Oral History Program LaVal Bradshaw Interviewed by Bruce Dalley 22 July 1972 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah LaVal Bradshaw Interviewed by Bruce Dalley 22 July 1972 Copyright © 2012 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii 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. Archival copies are placed in University Archives. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description The Weber State College/University Student Projects have been created by students working with several different professors on the Weber State campus. The topics are varied and based on the student's interest or task for a specific assignment. These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ 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 All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Bradshaw, LaVal, an oral history by Bruce Dalley, 22 July 1972, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with LaVal Bradshaw. The interview was conducted on July 22, 1972, by Bruce Dalley, at the home of the interviewee. The interviewee describes his past and experiences during the Great Depression. BD: This is Bruce Dalley and I am at LaVal Bradshaw’s house to conduct an interview as part of the oral history program at Weber State College. I guess we will just start out by asking you to give a little background information about yourself, your family, and ancestors, and church affiliation, and all this, if you would. LB: Well, my granddad was a farmer, a rancher, and so was my dad. So that is the reason I am a farmer, I guess. I didn’t know anything else. My granddad farmed out in Pine Creek. Do you know where that is out here? BD: Not for sure. LB: It’s where the freeway comes through the farm down here, outside of Coal Fort. He broke that up in there. And that was along about 1880, somewhere along there. Then they moved from there in her at Latterfield, my dad did, and I’ve been here ever since. I’ve been here all my life. BD: Your grandfather came to Utah, I guess, because of his religion? LB: Yes, he came from England. He was an Englishman. My granddad Bradshaw and my granddad Edwards, they both came here. My granddad Edwards farmed for a while at North Creek, then he moved down here in Latterfield. He was up there in about 1909, somewhere along there. Then they came down here. 1 BD: And the land that you farm now, is that your father’s land, or... LB: Part of it is my father’s land and part of it I bought from the State Land Bank, back in 1936, when J. F. Todden was the secretary of the State Land Board. BD: This is kind of what I would like to talk to you about, really, is the Depression. If we could kind of swing into that, and I could ask you if you made you of the Land Bank. Did you make use of any of the other things like buying cheap cattle and things like that? LB: Well, J. F. Todden was over the State Land Board, or he was the secretary; and he let me buy part of my ground here, and I got part from my dad. That was back in about 1936 or 1937. Then to help out, I got an FHA loan, to start with, and that helped me. We neve4r made too good farming until about 1940 or 1941. Of course, prices went up then. World War II started, and the prices went up, and it’s been pretty good ever since. I mean, it has been off and on, but... Outside, we do pretty good in this country here, outside if we didn’t get these droughts. This drought we got now, it is worse than the one we had in 1931 or 1930, or along in there. BD: Has the government started to help you, or any of the farmers now, through this drought? Or do you think they will? LB: Well, I haven’t investigated it with the boys yet. They are getting it down though, so you can borrow money at about 54.5 percent interest, or something like that, to buy feed with; and I think that you have to repay them in two years. BD: Other than that, you don’t know of anything? LB: I don’t. 2 BD: Do you raise alfalfa mainly? LB: We raise mostly alfalfa, wheat and grain. We feed it to cattle. Some raise cattle. The boys have been with me for seven or eight years now. I have two boys that help me farm. One of them teaches school part time in the wintertime, but the other boy helps me on the farm all the time. We milk 80 cows, 75 to 80 cows. We raise most of the hay and grain. Now, it’s always been a little short of hay here in Latterfield, especially when we have these dry years off and on. So we bought another farm over by Kanosh, west of Kanosh. It’s a pump well deal, and we broke that out of sagebrush and un-level ground. We have got about 100 acres of hay on there now. BD: Kanosh is what, about 40 miles? LB: It is 34 miles from here to there. BD: It takes about 30 minutes to drive? LV: Well, since they got this new freeway, you can drive in about 30 to 35 minutes, pretty easy. BD: When you bought the land there, was the well on it? Or did you have to get a permit for the well? LB: Yes, I got it from the state. The well was already in. There was a well permit there. But the guy didn’t have much water. He figured that he hadn’t dug deep enough. And that is what I figured too, so I just took it over and got permission from the state engineer to dig it deeper. We dug it another 200 feet deeper, and we got a good well. BD: The total depth is what, then? 3 LB: I think it is somewhere around 375 to 400 feet. BD: Four hundred feet. And how big of pipe do you have down this well? LB: Sixteen inch casing, quarter inch thick and 16 inches in diameter. BD: So that will put a lot of water out of it? LB: Well, we put in a 10-inch pump down it, and it pumps about 3 ½ second feet – 720 feet, or something like that. BD: So that is about half of the flow