Oral History Program Phil Sottosanti Interviewed by Sharice Stagler Circa 2010 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Phil Sottosanti Interviewed by Sharice Stagler Circa 2010 Copyright © 2025 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. 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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. 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: Sottosanti, Phil, an oral history by Sharice Stagler, circa 2010, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Phil Sottosanti conducted by Sharice Stagler circa 2010. Phil discusses his experiences going to St. Joseph’s Catholic High School in Ogden and his continued participation in the school’s Alumni Association. SS: So, did you go to Catholic School your entire life through the St. Joseph’s school? PS: Most of it in the Los Angeles area. We moved to Ogden from L.A. when I was a junior in high school, so I went to St. Joe’s 11th grade and 12th grade. SS: Oh, okay. Did your parents also go to Catholic schools? PS: My mom did, my dad didn’t. They’re both Catholic, but it’s just a matter of where the schools were. SS: Why did they decide to send you through the Catholic education system? PS: ‘Cause we’re Catholic. SS: Well, there’s a lot of Catholics that go to public school. PS: True. I guess they could afford it and they wanted a Catholic education for me more than some of the others who go to public school. SS: What do you think was the role of religion in your education going through St. Joseph’s? PS: Well, it was one of many courses that we took. It helped me learn my religion more, both the history and the dogma, you know, the doctrines of the church, as well as giving me a good general education. From a boy’s standpoint, I really think it’s important to go to a Catholic school or at least a private school where they can enforce discipline, which, what I’ve seen in public schools, you can’t do 1 there. I mean, I was smacked around when I misbehaved. Not brutally, not abused, but you know, spare the rod, spoil the child. That’s something we believed in very strongly. SS: Do you think that that was just the time? ‘Cause I don’t think they could still— PS: Possibly. I don’t think you can do that anywhere now. That was once upon a time when, as I see it, common sense ruled the roost, and not the fear of lawsuits. SS: Yeah, that’s for sure. PS: You go to a public school? SS: Yes, I did. PS: Okay, were there disruptive kids in the class that the teacher couldn’t do anything about? SS: Always. PS: Okay. See, that wasn’t the case in Catholic school. You knew early on how much you could get away with before you became considered a disruption to the class and kicked out. SS: Do you think a lot of that has to do with the class size? ‘Cause public schools have gigantic class sizes, whereas Catholic schools there’s less students per teacher? PS: When I went to Catholic school, that wasn’t the case. There were always more kids per teacher, per classroom, in Catholic school. So, it was a matter of the discipline, and the fact [that], you know, parents were paying money to send their kids there, and they didn’t want their money squandered. It wasn’t as expensive as it is now, because back then you had a lot of nuns and priests, so you didn’t 2 have salaries to pay. But we always had bigger classroom sizes, and that’s ‘cause there was so few Catholic schools and so many Catholic kids. So no, I don’t think it had anything to do with class size. SS: When you went there, you graduated in… PS: 1958. SS: 1958? PS: Yeah. There were only 23 in my graduating class. SS: How many Sisters were teaching and how many lay teachers were teaching? PS: They were all nuns or all priests, except for our basketball/baseball coach. We had a dance teacher who was a lay person. I can’t remember anybody else. There may have been a woodworks teacher who was not a nun or priest, but I can’t remember that being the case, ‘cause I didn’t take woodwork at St. Joe’s. SS: I talked to Norm, the principal now, about how religion is taught not only in the religion classes but in English and other classes, how it’s kind of tied into that a little. Do you think that religion was emphasized? PS: Well, the English classes didn’t use Karl Marx’s writings as a manner of teaching you how to read, but I’m sure it permeated our entire lives, you know, our waking moments, but I can’t remember things. I know I took not only a religion class, but I took a church history class. That was all part of history. SS: Did you have to take a test on it at the end? PS: Oh, heck yes. You had to take tests on every class you were taking. SS: Norm said that now at the end of your senior year you have to take this big national test on the religion thing. 