Oral History Program Don James East Ghislaine Black 28 September 2008 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Don James East Interviewed by Ghislaine Black 28 September 2008 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. 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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: East, Don James, an oral history by Ghislaine Black, 28 September 2008, 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 Don James East. The interview was conducted on September 28, 2008, by Ghislaine Black. East discusses his life story surrounding the railroad. GB: Where were you born? DE: I was born in West Weber GB: When were you born? DE: In a March the 24th 1924. GB: What's the first house that you remember living in? DE: The first house that I really remember living in, is the one that was at Strongknob, in here in the station, a railroad foremen's house, we had four rooms, there was a kitchen, front room and two bedrooms. I and two of my sisters had separate beds in the bedroom. And mother and dad had a bedroom of their own. Out in back of the house was a dirt cellar, where we was able to keep our can goods and stuff down in there. We was right next to the railroad tracks so when the trains went by the windows would rattle and the dishes all rattled, laughing even the beds rattled when the trains went by. GB: How long did you live at the house? DE: Oh we lived there for about four years and then we moved up to Lakeside, where we lived and then we went to school there at Lakeside school they had a school there when we moved up there. And that house was made of ties, railroad ties, and it had a dirt roof on it. And it had a back porch and a kitchen, and a big room that mother and dad had 1 their bed in, and the girls had their bed in dad and mother's room and I slept on a cot in the kitchen in that house. Until we moved to another house that had a little more room there at Lakeside, when a fellow and that had quit the railroad and so we took to moving into their house. GB: How long did you live out at Lakeside? DE: We moved from Lakeside in the spring of '37, we came in and took over my grandfather's farm. GB: How old were you when you moved back to your grandpa's farm? DE: I think, oh what would I be, I was born in 24 and I moved in here at '37 GB: You're asking me to do math that's not good, DE: That's me, my math... GB: So you were? DE: I think if I remember right would be twelve years old GB: About twelve or thirteen? DE: If I remember right about twelve years old when I moved in here on the farm GB: What were some of your daily activities on the farm? DE: Well, then was to go and take and do the chores, like feeding the chickens, the ducks, the geese, and the pigs, gathering the eggs, feeding the horses, leading them out to water and even milk a cow once or twice. GB: How many cows did your grandpa have? 2 DE: Well, my grandpa didn't have any cows, so it was my grandmother that had the cows. And when we moved in here we had, we were milking 7 head of cows and then we build it up to 14 head of cows and about the first few years we was in here. GB: What would you say life was like living on a farm back then? Would you be able to compare it to like later on in life? DE: When we first moved in here, we did a lot of hard work, where they got the machinery now days to do it, you had to do it all pretty well by hand. The hauling of the hay, when it came to the grain, and to go and put it through a thrash machine. Of course, you had horse implements to go and bind the grain. And then we had to go and load it up and haul it in on a wagon and then take it and put it through a thrash machine and with a pitchfork and throw it onto the conveyor, put it through the thrash machine. And then you had to go and sack the grain and tie it and then load it on a pickup truck or on a wagon and haul it over to the granary and dump the sacks into the granary and go back and do some more. GB: So it definitely wasn't easy work? DE: No it wasn't. And then you take it when it come to the thinning of the sugar beets in the spring and that after you planted them and they come up and then you had to take a short handled hoe, and you stoop over an take chop out the beets and space them, and then you had to go and take you fingers and if you had a clump that had four or five beets in then you had to thin them out with your fingers so there was only one beet left in a spot. Some of these here rows were round about 1,000 feet long or some of them even a little bit longer of course some of them would be a little bit shorter too. Did that from morning till dark. And with the potatoes and that you had to go and cut the 3 potatoes, cut the eyes out of the potatoes and plant them, and that was done with the planter. They had the single row planters and then we had a double-row planter, but most of them when we first moved in, in fact when we had it there