of North Creek then? LB: It is more than the flow of any of the creeks this year. You see, three and a half feet of water isn’t too much, but it is enough to water 165 acres. BD: You can keep that running the whole time, don’t you? LB: Yes, for five months of the year. BD: While I’m here, do you irrigate it by share? LB: Yes, out of Indian Creek. I have been here on Indian Creek all my life, and they have 336 shares. Do you want to know that? BD: Yes, please. LB: They had 336 shares from the Fielder Gason Company, plus we have a reservoir that has 660 shares. The reason that there is some difference in shares there, is that some guys, some people own shares there that don’t own any in the Fielder Gason Company. Now, the reservoir, we just fill it on the good years when we have plenty of water. Now we have water every two weeks. Each one of us holds so many shares; depends on 4 how many we bought. I think I own about 64 shares, out of the 336, so I have the water for 64 hours, every two weeks. When you take the water here, you take the whole creek. BD: There’s no splitting the streams, or anything like that. LB: Well, we split the stream every once in a while. The only time that we split the stream is if it happens to be a good spring for a month or two in the year, and if we have between 20 to 25 feet per second water. Then we split it with our neighbor and have it twice as long. But when it gets down to 8 to 10 second feet, we just take our turn so we don’t have to water so long. BD: Then there is no A, B, or C shares? LB: No. BD: Now, on your Latterfield Irrigation Company, do you have a water master and a board of governors and... LB: Yes, we have a board. It is incorporated in the State of Utah...and we elect a water master every year. He takes care of the water. BD: Do you always use tractors on your farm, or how long has it been since you converted over from horses? LB: No. When I first started to farm, it was back when I got married. I was married in 1934. Of course I farmed before that with my dad, and we always used horses and horse equipment until 1940. I bought my first tractor in 1940, a little Ford. Since then I have pretty well used tractors. I’ve got a little bigger tractor. That little Ford, I want to tell you, I 5 kept it for 20 years. When I traded it off, I got 2/3 as much for it as I gave for it. BD: Now, this was on a Ferguson Ford one? LB: Yes, I gave $675 for it when I bought it, and $100 for the plow. That makes $775. When I traded it off, I think I got $450 for it. BD: And you kept it 20 years? LB: I had it 21 years. In that time, I put two motors in it, good motors. Wore out two motors, but it was a good little tractor. Now I have Case tractors. I was going to get into the machinery business, and I buy Cases. It ain’t that they are a better tractor, but I kind of have to patronize him. We have now 100 horse power in a 35 horse power case. Then we have one that is about 45 horse. Of course, this one is older. BD: How many horsepower did that little one have? LB: It had on the drawbar; I think it was 18-horse. BD: So now you have about five or six times as much pulling power. LB: It is amazing how much tractors went up. That little Ford, as I say, was $675, and you buy, the smallest tractor you can buy now days will cost you $4,500. Four thousand, anyway. BD: Would this $4,000 tractor today be comparable to the... LB: They have a little more horsepower, and they do a little more work. But yes, for a lot of work, they wouldn’t do it any handier, no. BD: I want to ask you about your horses. You used a double horse team to plow? 6 LB: We used to plow four horses. And they pulled two plows, two gang plows. BD: So how wide of earth did that plow? LB: They would take about 28 inches, and the little Ford tractor would pull the same plow. BD: It was about the same speed to pull through, wasn’t it? LB: Well, it would go a little faster, and the only thing about a tractor is, it didn’t get tired. You could plow 10 hours a day, or 15 hours a day, and the horses could only plow six or seven hours a day, or five or six. It would depend on the ground. If they got tired in five or six hours, you would have to quit. The farm has been good to me. I haven’t made a whole lot of money, but I have been able to live. Two or three of the kids have gone to college. They could all went to college if they wanted to have done, but they didn’t all want to go. But two or three of them went and graduated from college. So I’ve sent them all on missions. The boys, five of the boys, have gone on missions, and the farm has paid for them. BD: You have five boys and what? LB: Five boys and two girls. The youngest boy is on a mission now. Your dad knows him, Chad. BD: How many children did your father have? LB: My dad had 15. He raised them here in Latterfield. He never raised one of them; one of them died when she was a baby, but he raised 14 to maturity. BD: This was after the days of polygamy then? 7 LB: Yeah, he just had one wife. It was mother. Dad has been dead four years this summer, and Mother has been dead nine years this summer. BD: Now, your grandfather—did he have a large family also? LB: Well, they were quite large on both sides. I think they both had about nine children. Grandad Edwards, I think he had nine, and Grandpa Bradshaw, I know he had nine. He had more than that, but he raised nine to maturity. I think he had three or four more, but they died when they was infants. BD: You came from a pretty large family and had a pretty large family. LV: Yeah, I only had seven. There ain’t any of us that have had as many as Pa. I don’t think any of my brothers—I think Howard is the next, and I think he has only got seven. So