3 PS: I don’t know how things are now. When I was going to school, we had IQ tests, which I’m not sure if they have now anymore. If we had an ACT test, I don’t remember it. But wait, it seems like we did, maybe I’m getting that confused with the IQ test. But, you know, tests and requirements and all that changed over time. As far as whether we had a better education or not, history will be the judge, I guess. SS: Did you participate in the extracurricular activities there? PS: Yeah, I was on the baseball team. I was class treasurer. ‘Course, I always looked forward to all the dances. Dances are considered extracurricular? I don’t know. SS: So, when you graduated, did you go to college? PS: Yeah, I went to Weber Junior College. SS: Did you go on a scholarship? PS: No. There weren’t too many scholarships available to our class. I don’t know whether it was just economic times or the principal didn’t particularly like our class. I know my wife had one of the highest IQ’s of anybody I’ve ever known, and all she got was a very small scholarship to Weber. SS: Did you meet your wife at St. Joe’s? PS: Yeah, we were in the same class. SS: Oh. So, when you had kids, did you send your kids through St. Joe’s? PS: Yeah, we started to. In the first grade, there was a nun who my daughter did not get along with. The nun was semi-abusive, so we yanked her out and never sent her back to St. Joe’s system until 10th grade. That was after she got out of junior high school, she went to Ogden High, and she hated it there. She got straight A’s 4 and there were so many cliques—economic, religious, ethnic—she just hated it. It seemed like nothing but individual gangs, whether you call ‘em gangs or not. So, I said, “All right, send you to St. Joe’s.” She loved it. Never got straight A’s again, worked her butt off. In fact, I remember the first day she came home from school she had so many books in her arms I was afraid she was gonna injure her back. She just grooved on it. So, she graduated from the high school in ’79, and she won so many small scholarships or fellowships to go to the U of U it cost us less to send her to the University of Utah than it did to St. Joe’s. SS: Wow. So, did you just have one kid? PS: No, we have a son as well, and his story was similar. That is, being younger than Jill, he never went to St. Joe’s grade school to begin with, because that experience with that particular nun kind of soured us. But when he got out of middle school we sent him up to St. Joe’s, and he liked it there very much. SS: Was it hard for you guys financially to send two kids? PS: No, and that was for two reasons. I had a pretty good job, I was an engineer at Thiokol, and also it just wasn’t that expensive. When I went there, it was $36 a month; all nuns and priests. When my kids went there in the late 70s, early 80s, it was still many priests, many nuns, but there were more lay teachers. So, tuitions were going up. Now it would be hard to send ‘em there, you know, two kids at one time. SS: Have your kids sent their kids through there? PS: Paul’s a bachelor, and Jill did not. She sent her kids to public schools. She doesn’t live here, so she wouldn’t have sent ‘em to St. Joe’s anyway. She 5 married a non-Catholic. He had a child from a previous marriage; he was a widower. You know, starting off with the public schools, their kids just kind of followed along. Plus her husband’s kind of tight with the buck, so if Jill wanted to send the kids to Catholic school, she kept it to herself. SS: Yeah, it is quite expensive now. PS: It is, yeah. In fact, what is it, between six and seven thousand a year I think, for the high school? SS: You know, Norm told me it was like eight. PS: Really? SS: Yeah, so it’s up there. How long have you been involved in the Alumni Association? PS: Ever since it was formed, and that was in ’04 I think. Yeah. The school was opened in 1954, so in ’04 we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the school, and we had a class reunion blowout for all the classes. I got a phone call one day from a—once a kid, no longer kid—who was in the class below me, and he said “Hey, we’re forming an Alumni Association. Come on up to the school at such and such a time.” I said, “Okay. I’m in.” I got talked into it easily, and I’ve been in it ever since. SS: What kind of activities do you do with them? PS: Oh, we have monthly meetings that last about an hour, and our whole purpose is to, one, organize our summer event, which is that barbecue that you went to. In past years, the following night we had a formal sit-down dinner where we’d honor 6 somebody from the school for past achievements. Have you talked to Ernie Martinez? He was in the class before me, he graduated in ’57. He was one of the best high school pitchers we ever had. In fact, before he decided to go in the Army he was gonna go to work for the L.A. Dodgers, one of their farm teams. But you know, people like that. Then Paul Willard was once upon a time a principal and coach and basketball player. In fact, he went to the University of San Francisco on a scholarship. So, we honored him. It’s a ploy to get people to buy expensive dinners so we can raise money for scholarships. That’s our goal. Right now, we’ve got four partial scholarships. Each one’s only for $1200 each year, and that’s from money we bring in plus any payout we get from the Catholic Foundation. Usually, when we get big chunks of change put into our endowment for the Catholic Foundation, they invest it, so our amount is slowly growing. Unfortunately, it’s not growing as fast as the tuition rates, and with the economy being what it is, the stock market doesn’t always assure we’re gonna get a good payout from our investments. SS: The amount that your scholarships give, does that change every year by how much money you guys are able to raise? PS: Only up. Yeah, if we have a good year we’ll increase the amount. If we have a bad year, we have enough in reserve that so far we’ve never had to decrease it. We’re a little conservative on our payouts because we don’t ever want to have to decrease it; that kind of loses credibility with us amongst the outlook that the kids might have. SS: So, how do you choose the students that are getting the scholarships? 