we had an old single row planter, one rode on the front there and drove the horses, and somebody rode on the back. And there was a wheel that turned and had little sections in it, and you had to make sure that each one of them sections had a potato set in it. And it would run around and then it would drop down into the ground and then it had some discs that were in the back and that would cover the potatoes up, the seed up on it. Then you come to the horsing them, and then you had the potato digger that had to have a team of horses on and then they drove the horse and they had a blade on the front that went and dug the potatoes up and then they had a chain that come around and it bounce the potatoes so that the dirt kind of fell off from the potatoes and then it would drop off the back. And then you would have to come along with buckets and pick those potatoes up and take them and put them in sacks. Put about fifty pounds to a sack or a little better. And even got so that some of the people had a kind of like a harness that you put on that had hooks that hooked into the sack and then you dragged the sack along between your legs and put the potatoes into the sack that way, but a majority didn't do much of that, they took and had the potato buckets and that to go and put the potatoes in. GB: How big of a farm was your grandpa's farm? DE: When we came in on it was 200 acres we had. GB: Did it ever expand or did it shrink? DE: It shrank. 4 GB: It shrank? DE: Yeah, we sold pieces off from it later on. GB: What kind of crops did you grow besides, you mentioned potatoes and beets and hay and wheat, is there anything else? DE: When we first came in on the place, we raised grain, which was wheat and barley, oats. And besides the Alfalfa or the hay, and then we raised potatoes and peas and the sugar beets. The sugar beets was mostly the cash crops that we raised, the peas and the potatoes were also a cash crop, which was earlier in the year. The peas a lot of times we took and harvested them and after we harvested them then we would water the ground and plow it and then plant fall potatoes in and then we would harvest them in the fall. GB: So the cash crops you would sell them to a certain people or grew them for a certain company? DE: Well, like the sugar beets we grew for a company and so was the peas grown for a company. Oh, I also forgot to mention that we raised tomatoes too, so that was a cash crop and that was for canning company, the tomatoes and the peas. The potatoes we raised them for a company, we didn't go and really sign on to them, we just, whoever was paying the most, we could get the most for, is who we sold to. And so that was with that and then of course you had your animals for the milk and for the meat and the eggs. GB: Did you go into any farmer market and sell your produce and eggs and things like that? 5 DE: See we would take the eggs and sell them to the little grocery store and use that to buy canned goods and food things that we needed for the house and so that's where we took care of the eggs. Of course the dairy products, you milk went to a dairy business, which at that time was the Cream of Weber, they come around and picked up your milk. GB: Like they do now or is it kind of different back then? DE: Oh, it was different then, you had it in ten galleon milk cans and there was an open flatbed truck, with just a railing around it to hold the cans from falling off of the truck. And they would take and pick your cans up and then they would bring back the empty milk cans and dropped them off at your place so you could have them to put the milk in for the next day, they came every morning and picked up your milk. And then you milked by hand then too, and that was a job milking those cows. GB: Morning, noon, and night. DE: No, just morning and night we didn't milk them three times a day like some of them do now. Of course my dad done most of the milking, he would milk about three cows to my one. GB: Did you breed the cows too or just milk them? DE: Do what? GB: Did you have a bull to breed cows? DE: We had a bull at that time and of course later on and then artificial insemination came into being and so we started that then and we didn't worry about a bull always around to watch out for. GB: Are they mean? 6 DE: Some of them get pretty mean, you have to watch and be careful around them. Because there have been some of the farmers who have got killed by a bull, being smashed up against a fence or knocked down and tramped on, and they have died from it. GB: How long did you grow up on the farm until you went to school or what? DE: Went to school here until I graduated from high school and after that I went on a mission for two years come home and back to the farm, and I got married and worked on the farm with my dad. And in sixty-four I took over the farm, I bought the farm from dad, at that time it was only a 100 acres then when I took the farm over from dad. Because