you’ll finish that line or whatever,” so we did a lot of that to get them to where they would come up and know they wanted to learn. See, these kids weren’t even sure they cared if they learned, nobody else cared, and it really was sad to see that they had no more motivation. Two of the boys and I can’t tell you their names, they ended up being pro-football players in that group. The worst child that I had, I say worst child physically, was a girl that was probably my size and she was in fifth grade and she was fourteen and she had diabetes. She was always up and down because you never knew. She was on insulin, she had shot spots that were infected all over her. I’d ask them, “Okay, what time you’d go to sleep last night?” One little kid said to me, “Well, I went to 30 bed at four o’clock.” I said, “In the afternoon?” He said, “Yeah, I had to get my space because there are six of us and we sleep on the mattress on the floor.” This is how devastating these children were, that’s how awful it really was. I had made a complaint, I had called the father about one of the girls that was just meaner than a snake. I don’t know how else to say it, that’s what she was. I called and the next day, when we started our reading group and the kids came in, they said, “You shouldn’t have called her daddy,” and I didn’t know the kids knew. The kids said, “Yeah, her dad stripped her naked, tied her to a tree, and switched her all night, because the teacher had called to say she wasn’t trying very hard in school.” Well, how do you make that up? I mean, these kids, it’s like I said. It was almost as if you had brought in an African community that all the children were totally uneducated and then you were just starting over. I couldn’t understand most of them, and I’d end up saying, “Pardon me?” because I didn’t get the slang, and there was so much with that, so it took a lot of time. I’m not kidding you, we just about killed ourselves, all five of us did. We’re still so close. We call and talk and if there’s any trouble, everybody’s on the phone. But to think that that particular team of women really, really made a difference in those kids’ lives. We used to do plays and sing songs, and costumes and all that with the white children. Well, when the black children came in, we thought nothing of it, we were going to do it again. These kids did not know the songs, they couldn’t learn the songs and you’d try to get them to stand in a line and they didn’t ever really ever understand what their responsibility was. I can remember Nat Surrell standing there and I don’t know what she had, but she 31 was this big black teacher and she said, “I’m telling you, you will learn this and you will enjoy it!” All of us sitting out there, trying to help with the kids, just died laughing and we kept saying, “This is not the way it should be, they should really have a good time,” but it was stuff like that that would come up that we’d all just stand there and laugh about how stupid were we or what were we thinking or whatever. But the patience was there, the total patience. The other thing was Dumas told me, “Susie, your reading group, don’t give them scissors.” I said, “Dumas, what are they going to do with those scissors?” He said, “If they don’t like it, they’re going to attack you.” I said, “Oh, they would never do that.” I never had a minute’s trouble with discipline in the classroom— but the one girl that was diabetic and her health was in such bad shape, she was one of nine I think it was, and they slept on the floor—I’d ask the kids, “What did you eat on the weekend?” Well, it was either nothing or it was popcorn or just a loaf of bread or something. They did not have a regular meal of any kind, no nourishment, and you know you need nourishment for your brain to work. We all concluded that this was physical, this was the whole ball of wax. These children had really suffered and they didn’t know any better, and so it was a hard, hard group to teach. Then of course when we would go to lunch, even though we fed them breakfast and lunch, we had to sit with them because they would just take that fork and take somebody’s hand out if they wanted something on your other plate. We had to try to let them understand the food’s going to be there and they’re going to get as much of it as they want. But then they’d go home and have nothing until the next day, and the weekends were awful so Monday was 32 terrible. Monday was a horrible day for everybody practically but we really had to work extra hard. I was so proud when we left, and the kids that went and had gone through all the grades and got to fifth grade, they were just as smart as the white kids. They’d had the nutrition and they’d had all the rigorous teaching by professionals. We never saw a superintendent, we never saw anybody come out to our school and we were the first one that did it. I think we were the first free breakfast