7 PS: We have them write essays. Any interested applicant will have to write an essay on one or two questions that our scholarship committee devises and throws out. We never know the names of the applicants when we’re judging them—I should say the scholarship committee, when they’re judging them—so there’s no bias. They assign numbers or letters or some silly thing. Not being on the committee, I don’t know. This year we had a unique situation where we had a tie, so we had to get together and figure out how we’re gonna break that tie. But usually you have kids who’ll address things, follow the rules and whatnot, and then your biggest concern is trying to figure out how much the parents wrote as opposed to how much the kids wrote, you know, which you don’t ever want the parents to get involved at all. I keep thinking I’m going to make a suggestion that we set up a weekend where the kids would come into school to answer the questions, and not allow parents anywhere near the place. SS: That would probably be smart. PS: Yeah. SS: So, how many applicants do you generally have? PS: I think last year there were 14. What it is—this is school wide—we give out two, one for juniors and seniors, and the other for eighth graders who are gonna be freshmen, and then the freshmen who are gonna be sophomores. So, it’s two scholarships from each of those two categories. It’s open to as many people who want to apply, and surprisingly, this year, there weren’t that many who applied. SS: Is there usually? 8 PS: Well, at 14, I guess that’s pretty typical. Now, Luanne Camagocky is Ernie Martinez’s sister. Are you going to be talking with her? SS: I have her number. PS: Okay, ‘cause she’s on the scholarship committee. She can give you inputs there. SS: How many people are on that committee? PS: Two or three I think, maybe it’s more. I was thinking three. Again, she’d be the best one to ask that of. SS: How many people are in the Alumni Association? PS: I’ll give you the number of those who show up for monthly meetings, the other ones I consider not members, but it’s about a dozen of us. Out of roughly 1800 people who graduated from that school over its existence, a dozen of us are in the Alumni Association. SS: Is it mostly…? PS: People my age. SS: Why do you think that the younger generations don’t do it? PS: Well, probably the biggest reason is they’re busy growing their own family. They’ve got their little nuclear family to take care of and they don’t have time. That’d be one. Two, they don’t have the tradition of being St. Josephites that we feel we do. How to say this… There are not that many Catholics in Mormon Utah, and so we kind of felt—we never had cliques at our school. I think we felt we were all one big clique, you know? Again, I think we have fonder memories just having religious people teaching us that maybe the younger kids don’t have. You know, if I’d gone to Ogden High, I wouldn’t have any feeling of emotional 9 attachment to those folks. It’s just such a big conglomerate of… Did you go there? SS: I went to West Jordan High, and it’s the same situation. PS: Okay, same? All right, do you have any emotional attachment there? Do you look forward to class reunions or everything? SS: I honestly don’t think I would go. All the people I would want to see, I’m still friends with. PS: Okay, very good. Us, you know, we scattered to the four winds, so I look forward to these reunions, quite frankly. You know, the little barbecues and whatnot. In fact, it’s that way in Catholic schools I think in general. I had one of the best weekends of my life last May when I drove back to Los Angeles to go to a grade school graduating class reunion. There were people I hadn’t seen in over 50 years! If you’re buddies with them then, you’re just as good buddies now. If you weren’t necessarily on good terms with ‘em, you know, people grow up and it’s still good to see ‘em, you’re cordial. But hell, I stayed two or three nights with one of the kids that I’d graduated with. We were just friends for life. It was just a great experience. SS: So, do you think that going to Catholic school makes better long-life friendships than public school? PS: I can’t answer that, having not had the same parallel experience in a public school, but I think it might be easier to make friends, because typically Catholic schools are smaller. You’re not just a number. But again, like you said, the 10 friends you had in school that you’re going to maintain contact with, you’re already doing that. You figure you’re lifetime friends? SS: Yeah. PS: That’s good. SS: Another thing, when you mentioned the difference in having the religious people there, do you think that since they have left the school that the education that the students received has changed, or the atmosphere, the quality they get out of it? PS: The quality of education I can’t comment on, ‘cause I’m not that close to the school. I don’t see how they couldn’t suffer from the lack of not having the religious folks there. I know very well that they can’t be that informed on their religion as people in my generation were, just ‘cause when I talked to people who are younger than me that have graduated from there, they’re not too knowledgeable on what’s going on. SS: Do you think that having less students allowed you to have closer