Oral History Program Maurine Cornia Interviewed by Linnae Dugger 18 July 1980 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Maurine Cornia Interviewed by Linnae Dugger 18 July 1980 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. 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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Cornia, Maurine, an oral history by Linnae Dugger, 18 July 1980, 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 Maurine Cornia. The interview was conducted on July 18, 1980, by Linnae Dugger. Cornia discusses personal and family history, and she also talks about the history of Globe Seafood Co. Inc. LD: This is Linnae Dugger; it is July 18, 1980. I am talking with Maurine Cornia about the history of Globe Seafood. MC: The way I met him was I went to summer school at Utah State. We had a history class together and we met up there and he went to summer school and so did I. We had the most fun I guess together up there was when we took a ballroom dance class together. There was very few men in the class, so I had a companion the whole time. That's really when we started going together. So we went together five or six weeks while we were up there. We played tennis together and went to college dances and had a really good time up there. He proposed to me and we were engaged before we came home. Well, I don't know what to tell you after that. LD: Did you start right in with the business or did you move back to Ogden? MC: There's a lot of space in between there. Haven't you heard that? Didn't he tell you that we went selling and he taught school? He graduated from Utah State and I was teaching school. Then we got married. A year after he graduated from Utah State he taught school out in Tooele County, out in St. John's for a year. Then we got married the following spring in June. We went to California, to Longbeach, and stayed a whole week in Longbeach for a honeymoon. My sister had a real fancy wedding and I thought it was a lot of fun to have a real fancy honeymoon. We came back and he taught out in Tooele 1 the first year he was married, then we moved over, too. He was the principal of the school and it was a grade school. But he wanted to get into high school so he got acquainted with the board members over in Marysville and got a teaching job there, and he was teaching high school. He was a coach and he taught math. So then he taught there two years and then in the summertime, (school only lasted 8 months), so in the summertime we came up to Ogden and Logan Knit. At Logan Knit we got a lot of samples and went out selling. Even the first year we was married, as soon as we came back from our honeymoon, we went up to Nebraska and sold Baron blankets made in Brigham City, Logan knits made in Logan, Utah. So we did that every summer for several years until my husband, through my brother who had been a supervisor for Logan Knit and had made a lot of money that way, he wanted Jack to be a supervisor and so we decided to give up teaching and be a supervisor and work all year round. To do that we decided to go up to the State of Washington. We lived in Seattle and we lived in almost every town, both the Eastern and along the coast of Washington, and also along the boundaries of Canada. So then we came out to the coast and spent one Christmas out there and he was able to get a lot of different people to work for him. In fact, one time in Seattle, he put an ad in the newspaper and he had a lot of ladies come in and wanted to work for him. So he liked Washington so well but I got terribly tired of traveling around. I had one daughter then, Joan, and she got tired of moving. One year I moved 13 times. We had a little trailer that we pulled behind the back of the car and we took a babysitter. She was from Marysville. She was one of Jack's high school students. She met a boy out in one of the wards out there and he fell for her so she planned to marry him, so she quit our job. We had to come back to Utah to get another girl. So we 2 got a girl down in Hooper to go out with us. She went out for a year or two. Anyway, we got tired of traveling around so much. Why, we went over to Pullman. That's one of the colleges in Washington. We decided to interview with a man there about the Future Farmers of America. They have a special agricultural teacher. He decided if he took one quarter of credits there, then he could become qualified to teach in the State of Washington. He found out that there were some jobs available so we did that. We sent the girl from Hooper home and we stayed up there. Went to school that quarter. Then he interviewed some of the people that needed an Ag teacher out in Pullman. Wendell Iverson, he met him and after talking to him he was real taken with him so he decided to sign up with him in Pullman, Washington. So we came home for vacation and went back. When school started we went into a whole entire new life. After we went to Pullman, Washington to live. Jack had this Ag job there. It lasted about 3 or 4 years. He