Oral History Program Paul Willard Interviewed by Sharice Stagler 19 July 2010 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Paul Willard Interviewed by Sharice Stagler 19 July 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: Willard, Paul, an oral history by Sharice Stagler, 19 July 2010, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Paul Willard conducted by Sharice Stagler on July 19, 2010. Paul discusses the efforts to get enough funding to keep St. Joseph’s Catholic High School open when it was almost closed, as well as his experiences both as a student and later a teacher and principal at the school. SS: Interview with Paul Willard. It is July 19. [Recording stops] [Recording resumes] PW: 1977. Those were the last two Sisters that were there. She was the principal and she was an English teacher. Obviously, what led to that was that the number of Sisters available was decreasing in numbers, and the size of the school—being a very small school of 130, 135 kids, something like that—they thought they could probably put their resources to a better use, I guess. I don’t know. Anyway, they notified the bishop in Salt Lake that they were no longer gonna staff the school. Originally, that was going to be the death knoll for the school, because they were going to close the school. SS: What made them decide not to? PW: Well, we got a group of parents and went down and met with the bishop and said “What will it take to keep the school open? What do we need to do?” It was a financially thing primarily, but he also said, “You don’t have a principal and you don’t have the funds you need right now, so we need to have some kind of financial commitment that you can keep the school open financially and that you can find somebody to run the school.” 1 SS: Were you teaching at the school at the time? PW: Yeah, I was coach and vice principal at the time. So, what we did is we—through our Boosters Club primarily, but a lot of our parents were involved in that—set up on a campaign to have people sign a three-year pledge to donate money to keep the school open. We raised… I don’t remember exactly the amount of money there was, but we got the pledge from the people that they would do this, and then we had to try and find somebody who would be the principal. We went right to the Jesuits at first, Father Hurlock and Father Devlin, and asked them if they would be interested. They said, “No, we don’t want to be the administrators of the school. We’ll just be the teachers of the school.” By default, I said, “Well, I believe in the school enough, let’s give it a go.” So, I agreed to become principal in 1978. So, the parents with their pledges, and we cut the curriculum down to just the brass tacks that we could, and we fortunately had an enrollment that allowed us with the tuition that they were paying to keep the school open. We eliminated some of the extracurricular and elective classes, we cut it right down to the bare necessities of requirements. SS: So, did you have to lay off teachers to do that? PW: No, we didn’t. We just simply utilized what resources they had, and I don’t remember that there was any… Well, let’s look and see, we can compare faculties. I don’t remember right off hand now that you ask that question. [Pages flip] But if you look at the faculty, they’d be in the front here. Let’s see here, point out some of these names. Father Devlin was still there, Father Hurlock was still there, Father Susott was there, and Father Kearn was there in ’78, so we didn’t 2 lose any of those. There’s one, two, three, four. We didn’t lose any of the Jesuits at the time. The librarian was Martha Newland, and yeah, she’s still there. The English teacher was Wiggit, and I think we did replace him, but I’m not sure. He moved himself; he went somewhere else. Jack Green, the science teacher, was still there. Kathy Pilkington, Marilyn James. We replaced the P.E. teacher because James left and Joan Evans took her place. Pilkington was still there, so she’s still there. [Pages flip] Our secretary was Noreen Williamson still, she was my right hand, so I know she was still there. So, we had to replace an English teacher, we did that with Andrew Wiggit, and I became the principal and still taught my classes. I still taught classes; I didn’t just do administration. We didn’t reduce the faculty except for the loss of two nuns, and we replaced the English teacher with a lay person. SS: Did tuition increase after the Sisters left? PW: Oh, it had to increase some, and again, I wish I could tell you, but I don’t know what the percentage was, but it had to increase some, yes. SS: How many people were you able to get to make the three-year pledges? PW: I would guess probably around 75% of the parents. SS: So, was the pledge just saying that they would keep their children enrolled? PW: They would give an additional amount of money on top of tuition. SS: And then did you get pledges from outside the parents, like other donators? PW: Yeah. The family that has been far and away the largest single contributor to St. Joseph High School for years and years and years is Bob and Mary Evans, and 3 their kids all went through there. He was a grain broker. He had his own grain exchange here in Ogden. They always have been beneficiary. They still are beneficiaries of the high school. SS: Were they students at the high school, or just their children? PW: No. They’re from Minnesota. SS: What was their motivation for giving to that particular cause? PW: They believed in Catholic education. They really believed very much in Catholic education and in keeping it in Ogden. They were a very significant part of this, and then we got a couple of grants. God, I can’t remember. It’s a long time ago. I don’t think it was the Carnegie Foundation, but it was like the Carnegie Foundation. We applied for a couple of these things and we got a couple of those