relationships with the priests and the Sisters? PS: Sure. SS: It seems like a lot of people that I’ve talked to have mentioned being really good friends with some of the priests. Or, you know, a lot of people that graduated in the 80s or even went to school with Paul Willard are still really good friends with him, where I don’t think in public school many of us leave and have any interest in talking to our teachers in the future. PS: Yeah, it was, like I said, just one big clique. I can understand that, and I feel that way. There was one priest in particular, he died a few years ago, he’s the one 11 they named the gym after, Father Hurlock. Yeah, he’d slap me around when I was screwing off in class, and he was the one I’d go to late in life when I had questions. When my wife died, he’s the one I wanted to say the funeral mass. He couldn’t, he was out of town at the time, but yeah, we had that kind of relationship. Everybody talking about Father Hurlock will say that. SS: Yeah, I’ve heard good things about him. PS: Yeah, and he was one of the many. He was kind of the mainstay; he was here throughout. There were a lot of priests that came and went. There was one, I remember him for a couple of reasons. He was an algebra teacher and caught me screwing off in class, and as a punishment I had to write out word-for-word a chapter of whatever it was we were looking at in our algebra text. Have you ever tried writing just one page from an algebra book? Talk about dull and time consuming! I had to write out a whole chapter. Anyway, I got an A in algebra. It didn’t hurt my education any in doing that. When I was down at Loyola after—again, Weber at the time was only two years, so I was down at Loyola finishing up. I was in my junior year, and there’s a knock at the door, and here’s that priest. He’d been transferred around, and he said, “Yeah, I’m down at Loyola High School a few blocks away. I was walking through the parking lot and I saw a Utah plate, so I thought I’d track ‘em down and see if I knew who it was.” So, invite him in, offered him a drink. That’s something you don’t do [with] typical teachers or in other religious schools, but we always had a bottle of scotch in the room. He declined. SS: Where is Loyola at? 12 PS: It is about two miles from LAX in Westchester. SS: Oh, okay. Do you have any favorite memories from St. Joe’s? PS: Well, most of them have to do with my wife. But when I moved here from L.A., I noticed right off the bat how friendly the kids were. You know, they just took me right in. I went to three different high schools. First one, I hated. I was a freshman. It was a Catholic school, but it was in another city, and so they were getting kids from all over coming to this school. I was in about six fights my freshman year, and I only won one or two of them. The next school I went to I liked a lot, and again we were spread all over the map, so it was hard to get any out-of-school friends. Matter of fact, it was a real good school, best school I ever went to. Then I came up to St. Joe’s and everybody lives nearby and just got along. SS: Did everyone live nearby when you went there? It seems like Ogden would’ve been smaller. PS: It was smaller, but I guess there were some [who] came down from the Indian school in Brigham City. Have you lived here long enough to know that there was a big Indian reservation—I don’t know if it’s called a reservation, but there was a boarding house up there for Indians, on the northeast corner of the intersection of the main drag going through Brigham, Highway 91, and the road going up through Sardine Canyon to Logan? Okay, now it’s a golf course, Eagle Mountain Golf Course, but it used to be an Indian school. In fact, some of the barracks are still there. But anyway, there were four or five Indian kids in our class, and to this day they’re hard to get a hold of. I don’t know where they are. We have [been] 13 sending out mailers for fun, hitting ‘em up for money, or just to invite ‘em to parties and whatnot. I have very few of their addresses. SS: So, did they bus them? PS: Yeah, there was a St. Henry’s Parish in Brigham City that would drive the kids down. I guess there were some arrangements, a car share in between the high school and St. Henry’s Parish. The rest of us, very few of us drove. You saw how small the parking lot is up there? SS: Yeah. PS: Actually, you didn’t, but the parking lot when we were going there was curtailed to just what’s immediately at the front door of the school, none of the stuff back there by the cross; that was all vacant lot. But very few of the kids drove anyway, so parking wasn’t a big problem. We hitchhiked, took city buses, walked, whatever. SS: So, did you live in the immediate area around it? PS: Yeah, close enough where for a while I could walk to school if I couldn’t get a ride. Then we moved out to South Ogden, and if I couldn’t get a ride with somebody, I’d hitchhike. That was back in the days when you could hitchhike with no problems. SS: And people actually picked you up back then? PS: Yeah, sure. SS: That’s funny. PS: I’m a man with a golden thumb, here. I met a few girls that I got dates with, I got a job offer. I had one unpleasant experience. A guy had romantic intentions 14 toward me. He drove down to the bottom of the canyon here rather than drop me off where I wanted to go, pulled into some secluded area. As soon as he parked the car, I grabbed the car keys, jumped out of the car, and threw ‘em as far as I could out into the wilds. I don’t know how he ever got the car home. Then I picked up a couple of rocks and invited him to come out, which he didn’t. But then I had no trouble hitchhiking a ride home from there. The first vehicle that came by picked me up and took me home. Once I got—this was when I was thumbing around L.A.