Oral History Program Dutch Belnap Interviewed by Charles Trentelman 24 February 2014 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Dutch Belnap Interviewed by Charles Trentelman 24 February 2014 Copyright © 2023 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial house flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. After World War II, the railroad business declined. Some government agencies and business related to the defense industry continued to gravitate to Ogden after the war—including the Internal Revenue Regional Center, the Marquardt Corporation, Boeing Corporation, Volvo-White Truck Corporation, MortonThiokol, and several other small operations. However, the economy became more service oriented, with small businesses developing that appealed to changing demographics, including the growing Hispanic population. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Belnap, Dutch, an oral history by Charles Trentelman, 24 February 2014, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Dutch Belnap 24 February 2014 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Dutch Belnap conducted circa 2013 by Charlie Trentleman. In this interview, Dutch discusses his memories of 25th street in Ogden, Utah. DB: I think 25th street was a big part simply because it was tied to the railroad. CT: Yeah I was talking with a guy who works up in our library, his name escapes me, memory like swiss cheese these days, but like you he worked summers down there a lot. He worked in the baggage room, he worked in the commissary and in the laundry room. DB: I worked in the mailroom. CT: Did you? DB: Every Christmas right where those little cafes are now, back in the main lobby. There’s a café back there. Well that was the mailroom and so all these packages would come in and you had to sort them for the different trains going out. That was another job that we made pretty good money at, throwing packages around. CT: Did they just like hire you on for the holidays? DB: Yeah, just a holiday deal. Then I had a job one time working for the Standard stuffing Sunday papers. CT: Oh my goodness. DB: They’d come off and you’d have to take all these supplements and everything and stuff them into the main paper and stack them. CT: Well that would’ve been when they were located on… DB: 24th and, CT: Kiesel. 1 DB: Kiesel. CT: They were in the Kiesel Building. DB: Right they were. CT: What do you remember about that part of town as opposed to 25th street? DB: Well I remember Joe Breeze specifically. Tell a story about Joe Breeze. When I was a high school coach I had a kid, I won’t mention names because one of the editors sons played for me at Weber High School. He was struggling, he was a big kid but he was really soft. I told him he had to get tougher and I was always pushing on him that he had to get tougher. He was the biggest kid I had but he played like a girl, it drove me nuts. So I found out that this guy from the paper was trying to get me fired. He went to the County Superintendent and Joe Breeze heard about it. I got a call that said, “Joe Breeze wants you in his office in the morning at 10:00.” Joe was probably one of the more powerful guys in Ogden. CT: He was, yeah. DB: So I went in his office and it was on Kiesel. He said, “Coach, how you doing?” “Pretty good Mr. Breeze.” He says, “I hear somebody’s trying to get you fired.” I said, “Well yeah.” He says, “Well let’s just relax a little bit,” called his secretary and said, “Send Mr. so and so in to see me.” So I’m sitting in front of Joe Breeze and this guy comes in. Joe says, “I hear you’re trying to get this young man fired is that correct? Don’t lie to me, it’s 2 all over town. I’ll tell you, you’re not using the newspaper to get him fired. If I hear anything more like that I’ll get you fired, go back to work.” Joe says, “You won’t have any more problems with him. CT: Good for him. DB: And I didn’t. CT: I’m trying to think who that could’ve been, there’s only two or three guys. DB: I bet you can guess. Anyway, Joe was also on the committee to bring baseball back to Ogden. So he was one of the guys that when Richie introduced me to Joe, and I think there was John Lindquist and one of the Scowcroft guys. They were the big power in Ogden. So they hired me to take over general management of the club. CT: That was when you took over the Dodgers? DB: Yeah, it was a beauty. CT: Yeah. Tell me about Richie I haven’t heard many good stories about him. I mean I worked with him for a bunch of years but we were always on opposing shifts. He was one of the nicest guys. DB: He was one of the nicest guys and we became friends when I was a high school coach. He got after me one time in the papers so I’d come stomping in his office. I said, “Hey. He said, “Now wait a minute Dutch, you’re doing all these good things but when you screw up I’m going to report them. If you want just the good things I won’t report anything. If you want me to report everything I will.” So we became very close friends and he was a really good guy. Coaches liked him, he was a good sports writer and he was fair. He had a son, I don’t 3 know what you’d call that, but he had a son who was really mentally challenged. In fact, you’d go to his home, and the son’s name was Mille. He was probably fourteen or fifteen years old and he was obese and one of the things he’d do, he’d get a tea bag, shake it all day long and looked at it. He had two daughters, one of his daughters brought a date home to introduce him to his dad and while he was sitting there Mille came out of his bedroom stark naked. CT: Oh good heavens. DB: So he and Shirley became good friends of mine. They really struggled and I said, because I was teaching handicap children in the high school, “You really outta look into sending him to an institution, not to put him away but to teach him a skill.” So they took him down to American Fork and he’s still down there. Now he’s in a group home, he had done so much that he’s in a group home. But when you have a mentally challenged child it puts a lot of pressure on you. CT: It does, yeah. DB: But he was a good guy. He loved to fish and we’d go fishing together. Do you remember Don Warner? CT: Yeah. DB: Don was a year older than I was and he went to Utah