to help a little bit, but it was basically the people of Ogden who saved the school. I mean, yes, we did get a little of outside support, but by and large most of it came from the people in Ogden who believed in the school. SS: What was the plan after the three-year pledges ended? PW: Well, hopefully the school would be able to operate and be self-sufficient again and tuition would be able to cover the expenses and whatever else we had to do, but we also knew that we needed to raise additional money. What they had done in the past is they always had some kind of a carnival, and they’d make five or six thousand dollars out of that. I said, “That’s just a waste of time. We need to do something more than that.” I don’t know if you know anything about these school silent auctions and dinners? It was just starting, and it was pretty big with a couple of the really big 4 schools on the west coast. Like some of the Jesuit schools on the west coast where they’re all boys and they’re 800,000 students; they would solicit from the community items to be auctioned off in a dinner fundraising auction. We start talking about that, and it was the grade school principal Tom Judge and the president of the grade school board, Doctor Mike Janeway, and the president of the high school board, which was Al McDonald. We started talking about what we needed to do to really raise money for the school, because we knew that the three-year thing was going to be just a temporary thing. We ended up starting what is called SPREE. It was an acronym for Supportive People Retaining Educational Excellence. One of our students came up with that slogan. We had a little contest and that’s what we ended up with, and it’s still in place today. It’s 32 years later; they still have SPREE every April. I couldn’t tell you because I was away for quite a few years when I was in Park City, but we started out the first year and we made somewhere between 20 and 30 thousand dollars the first year, and it has grown as much as a 100 thousand dollars a year. SS: From one dinner? PW: Yes, from a dinner and auction. SS: Where do they have the dinner at? PW: Ogden Union Station. SS: Is that where you originally had it? PW: Yup. So, it’s a community thing, and it’s not necessarily dealing with our parents, it’s dealing with the greater community of Ogden. It was a formal dinner, a sit- 5 down dinner that was served by the students and some of the faculty, and then you’d have some items that were silent auction items where they could go around during the cocktail hour before dinner and bid on things silently. They had a bid number and they would say, “I want this item.” You know, it’s a picture or [whatever]. We would pick out somewhere between 50 and 75 large items and have an actual auction. They auctioned off, like, trips to Hawaii—they got a trip to Hawaii donated. Somebody had a condo over there that they donated for us, and then we got somebody from the new airlines to get a plane ticket over there. Evans, again, had a condo in Sun Valley, and so they let that be one of the auctions, for a week in Sun Valley. We had autographed volleyballs from the girls’ volleyball team that was successful. Some of those things would raise $400 or $500. People would spend that kind of money just to buy that remembrance. The first year we raised somewhere I’m thinking around $26,000 if I remember right, but I’m not positive about that. So, obviously we knew we were on the right track, and every year it improved a little bit. We used to have the kids involved in helping serve the dinner and some of the faculty, and like I say, it was a formal sit-down dinner. It was a tie affair; it was not “Come in your Levi’s and casual.” It’s run its course a couple of different ways, but it’s still in operation. I was there for the 30th anniversary a couple years ago, and it’s still down at the Ogden station, and they still—I don’t know, I have no idea ‘cause I don’t have association with the school that way—but they’re still making 40, 50, 60 thousand dollars sometimes, in that one night. It takes six or seven months to 6 plan this, it’s not something you do in a couple weeks, and it’s pretty much run by the parents. They get involved with it and they go out and do the soliciting and gathering the information and stuff like that. It’s still a pretty neat thing, and it’s nice to see that it stayed there after 32 years. SS: So, is it like a “By invitation only” thing? PW: No, anybody that wants to come. SS: When it started, how did you broadcast it to people to get people to come? PW: We went through the different parishes where the kids were going to school, but we also put ads in the paper. We got coverage of the local paper talking about this was a fundraiser for the school trying to keep the school going. The Sisters had left and we were in need of some financial support, and it was something that was contributing to the Ogden community, it gave people a choice of schools and it was something that had its history here. The Sisters of the Holy Cross and St. Joseph Elementary have been around here since the 1940s. SS: Yeah, it’s been a while. What paper was that in? PW: Ogden Standard-Examiner, but it would’ve also been in the Salt Lake Tribune. We got the Tribune to cover it ‘cause a lot of people in Ogden take the Tribune, and you would get them to do that. It may be something they wouldn’t run several times for it, [but] they’d do it once, they’ll let you know. I remember one time one of the things that we had was—do you know who Howard Hughes was? He was kind of the eccentric multi-millionaire that wandered off in the desert, and he was a guy that was very instrumental in… God, what was the name of it? Gotta think of it. He helped create an airplane, 7 and we had one of the original models, we were told, of what he had created, so it had some historical value as well as some national [value]. One of the local television reporters had a connection to one of our people and he got involved with it. I’m trying to think what the hell his name was, because he used to be on channel four, and he gave us a couple plugs with that, talking about this. I can’t remember the name of the plane now. We were really lucky to have something and get some kind of attention like that focus on a little bigger level. I mean, we just had all kinds of different things that went on, and some of ‘em were really cool and some of ‘em were not so cool. But anyway, it turned out to be something that became pretty much an annual event, and something that people in Ogden now kind of just recognize and see it every year. SS: Was the food donated as well, or did you buy that? PW: No. We would get a contract with one of the local restaurants, and so one time it would be one of the places that maybe we’d serve prime rib, and another time— but it was a formal sit-down dinner, it was not just kind of a buffet or something like that. Over the years, it’s pretty much maintained that. I think a couple of times they’ve modified the dinner a little bit, but it’s back to where it was originally. I know that because I’ve been there the last couple of years. So, that’s one of the biggest single things, and the money primarily was split between the two schools, ‘cause at the time it was for St. Joseph schools, not the high school or the grade school, because both schools obviously needed it. We needed the elementary kids coming to the high schools. They also had 8 some financial needs, but they’ve always had—because they’ve got eight grades to go through—typically a little more financial solvency than we’ve had at the high school, ‘cause there’s only four grades up there and you get 25 or 30 kids in a class, you’re only talking about 120, 125 people. That was probably the second biggest thing, the fact that the parents gave us the money that they did with the pledges, and then starting SPREE would be the two things I think that brought the school through that time and has continued to. And tuition’s changed a lot since then, I know tuition is upwards of six or seven thousand dollars now. SS: Yeah, it’s quite expensive. PW: And yet it has maintained itself, it has kept pretty much the same enrollment. A couple of times they’ve tried to increase the enrollment, I know that. It lost some of its flavor, because some of the people that they brought in weren’t of the highest character maybe. The school got a little bit of a tarnished reputation, I think, when they did that, when they started bringing in some people that didn’t really maybe have some of the same principles and same values of the high school. So, the enrollment has never really been… I think at one time they got over $240 one time, but it’s never been much over $150 or $160 consistently. That’s where it pretty much is. My graduating class—‘cause I graduated from there in 1960—was 32 kids. My wife’s class was 27. So, you’ve always been right around that 30 number for graduates, and I think [it] was about the same thing, it was about 32, 33, something like that this year. SS: That makes for a close class. 9 PW: It does. It was interesting to me that a lot of the parents were blue-collar, middleclass parents who placed a value in Catholic education and were willing to make the sacrifice for that. It wasn’t well-to-do people, it wasn’t like all the rich kids went there. A lot of the people, especially at this time, especially when I was principal and back when we were struggling here, it was just a real blue-collar effort to keep the school alive. It was not by the elitists or the well-to-do only or something like that. That was one of the unique things and kind of the interesting things, I thought, about starting SPREE, was that we did reach out to the community and we did find some of the other people in Ogden, who had no connection to the school, supporting it. They would come to the dinner and they would spend their money, they would buy some of these auction items. And you know, I think the dinner first started out, it was $25 a plate, and I think our dinner maybe cost us $12, so you made a little bit of profit on the dinner, but most of the profit was come from whatever you could auction these items for. We’d get a professional auctioneer, and some of the time they would donate their services because they knew what it was for, but sometimes we had to pay ‘em. Sometimes we had to hire an auctioneer. But we would have a professional auctioneer, so, you know, it was [imitates auction chant then laughs], and they do that whole thing, and it was really fun. It was really a lot of fun. It’s become, like I say, pretty much like a tradition now, ‘cause it’s there every year. It’s right around the weekend of April 24, whenever the weekend is, that’s when it’s consistently held, so it’s that almost last weekend of April. 10 SS: How much are the plates now? PW: I think it was $75 apiece the last time I paid it, so it was $150 a couple. SS: Wow. So, when the school was going through all these problems, did the church itself do anything to gain more support? I know in the 50s when the school was opening, they did a lot to raise funds to open the school, you know, from door-todoor fundraising, they had put out pamphlets asking people to give what they could. Did the church do anything, or was it all the school? PW: No, the church has obviously helped. What they eventually went to—and it was something that came from the diocese in Salt Lake, the main office in Salt Lake—was that the parishes would agree to pay a partial assessment if you were an active member of the parish. So, if your parents went to St. Joseph’s parish and you went to St. Joseph High School, St. Joseph parish would give a certain amount of money per student if you were a contributing, active member in the parish. So, if your parents were giving money to St. Joseph’s Church and going to church there, and they had their son or daughter going to St. Joseph High School, the high school would receive a little bit of money from the church for that, in connection with their tuition that they would pay. SS: Did that just start when all of this was happening? PW: It was a little bit later, actually, the subsidies from the parishes. At the time, there were three parishes in Ogden. Holy Family was just getting started, which is the parish in South Ogden, so there was St. Joseph’s, St. Mary’s and St. Jane’s were the three primary parishes, and Holy Family became the fourth parish in Ogden. There was a parish in Layton, St. Rose, and some of the kids came from Layton. 