in the United States to be honest, but nobody ever came to see or noticed their test scores or however it looked or whatever was going on. There was always a story down there that there was a Catholic university, and I don’t even remember the name, but they said for a fee they’d just write you out a certificate to be a teacher and nobody else questioned it. Nobody cared, that’s the whole point, nobody cared. So if they were black, get them out there, put them in the classroom—and some of it was really funny. We had a first grade teacher that came in that obviously had no teaching. I mean, she didn’t know anything. She came to school and she was telling us, in the teacher’s lounge, of how many that she had that were going to go see the Wizard of Ooz. She didn’t know Oz, she’d never heard of it. It was just stuff like that that you just think, “You’re kidding me! Wizard of Ooz?” The other first grade teachers were watching and they were saying, “You know, nothing’s going on in there,” and they didn’t want to turn her in but they had to get somebody in there to make sure she understood what she had to do and she didn’t last the year. She just didn’t have the ability to do it and the parents complained, because they were mixed classes, but that kind of took care of itself. 33 LR: As you look back at what that experience was, historically speaking, what does that mean to you now? SH: Oh, everything. Every time I see a child of color in any school anywhere, it doesn’t matter, I think the education system has been so reformed. I think in Ogden City schools we have the best prepared teachers in Utah, and that’s because of the fact that—this is the low-income area and so therefore these kids don’t score high, but the teachers know the best techniques to teach and that’s why we can’t keep anybody here. The teacher’s leave after a couple of years and go out to the county or somewhere else ‘cause they don’t have to deal with non- English speaking children or things like that. That’s what I say. Everybody loves to get them, Salt Lake, Davis, Weber. If somebody applies from Ogden City schools, they’re going to find them a job ‘cause they’re so well trained. LR: Let’s see, oh. This is a little further back but you talked about the native town, Broken Bow, and I wanted to hear more about it. Can you talk a little bit more about that experience? SH: Well, I don’t know what else to say. We finally bought a trailer that we could move around in, because there was not housing in a lot of these places where Dwayne would have to go. I didn’t want to go home, I wanted to stay with him, so we bought a trailer and moved around. In a lot of those communities there was a lot of alcoholism, there was a lot of poverty, really a lot of poverty. Dwayne would always bring home somebody, just like a child, drunk, or not drunk. I kept thinking, “Oh, I hope they didn’t know how to find me when he’s not here.” But it just was very interesting, that whole culture of native—now that I’m here, you go 34 down south from here, you see the poverty, you know how they live. No electricity, no water, no nothing. Well, the other Natives in those cities had all those assets, so to speak, they didn’t know how to live well. I don’t know if they got a check from the government. I don’t know what they did but they still followed their ways. They would be in town shopping or whatever, they were not used to any of that. To go into a market and buy a piece of meat, that had always been one of the things that they’d always done themselves and that was taken away from them too. I just found it interesting that you could go into a store, see somebody buy something, a yard of material or whatever—‘cause these towns are not big let me tell you. Some of the people in the community were not happy, but there were those that looked out for them too, that would help them stumble off the street or whatever. I always thought I wanted to go to a reservation and teach, that’s what I really wanted to do. I really thought, “Oh, I’d love to do that,” but it just wasn’t the time. I don’t even know if they had anything going on the reservations at that time, in the early 1960s. I look back at the 1960s on television and I think, “I really didn’t live through that.” I mean, I did and I was there, but it was so different than what was going on in my mind. I don’t know how to say that. I mean, you saw cruelty and I never grew up with any of that ever. And then living in the Deep South—you’ve never lived anywhere until you’ve lived in the Deep South. That was another whole thing, you know what I mean? We lived in a totally white neighborhood, but I currently have a black family there [point to both sides of the house] and a black family over there. That’s never bothered me. 35 It all just seems so cruel to me, and the integration. I knew it was all going on. I watched all the stuff with Alabama, and shooting