most of them have only got three or four. BD: Now, during the Depression, you said that you went through the Land Bank and bought, got the money to buy your farm. LB: No, I bought it from the State Land Bank...They never charged you. What they done, is they sold it to you. See, they foreclosed on a lot of these farms, and they sold it to you at 5 percent interest, I think. But you had to pay 10 percent down. You just had to pay them; you had so many years to pay them. And that is the way I bought it. But after, when I dug the well, I do have a well now here on this farm, a little well. It only throws about a second foot. But when I dug the well, I borrowed some money from the Fede3ral Land Bank to dig that, and I think I put $8-10,000 into it. Into the well pump and all. 8 BD: Do you think those programs with the Land Bank were effective, or...? LB: Yes, it’s a good deal. The Federal Land Bank is still a good deal. I guess they kind of formed their own business, or some way, it is governed by the government in some way. But it is kind of farm-owned. BD: It is supposed to be an independent branch or agency? LB: But the FHA is a good layout too. They do a lot of good to people that cannot get money from the private banks. They give you a longer term and lower rates of interest. They are really good. This REA, this lighting system we had here—I was one of the ones that helped to start this in here. We got this in about ‘39 or ‘38, from the REA. We borrowed the money and hooked the lights up at North Creek and out there at Latterfield. Maybe they told you this, have they? BD: Yes, part of this. But I would like to hear what you have to say. I know that the lights didn’t go up North Creek all the way until about 1950, but I knew they were down around the schoolhouse down through here. LB: Didn’t they go to Fred Sr.? BD: I don’t think so. Not until 1949 or 1950. LB: They might have done; that is 10 years later. What they wanted is a little more to run it up there, so they might not have done. They basically put it up there, but eventually we wasn’t getting it paid off too much. But when the Utah Power and Light come here some years ago, why we owed a debt on it, and we just turned it over to them. It was all we people that was interested in, was power. But they sell the power to us just as cheap as 9 we was getting it. We was buying it from Beaver City, see, and by the time you kept up your expense and that, it was costing us more than it does now. The only thing that I can see the difference is that, where we used to have only a few lights and a refrigerator, and something like that, now we would only spend about $5 or $6 a month for electricity and the house was costing us $25. Maybe it doesn’t with Fred and some of them, but most of us, it would cost from $10, to $15, to $20, to $25 a month. BD: That is quite a little variation there, or did it make that much difference... LB: No, we’re burning about that much more power. I don’t know, but power isn’t a heck of a lot more than it was then. Instead of burning 2-300 kilowatts a month, it is running into 1-2,000. BD: I guess the phone company came in about this time, didn’t they? LB: the phones are all here. What I mean is, as long as I’ve been here – what I mean is, the phone line used to go through here, see, and we always had a phone or two out here. There were only about two or three, but almost everyone has one now. It is a party line. It is pretty hard to get private lines; it is too expensive. You could get one if you paid $30 or $40 a month for one. BD: What seems interesting to me is, I thought everybody in the world had power by about 1900 and that. It was 1939 before you got it here, did you say? LB: It was ‘38 or ‘39 before we got electricity out here. We used to, we had gasoline motors and stuff like that. BD: When you went to school, you studied by a coal oil lamp, didn’t you? 10 LB: Or else gasoline. We used to have some gas lights. They gave out about as much light as these. They was dangerous, and they was quite expensive, and they wasn’t convenient. Another thing, they didn’t have, you didn’t have refrigeration. But it was that way all over the United States. What I mean, the REA opened up a lot. The reason FDR did it, is to help the people out of the way. The power company wasn’t interested because you didn’t, there was not enough family use. I think there was only about 20, or 25 maybe, altogether here in North Creek. And they figured on only getting $3 or $4 a month apiece when they first put them in. That is about all they thought they would get. So when you figure that out, about all they were getting was about $100 revenue. Where now, see , they are in there. I don’t think they stopped to realize the people would get more appliances. Now it costs me as much, I dare say I pay as much power bill per month as the whole Creek used to pay. I pay more now than I used to pay then because I sold my dairy and bought a home. It costs me around $#50 or $60 a month to run the dairy barn at home. BD: You have electric milkers and that? LB: Yes, then refrigeration to cool the milk. That there is what takes the power. By the time you do that, it costs you about $2 per day, but you get $2 of milk, plus we have the house. By the time you get the house and that in, we are paying about $70 a month. BD: I guess the REA was part of Littlefield. Do you that Franklin Roosevelt helped the Utah farmer out with the New Deal and the programs that he instigated? LB: He helped the average man out. I didn’t agree with a lot of his policy on this and that, 11 but he was a farsighted man, and he helped the average guys having a hard time to make a living. He made it so that you