—I got picked up by a fellow who really looked ragged. Barefoot, needed a hair comb, you know. It was nice, we were chatting. It turns out, I asked him “What are you doing?” He says, “Well, I’m looking for a job right now.” “Yeah? What were you doing before?” “Oh, I was in San Quentin for 10 years.” “Oh yeah, what for?” “Murder.” [Laughs] I said, “Oh, really?” Well, you don’t run into people like that too often. Nice guy, drove me right to where I was going. SS: And he just told you it was murder? PS: Yeah, just matter-of-fact, you know. He didn’t say whether he was guilty or innocent or anything, just, “Yeah, I was in there for murder.” Maybe it was to see what my reaction would be like. [Both laugh] SS: Like, “Okay, let me out now.” 15 PS: Yeah, “Oh, that’s cool.” What are you gonna do? Anyway, we’re getting off the subject. That’s how we’d get around. SS: You said you played on the baseball team. When you played against other schools, did your parents take you? Did the school have a van? PS: Yeah, it was mostly parents with station wagons who would drive the kids to Bingham or to Judge or to Summit High. SS: To Bingham? PS: Yes. SS: Was that the original one that was out by Copperton? PS: Way out there. Yeah, yeah. SS: That’s more of the area I grew up in. PS: That’s a long drive. You know, they didn’t have freeways back in those days. SS: Oh, yeah. PS: Yeah, so it was Highway 89, 91, which I guess now is Main Street when you’re going through Centerville and whatnot. SS: Yeah. My mom lives in West Jordan and it takes me about an hour to get to her house, and then Copperton, where the old Bingham High School is, is another 20 minutes past her house. PS: Yeah, it’s about an hour and a half, it seemed like. SS: Wow. So, did you guys just play against small schools? PS: Yeah. We scrimmaged a couple of times against Ogden High. We were just practicing, you know, get our can kicked. When you got 20, 30 kids just in our 16 class, and half of ‘em are girls, or maybe even slightly more, the talent pool to select from isn’t too heavy. Just about everybody who went out would play. I used to get in trouble with the coaches. Practice game, we’re playing on Monroe Park, which is grass you know. He said “All right, these are new uniforms; don’t any of you guys slide.” So, I get on base. First thing I do is steal second, beautiful slide. Next, I steal third, beautiful slide. Grass stains all up and down, the coach is just furious. SS: What color were your uniforms? PS: As best I can remember—I guess I could look ‘em up in the books here—kind of green and grey with yellow lettering. I’m not sure where the grey came from. SS: So, did you play with Ernie? PS: Yeah, one year. He was a senior and I was a junior. SS: Oh. I talked to him at the barbecue a little bit. So, when your daughter went there, did she participate in extracurricular—? PS: She was in the photography club. Anything else… she wasn’t a cheerleader. Oh, she was on the school newspaper too. SS: What about your son? PS: He was in the drama club, wasn’t in athletics at all. I think that was about it. He always thought St. Joe’s High should’ve been just like the atmosphere in Ridgemont High, the movie with Sean Penn. His motto was “Hey dude, let’s party,” which was too bad. He was smart enough where he could float through high school, but when he got to college he said, “This crap is too much like work,” so he dropped out. 17 SS: It seems like most the people that I’ve talked to that went there from the 60s to the 80s, they ended up being rather successful and went through college and had really good jobs. Most of my friends from high school are still unemployed. PS: How long have you been out of high school? SS: I graduated in ’04. PS: And they still haven’t found jobs? SS: You know, a lot of them have had on-and-off jobs, crappy jobs, haven’t gone to college. PS: Have they considered the military? Well, I guess that’s a general question for a lot of individuals. SS: You know, couple of ‘em went, but there are still the ones that have just kind of found whatever jobs work. I don’t think anybody has gone to college out of my friends. PS: Well, you know, with the cost of sending kids to Catholic school, it’s usually more economically well-off people going there, and their parents got that way by some way or other. They really push their kids to get the best education they can. ‘Course, there are a lot of people on scholarships, too. I know my parents stood over me, you know, made sure I did my homework and whatnot in school when I was in grade school to prepare me to make me want to go on. Neither of my parents had a college education, so I was the first Sottosanti to get a college degree, and that was because my parents pushed me. SS: Do you think that— PS: I think times have changed. 