decided he didn't like school teaching. He had always had his eye on a business. He thought he would like to go into some of business. So we really saved all the money we could get ahold of and decided we would come back to Utah and see what we could do here. By that time we had another girl, a daughter, Marilyn, that was born while we was living in Pullman. However, we went to the County Seat where she was born . . . Anyway, we had these two children and we were driving 25 miles to all of our Church meetings which was not too much fun. It was too far to go. We decided we would like to come back to Utah. We had been away long enough. We had saved up not much more than a thousand dollars. However, money was a lot more in those days. Anyway, we came back. We stayed with my sister here for a while we was looking for a business of some kind. The Mound Fort Grocery over here on Washington and 13th was for sale, so 3 we decided we would buy that market. We found a place to live right close in this neighborhood. On April 13, 1944, Jack bought the Mound Fort Grocery. It was kind of a slow business. He could see that it wasn't making enough progress. We moved from an apartment, then we moved to a home on 13th Street. We was real close to the market. We had a lot of problems that came up--sick spells, and accidents and things like that. He read an ad in the paper that Mike Holliman was selling the Globe Fish Market. It was located on Washington. So he went and talked to him and we talked it over and he decided he would go from the Mound Fort Market. We would buy this Globe Fish Market. We moved from the Mound Fort Market to the Globe Fish Market on April 13, 1944. This was during the war and meat was very- scarce. He was able to have such a good business at first that he was able to clear $1600 in six weeks. My brother had a real good looking Oldsmobile. It was rather new. He hadn't had it very long. He had made enough so he could pay cash for it. He was real thrilled about that. That was in six weeks. So on May 5, 1946, we went on a business trip to Los Angeles. My husband went up and down the wharf there, where the fish markets are along the seafront. He contacted a lot of people that was in business there. He had such a vision because he had been able to sell so many Utah trout. Now he had bought from two or three trout farms right around this area. And he bought some from a White Trout Farm up in Idaho. There was one in Mantua, and I believe there was some others nearby. Anyway, he contracted with different seafood people there on the market--there on the wharf that they would buy Utah trout. So he started to sell Utah trout on the L.A. market on June 2, 1946, and he was the first person to ever do that. And he made well with that. On the 24th of July--it was so funny--I'11 have to tell you about that. Every year the boys was 4 just growing up. They had a big parade down Washington. The boys would come over and they would make hotdogs right there in the store. They would cook their hotdogs (I don't think hamburgers, just hotdogs) and sell them. They did a real good business there. Here the boys made most of their spending money which they saved and was quite interesting. People would come up there and that's before they started selling on the corners and places. Most times our friends and people that we knew would drop in and after the parade was all over, the store would still be full of people that was still thirsty and hungry, and so we had fun. My two brothers worked at the store, too. Both Art and Norm, in 1946 they worked. No, I imagine, especially, Art was going to school and that's how he picked up some money in the summertime. Grandpa Christensen came up from Redmond, too. After he was going to sell his farm out there and he was contracting for, so he came up and you see my mother-in-law was--her folks lived here in Ogden--they were the Johnsons and so they encouraged them to come up. They had lived in Redmond all their lives but they deserved something better so they moved up here. Grandpa started to work in August, 1946, and it was kind of funny, too. My father, he was a retired schoolteacher, but he would come down to the store all the time. We as a family have always been real fish-minded. So he was down there constantly buying fish. I have to tell you that part, too. Jack sold a lot of-- I'm trying to think of the little fish he sold--anyway, my mother loved trout. He said, well, we can't always afford those nice big trout, so he . . . Oh! I know, Dad would take these little catfish home and my dad helped Mother do some of the cooking so Dad would put breading on these little catfish and tell Mother they were trout so she would like them just as well. My dad started working, too. Grandpa started working in August, and in the same year in September, 5 my dad started working down there. And they would wear the white caps and these big white aprons and they were both real slim and not much difference. Grandpa Christensen was a little taller, but there wasn't