protesters with water and dogs, and I just thought it was the worse thing I’d ever seen. I actually said something, I made a remark and I’ve always kind of regretted it. I watched the governor that didn’t want the blacks to go into the schools and I thought, “You know what? As awful as this sounds, he was elected by white people—‘cause they [blacks] didn’t vote then—to do exactly what he did. Is that honorable or isn’t it?” Dwayne said, “Honorable?!” I said, “I know! But look, he’s doing what he was elected to do and this is what he said he was going to do.” Of course he got shot and all of that too, but in my mind, “Do people, can they not stand up to that and go on and do what’s right? Can they not help that little girl go up those stairs and not have those terrible fire hoses on these children and dogs?!” I was appalled. And then when they started killing the civil rights kids down there in the South—that was mostly in Georgia. I never saw anything in Louisiana, only except that we had a parish in Louisiana that was below ours. We were Jefferson and then the next one, and nobody black would be there after dark. They were terrified. They never lived there, Plaquemines Parish, and they still don’t. I know they knew they’d be killed. It’s just the way the community was. When you look at history and we look at what’s happening now, I keep thinking, “You know, I have lived through that.” I watched my grandfather from the electric car and electricity and all that until the man on the moon, he lived through that. That was quite a time too. There was a lot of poverty. Families had to work two jobs just like it is now, but they’re working two jobs to have more not less. 36 Dwayne and I talk about this a lot, if we see something on television we say, “How did that happen? Why?” I’m from the land of Lincoln and Chicago was always different, it was like a whole different state. But after Chicago, everything down was—everybody was fine in the neighborhoods and whatever. I do remember my mother had a lady that ironed for her. We would go to her house to take the ironing and I’d go with my dad, and she was on the end of a black street that I remember. Sweet lady. It was like two cents a shirt or maybe five cents, I don’t remember. I mean, it was ridiculous. I can remember even as a kid saying to myself, “Would I do that for a nickel? I don’t know.” I’ve always been very aware. We had kids in high school, elementary, never had a problem. Girl Scouts, black and white, just never a problem. And high school sports. LR: Talking about what you lived through, historically, and living through the women’s rights movement of the 1970s, what do you remember about that? SH: Women’s rights, I know but I don’t know. I always voted. I was always allowed to vote. For me at my age going through that period, there was a lot of women’s rights things that I thought some of it got to be silly in my opinion. That’s kind of what happened. People can take things and turn them inside out and they look like you’ve just wasted your time. But I think for the most part, I have never seen anything that I know of that a woman was mistreated. But see there in the 1970s you were either a secretary, a teacher, or a nurse, but you didn’t have any opportunities on the outside. In the small town I was in, very few women worked. Everybody stayed home, took care of their kids. 37 Then when the 1970s came roaring in—I felt really kind of bad. Randy was three and I decided to go back and teach. My mother said, “You’ve got the degree and if you want to use it and you think you can do it, go for it.” His [Dwayne’s] mother on the other hand was like, “Oh, this is the worst thing you could ever do, is to work out of the house.” They lived up more towards the St. Louis area so that was a whole different thing too. Then you look at Missouri and these abortion laws—but when Roe v. Wade passed, I was in the streets. I’m not kidding you, I was so excited. I know you had to be careful who you told, and you still do, but I don’t want anybody telling me what I have to do. I told Dwayne that and he said, “You don’t now, Susie.” I mean, that idea of having to be in that corner, I just don’t understand it, for women not to be at a higher level. Now they are. I mean, you see a lot of CEOs that are women. You see a lot of black CEOs now that you didn’t see before because of their education. To me, that’s really wonderful. I don’t want them to go back to the Dark Ages. I do not understand because Alabama and the southern states like that, they still do not treasure their black community. They put up with them, but they don’t treasure them like you would anybody else. To think that they want more black children born? I don’t get it, because they go on the welfare system because they still aren’t educated enough not to be. You know what I mean? So why would you, if you lived in Georgia, not want to have