State so between him and Don they covered the sports in town. Then Al Warden was a promoter. Big Al. CT: I’ve seen a lot of stores about Al Warden promoting boxing in town and all that. 4 DB: He promoted the boxing, he promoted the Harlem Globetrotters. He did four or five things and then got a piece of the action so paper was a pretty good venue for him, sold a lot of tickets. CT: Well that was back when the paper in general was a much bigger part of this town then it is now. DB: It really was. CT: You know the sports editor for example, people like Vincent and Al Warden, they were major players in this town. DB: Yeah I don’t think five percent of the people know who the sports editor is now. CT: Well exactly yeah. Do you? DB: No, I should. CT: Yeah, you see. DB: I know Jim Burton, I know Roy Burton then the kid that left and went to the tribune. What was his name? CT: Well you would ask. DB: Yeah. CT: Yeah. I know the guy. What’s interesting is they just laid off the sports editor and nobody even knew who he was practically. Right now, a guy name Brady Bingham is basically being the sports editor. Chris Miller was the sports editor for about ten to fifteen years. Randy Hollis, he was there and he should’ve been sports editor. DB: Sometimes I think when I look at the newspaper today, I mean it’s driven by advertising. 5 CT: Yeah. DB: It does, it’s lost its hometown feeling. That’s what I think. CT: Yeah it worries me too. They used to be a major player in the economy around here and in politics. I mean the Standard Examiner was a key to getting Union Station donated to Ogden. I mean they rallied people, Joe Breeze and Murry Moulder and people like that was the ones that formed the committees that did this. DB: That’s right. CT: You just don’t see that anymore. You don’t, I don’t think they’ve got the place in the community that allows them to do that. They don’t have any advertising anymore. DB: You know they should… CT: Breaks your heart. DB: They should have a marriage with the university because they’re both big entities and that’s how it used to be. You go to the Chamber of Commerce, you go to any big venues in town and there’s Joe Breeze is on the front table. He was always a very, very strong man. CT: He was very active in all of those things. DB: And very honest. When he told that guy to get his butt out of there and I said, “I’ll vote for you Joe.” CT: Well you know as an ethical journalist there’s really nothing else you could do. I mean you can’t have people on the newspaper throwing their weight around town. The whole newspaper loses respect right there and so I’m glad to hear he 6 would do something like that. When I started there in 1978, Joe Breeze had died and he had not been replaced yet, they did not have a publisher. They had the Glassman’s and the Hatches, they owned the newspaper and they had just hired a general manager. Guy by the name of Jack Backs, I don’t know if you ever knew Jack. DB: I knew Jack. CT: He was a nice guy but he was not the publisher because two families owned it and I don’t think they could ever decide who got to be the big fish. Well the Glassman’s owned 51 percent and the Hatches owned forty nine percent. So we didn’t get a publisher back until the Hatches bought out the Glassman’s seven or eight years later. DB: Who was your big guy, one of your publishers came in what’s his name? He played basketball at Vanderbilt. CT: Scott Trundel I think. DB: Scott Trundel, yeah I enjoyed Scott. CT: He was a nice guy. Now he was another guy who he was very active in the club and the exchange club and things like that. He was a big promoter in the community and I think that helped the paper a lot, I really do. DB: I’m sure it’s hard for the paper with this new electronic stuff. You can pull it up on the internet and see and do what you want. I don’t know, but I say the best part of the newspaper is the obituary because they get a pretty good piece of change doing that don’t they? 7 CT: Yeah, they make a lot of money on the obituaries. They make money on the legal ads now, but you know the normal classifieds are gone, they’re just gone. Those were huge money makers for that paper. They’d get 5,000 from each page of classified ads. DB: So who owns it now? CT: Who owns it now? It’s now owned by the Sandusky Newspaper Group out of Sandusky, Ohio. It’s a family owned newspaper group, they own about six newspapers around the country and the Standard is the biggest of them by far, although it’s really lost circulation in the last few years. The Hatch family, they bought it right before national advertising started to go down the tubes. They just had a hell of a time and ended up selling it. Oh geez it’s been twenty years now and these guys from Sandusky have owned it ever since. So yeah, it’s too bad. DB: It’s too bad. CT: It used to be locally owned and it was a very powerful thing around town then. DB: Yeah if you mentioned the name Joe Breeze, if Joe says that’s right, that’s right. CT: Exactly, he was a big power in the community and it was good to see that. You knew Murray Moeller didn’t ya? DB: Murray Moeller? I loved Murray. CT: Yeah, he was still there when I started at the paper, he was the editorial page editor. DB: Great guy. CT: Great guy, we got his picture on the wall down at Union Station because he was a big help for the Union Station. 