the way the conditions was before World War II broke out, the prices and with the Depression there the prices were real low, we was having a hard time of making a payment on the place. My grandfather had, we was in debt to the federal land bank and so to make our payments on the mortgage of the place and besides giving my granddad and grandmother money for the place, made it kind of hard to go and make those payments. So we sold half the place to go and pay off the mortgage. GB: How long did you grow sugar beets and tomatoes, were you already graduated by that time? DE: Oh, yeah. We raised them, oh, I can't remember now the years, but finally these companies moved out. GB: So they were local companies. DE: Yeah, they were local companies, a lot of them moved to Mexico, because it was cheaper for them with the labor and things. And so when they pulled the sugar factory 7 away from here and the canning factories, and left no place for us to be able to go and raise those crops and that. Then most of the places around here turned to dairy. So that was their main thing then was the dairy. GB: When you came back to the farm and took over, how many cows did you have then? DE: When I took over the farm then, we were milking around about 40 head of cows and we build up to around about sixty head of cows that we were milking. Before I got rid of the cows and quit the dairy business. GB: Quit the dairy business. DE: Of course we had some sheep too. We had at one time close to a 100 head of sheep besides the twenty, thirty head of cows that we had. GB: If you could chose, which is easier to deal with, the sheep or the cows? DE: That seems to be kind of a tossup there I think. Of course the cows wasn't too bad to go and handle, and the sheep it was a job of shearing them for the wool on the sheep. So I don't know, it was kind of a tossup between them I think, which was the easiest to handle. Of course then you come with your electric milkers and your tanks and so you didn't have to carry the buckets of milk and dump them into the cans, it went right over into the milk tanks and your truck came along and pumped the milk out of the milk tanks, so you didn't have the milk hauler coming around and throwing these ten galleon milk cans up on to the trucks and hauling to the dairy. GB: Did you have any names for your cows? DE: Oh, we had few of them; yeah we had quite a few of them at one time. GB: What were their names? 8 DE: Well, we had an old jersey cow that we called Jersey and an old Guernsey cow that was named Guernsey and then we had Spot, and then we had some names that I don't mention. GB: Non-mentionable. DE: Oh there was tiny, blue, whitey and some of them we bought from different people we gave them their names. GB: The people's names? DE: Yeah. From where we bought them from. One that I remember was Moronee, been too many years ago I guess I forgot some of the names, but we had some of them we had about 30 head of cows that we had names for. GB: Were they all, you mentioned one was a Guernsey and one was a Jersey, were they all Guernseys and Jerseys? DE: No, the majority were Holsteins, in fact we so that they were all pretty well Holsteins there at the last. And there at one time we had some that were Roans, the red and white colored, it was milking short horns that we called them then, Derm cow. The blue cows they were a cross between the Holsteins and the Derm cows. So that's where we got the blue color-like to them. GB: Would you say that one or the other cows milks better than the other? DE: Mostly it’s whatever you are really looking for. Your Jerseys and Gurnseys and that they were richer, they had more cream, butter fat in them than what your Holsteins have. And if you wanted a lot of cream in your milk then the cows that you wanted were the Jerseys or the Gurnseys, the Jerseys were really rich. And too they got so that they 9 were making a lot of quite a bit of cheese around here we started having cheese factories move in. They were more for the making of the cheese, so they wasn't too much for the butter fat in the milk and that, they took and went more for the Holsteins and your Holsteins give more milk than what the Jerseys or Gurnseys give. Your Holsteins and that will give about a five-gallon bucket full or little better of milk where your Jerseys or Gurnseys around about three or five galleon buckets full of milk. GB: Did you ever have to move your cattle back and forth or did they stay in one location? DE: Well, we had to take them to the pasture, where they stayed after we got through milking them in the morning and then we would have to bring them back up from the pasture at night and that to milk them and then they would stay in the coral all night and then the next morning we would milk them and take them back to the pasture for the day. That was mostly there in the summer, but in the winter time a lot of the times when we got the crops out of the fields