those abortion rights available to any woman, but the blacks in particular? In New Orleans, I had a mother that sat down and she wrote down twelve names for her children, and she had a different last name for every child and they were all on welfare. I didn’t 38 know she was smart enough to do it. She didn’t look like she had the intelligence to do it. They cared about their kids but that’s the only way they could live, and it didn’t matter what man or whatever. Then you have kids sleeping on the floor on mattresses and all that, which didn’t make sense to me either. Children on the weekends, in Ogden City schools, take home food for the weekend. They put them in backpacks and they carry them home and they bring them back. So you still see that level of concern for children eating and having food. It’s Hispanics, it’s whites, it’s blacks, it’s everybody. So I don’t know how you turn that around other than education. The government spends the least amount on it as they can, and the state of Utah, the same way. If you don’t educate them, you’re going to have to pay for them one way or another. LR: Right. This is a fun question. On 25th Street, your barber, who was it? SH: Brent Baldwin. Do you know him? LR: I thought it was maybe Willie Moore. SH: No. I knew Willie Moore and I knew his wife, and we were on committees together with the city, but he did not cut my hair. I don’t remember him being in that barber shop but I could be wrong. But the guy I went to was Brent Baldwin. It was pretty dilapidated down there. LR: Right, 25th Street back then was. SH: But that’s the other thing. I was on the Landmarks Commission the entire time that that was all revisited and looked at again. I was down there for all of it on the Landmarks Commission. I served seventeen years, which I don’t think that’s 39 right, but I did and I loved it. But they had to find people that would do it. We’d go down for the simplest things that were going on in the store fronts or people doing something they shouldn’t or whatever. And this is one of my pet-peeves with the city, those buildings were all built with water coming in through the back but they have nothing in the front, so they can’t go out and hose off their sidewalks and take care of the curb, the gutter, and the sidewalk. I’ve always said to myself, “Why?” I’ve said it I don’t know how many times, “Get a little cart like a golf cart, put water in it, make it a heavier sprayer, and tell everybody on the street one night. Then next week is the week you just go down and hose it all off.” I was really upset when we had the hundred and fiftieth anniversary because they did nothing. They do nothing for the winter. They don’t go down and say, “Everybody has to be off the street.” Because when you go down there you either have to jump over the hump, or the snow blowers put it on the sidewalk, and I just think that’s terrible and I don’t think that’s hard to fix. I think somebody could do that in five minutes. Just makes me want to say, “This is in the best interest of the city. How can you not keep it clean?” LR: Right. You mentioned, when you were talking about the demolition by neglect, how the ladies mortgaged their homes to keep the Egyptian Theatre in trust? SH: Yes, they did. From Weber County Heritage, now I wasn’t on the board then. It happened before my time—I can’t say that because I knew the wrecking ball was sitting out in the street. They took their mortgage of their houses that were paid for and they put them up as collateral to the guy in Salt Lake that was going to tear it down. The wrecking ball was in the middle of the street and the ball was 40 hanging on it, and they got Weber County Commission to put together some kind of agreement with Weber County, and Ogden City did do it too, to hold off so that they could preserve it. It ended up being Weber State—which I think Weber State hadn’t planned on. That’s another whole side-story—but that was pretty interesting too because it ended up costing them a lot more than they had planned on. I don’t know who the president was at the time, but any rate, it was quite a significant amount of money that Weber State had to put in it that they hadn’t planned to. But they finally got together, and they just held their houses, the paper, until they could get the money together and get everybody organized enough to do the Egyptian Theatre. When I was on Landmarks I went through every single place in that building, all the way up through to the ceiling with dead pigeons and whatever else they had that was in the top of that thing. We all, and when I say all I mean everybody, got so involved in that because they’d have to come back for stuff. The only two places that we know that have the interiors of the buildings that are on the national listing is Ogden High, and they did it when they were doing their renovation, and the Eccles Egyptian Theatre. They’ve never taken