much difference in their sizes. So people would come in and say, Mr. Christensen, you have twins working for you. And they'd just laugh at that. But it gave both of the Grandpas something to do, which was real good for them. They liked that and then they socialized with people. Anyway, in August 25, 1947, Globe Fish Market moved from 2372 Washington Boulevard to 429 23rd Street. It was so nice to get it off Main Street there because, I don't know, that was no place for a fish market. It was the only kind of a market like that that was there. The others were all clothing stores such as they are today. LD: Is this when they started to fish in the Bird Refuge for carp? MC: Well, I think they did that later. I had in my notes here that Jack went to L.A., March 2, 1948, and that's when he called the markets and they were very interested in selling carp as well as trout. In July 20, 1948, Jack tried selling direct to the Japanese people in Honeyville and Deweyville in Box Elder County, but that wasn't too successful because he was selling right out of the back of the truck, almost like some of them do it now. Of course they didn't have refrigerator trucks. They used ice. So, I don't think he did that very many months. LD: Is that when the wholesale started in or did you always have wholesale? MC: Well, we sold wholesale a lot. I'd have to go back. I could probably find that, but I haven't had time to look it up. You see, he had a route that went down to Southern Utah first. Did you get that from Garth? 6 LD: A little, but not a lot. MC: We went to Southern Utah, first. We went as far as Delta. That's a long ways. He sold fish down there. You know he was afraid to go to Salt Lake and like that. He always said if he went to Southern Utah, (of course that is where he had always lived, you see), so he thought that was pretty nice to go home down to Richfield. But that's not where the money was and I told him, 'Why not try north. He said, well, Booth and some of the others were up there. But pretty soon he got so he was doing both. He was going south. He was going down there and staying overnight or something, then he would go north, and he had someone staying at the store to help hemi guess he told you about . . .You see, I'd have to go back and look all that up. LD: Did you go on the trips with him? MC: Only just for fun. In the summertime we went lots of time and we liked to take the boys, too. We took them in the summertime. (When the carp fishing really started it must have been quite a bit later than that.) The boys would have to be nine or ten but they really wouldn't be much good to him until they were twelve or so. Then we quit the trip down South and we only took the trip north. Then after that it got slower and slower and slower. His mother died and his father lived in the Hudson Hotel. He got so lonesome. Every Thursday Jack would go to Salt Lake City to pick up fish or make deliveries and he stopped and called up his brother and they'd take Dad out to dinner. LD: Did you work at the fish market very much? MC: Oh, no. I never did. The only thing that I did--I would go down… He was a person that didn't like me to have charge accounts. He handled his money very well. If Garth 7 handles money well, that's where he got it from. I would stop at the market and when I was downtown shopping. Then he gave me what I would ask for. He never made too much trouble about it. He would let me have it. It wasn't that he was so tight about it. He'd say, 'Now let's see. One of the places down here needs some shrimp or something.' He was always getting me to deliver. I'd say to the girls, 'Maybe you had better go ask your dad for the money we need. He probably won't send you to deliver. I didn't look forward to it at all, going around the Utah Noodle and delivering to the back door to these Japanese people. The girls worked, though. I guess you talked to them. They did books for him. Marilee was pretty good at that. She worked for Garth some, too. Do you know my daughter, Marilee? LD: Yes. MC: She worked for Garth quite a while, too. Shawna was saying not long ago that she thought Marilee had the best relationship with Daddy than any of us because she worked with him, kept the books. Any of us that he could catch, why, he'd send us, but especially the boys out. "Oh, you got lots of time. Go deliver this." But that's about as much as I ever did as far as the work down there. But now, over to Mound Fort, I might have worked over there some, when we had that for two or three years. I worked there mostly when the girl we had working for us needed time off. LD: Do you know much about the fish market before you guys bought it--how long it was in business or how it got started? MC: I don't know much about him. Does Garth have any papers on him? I understood he died. He was, as I understood it, was a single man. Didn't have any family. He didn't have the fish market very long. When Jack took the fish market we took our groceries 8 and moved into it. We had groceries there for quite a