then we would turn them out into the fields during the day time and then bring them in at night out of the fields and put them into the corals. So we did have to travel for quite a bit with them. GB: How far would you have to move them, move them in the summer? DE: Not very far, they just go, it all just depends on where your pasture was. And you had to go out on the road and down a lane into the pasture, just depended on how far that was. And some of the farms had a lane that went right from the coral to the pasture, and so they only had to go a little ways to get to pasture. This place was kind of a marshy place. The pasture went straight out from the coral where they corralled them at night. Then they fed them hay and grain while they were there in the coral and when they milked them they give them so much grain while they were milking them. 10 GB: Keep their minds distracted from what was going on. DE: I imagine that was what it is, it helped them bring them into the barn, as soon as they opened the barn door, they were ready to come in to get to the grain. GB: Did you move them with horses, or just on foot? DE: Just on foot, sometimes using the dog, turn the dog out into the coral to bring them in. GB: Did that work mostly well? DE. If you had some good dogs, they work pretty well at it. Cows and that get pretty scared of the dog, some of these dogs and that worked pretty well with the cattle, bite them on the heel and make them jump and move and then they come in for you. GB: Did you move your sheep by foot or dog? DE: Yeah, on foot, sometimes and that we had a saddle horse that we would take and move them and if we had to go very far, over half a mile, we would use the saddle horse and the dogs to move them. GB: How long did you horses to move your equipment, when were you finally able to get your first tractor? DE: Well, the horses we used them right up 'til, we were using them after I come home from my mission. And that was in '48, that I come home from mission, and we used horses then for a few years for to cut hay and to cultivate the beets and the potatoes. And to pull a hay wagon along, It wasn't until around about what 60? I think we bought our tractors and tractor implements along around about 1960, I think it would be around the time we got more of the tractor implements. We had a tractor that we done most of the plowing with earlier and then we used the horses to work the ground down, and drills 11 and that to drill the potatoes and beets. We even had some of them that the tomato planters were horse drawn. Pretty near after some of the crops pretty near went out of the country around here because of the factories moving out. We put horse implements ahead of that. But it wasn't too long before that that we were able to cut out the horses. GB: Did you still have horses to ride with or did you sell them? DE: Oh we still had horses to ride with. GB: What were their names? DE: Oh, there was Dime, Penny, Paint, Queen, Bess, Duke, Prince. GB: Were they all different kinds of horses or were they all the same breed? DE: Oh, some of them were cross between the Paint and Perchant. And had some that were a cross between Quarter horse, but some of them were straight quarter horse. Our workhorses were Shire and Perchant, were the most that we had. They are a little on the heavier side. GB: What kind of animals did you have besides, horses, cows, and sheep? DE: Oh, we had pigs, chickens, ducks and geese, turkeys, a variety. GB: Which was the easiest to deal with the chickens, geese, turkeys or ducks? DE: Your ducks and your geese didn't have too much trouble with them. Once in a while you get some of the old ganders that kind of mean, if you got around them. And if they had little ones, they would take out after you. The old gander if you get to close to his flock. It seems like all your animals have some of them that can get pretty mean. GB: Have their own temperament, like Humans. 12 DE: I remember the turkeys that we had one time. My sister, she was taking a course at Weber State, to be a nurse, no not a nurse, she was being a beautician. She came out to get some milk out to the yard, where we had the milk. The old turkey, she had her white uniform on, the turkey took and chased her back to the house, and the old torn turkey. And the old goose took after her too, the old gander. GB: Talk about bulls seeing red, it was geese and turkeys seeing white. DE: And we had a Ram in the sheep, we had some of them that was mean and that would take after you. We had to watch them, but the majority wasn't bad. And the Bulls and that they pretty well kept them in a pen so you didn't have to be around them too much. Just putting them in the coral and taking them out and putting them back in the pen we had for them. GB: So did you use the ducks and the geese and the chickens, well you had the chickens for eggs of course and meat, but did you use them for eggs too. DE: No we usually