8 DB: Yeah, it’s a nice town. I’ve lived in a few towns but I like Ogden. It’s not as metropolitan as Salt Lake but the thing that bothers me, I’ll pick up the paper and they’re doing more stories on Salt Lake teams and the Jazz and everything else then they are Weber. I’m thinking hell those people don’t buy advertising in Salt Lake there do they? They don’t spend any money here. I mean we seem like we get all advertised by the Hollywood stars and they could care less about us. CT: Yeah. Now you were a coach at Weber too, is that right? DB: No I coached at Utah State. CT: Oh okay. DB: For fifteen years and then I was the athletic director at Weber. CT: Oh okay, at Weber State? DB: Yeah, though I spent fifteen years at First Security Bank too and started out as a marketing guy and bringing business in. Then I ended up being the manager of the mother ship which was First Security Bank on 24th street. So I had fifteen years of banking and twenty years of coaching and then I’m retired now. CT: So that’s quite a jump from banking to coaching. DB: Yeah. CT: What made you do that? DB: Well I went from coaching to banking. CT: Coaching to banking and then back to coaching? DB: Yeah well, I went as an athletic director at Weber and when I got out of coaching I had a job with a big insurance company and I was covering from St. George to Logan, all the banks. We were selling mortgage insurance, private mortgage 9 insurance on loan. The next year in the mid 80’s the bottom fell out of real estate so then I got approached by First Security Bank and they said, “Why don’t you come into Ogden and work in our public relations and marketing, and bringing people into the bank.” So I was introduced to George Eccles in Salt Lake and my boss said, “I know who you are. Are we going to have a basketball team or are we going to have a banker? What the hell do we have going here?” But I knew a lot of people and it got me in the door so my job was to bring business and keep business in Ogden. I did that for about seven or eight years and then they made me the manager. I didn’t like that as well because I had about 35 women I had to supervise. That’s like herding cats. CT: Yeah. DB: So I’ve been around a long time. CT: You have been yeah. DB: And I’ve seen some big changes and its been interesting. CT: Yeah you must have a good feel for the business climate in Ogden. DB: Yeah. In the old Ogden we had Samuel’s, and you remember they had Keely’s Café. They had all those businesses lined up along Washington Boulevard that was pretty nice. Then the mall came in and they took that one out south and it just kind of dried up the town. I guess they do it to all towns with the malls and everything. It kind of lost some of its hometown flavor. Then they cleaned up 25th street and it’s still interesting. It’s still an interesting street; I don’t think people realize some of the things that went on down there way back when. 10 CT: Well it’s interesting because you’ve got two kinds of people regarding 25th street. You’ve got the people who have no clue about its past and then you’ve got the people who remember it all too well. I remember at the paper we’d still get phone calls occasionally from people who live up above Harrison Boulevard and the subject of 25th street would come up and they’d go, “Oh I’m never going down there, that’s the horrible part of town.” I’m going like, “Lady it looks like Disneyland okay, I mean it’s perfectly safe. I was down there last week with my granddaughter it was fine.” They’re going, “We used to go down there and watch drunks.” I’m going, “Well yeah that was thirty years ago. Okay trust me it’s cleaned up,” because it’s beautiful now, I mean they’ve done a great job down there. DB: Yeah it really is. CT: You know there’s still a few bars but they’re run by very hardworking respectful people. The prostitutes are all gone, at least as far as I know. DB: I think they are. I know a few years ago there was a couple of massage parlors down there that went beyond and above the massages, but you know. CT: I seem to recall I think it was Burt Strand. DB: Burt Strand, outdoor editor. CT: Yeah outdoor editor. He used to tell me about being a police reporter down there and going in with Sheriff Mac Wade and raiding some of those places down there. He always talked about one of the places up on the second story. I thought he was talking about above Pancho’s but somebody else said, they went up the stairs and there was this giant picture of a naked lady on the wall. Of course, the 11 rooms that they used were off to the side over there. Interesting, you know where Pancho’s is right? DB: Right and the Rose Rooms were right across the street. CT: Right across the street. I guess during the 1940’s Pancho’s was called the Beehive do you remember that? DB: I know that I have a buddy that worked at the bank, he and his buddy bought a part of that down there but I don’t remember. I just remember Pancho’s. CT: But a guy name of Ron Ross, now do you know Ron? DB: Right. CT: He just lives up the street here from me in fact, but he was telling me that in the 40’s when it was called… DB: Was that Fireman? CT: Yeah, Fireman Frank. DB: Fireman Frank. CT: And engineer Ross. DB: I remember. CT: He used to play piano down there, he said he would always play the piano at Pancho’s, or the Beehive which you know how big it is. There’s no room in there but they would play against that back wall and he said that there were naked ladies who would lean out the top windows on the second floor and wave to the sailors or soldiers going up and down the street. He said occasionally they’d put on a shirt and come down and talk to him playing piano. 12 DB: When I got out of the navy when I was going to college I got a job at Bick’s Billiards. Bick’s was on the corner of 25th and Kiesel, it was a billiard parlor. Bick was a little teeny, really a nice guy so I would go in there at 3:00 and I would run the billiard parlor. Two funny stories, the paper had come out about 2:30 or 3:00 and we had this one little Spanish kid that would always work 25th street. He’d come in and say, “Standard Examiner, Standard Examiner,” I think sold it for a dime. This smartass was playing pool on what we call the money table, when we had two tables and guys could win and they’d play each other for money. This one guy said, “Hey kid I can’t read,” and the little Mexican kid said, “Well we got funnies for the dumb ones,” and the place went crazy. CT: I love it. DB: I love it. It’s one of the best lines I’ve ever heard. We got funnies for the dumb ones. CT: Good for him, did he sell him a paper? DB: No, but one of the interesting things about 25th street, we had hustlers in town, guys that would play pool for money. Had nothing to do with the pool hall but they’d come in and say, “Dutch I want to rent that table for an hour.” They’d pay us and then they’d call rack and I’d go down and rack them up. They could bet anything they wanted too. Some of them were big money games. CT: Really? DB: We had a guy that worked at the railroad and he didn’t look like he was all there. His name was Roberts and he was the best player