very good care of it and Landmarks would have to go back and say, “Wait a minute, you’ve got to fix this,” ‘cause there you go back into neglect. Now that things have changed and the county is putting money into it, if you notice, there’s something there every day. Weber State was trying for a longtime, but they finally hired somebody that could get stuff in there, free and otherwise, to have that on all the time. 41 LR: Right. It’s a beautiful building. SH: Oh, it is. The last thing that we didn’t get done is they came in and put a new sound system. When they put the sound system in, they put the things that hang on the wall, they’re black, and they promised they’d paint them just like the walls ‘cause it was a new element. They never did it. I don’t think they ever will. Made us all mad, we spent all that time and energy trying to make it exactly like it was supposed to be. But they’ve got something going good now, I think it’s really good. LR: It is good...it’s great. Okay, two questions and then we’ll be done. One, it’s something that they’ve just recently asked me to start asking and I almost forgot about it, what do you consider ‘women’s work’? SH: Anything they want to do. I don’t think anybody should be held back. I really think it’s almost awful they put female and male on an application. I don’t like that because you can have somebody that you would think is a man—I guess their name has to be there, but maybe not even their name—when they’re looking for qualifications, why does any of that matter if they have the qualifications? Of course they always do an interview so I don’t know, but I don’t think it should be male or female. I just feel like a woman can do anything she wants to do. I know there are ceilings and things you come up against, but just like every other woman in history, you just keep going. Just keep butting, and butting, and butting. Now in this climate, they’re [men] all going to be afraid to do anything. “I don’t want to touch anybody.” 42 We never saw any of that sexual harassment, never. It would have never occurred, I don’t think so. And I don’t know why men think, in this day and age, they can get away with it. Is it this loose feeling that you can do whatever you want to do whenever you want to do it? [shakes head] No. But we have standards too. I mean, women have high standards. Generally speaking, women have higher standards than a man, and the reason I say that is because I just think men are more likely to step out of bounds than a woman would, but women have affairs too. I don’t know who starts them but somebody finishes them. The thing that makes me so mad is if you know the man’s married, she ought to go to jail, the other woman. [laughs] How many families have you seen that you thought were just perfectly happy and the husband walks away? We had one up here on the corner and I just thought, “Somebody needs to kill him, that’s the best way to get through it.” His children tried to commit suicide. He did some of the worst things I’ve ever heard of in my life and I just couldn’t imagine. They were supposed to go on a cruise together, he gets her on the boat and gets her set up and then he doesn’t get on the boat with her. She’s on a cruise and he’s back here taking what he wants out of the house, doing everything he can do. She has no way to communicate, has very little money if any, and when she came back, the whole thing had just blown sky-high. And of course she got the four kids, and he’s a doctor, and she got whatever was leftover. I mean, he knew how to do it and I just don’t understand it. LR: I don’t understand that either. 43 SH: I just don’t have any time for that. I look at Hillary Clinton and she forgives him, but I never will. She was a young girl, and my daughter was her age at the time, and it really hit home and I thought, “You rascal.” Would he want it done to his daughter? LR: Yeah, it makes you think. SH: It does. And it does take two but boy when you’re that age, and it’s the President of the United States or somebody really impressive, and they don’t have enough knowledge of life to know that it won’t last? It’s really sad. Okay, what’s your last question? LR: Well, first of all, do you have any questions? CB: I had a quick one. You mentioned being in D.C. and witnessing an inauguration. Which president did you get to be there for? SH: We saw Ford being inaugurated and we were there for Carter, so we saw those two. We went to every Christmas tree lighting that they had on the mall, you know, all of the Pomp and Circumstance, and the beauty of the city when it’s lit up. My favorite place of course was Mount Vernon and I’d gone over there every day and I kept saying to Dwayne, “That’s where I would really love to volunteer.” It’s funny how things connect when you get my age and you realize how they’ve connected. We had a really good friend in New Orleans and he was born out East