butchered the ducks and the geese in the fall. In the earlier days we sold them to the grocery stores. We would take them into Ogden and sell them to the grocery stores, the geese, the turkeys and the ducks. Then later on, it got so that a lot of these places couldn't buy things from the farms without having them inspected. Weren't able to do that then. We could still sell it to people that come and want to buy it for their own use. But you couldn't sell it to a grocery store anymore. That is one thing you couldn't do. Same way with their calves, we use to go and sell the calves for veal. We could sell them right to the grocery store, these small grocery stores would come and buy a calf from it. And you could have a guy come and butcher it or else you could butcher it yourself and take it to them. 13 GB: Did you have any fun while growing up on the farm? DE: Oh yeah, we always had something to do; we even had our own little rodeos, where we would ride the calves when we were kids. GB: Were you any good? DE: No, I was no good at riding; well I rode a few but not many. GB: You didn't do any mutton busting? DE: No, we used mostly the calves around about 3 or 400 pounds, and there was one or two horses we broke to ride, we were pretty, well at least I was pretty careful at breaking them out. I didn't try to be a cowboy on them. We worked with and that. And we would take one of our saddle horses that were good and take and snuggle them up to where they couldn't buck and ride them around and then take and lengthen out the rope and let them ride along with each other. A lot of times these horses where you go and try to be a cowboy and ride and that and try to break them out, sometimes they get spoiled and that is all they are good for is for rodeos. GB: What other things did you do? DE: Oh, we went dancing, to shows. GB: Was there anything around her local or did you have to go into Ogden? DE: Around here there was all those small communities that use to have dances, and almost every Saturday night was a dance somewhere in the communities were quite close to you, so you went to them. Some of the communities had guys and women that could play the piano and guitar and the fiddle and they put on their own bands for their small communities. And then later on then they started hiring bands to come out every 14 Saturday night to play at these places. So we would go to the dances. And then there were always birthday parties that you went to and Halloween parties and different ones in the communities had a party that you get together and they would have one in the fall, right after the harvest is kind of over, they would have a few for the community, an all-day like deal. And they would have horse races; kids would come on their saddle horses and race each other. And have all kinds of things in the day, these here ball teams. Different communities had ball teams and they would play each other. GB: Get into any mischief growing up? DE: Not much. We didn't have time to get into much mischief then, because pretty well all during the week and that we were busy and that working the crops. There wasn't too much trouble because kids were all too busy doing something. But, once and a while they would have a fight at the dance, and people would get their feelings hurt and there would be a fight then. GB: Kind of typical start a fight. DE: One of their communities would think they were better than each other during the baseball game they would fight mostly just shouting. GB: Did you have a truck to drive into town or did you have to take a wagon? DE: Well we had a car we used. I remember when we was on the railroad and we would come into Ogden, my mother's brother met us there and this was in the winter time and we rode from Ogden out here in a bob sleight team and bob sleigh, but only remember the once that we done that. GB: Did you use a car other times? 15 DE: Yes. GB: Were they paved roads or still dirt? DE: No. Roads were all gravel especially in my time. GB: I guess it is better than dirt roads. Was the community willing to pull someone out when you did get stuck? DE: Oh yeah, Even when somebody would get into the ditch along the side of the road, somebody would come along and pull them out of the ditch. GB: How often were you able to go into town? DE: Majority of the times you went on the weekends, that was the farmers' day in town which was usually on a Saturday. You go in and do what business you had to do and buy the groceries you needed for another week. Saturday was the farmer's day to go to town, go to the market. But, then they got so that we was going to town on other days later on. GB: Did you ever thought what you would have done, if you were never a farmer? DE: One thing that I always wanted to be was a rancher. I wanted to have a big cattle ranch, and I never did. GB: You became a farmer instead. DE: I became a farmer instead. Of course I think I got the idea from when I was out on