could get money. Then like this light deal, see, he helped. He put the lights here, made the system so you could get the lights. And he helped, you could get loans. This FHA never came into effect – I don’t know just when it came into effect – but it was after him. I don’t know, but I think it was after ‘32 when it came into effect. Then he – the banks went broke. I was around when that thing happened. Did Fred Sr. tell you about that? BD: Oh, just a little. But I would like you to tell me. LB: I was in Willard Flat, farming for my dad, and I was 16 years old. In 1932 or ‘33 when all the banks were closed for two or three weeks. I’ll never forget it because I was just a 16 year old kid, and I was milking a few cows down there to make a living to help buy the groceries because I was a farmer and feeding the cattle in the winter time for my dad, and I was down there alone. Well, anyways, when the bank was closed you couldn’t cash a check nowheres. Not even a milk check. It was that way for two or three weeks. You guys don’t know what hard stuff is. It happened to be that I had $20 or $25 in my pocket when that happened. You know, I wasn’t sure, and I don’t know if anybody else was, if you were going to be able to cash a check in a month, or two months, or six months. I’ll never forget one guy down there, a family. It was a man that had two or three kids, or four or five kids, and they was going to cut his power out because he didn’t have any money and couldn’t do nothing anyway. I owed him $5. The $5 paid them enough that they didn’t cut his power off. I felt sorry for him. Well, out there with as much money as I had, you could live out there until you could cash a check. 12 BD: I guess it got pretty tight there. LB: Oh yes, you don’t know how tight it was. Then anyway, the banks, you see, they had this here FDIC in the banks. The banks were guaranteed for $5,000 it was. Now they have got it up to $20,000, haven’t they? BD: Yeah. LB: They keep raising it, see, and that is all in the federal deal. It was started then. But in the Depression it was rough. You ask Fred Sr. You young guys cannot remember that, but I can remember milking cows, five or six cows, and if you got $10 or $15 in the two weeks out of it, you was lucky. My dad milked cows, he did down here in ‘31' or ‘32. We had a drought here, and we used to milk 20 to 25 cows. My highest check a lot of times wasn’t over $25, or $30, for 25 cows. So that was about $1 apiece for two weeks. You couldn’t give cattle away, or sheep, or pigs. The government come out then, the last part of Hoover’s reign. See that was in ‘32, and he come out in, see the Depression hit in ‘29. He came out with some grain to try to help us feed our animals on account of the drought. Well, I fattened some pigs. I know we had seven or eight, because they were old pigs. I fattened them so fat that we couldn’t give them away. They was big enough to kill,. They weighed 200, 250 pounds, and you couldn’t give them away, you couldn’t sell them. People didn’t want to buy them. Some didn’t have enough money to buy them so I gave them pigs all away. I went to Milford there, and I talked to two or three guys, and this guy told me he could use a pig because he had a family. I knew he wasn’t making much money either. I told him that if he come out, I would be glad to have him take them off my hands. Of course the grain, I think they gave us that grain right out, but 13 the grain didn’t cost me nothing, and I was feeding them skimmed milk. We separated the milk, and they was just getting bigger and fatter, so I gave them to him. It was the same way with cows. BD: Did you ever sell any of your cattle to the government or anything like that? LB: Yes. In the height of the Depression, one drought come along. I think that was in ‘34. We sold our calves for $4 a head. They had to be good calves, little baby calves, they didn’t pay any attention to them. They wouldn’t have up to a month or two months old. But if they was six months old, you would get $4 a head, and you would get about $10 or$12 for yearlings, and $20 or $15 or something like that for cows. I helped two or three boys, we drove up 400 head of cattle from here on this side of Beaver and drove them to Milford. Then they put them on a train and I don’t know where they went. But that wasn’t calves. That was just the bigger stuff, and that is what we got out of them. BD: Back before the Depression, what would you sell a full-sized cow for? LB: Well, it wasn’t high like they are now. You could, they figured if they got $70 or $60 for a two-year-old steer, and you could get $20 or $35 for a good calf, that was a good price. BD: Then that $4 a calf that the government was offering you was better than nothing, but it wasn’t really... LB: They just done that to help us. That is what they done. Well, a lot of guys that had money, you know, the Arbys, that’s where they got a good start. A lot of people don’t know that, but Arbys had a little money, and they had a little money they could borrow with money. But you take a guy that has $50,000, they was rich. You take $4 calves, 14 these calves, you didn’t have to feed milk. All they need is some hay. They would weigh 2-300, some of them 400 pounds, and they come and picked a lot of them. The government, if they were right good, they shot them, see. They just took them out in the brush and shot them. Well, the Arbys bought one thousand head at $4 per head. Some of them had eight or 10, that would be up, that would weigh 5-600 pounds. That is actually where they got their start. They was about like the rest of us then. If the rest of us had had hay and a place to put them, we would have done the same thing. 15