Oral History Program Wallace A. Clay Interviewed by Joanne Frandsen 14 February 1973 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Wallace A. Clay Interviewed by Joanne Frandsen 14 February 1973 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: Clay, Wallace, an oral history by Joanne Frandsen, 14 February 1973, 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 Wallace A. Clay. The interview was conducted on February 14, 1973, by Joanne S. Frandsen, in Mr. Clay’s home near Pleasant View, Utah. Clay discusses his life and his experiences with inventions. JF: Can you tell about your early life? WC: Next month on March 11th I will be 89. I was born at Promontory Summit where the golden spike was driven on March 11, 1884. My father was the day telegraph operator at Promontory at that time. After about a year at Promontory, he moved down the hill to a station at the foot of the hill called Blue Creek, and there I spent the first eight years of my life. It was kind of a desert station and it was very lonesome, the coyotes howling every night. JF: Do you remember anything about the schools? WC: I never went to school until I was eight years old as there was no chance to go to school. My mother's sister, Aunt Sadie Meadowmiss, who was the night telegraph operator, gave me my schooling during those first few years. In the year 1893, I hadn't been to school only what my aunt had given me. The family subscribed to a magazine called The Youth's Companion. In the winter of 1893, the family moved to Ogden which gave me a chance to go to school. We lived on Jefferson between 26th and 27th and I walked to Madison School. That year a Mrs. Petersen was in charge of the Chart Class so I went to that class. I wasn't very long there, however, since I knew how to read so well. I was promoted to the third grade before long and then to the fourth. JF: What work did your father do at this time? 1 WC: My father was a telegraph operator on the Central Pacific in those early days at Blue Creek and that winter he took a job in Ogden operating the railroad scales where they weighed the cars down in the railroad yards and I went to school that winter graduating in the fourth grade in just one year. JF: How many other children were in the family? WC: I had a younger brother and a younger sister; they were both quite a bit younger than I. JF: What occupation did you pursue? WC: Well, I have always been intensely interested in things mechanical for the reason that I think I had a distinct advantage over modern children inasmuch as a lot of things distract their attention. We didn't have television or radio and I had to use my head a lot and figure things out for myself. I became quite a philosopher by the time I was eight or nine years old. At the station in Blue Creek there was a hill behind the station and being all alone I would sit on a big rock and try to figure out about the world - how big it was, etc. JF: This was before you were eight years old? WC: We will say from the time I was seven to nine. JF: You mentioned living in Kelton and Corinne. WC: Yes, later on. My father was a cowboy when he married my mother and he was very much interested in horses. In Blue Creek he homesteaded a piece of ground next to the station and he had some pasture there. JF: Were there any Indians in the vicinity? 2 WC: No so much, but in those early days, the Indians would be allowed to ride free on the railroad cars if they sat out on the railroad cars steps and all the time all passenger trains stopped there to take on water. It was at the foot of Promontory Hill. There was a big water tank and the engineers stopped to take on water and especially on the baggage cars near the front of the train, there would be a bunch of Indians and squaws sitting on those steps. They could ride free; they didn't have to pay and they would ride back and forth. As a child I would go and talk with them. Every once in a while you would see Indians on horseback. JF: Did the Indians trade? WC: No, as far as I knew. By that time they were all on reservations JF: What kinds of Indians were they? WC: I imagine some of them were Uintahs and Blackfeet. There wasn't any trouble with them as far as I knew; they were tame. On June 10, 1869 when the two railroads came together - fifty years later they had a fiftieth anniversary of the driving of the Golden Spike. At that time just below the hot springs near the alkali flats was Ogden's airport and that brought the anniversary to 1919. At that time we had a gas station on the main road between Ogden and Brigham and a little store called The Coal Springs Grocery and I took down a load of gasoline. They had a flying circus as part of their celebration and the airplanes were stationed on this Ogden airport on June 10 and llth. At that time I wrote some articles and took photographs of those World War I airplanes. JF: That was during the war? WC: The war ended in 1918; this was the year after the war ended. 