and he was Dwayne’s boss. Katrina happened here, he lived here, his wife had passed away, and she and I were very close, and they didn’t have children and they kind of went with our family. When he left and he moved back 44 to New York where he was from, and we went back for his hundredth birthday, I was talking to Judd about his life and what he had seen and where he’d went to school and all the things you really didn’t feel comfortable when he was Dwayne’s boss to ask those questions. He said, “You know the piano that’s in Mount Vernon?” I said, “Yes, I do. What about it?” He said, “That was my family’s piano that had been passed down through generations. Then when they decided to do Mount Vernon and do all the furniture and whatever, the family gave that,” and I can remember seeing that piano distinctly in this big hall that they had that it was in. I thought, “Isn’t that interesting?” So it was his family’s piano. LR: That’s fascinating. SH: It is fascinating. I said, “Well, next time I go, I’ll have to do that again too,” ‘cause every time we go to Washington I have to go to Mount Vernon. Such an elegant place, and we didn’t live all that far from it either. So it wasn’t like it had been an effort to go and volunteer but they were really reconstructing everything. All the grounds, the land, everything you can think of. We went to Jefferson’s home, we took the boys, and Courtney was a baby. But we’d drag them to all these things that we could think of, they may have not been old enough to know what they were looking at but we were going to take them. So we went and saw Jefferson’s house, and the lady said, “Can anybody in here show me where the toilet is?” Kelly was five and he ran right over to this chair—‘cause I got the toilet down, I already had one—to show them where the toilet was. It was so funny. He was so proud that he was the only one that knew. LR: That is so cute. 45 SH: It is cute. It really was. But I’ve had a really good life. I mean, you go through adversity but you still can have the best life you want to make of it. For me to be here in Ogden in particular—guess what the name of my china is in my china closet from my grandmother? Ogden. I had never unpacked it. I’d had it, my sister didn’t want it, so I brought it with us to Virginia and it was in a bushel basket, the old bushel baskets, wrapped in newspaper. Never opened it up, never looked at it, and we got to Washington and I said, “You know, I’ve got to decide what I’m going to do with this stuff,” so I opened it up and it was Ogden. Then I guess it was even a year later, and Dwayne came home and he says, “We’re moving. What do you think about Ogden, Utah?” I said, “Well, I know where Utah is but I don’t know where Ogden is, other than Salt Lake City,” and we got such a kick out of it because I had that china named Ogden. All this pulls together some way. LR: It is really fascinating. Well, this has been a lot of fun but let’s ask the final question and it’s a three part question, and this is the question I’m asking everyone. How do you think women receiving the right to vote shaped or influenced history, your community, and you personally? SH: Oh, everything, I think it gave the women the right to feel like they could do anything that they wanted to do now, and not just the right to vote, but the right to say what they felt and a lot of women in those times never voiced what they thought. After they got the vote, I think they could decide and they could disagree with their husbands, and their husbands would never know what they did anyway. Like I said, I never went through that point where I didn’t have the right 46 to vote so I don’t know. I always have voted in every election. I don’t know what else to say. I think it gave them standing, a position that they could carry forward, where before they were just not even accepted really. LR: How do you think it’s influenced you personally? You say you vote in every election that you can. SH: I’ve never really been afraid of anything, like running for mayor just for an example. I would’ve never in a million years thought that I would’ve done that. From eternity, I never would have done that. But the fact that I got so upset with what I saw that I didn’t want other people to have to suffer through it, and the mayor at the time was a miserable, little man and he needed to be stopped. He wasn’t stopped but he was better, and the council held his feet to the fire. I just thought it was an important thing to do. And I think opening up the council and having my husband say, “Go for it. Write your letter and let’s go,” and that’s what I did. There’s no way to explain, it was awful, but I’ve just never had a reason not to. LR: That’s a fantastic answer. SH: So you just do it but it does take a lot to do it, more than I thought I had, but I managed it. LR: Right. I do have one more question. If you were to have the