in town. I’m working the front 13 desk one night and this great big guy comes in and he has his own satchel with his cue stick and said, “Hey you got any games around here?” I said, “Roberts, he’ll play.” “Well we want to rent a table for two hours.” So they got back there and Roberts let him win about two or three games and they were about five bucks a game. “Roberts,” the guy says, “Let’s play for more money.” Roberts said, “Geez how much you talking?” He said, “Well let’s play for one hundred dollars a game.” Roberts he said, “Well I think I can do that.” So I rack them up and every time I’d go back this guy is just getting redder and redder and redder. He is probably eight or nine games off of him. CT: Roberts did? DB: He did, put the money in his pocket and walked out. The guy walked out so I’m getting ready to close up about three hours later the guy shows up. Now I’m just a college student, I’ve got everybody swept out of there and I’m cleaning up, he’s about 6’4 about 210. He says, “Okay I want my money back.” I said, “What do you mean your money back?” He says, “You set me up.” I said, “No, no, no, no, no. A kid has nothing to do with the pool. I didn’t set anybody up. I told you he played. You asked for a game and I just pointed to him.” He said, “Well I’m staying here until I get my money back.” 14 For some reason Bick never came in but that night he came in. He says, “Dutch how you doing?” I said, “Fine.” He said, “Got any problems here?” I says, “Yeah,” and I told him the story. He said, “Sir, we don’t set anybody up. You rent the tables and it’s your game. If you lose you lose. We don’t get anything, all we get is our four or five dollars an hour on the table.” “Well, I’m not leaving until I get my money back.” CT: God. DB: Bick reached around, and the counter was about this high at that time. He reached underneath I didn’t know he had a cue stick and it was full of led. He took it up over his head and he hit that counter and boy it sounded like a rifle. He says, “Now look boy, you can walk out or we’ll carry you out of here. Now don’t you ever come in here and challenge this kid or me again. You’re going to walk out or we’ll carry you what do you want to do?” He looked like Babe Ruth standing there with this cue. The guy turned and walked out. He said, “Dutch just bring this stick out when you need it.” Another time we had some hustlers in town, we had two pinball machines right up front. He said, “These pinball machines pay for the rent and your salary,” because if a guy got so many games you’d have to pay him off in nickels, they were nickel machines. He says, “They are set for about twenty percent loss, eighty percent win.” 15 These two guys come in and this one guy he’s sitting up at the top of the pinball machine watching this and this other guy. So I’m running around and I’m setting up tables and taking care, they had 500 games rung up as winners. So now we have to give them out in nickels. I think it was 25 bucks and Bick says, “Well how did they get that?” I said, “It was just on there.” He said, “Tell me what they look like.” I said the one guy had a sack and I think it was a bottle of liquor. He said, “No it wasn’t, it was a magnet. Those are steel balls and what they do is pull and steal a ball out, take it around and drop it in the hole. I got to put the brass balls in there because that won’t work.” So they come back about four or five days later and they stayed for about 10 minutes and they walked out. Then they came back again and this time they didn’t have anything and same scenario. I’m working at the end of the day, they got six to 700 games rung up on there. Bick says, “Well I know what they did.” If you looked at the pool table it had this glass display and it was about that wide. This guy had taken a hand drill (sound effect) and he knew right where the tripper was and he had a little wire and he’d stick it in there and he’d hit the trip wire. As long as you’d drowned out that trip wire it would ring up these games. He says, “These guys drilled my machine.” I took the glass off and put two pieces of metal inside the glass so they couldn’t. They come in and broke a couple bits and left again. 16 You know its interesting people would spend more time on trying to cheat you, but it was interesting. We’d have a guy come in every night, don’t know if he was homeless, but it was cold so he’d just sit there. We’d have to sweep him out, I never got rid of him or anything. But it was interesting to see the hustlers come in. CT: Well you got to let a guy keep from freezing to death too. Now where was this, this was on 25th? DB: Corner of 25th and Kiesel. CT: Kiesel so it would’ve been… DB: Right next to a habberdash shop where they sold hats and stuff. But Bick’s was an old building, there was two/three billiard parlors in town. There was one that was called the Penthouse over on Washington Boulevard, two on Washington Boulevard, but this was the money pool room for the guys that was serious about it. CT: So it would have been 24th and Kiesel or 25th? DB: 25th. CT: So it would have been, I’m just trying to think in my mind where it is. DB: I’ll tell you what year it was. CT: It would have been right next to Armstrong’s wouldn’t it? DB: Yeah. CT: About where the Trailways bus station was? DB: Yeah. CT: Okay. 17 DB: But it was the last one before you crossed the street. They did sell beer so I’d been in the service and I was old enough to sell beer. Had a rule, if they started slurring their words and they couldn’t talk properly you couldn’t sell them anymore beer. CT: Whatever happened to Bick anyway? DB: You know I really don’t know. Nice guy, tough little guy and he liked everybody but boy if you crossed him or if you backed him in a corner he was tough, people knew that. CT: Well if you’re going to run a pool hall in one of the nation’s tougher towns yeah. DB: We had another guy who was a veterinarian and he was an athlete at Utah State. He was one of the better pool players, but we had a bar that was probably 40 to 46 inches high, and his name was Jim Erz. Jim was kind of a legend because he was a pool player and he’d gamble. So he was there one night playing and when he got all done he’d won some money from this guy and he says, “You want to win your money back?” The guy says, “Yeah.” He said, “I’ll bet you I could stand flat footed and jump up on this table here.” Well he played basketball at Utah State and you really had to have a pretty good lift at that time. “I’ll bet you the ten bucks I won from you that I can jump up here without any aid of anything and I’ll just take one step and get down and jump up and land on my feet,” and hell he did it. CT: So he’ll need another ten dollars. 