while. Did you find that out from Garth? LD: Yes. He said you had groceries, but he didn't elaborate on it 'cause he wanted you to fill me in on the early years. He mostly talked about the later years when he took it. MC: Well, Jack always had an idea that if you could seal fish and meat . . . Now, out at Mound Fort he had meat there and we delivered. We always had a delivery boy or somebody that would deliver all around the neighborhood there to quite a few people we know. It was fun. One time, we had a lot of T-bone steaks. Jack said that they aren't selling very good. So we might just as well bring them home so we froze them. We laughed and laughed about that because that was the only time we had so many Tbone steaks that we got tired of them. So we laughed about that 'cause we had a lot of them. I don't know what else to tell you. I do a lot better with notes and if you give me a little more time. We went to California one year, and we went in the truck. I never will forget that 'cause I didn't want to. But we always stopped on Las Vegas to see a fancy show. So we stayed at the Flamingo Hotel. It was one of the neatest ones there. But out in the parking lot was this great big load of shrimp on the truck. I said, 'they'll thaw out!' And he said, 'No, they won't! I have them packed in dry ice.' So they sat there. We got home with this load of shrimp and he says, 'I had a great business this week.' It was the first week in April. We sold $2400 worth of seafood in one week. Easter Sunday was the 17th of April. Does he have when Don Maisey worked for him in 1950? LD: Garth said he just couldn't remember too much of the early years 'cause he was so little. MC: Every time he would send trout to California you would have to tag them. So when these boys were little, Jack would get them down there and Marilee and the boys would 9 tag trout all morning. But every time they had to have a little tag on them--something to do with the law. I don't know if it was always like that, but he paid the boys. He didn't pay them a high salary but he always had their own money. They were the envy of the other kids in the neighborhood because they worked down there and had bank accounts. They had their own money. They paid their way into school and like that. I tell you, Joan said she is self-educated 'because I paid my own way through school.' LD: Garth said to ask you about the fish you had to soak in lye water. MC: Oh, that's the lutefisk, and that comes from (did he tell you?) Sweden. LD: Scandinavia. MC: Scandinavia fish. That was real funny. They had to soak out this fish, oh, something like six weeks before they could use it. It came in big, hard--just like bark. Well, these huge pieces of fish would come into the market from Sweden, and some Scandinavia countries and it would be like huge pieces of bark and they would come in long boxes-real long boxes--and always wooden. When they'd open them up then you couldn't do a thing with those, so you would have to soak them out. The only thing you could soak them in was a big huge barrel because they would have to stand up on end. They would soak them for six weeks or longer. I don't know exactly. But people would always look forward to them, 'cause it was a big delicacy that they would have at Christmas from Scandinavian countries. They had to be soaked in a certain solution with lye water. They would put this lye in the water, then put these fish in there, then everyday (even on Sunday) they'd have to go down and change the water. They'd drain all this water off then fill it full of fresh water again. Every day it had to be done for this length of time, whatever it was. People would come down and' they would bargain for it. They would 10 have their name on the list and when it was ready to use you would call them and they would come in at a certain time. So one day I happened to be down there. I don't know if I was there by myself, or I kind of think Jack had gone to the bank or gone somewhere. Some lady came in and she wanted some lutefisk. She came over and looked at it and she saw it in the barrel there and she said it was within maybe a few days of being ready. She said she would take a piece so I weighed it up and wrapped it for her and she started out. Then Jack came in. He said, 'How you been doing?' And I said, 'Oh, not very much business, but I did just sell a hunk of lutefisk, though.' He said, 'Oh, no! It's not ready. Why, you can't do that! If that lady takes it home and cooks it up and eats it, it will kill her! That lye is strong.' He said, 'Where is the lady?' So we both ran to the door and I think I ran out and down the street. I almost caught her before she got to Washington. I stopped her and said, 'You can't have that lutefisk! It's not ready for you. You can't eat it like that! 'She looked at me as calm as a cucumber and said, 'I knew that all the time, so I'll just take it home and soak it another few days. 'So I went back to the store and Jack said, 'I would sure hate to be sent to Court for killing some lady!' 11