opportunity to give advice to your granddaughters, that generation of women, what would you say to them? What advice would you give them? 47 SH: Well, I have said it ‘cause I do have a granddaughter that’s twenty-three. She was always a good student in school. Her dad, which is my son, he’s a prodigal son. He comes and he goes and he just isn’t going to conform to anything. Taylor was always the strong one there with her mother and I just always felt like she could do anything she wanted to. She really thought she wanted to be a dentist and so her grandpa and I told her, “Whatever it’s going to take Taylor,” ‘cause they didn’t have the finances to do it, she didn’t. So after we talked about it, and she talked about it for a long time, she decided that she didn’t really want to take that much time out of her life to go and be a dentist and go through all of that and be away from home. I think she did that for her mother because she didn’t want to leave her. She tried twice at Weber State to get into the dental, straight A’s and everything and never could get into the one here. The next one was down in St. George and she applied and got in right away and just loved it and did so well, top of her class. Now she’s out working and loving it. She’s single and that’s okay ‘cause that’s the way she wants it to be. She’s very strong-minded about what she can do and I don’t know but she’s always done very well. We laugh at her now, because she’s going to do what she’s going to do, she really is. And for her to leave here with her mother and she has three brothers, but to leave and go somewhere else like St. George, she was nervous about that. I wasn’t that far away from my parents but I knew they were there and that’s the difference, if you know somebody’s backing you and you know they’re going to be there. I was really worried, we were both really worried, and her mother was in particular, that she wouldn’t get down there and like the people around her. But 48 she liked what she was doing, but you never know because they go in as classes, about twenty-three or twenty-four of them. That’s how they do it down there, I don’t know what they do here. But I’ve always heard it’s the hardest thing to get into the nursing program at Weber State and the dental program. Those two are the hardest, and the teaching program too. I know a lot of people that would have been wonderful teachers but they could not get into the education department, and I would’ve thought they’d have jumped over backwards up there to get as many new teachers in as they can. She’s my only girl, the rest are boys and I said, “Grandpa, you take care of the boy side. I’ll take care of the girl side of this.” ‘Course our daughter, she got an education, she got her degree and loves what she does, works from home, and she’s just great. You know what she does? This is interesting. I keep calling her a party planner. When I was on the Queen Committee, we’d have to set up all these big parties and table decorations and everything for the Queens, and Courtney was young and she just loved it, had the best time with it. Well, she went up to Utah State to school and was going to get a degree in, I don’t remember now what it was, but somehow or another there is a degree up there she has it in marketing. So now she works for one of the largest national companies out of New York City that put on these huge events, like the technology thing in Las Vegas where they bring in thousands of people? That’s what she does. They call it Cisco Live, and she’s leaving next Wednesday to go to Las Vegas for ten days, and they take the largest area they have down there 49 and they redesign it and they put everybody in it and that’s what she does for a living. A year ago in Las Vegas, they built an entire Home Depot inside the convention center and had every single department that was in there with all the tools and everything they should have so that they could bring in the vendors or people who worked for Home Depot and could visualize what it looked like. Then they had people there who could show them how to use the equipment, how to sell it, how to do all that. Can you imagine? And then they tore it all down the day after. I cannot imagine. One year we went with her over to the Broadmoor, my sister and I went over and I said, “What can we do? Tell me what we need to do to help you.” She said, “Well, I have three hundred robes that we’re giving gifts to certain status of people that whatever they win.” I said, “Well, we can do that, we need to put names on them,” and she said, “No, you need to put a hundred dollar bill in every pocket.” We just started laughing and I said, “As a teacher, we were lucky to get an apple or a candy bar,” and here they are stuffing these things with hundred dollar bills. LR: Yeah, well, thank you so much for your time and your willingness to sit and talk. SH: Well, thank you, it was fun.