18 DB: Well the guy said, “Well I’ll bet you another ten bucks I’ll kick your lungs out if you don’t give me the money.” So he gave him the ten bucks. CT: Now what is his name, Jim? DB: Jim Erz, he just passed away. CT: E-R-Z? DB: Yeah, he owns Erz Animal Hospital out there in South Ogden, interesting people. But I think my highlight was when the little kid told the smartass that there’s funnies for the dumb ones. Have you ever heard that? CT: No I never have, that’s beautiful. I said I want to buy a paper from that kid. That wasn’t by any chance, there’s a bunch of people around here who used to sell papers I can see doing that. What was his name? DB: How about Jim Stavarkis? CT: No it’s not Jim although he would too. Oh what was his name? I can never remember his name. His daughter works in the county attorney’s office and he was a big power in the Republican Party around here for years. DB: Oh Alex. CT: Yeah Alex Furtado. DB: Alex Furtado. CT: I could see him doing that. DB: Yeah well, another one of my favorite guys that you mentioned, Mac Wade. We were in high school and Mac showed up to basketball practice one day and pointed to his kid and said, “I’m going to take this kid right here coach. I’ll bring him back, but I got to take him.” Jerked him off the basketball court and what had 19 happened over the weekend, he and his buddies had put a half of a dozen sheep in the Plain City Elementary school, but these sheep had been on beat pulp. They had the diarrhea and they shit all over the place. So they caught the one kid then they told on this kid so he and his buddies spent the whole weekend with warm water and buckets cleaning that whole school. He said, “He won’t be available this weekend but we’ll get him back to you for Monday.” That was Mac Wade. CT So that was the Plain City Elementary? DB: Plain City Elementary. CT: Oh god, about when would that have been? DB: 1952. CT: 1952, I’m going to look that story up. That has to have made the paper. DB: I remember Mac Wade when the girl got murdered out there by Riverdale Bridge. Remember that story? CT: Yeah. DB: I don’t know if you remember Mac, because he was the top law enforcement officer in the county, was sequestered to be on the firing squad. Mac told the story he says, “You all think you’re tough and you all think you can do this and do that, but they handed out six guns, one of them had a blank, so you didn’t know if you had the blank or you didn’t have the blank. Had this big black patch over this guy’s heart right over the side of his chest get you to shoot through that black patch. So as tough as you think you are, you’re standing there and this guys strapped into this chair with mattresses all packed around him. When we shot it 20 kind of blew his chest open. You could physically see his heart and he was still alive. It just haunted me for many, many years. I’d never volunteer to be on the firing squad again.” But that’s how they used to do it then. CT: Yeah, yeah. Well the last time they executed somebody that’s what they did, six guys one with a blank and pin loaded patch over his heart, and told everybody to aim for that. DB: I believe in capital punishment, maybe a little lethal injection or something. CT: Myself I think life without parole is meaner. DB: Well yeah but it’s a lot more expensive. CT: Well not really. DB: Oh really? CT: They’ve run the numbers and actually the amount of money you spend on executing somebody because of all the appeals and all the lawyers and all the time it actually works out to be cheaper to just stick them in prison without parole. Because that’s only about 30,000 a year as opposed to 1,000,000 dollars or so that it takes to execute somebody. DB: Boy Texas does it right. CT: Yeah. DB: They whack them out. CT: Yeah they do, but life without parole, like I say, if you want to punish the guy, life without parole is meaner because with a life without parole they don’t get anything. If they want a TV set they’ve got to come up with the money to buy one. They don’t get school, they don’t get anything because they’re not going 21 anywhere. There’s no sense in trying to reform these guys they don’t get counseling they don’t get school they don’t get privileges they just get warehoused. I mean I just can’t think of anything worse. DB: When I was at Utah State I had a player out of Englewood, California, and he was a tough little guy. His father was a pimp, he was not a good example for a father, but the kid he played with was a center and he was 6’10. I hired his high school coach to come into Utah State, well to shorten the story up, the kid was a con artist. About three weeks into the season I get a call from the phone company. Back then when you’re a coach you had a phone card and so you’d make a long distance call you had to give them your number. Well when you’re recruiting you’re calling the kid and talking to the coach and apparently, he wrote my number down. Well by the time we got to Utah State he started using this number and I had a phone bill of about 400 dollars. Detective from the phone company says coach you got a guy using your phone every night. We snuck over to the dorm and got in a linen closet right by the phone and here he comes, calls his girlfriend for a half an hour. So I call him in the next morning and he starts lying. I call the cop in, call his dad and his dad says, “How much was it? Hell that’s nothing coach I’ll just send you the money.” I said, “I could send your kid home right now but I’ll give him a chance.” Well when he graduated his senior year he hooked up with a little gal from Layton who was a student at USU. Her father was a lieutenant colonel, beautiful little black gal, her name was Toy. Everybody said be cautious of Oscar. They go 22 to Vegas and he’s doing the same thing