18 SS: —A lot of the reason why St. Joe’s has such a high college admittance rate is partially because of the parents that send their kids there are just more likely to promote educational values? PS: Yeah, I think so. Well, it’s the parents and what the kids learn in school. It’s not just the school, and I don’t think it’s just the parents, either. Again, you don’t have the disruptions. To me, that gets underplayed too much. You don’t have the disruptions in Catholic schools that you do in public schools. I think personally, I can get distracted so easily. If I had all that non-discipline in school, I probably wouldn’t have learned much of anything. SS: Yeah, that’s true. PS: That’s just my personal makeup. You know, I had to be slapped around once in awhile just to keep me in line. Here’s the straight and narrow, I’d be wandering here and here, you know, and get smacked around to redirect where you’re going. I always thought that’s just the way boys are, you know? SS: Your parents were just okay with them whacking you with rulers at school? PS: Oh, yes. In fact, when I think of this grade school nun I had in sixth grade, she took her ruler, and with the metal edge smacked my fingers when I was messing off, once. I still remember that. It didn’t stop me from messing off, but God that hurt. SS: That’s great. So, you met your wife at St. Joe’s. How long after you graduated did you get married? PS: Oh, it was 10 years. SS: Wow. 19 PS: Well, what it was, she and I went together very briefly in high school. I always wanted her, and she was very popular with the college boys. After Weber, she got married. Nine years later, I was up here visiting my brother, I’d lived in L.A. all this time after I went down to Loyola. I was just up here on a lark on a visit, coming back from a business trip. My brother and I were bopping around downtown, and we ran into Mary and her mother at ZCMI, of all places. Great place to pick up chicks. She invited me over, and her husband [was] an Ogden cop. He was working night shifts, and so we went over there in the evening, just talking the good old days and whatnot, and one thing led to another. Turned out, they weren’t getting along that well. They got divorced a year later, and a year later when her divorce was final, we got married. SS: Ah. Did she have kids with that—? PS: Yeah, they had the two kids. We never had our own kids. SS: Oh, okay. I see. Well, that worked out for you. PS: It did. Yeah, everything. For me, life was great, till she died ten years ago. SS: That’s sad. What did she do? Did she work? PS: Before the kids came, she was a legal secretary. After they got to high school age, she went back to Weber State and became an interior designer. Then she went to work locally here till she decided she didn’t want to do it anymore. She’d been working about 10 years, quit around 1990. SS: That’s interesting. PS: Yeah. In fact, she could’ve landed the interior design contract for Flying J. They liked her a lot, but she was in a three-man office, and the owner and the senior 20 partner just didn’t hit it off with the guy [that] owns Flying J for some reason. Flying J—I’m just quoting Mary here—said he didn’t care about that because he wanted to work through Mary. It never came about, but anyway that could’ve been a very lucrative position. SS: So, did she do mostly commercial interior design? PS: She did both. She liked commercial because she likes dealing with professionals. When she went to ZCMI, that was entirely residential stuff. SS: ZCMI did interior design? PS: Yeah, they had a pretty good-sized interior design department. When times were getting tight, you know, they started putting the squeeze on the employees, that’s when she quit. [She] said, “Had enough of this crap.” People were starting to get laid off. But for the longest time she enjoyed it quite a bit. SS: I didn’t know that they had interior design; I thought it was just a department store. PS: Well, to sell their drapes and sell their other wall coverings and whatnot. SS: Yeah, I guess that’s true. Then you worked as an engineer? PS: Yes. I was at Thiokol for 10 years, and then I went to TRW on the base for the next 25. Before that, when I was in L.A., I was working at Jet Propulsion Lab. That was exciting, it was sending off spacecrafts and whatnot. SS: Wow. How long did it take you to get that degree? PS: Four and a half years. The half year was because Loyola is a Jesuit school, and any Jesuit school requires everybody to take philosophy for all four years. So, 21 going there as a junior I had some philosophy classes to make up, so that extended my time to get a degree to another two and a half years. SS: So, you just did the two years here and then the two and a half there? PS: Yes. SS: Wow, that’s fast. PS: Typically, it’s four years for a mechanical engineering degree. Now, it’s a bachelor. I didn’t get a master’s degree or a PhD. That’d take longer. SS: I didn’t know that it was only that long. I had a boyfriend—oh gosh, this was five years ago—and it seemed like he had been working on his forever. He was gonna go for engineering. PS: Was he working as well as going to school? SS: Yeah. PS: Maybe he wasn’t taking the full curriculum. SS: I think he was taking full time. PS: Really? SS: He was going to the U, and I think he was going full time, but I don’t know, maybe not. We’ve been broken up now for four or five years, and I still talk to him and he’s still not done. I think he’s just maybe dinking around, then. PS: That could be, yeah. SS: Yeah, you would think he’d be done by now. Well, that’s interesting. Are those two yearbooks the same year? They have the same cover. 