the Railroad, out in Nevada and a lot of cattle ranchers around out there. GB: That's what you wanted to be when you grew up. DE: That's what I wanted to be when I grew up. 16 GB: When you became a farmer now thinking back would you have done anything different, if you had been given the opportunity? DE: Yeah, I guess I might have done if I had the opportunity, I would have been a cattle rancher. I still enjoy being around cattle. GB: But, you're pretty content with being a farmer. DE: Yeah, I got so I was pretty content at being a farmer. Of course when we was on the railroad I used to go out where the sheep guys were out on the winter range, especially when one of my granddads were out there with a herd of sheep. I would go out there and stay with him on the weekends when I wasn't in school during the winter time. I enjoyed that, I enjoyed working with sheep. GB: Your high school that you went to when you grew up and came back to the farm. Did you go into town, or was in out here in this area that you went to school? DE: I went out to school here until the eleventh grade and then I went to the eleventh and twelfth grade into Weber High in Ogden. The old Weber High. Right where Washington and 12th street is. GB: Right in the area where Shopko is now? DE: Yeah. That's where I went to High School. GB: For the Eleventh and twelfth grade? DE: We had the first to the 10th grade out here in West Weber. GB: A lot different than it is now. DE: We didn't have near the people we had out here then that we have now. 17 GB: True, I am sure there was a lot more space than there was people. DE: When I graduated from high school, there was about 200 and some odd students that graduated at Weber High, if I remember right it was 206 my graduating class was. Opportunities, things change, and so the farming area cuts down. Houses are built. GB: What's the one thing you were glad about progress change the way of Life? DE: I don't know, I hate change. More problems come, way things have gone, selling property to build homes and those who have moved in out into the country and caused a lot of places to sell out of their business because they had so much trouble. A lot moved up into Idaho, Wyoming, Montana places like that. And then the prices of things have changed, and how to operate came somewhat more than what some could handle. GB: Were glad to ever get plumbing or did you like the outhouse? DE: It made it nice, the new plumbing. Not go out in the cold. And then have to change the outhouse around every so often. GB: Did you have to move it or clean out? DE: Dig a new hole, fill the old one in. GB: Is there any memorable moments about your childhood growing up on the farm? DE: Everything had something to do with your life, way the new machinery came in. I enjoyed driving the tractor and harvesting the beets. Before we had to have a knife and chop the leaves off of the beets and throw them into the pile, and then throw the beets onto the truck, I liked that. The only thing I didn't like was when it got cold weather and wet weather and sometimes that made it hard to do. And then when it changed from 18 hauling the hay by hand and then hauling it when it was in bales, made it easier. Then when taking a fork and throwing it on the wagon and taking it off by hand. Had fun even doing those things, and fun taking to each other and laughing to each other like, when I was loading hay on the wagon and dad and his brother had it pitching the hay up on the wagon. As uncle Lloyd went to move a pile of hay to throw on the wagon there was the snake with the frog in his mouth, he was jumping up and around and screaming. And there was things like that happen and you have fun and you remember those things that happened. GB: For the most part you enjoyed your life? DE: Yeah, I enjoyed working with my dad and uncles, and my sisters helped with the beats, my mother even helped. Not all the time, because she had the house to take care of or a baby. When I was going to school, my aunts would come and work in the fields. And when I got off from school, I would have to come and clean the barns all out and put straw in the barn and that for the cows and we locked the cows in at night and the horses had stalls and we locked them in at night, so it was warm for them in the winter time and the fall. When it was stormy, it would kind of protect the animal and so when I got home from school, it was my job to get the chores done. So when dad and them would come out of the fields, all they had to do was milk the cows. And when I got a little bit older I was able to do more of the feeding. It was quite a bit to do. Since I was the only boy I had to do quite a bit of the chores. My sisters and that when they got a little older they did the feeding of the chickens and the gathering of the eggs. GB: They did their share as well; it might have been a little bit different. DE: And course they had to help do things in the house. 19