his dad did. He’s running numbers, selling drugs. So she said, “You got to change your lifestyle or I’m going back home. I don’t want to live like this.” In the meantime, he went out took out a $390,000 insurance policy on her, he’s the recipient. He flies into L.A., picks up an old high school buddy and says, “I got a job for you, pay you 500 bucks. I’ll fly you into Vegas, put you up in Caesar’s, get you a prostitute, you can stay one night. You just got to whack this person and you’re out of town. Nobody even know you’ve been in town.” So the kid comes and she’s a beautiful little gal, they lived in this little townhouse. Oscar said, “She’s going to be at this particular spot and I’ll let you inside the house like you broke in and when she comes in just whack her. Leave the gun here, because it doesn’t have any markings on it and go back to L.A.” He says, “I can’t do that, I can’t do it. I just can’t kill a young woman like that.” “Well get your ass out of here,” so he sent him back to L.A. The next night, 911 someone shot her in the head with a .357. CT: Good heavens. DB: He took the gun and hit himself in the jaw, cracked his jaw and his eye. “Please come I think we had a burglar rob us, I think my wife’s been shot.” He was a con’s con artist. So yeah it was somebody come in and Oscar caught him in the middle of it and hit him and shot his wife and left. I heard that story and I thought nah it was a soap op. The insurance company says, “You know what, there’s something fishy here. This policy is less than six months old. He is the sole 23 recipient of all this money.” So they put a tail on him and he was a tough, mean little bugger and he knew he was tailed. In about a week of the tail he grabbed this guy and he said, “If I see you again I’ll take care of you,” so the guy reported back to the insurance company. CT: The guy whose tailing him he tells this too? DB: Yeah. So the insurance company says judge we got some other evidence on the robbery murder with the Williams girl, his name was Oscar Williams. So they brought him back in court and he started to lie to them and they says, “We’ve got one more witness your honor.” They went back to L.A. and they found this kid. They brought him and put him on the stand. “Did you fly into Las Vegas on such and such?” “Yes I did.” “Who paid for your trip?” “Oscar.” “What was your purpose here?” “To whack his wife.” “Did you know?” “I was back in L.A.,” and he had proof that he was. They had that all. The judge looked at him and said, “You will spend two consecutive life terms in the Nevada state prison,” he’s still there today. Just sad that they do stuff like that. CT: Well you know his dad bought him out. DB: Well his yeah, I kicked him off his senior year. The reason I didn’t want to send him home was I thought if he goes home he’s going to turn out just like his dad. 24 We played Colorado State at the Air Force Academy and come back after the game. We land in Salt Lake and bus to the mouth of the canyon and here’s my buddy the chief of police. We had to stop at a railroad crossing there in Wellsville, “Coach I got to take one of your kids.” I said, “Who is it?” He says, “Oscar. When you get your kids back in the school come out and I’ll tell you what happened.” So they cuff him and take him out. Another student, a black student, and Oscar walked in picked up a 600 dollar stereo out of this kids room and they were carrying it across campus, put it in Oscar’s room. Other students saw it so they called the police. They brought in the city police and I called his dad said, “I’ll send my attorney.” I said, “No you won’t, I don’t want your attorney. Your son is off the basketball team, I made a commitment to let him finish school. If he keeps his nose clean and he sits out a year and keeps his grades up I’ll get him his last year so he can play. I don’t want you up here.” So I let him do that and then he, end of the story, don’t print this one because the end of the story is… CT: I don’t work for the newspaper anymore. DB: The end of the story is, we’re playing Nebraska at Nebraska for the NIT, and we got a good team. If we beat them, they got to come to Utah State and then our next game is Texas and we haven’t lost at home all year. So he’s my point guard and he just kept the game, you know in the betting they gave them four or five 25 points or two or three points I mean. I couldn’t figure out why he’d turn the ball over, he’d forget to pass it in at the right time so it kept the teams even. Well were down one point with fifteen seconds and I call time. He was a good player so I said, “Oscar we’re going to set a double screen for you, and you come up and get the ball and drive the middle.” I told my two big kids, I said, “If any one of those two big defense just come in and drop it off and we’ll do a layup.” It worked every time because we had the play to do it. They give my kid the ball the clock starts, he won’t come off the screen. Everybody is waiting for him, you know it’s the play. They call a five second call on us. Now we’re down one and they got the ball. Now we got to foul them to get the ball back. We foul them, they make the one and one. We lose the game so I get everybody in the dressing room I’m saying, “Where’s Oscar?” “He’s on the phone with his dad.” The manager heard Oscar say, “Dad we won,” which means they bet a lot of money on the game and they won the bet but he wasn’t upset about it. I couldn’t prove anything but I know damn well that this kid had thrown the game. CT: Oh that sounds pretty obvious, yeah, geez. DB: Then three months later his wife was shot. He was a mean person with a bad attitude. CT: You got to wonder what someone like that is thinking? DB: Well just his dad. His dad came into town once and I always tried to be nice to the parents. I got them a room. He’s got this black satchel and he’s got money in there and I saw a gun. He said, “Can you go buy me some liquor?” 