3 JF: Were there any Mexican bandits' raids in Utah that you remember? WC: No, it was quite peaceful that way in this northern part of the state; I believe further south they had some trouble. JF: Do you remember anything about the Spanish American war? WC: Yes I remember quite a bit. It ended in 1898. At that time my father was operating the old Utah Hot Springs Sanitarium here and I was 14 years of age. At that time large crowds would come out to the springs in those early days before the automobile. They came out in the surrey with the fringe on the top. Whole families would come on special days such as the 4th and 24th of July. In connection with the resort there was a liverystable and the stable boys would put the teams up in the stables and the family would spend the day swimming and other different sports: bucking bronco and races, etc. I was selling peanuts at this time during 1897- 1898; my father set me up in business. He bought a sack of roasted peanuts and I would sell these. I had a kind of rig on me like you see cigarette girls wear. One corner of this resort was a saloon, old fashioned, where they sold beer in great big glass beer mugs for 5₵ a glass; everything was awfully cheap then. A Sunday dinner was only 25₵. It cost 25₵ to get a bathing suit to go into the hot pools and the big outside pool. I would have this tray taking one of these beer mugs and dip into the large sack of pear and get a beer mug full and then I had some little paper sacks w:3 red, white and blue stripes on and would turn it over the top of the beer mug and then turn the whole thing the other side up and all the peanuts would drop down inside the sack (it didn't quite fill the sack with peanuts) and then whirl it two or three times, make a couple of ears on it and with the tray in front of me, go out among this crowd perhaps 1,000 people milling around the building and holler, 4 "peanuts, a bag, right this way" and about 20 minutes or one-half hour I'd have them all gone, and then I'd rush in and fill up another bunch. JF: Did you travel very far from this location and go anywhere besides Northern Utah? WC: My father was telegraph operator at Promontory Summit, at Blue Creek, at Terrace, at Kelton, Utah at Tacoma, Nevada at different times while I was growing up and of course, I had experiences in these places. JF: By the time you were grown you came back to Ogden? WC: By the time I was 20 years of age, my father had quit telegraphing and he was in the business of buying wild horses in the west and shipping them back east and auctioning them off. In the year 1904 they had a big international exposition called the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri. I was 20 years old and I went back on one of these shipments of horses. They were bought all over Utah, Wyoming and Montana and all over the western country and were shipped back to St. Louis and sold at auction. I and several of my schoolmate buddies went back as drovers. Every four or five carloads of horses there had to be a man to go along to take care of the horses. They had to stop several times between here and St. Louis overnight or over- day and water and feed the horses in the stockyards. The first stop was Green River, Utah, second: Cheyenne, third: North Platte Nebraska. JF: Did you have any difficulty going on the journey? WC: Just a lot of fun. The reason why they had to have these drovers go along sometimes: In the stock-car full of horses one might lay down and the others might tromp them to death so every time the train would stop at a station the drovers would go out and with 5 frog poles get the horses to stand up again. We stayed for six weeks living in a tent just off the fairgrounds, called Forest Park. There were six of us. The tent cost 25₵ a night. The next day we would go back into the fairgrounds through an underground entrance called the Sticker Street entrance. At one time we got on one of the Mississippi steamboats, a big stern wheeler. It was an excursion boat running between St. Louis, Mo. and Memphis Tenn. called the Herbert H. Spencer. There were two big boats of this type of stern wheeler; the other one was called the Robert E. Lee, a famous boat on the Mississippi River. That was quite an experience. When we went down as a drover you had a first-class ticket to come back, free of charge on the railroad. JF: How long did it take to make the trip down? WC: It seems to me it took one week from Ogden. Some of the horses would come in from Nevada and Idaho, but they made up the full train in Ogden. We went down to St. Joseph, Mo. and left the Union Pacific there and went the rest of the way to St. Louis on a smaller railroad called the St. Jo and Grand Island. While I was down at the World’s Fair I had a telescoping suitcase with extra shirts and kept filling it up with the literature I gathered at the fair and when I came back I had discarded most of my clothes but had the whole suitcase full of literature of the different projects advertised, etc. and spent the next couple of years Inventing along the lines of the different things I had seen at the fair and then started inventing in the 3-D business, the method of showing pictures in three dimensions you see on postcards, etc. JF: What do you consider was the best invention during your lifetime? WC: There were so many of them. When I was a little boy, we used coal-oil lamps and tallow candles and old cast-iron cook stoves and I lived through the era of the very primitive to 6 what we have now. There have been many tremendously important inventions, the airplane and in fact, a lot of inventions in railroading from the old steam locomotive to the diesel locomotives. JF: As far as making the lifestyles easier, what was the best invention? WC: The invention by Edison of the electric light. JF: What was your best invention? WC: I think the improvements in the 3-D pictures. JF: Do you have any patents on your inventions? WC: Yes, I had a lot of 3-D patents. I made a model here at Utah Hot Springs in 1957 and kept getting out improvements, etc. but this was a very expensive field in optics and I couldn't do very much myself. I had to get a big company interested. I put on an exhibit, the first one in the Intermountain Inventors and Designers, in 1967 in the University of Utah Union Building. That was the year we all got together and incorporated. I was a charter member. 7