22 PS: Yeah, one’s Mary’s and one’s mine. This is Mary’s, I don’t know whatever happened to mine, the senior year. [Pages flipping] This is nuns, this is Father Hurlock. SS: That’s the one that the auditorium— PS: The gym was named [after], yes. [Page flips] Now this, he’s one of the two lay teachers that we had. We honored him a couple years ago. I remember in high school, this guy was very close-mouthed, he didn’t communicate at all, yet he was just friendly and outgoing and talkative a few years ago, and he remembered a lot of stuff about the individual kids. SS: How do you guys decide who to honor every year? PS: It’s not very formal. Somebody comes up with ideas and say, “Hey, this guy did this, that, and the other thing.” Initially it was easy because we had a track guy that I wasn’t aware of, he came along after I’d left there, and he set all kinds of state sprinting records that still stand, but I’d never heard of him. So, he was a shoo-in. Then, as time goes on, you start running out of people, and so, again, it’s good to honor people, but the idea is to make money on this dinner. SS: So, why didn’t you do it this year? PS: We didn’t do it this year because the people we wanted to honor suddenly had a family wedding that conflicted with the weekend, so it was a last-minute cancellation. We had to do a little scrambling there. SS: Oh, so are you guys still going to do it at a later time? PS: Yeah, we’ll probably do it again next year. [Page flips] Let’s see, this is my class. There’s Mary. I think I’m in here somewhere. Yeah, so many of us have died. 23 SS: There’s you. PS: Oh, yeah. Yeah, it’s in Mary’s book. Anyways, these photographs in here... Looking for what the baseball uniforms looked like. [Pages continue flipping] SS: What is the Sodality? PS: That was kind of a religious group, and, not being in it, can’t give you much detail, but it was strictly religious. SS: Do you think that the Civil Rights Movement affected St. Joe’s at all when that was going on? PS: In what way? The way you’ve asked the question, I can’t think of any relationship between the two. SS: Like in the rest of the country, they had problems getting African Americans and things into the mostly white schools. Do you think that there was a problem with that in the Catholic schools as well? PS: I don’t think so. See, I came from L.A., and that’s a great melting pot. While we didn’t live in Black neighborhoods… I can’t remember too many black kids in my educational background, now that you mention it, but I never thought about it. I think it’s probably more economic than religious. I don’t know what the percentage of Blacks are in the Catholic Church as opposed to whites, and it does cost money, even though back then it wasn’t prohibitively expensive. You know, that prohibitively is all relative, depends on how much money you have to spend to begin with. No, I don’t think Civil Rights and Catholic schools have anything to do with each other. 24 SS: When you went there and when your kids went there, did they have the financial aid programs like they do now? PS: No, I don’t think they did. Now, there may have been a few kids who got help. You know, Mary came from one of the poorest families, and I don’t think she got any help of any kind. SS: I wonder when they started doing that. Do you think they just started the financial aid to get more people in? PS: Or to keep people from dropping out. Yeah, I guess, same answer, and the answer is yes. SS: When you went there, did they have Mass at school? PS: Yeah, on first Fridays in the auditorium they’d hold Mass. SS: Did they still do that when your kids went there? PS: Yes. I assume they still do it now, but I don’t know. SS: Do they just have the local parish people come in and do it? PS: The priests? Yeah. See, when I was going there, ‘course you had the priests who there. If they didn’t do it, the priests from St. Joseph’s Church would come up and do it. See, when I was going there, there were only two Catholic parishes: St. Joseph’s, which was downtown Ogden, and then St. Mary’s where the Jesuits lived, and that’s out in West Ogden. SS: So, when you went there how many non-Catholics were there in the school? PS: No idea. I’m trying to think if there were any in my class. I can’t think of any. I don’t think there were any non-Catholics, and that’s not by design. In my grade 25 school, you know in L.A., we had non-Catholics going there. But I’m not aware of any non-Catholics. SS: It seems like now there’s a few more non-Catholics. PS: Yeah, I suspect that’s the case. In fact, when we were up there at that barbecue setting up in the morning, a man with his daughter came here looking for a certain building because she was taking an entrance exam there. Started chatting with him, pretty friendly people, and [they] said they were coming from St. Paul’s Lutheran School that had closed this year. SS: Yeah, I heard about that closing. PS: I guess Christian Heritage is having a hard time also. SS: When I talked to the Schwartzes, he was talking about those schools closing too. We were talking about how the last few years charter schools have become popular and how that might be affecting private school enrollment. PS: It could. I don’t know that much about charter schools. I think our tax dollars are paying for them, and right now Catholic schools don’t get any tax dollars. I always thought that was the way it should be. SS: Yeah, they’re a standalone school. Have you attended any of the SPREEs that they’ve had? PS: Sure. I remember in 1984, it was either the first or second SPREE, but it was down at the Union Station. It was really a big deal. I remember the nuns going around pouring champagne for people. You make more money on auctions when people have had a few drinks than you do without the drinks, you know? [Laughs] Yeah, that was a good time. 26 SS: They sound fun. Just like gambling: if you sit at the machine, people come and bring you drinks. PS: Oh yeah, there’s a reason for that. SS: Yep, you spend more money if you’re toasty. All right, well I can’t think of anything else. PS: How many have you interviewed? SS: I interviewed the current principal, and then I interviewed Paul Willard. Then I interviewed Joe Schwartz. PS: Old Joe Schwartz? SS: He lives right up the street. PS: Yeah, I know where he lives. He and his wife were the ones we were going to honor this year, and it was their family that had a wedding. SS: Oh, he’s so nice. PS: He is. A real nice man. SS: He’s a very nice man. Then Dick and Marge… PS: Molumby? SS: Yes. I was trying to think of their last name. PS: Yeah, when my daughter graduated, they had the graduation party at Molumby’s house, because Kathy was one of Jim’s classmates. Mary and I volunteered to be chaperones, so we’re there all night. The rule was you got a kegger, enjoy, but you’re not leaving, and if you do leave, you’re not coming back. We went through the night and they had a real nice breakfast in the morning. So, one kid obviously had drinks, and he shouldn’t be driving. He wanted to leave, and rather 27 than giving him crap I just went out and stole his coil wire out of his engine. He couldn’t start the car, so he came back in. Next morning I put it back in, so he never knew until years later, when I told him about it, what had happened. SS: That’s funny. PS: Yeah, that was fun. We enjoyed that. SS: I’m going to interview Bob Stowe, but he had gone out of town for a little bit. Then I also have Mary Evans’ number. I was going to try and contact her maybe. Then, the last nun at the school, she was the principal right before Paul took over, a she’s still alive in Indiana. PS: What’s her name? SS: Teresa… I cannot think of the last name, but she was the last principal before the Sisters left, so I was going to try and maybe contact her. Oh, and then I also interviewed Lee Forsgren. He was the class of ’78 or ’79. He’s a lobbyist in DC, in the politics things, so I interviewed him. I’ve done quite a few. PS: Good. What’s the class for that you’re doing this? SS: I’m a history major, and it’s for my senior thesis class. It’s just the big paper. It was technically due August 4, but I took an incomplete in the class so it would give me an extra month to finish it up and finish the interviews, because I had a slow start in the summer. It was a summer semester class and school was out, so I had kind of a slow start, but we’re getting there now. Then I also talked to Mary Johansen, she’s the lady that’s the Alumni Association historian. Real nice lady. I talked to her a little bit. She let me borrow the scrapbooks that she has from the Alumni Association, and it’s got a disk with 28 some interviews on it that I’m looking at, and newspaper articles that she’s clipped, and pictures and stuff. So, I’ve got those to go through. I’ve started that, but she has three scrapbooks, so there’s quite a bit. It’s going along really good. PS: So, are you going to be done in time? Or are you having to get another incomplete? SS: No, I ought to be. I thought about maybe doing a survey with the students that are there now to see how many of them their parents have gone there and things like that, how many of them are Catholic now. PS: You could probably get that from the principal’s office and not talk to the kids. SS: Yeah, that’s true. They’ve got all the tuition and financial records, so I was going to look at how the tuition has increased over time, because it’s been big jumps. A lot of that, you know, is technology. PS: Sounds like a thorough investigation here. SS: I went down to the Diocese Archives, and they have all of the financial records for the school up until the mid-60s. They’ve got all the records. When they built the school, they’ve got every check that they paid out in building the school and where they were getting the money to build it. They took out a big loan from a South Bend Indiana school, St. Mary’s I think it’s called, and then they were getting donations from the church-going people to build it. There was a big pamphlet that was published and given to the families, and they did fundraising drives and all that. They have all the records of that stuff down at Diocese, but after the mid-60s there’s nothing, really. They’ve got records of every nun that taught there and all that, but then after that there’s not a lot. 29 I was going to look a lot at the tuition costs, because it seems like they didn’t increase when they went from Sisters to lay teachers so much, because then they started doing other things like the SPREE to earn money. So, it doesn’t seem like that had too much to do with the tuition increases, ‘cause the enrollment has been pretty steady throughout. It’s been $150 to $210, I mean, it’s been in the same range the whole time. Even after they put on the new additions, the enrollment has still stayed. PS: Excuse me, I didn’t realize what the time was. SS: Well, thank you so much. PS: It’s a pleasure, I hope that helps. 30