26 I say, “No. I don’t drink and I don’t want to be seen in a liquor store. It’s just around the corner you can go buy it.” He wanted me to go buy him a bottle of liquor. I wonder what his dad thinks today. He’s been in there since 1978. CT: Really? DB: They say he’s buffed up and he’s a force in the prison. CT: Probably is, yeah. DB: He’s still writing his buddies, “Hey I’m innocent. If you get me some money, I’ve been studying law books, I can get out of here.” CT: Sounds like somebody who is just in his element in prison by the sound of things. DB: Yeah. CT: Yeah. Wow. Yeah who knows if in what 35 to 36 years now… DB: 36 years, he’s still there. CT: Still there and there for a long time. DB: People say you going to go down and see him? I said no. CT: Why would you want too? DB: You know, I caught him one other time, but he got out of it. Were in Seattle and what he’d do he’d bring all the sophomores and freshman to sit in front and we’d give the kids fifteen dollars for meal money which was a big deal. I’d been going to Seattle every year and the manager says, “Dutch I don’t want you to bring your team back here.” I say, “Why?” He says, “Because you stiffed me for about one 100 dollars’ worth of food.” 27 I said, “What do you mean I stiffed you?” He said, “You had a whole table full of kids and everybody got up and left and the little black guy (Oscar) come up and paid for a cup of coffee.” CT: Oh Jesus. DB: So I called some players, “Whose table did you sit at?” “At Oscar’s.” I said, “What did you have to eat?” “I had [inaudible].” “Well it cost you six bucks.” He says, “Oscar said, ‘You owe six, you owe ten. You guys give me the money because the coach doesn’t want you to drink coffee.’” I didn’t care if they drank coffee or not. He waited until everybody leave and put the money in and paid for a cup. So I said, “How many guys sat at your table?” “Oh eight or nine.” I said, “There was nine of them counting yourself, right?” I named the kids, and I said, “They all gave you the money, didn’t they?” “Oh,” he said, “God coach I forgot to give to the cashier, I’m sorry.” I’m looking at this little con man and I march him down to the manager and I said, “This young man made a mistake. He had the money, but he forgot to drop it off.” So he pulled it out and said, “I’m really sorry I’m just worrying about the game.” I mean it never quit. CT: That’s tough to deal with someone like that. 28 DB: Oh he drove me nuts, I used to have black hair until I coached him. He was something else. CT: Did you ever encounter Darnel Hainey up there? DB: Very much so. I was up there the night they played BYU. Earnest Wilkerson was president of BYU. Somebody called Darnel a nigger. He was standing between him and another guy reached over, punched him right in the forehead and just knocked his ass across the floor. Then both benches and it was a free for all. The football players got involved, it was ugly. Yeah, I knew Darnel really well. CT: I still see him around a lot. He and his wife are good friends of mine now. He’s told me a lot of stories about the stuff he and his wife had to go through just to court each other. Go to movies separately and things like that you know. DB: It was pretty bad at that time. CT: Yeah. DB: I knew Darnel. CT: Yeah, he’s still around. In fact, I’ve got a couple of his paintings downstairs. He does artwork and he does paintings now. DB: I see him down on 25th when they have the street festival. CT: He’s down there selling now. DB: He’s got this African ark. CT: Yeah, he just had a big show down at the Historical Society in Salt Lake. They had a big thing for Martin Luther King or black history month and they had a big display of his paintings down there. Just a nice guy, my wife was going to Weber State when I met her and we got married. He was dean of student affairs up 29 there then. Our favorite story about him is he was basically the guy in charge of keeping all the black students. He said he would tell them that he wasn’t allowed to hit them but nobody ever said he couldn’t drop them. You know Darnel he’s about eight feet tall and has got hands twice the size of yours or mine. He could easily drop anybody if he wanted too. He’s still just the nicest guy, he and his wife both. Two of the nicest people in the city. DB: Do you remember a guy by the name of Cornell Green? CT: No I don’t. DB: Cornell Green played for Utah State and he was from Oakland, California. About 6’5, 220 and Darnell had a habit, because he’s the biggest guy, and when you’d be shooting free throws he’d reach over and pinch you. We had a little basket that we made that was just two inches larger than the basketball and you had to make four of those before you could go in at night so they had to concentrate. Cornell was very, very quiet, never saying anything but just strong. Darnell come and put his hands on him and he said hey keep your hands off of me I’m shooting free throws. I don’t want any of your bullshit. Kind of embarrassed Darnell, so he come back again and put his hand on him and he turned around and grabbed Darnell by the wrist and bent him on his knees, bent him on his back. Then dropped right on the middle of his chest with it he said, “Now you son of a bitch keep your hands off of me, I’m going to shoot my free throws,” and that was the last time. The other story about Cornell is the Dallas Cowboys come in and say you got a kid about 6’5 that we think could make a pretty good defensive back. His 30 name is Cornell Green, he said well I played football in high school so they sent an agent in to talk to Cornell. The guy says, “We’re willing to give you 1,500 dollars if you just come to try out camp. He says, “I want to make my own deal without the coaches in here.” We go out two minutes later he called us in, he’s laughing and Cornell’s smiling. We said, “What did the kid want?” He said, “He wanted 1,501 dollars. He wanted to make his own deal.” So he goes to camp with the Dallas Cowboys and his thighs, he had big, red welts and they couldn’t figure it out. The trainer walks by and he’s putting his hip pads on backwards so when you get down in the three-point stance they would cut into his thighs but he played in six all-star games after that. An outstanding football player. Ogden’s a good town, it’s an old railroad town, good hardworking people. CT: Good people in this town. DB: They had a canning company down there called Pierce’s, I used to work down there. CT: Oh yeah? Where was it located? DB: I think clear down on Pingree. Pierce’s Pork and Beans, they made pork and beans down there. The farmers would take their tomatoes in there and they’d sell them. They’d buy the tomatoes from the farmers and then they’d put it in the pork and beans. Then I worked at Swifting Company which was over the viaduct on the killing floor. That was a fun job. 31 CT: Oh god. I’ve heard some horror stories about that killing floor over there. Which were probably true. DB: I delivered ice for Wally Jensen. He had an ice vending company and I pulled this old truck out and go out to a building and there is a sign, it’d say 25, 50, 75, 100 whatever and they all had ice boxes, it was right after the war. So if they wanted twenty five pounds of ice you’d cut that off, put it on your back and walk over and put it in their fridge and you’d do that every day because a little block of ice would last about a day. That’s how they kept their food. CT: Back when everybody had ice boxes. Yeah it’s fun to look at ads and city directories from back then and see what the town was like then. DB: Utah Wholesale Groceries was real big. They distributed groceries all over. They had Scowcroft’s, there was about four or five in this town and they owned the town. CT: Scowcroft’s was huge back then. Whatever happened to it? DB: Well I think the thing that happened to a lot of businesses in Ogden. He would come in and start it up and give his heart and soul. CT: Yeah, well you know that’s kind of what happened to the Standard Examiner. DB: Exactly. CT: The Glassman kids sold it to the Hatches because the Glassman kids wanted to cash out and so they sold it to the Hatches. The Hatches weren’t very good business people. The only people that could take channel 2 and the newspaper… DB: So what was the results? 32 CT: Exactly. They took that entire Channel 2, they owned the whole thing. By the time they got done I think they owned twelve and a half percent of Channel 2. That’s all they got left and the rest was just pissed away or who knows. DB: I remember Utah Cigar Company down on 25th street. Cutrubus’s owned it, their dad he was Greek. He sold candy, gum, and cigarettes to everybody up and down 25th street. He had a good business and those kids get out of high school and they’d have to go down and sell candy, cigarettes and gum. The old man went to Greece, made enough money to take his wife back to Greece and in the meantime, we had one of his top salesman embezzled a whole year’s salary out of him. So it really drove them out of business, the Utah Cigar Company. CT: Where was that located? Was it on 25th? DB: 25th street between Grant and Lincoln. Just a little hole in the wall and they’d get all these supplies in and the old man would go around and take orders for cigarettes, gum and candy. Then cigars, they called it Utah Cigar Company. CT: Yeah I remember I talked with Homer Cutrubus about… DB: Did he ever tell you about working there? CT: No he never told me about working there. DB: Because he worked at the ice house with us too. CT: Oh did he? DB: We all worked at the ice house, yeah. CT: I’ll have to give him a call and talk with him about that. DB: Ask him, say, “Did your family own the Utah Cigar Company and what happened to it?” He’ll probably tell you the guy that screwed them out of a lot of money. 33 CT: Yeah well I’d love to hear that. He was telling me how he used to work for, what was his name? The millionaire in Las Vegas, oh geez I hate it when names don’t come to me anymore. The reclusive billionaire was his name. DB: Yeah it was Howard Hughes. CT: Howard Hughes, yeah. He worked for Howard Hughes for a long time. In fact, he wrote a book about it that came out just last year. DB: So did Jim Witmore. CT: Yeah. DB: Yeah he was a little different. CT: Interesting, interesting times. DB: Then the Newmark kid still believes… CT: Still believes he owns… DB: They picked him up coming out of a cathouse. CT: Exactly yeah. Newmark is one person I’ve never interviewed but it would be fun too. He’s still up in Brigham City as I understand or he’s around here somewhere. Well listen I think I’m running out of intelligent sounding questions and I’ve taken a lot of your time. DB: No I enjoyed it. CT: But I’d like to talk with you some more sometime whenever you’re free or available or whatever is convenient for you. DB: Yeah maybe we’ll talk about the blacks because the best kid I ever coached in my 22 years was black and the worst I ever coached was black so there’s a spectrum there. 34 CT: Well you know skin color doesn’t mean ability. DB: No, no. CT: That’s one thing I’m interested in is the racial divide in Ogden in general and how that worked out because, like you say, it was all blacks on this side of the street and whites on that side of the street. You hear people say well everything was fine. DB: See Ogden High had about three kids that were black athletes. Chris Farland and kids that really did well. I think they probably did more to kind of break the barrier because it was… CT: That would’ve been when? DB: Oh this was probably back in the mid 50’s. CT: Oh okay yeah. DB: Then when I played in junior college, I think we had three black kids on our team. We had two from Rock Springs and one from Ogden. Tell you one story about the Carter family from Rock Springs, Wyoming and they were all coal miners. Joe Carter was the point guard for this team at Weber that won the national championship and Tom was a big fullback so Milt Meacham brought him in. I was one of the only married kids on the team so I lockered with Milt and at that time I was wearing garments and all that stuff. It was colder than hell we’d just finished practice and I got 15 dollars a week from handing out towels, that was my scholarship. Milt and I was in there getting dressed and Tom says, “Come here come here. I’m freezing my butt off do you think I could get some of those underwear like you?” 35 I went back and told the coach and we started to laugh. I said, “We don’t have any that big Tom.” He said, “I’m freezing my butt off out there and I need some of those long underwear.” CT: Get him some long johns or something. Okay well Dutch I’m just incredibly grateful to you. DB: Well thank you. CT: For taking this time. DB: I enjoyed your writings. I miss your writings. CT: Yeah I miss doing it too you know. 36