11 There was no parish like there is now up in Eden and Liberty, and there was no other private schools operating at that time. That was the other thing, if you wanted your kid to go to something besides public schools, we were the only option at that time. Now there’s quite a few private schools. St. Paul’s Lutheran has opened a school, there’s Wasatch Academy, there’s a Layton Christian, there’s… what’s the one out in Riverdale? Some kind of Christian academy, I forget what it’s called. Chistian Academy or something like that. There’s several private school choices now, both at the elementary and high school level, but there wasn’t at the time. So, if the parents were looking for another option to public schools, there weren’t many choices. We were, at that time, the only choice you had. Some people obviously felt that, “Well, if I’m not Catholic, do I want to send my kid to a Catholic school?” So, you had that dilemma for some people, but obviously religion wasn’t the only thing that drove some people or motivated some people. SS: How much was the subsidy that the church started doing? PW: I couldn’t tell you that, I don’t remember that for sure. I would guess it was probably something like $750 or $1,000 a year or something like that, but I really don’t know. I don’t remember that. It wasn’t very much. I mean, it wasn’t like they’re covering half the tuition or something. You would have to look and see, ask that question today to Norm or somebody. SS: It’s $250 now. I can’t remember if he told me $250 or $275 now that they pay of the tuition, so it’s not… PW: $250? 12 SS: Yes. He said it’s not very much. PW: Well, as the subsidy from the church? Okay, I wouldn’t be able to tell you that. I don’t remember that for sure. Maybe we didn’t get that much. It seems to me that part of when they put that subsidy in it was to pay and help subsidize a portion of the cost of tuition, and tuition at that time was $500 or $600, something like that. SS: That’s changed a lot. PW: Oh yes, yes it has. I know some people when we were up in Park City that they sent their kids to Rowland Hall in Salt Lake. $17,000 a year. SS: Wow. That’s just… I can’t even imagine. PW: That’s more than your tuition for college. SS: Yeah. Going to St. Joseph’s is more than my tuition for college! [Both laugh] I was thinking that. When Norm told me how much it was, I was like, “Oh my gosh, parents that can afford to send their kids there can afford to send their kid to whatever college they want, I’m sure.” PW: Well, the thing that they’ve done a good job of announcing, I think, and making people understand too, is the graduation rate is very significant. You know, we don’t have 10% or 15% of the kids not graduating, typically. The kids coming out of that, it is truly more of a college prep curriculum, and these kids are qualifying and receiving thousands and thousands of dollars in scholarship aid. So, it’s money that’s going to come back to the parents a lot, in the sense that they’re going to be able to go to a college and receive academic financial aid to that school. From that standpoint, they could tell you—in fact, Bob maybe knows this ‘cause he’s on the school board, Bob McConaughey goes to the school board 13 meetings quite a bit—that class last year, it was a class of… I know it was less than 35. They received I forget how many hundreds of thousands of dollars of scholarships. SS: So, most of them are going to school on scholarship? PW: They’re getting some financial aid if not all financial aid. So, again, that’s one of those things that you’re getting some selected college prep work. They’re trying to expand the curriculum up there too, I know that. They’re trying to get more offerings into advanced placement and stuff like that. That’s hard, because with those few students and having that kind of a selective process where you may have 15 kids in an AP class and that means the other 15 kids are just in a regular class, that’s two different teachers, probably. That’s gonna to be tough to do, that’s gonna be hard to do, but that’s what they would like to do. I know that’s what Norm has as a goal of his is to make more offerings so that they can encourage people, to say, “We truly do offer you the opportunity for AP classes, advancement placement work,” as well as just meeting the traditional needs of kids if they aren’t that strongly motivated. So, I know that they would like to do more of that, but I have no idea how many classes they’ve got that way now. I spent some time with Norm a year ago talking about that, and he asked me what we were doing earlier, and I told him. I said, “We didn’t have that option then. We were just trying to survive.” SS: When I talked to him, he said a lot of the kids right now are on financial aid where the school lets them pay what their income allows them to. When you were principal, did they have any sort of financial aid, or was it just, “If you can pay 14 tuition you can come, if not, you know,” because you were struggling to survive anyways? PW: If some of the parents had a real financial difficulty, they would typically go to their parish and talk to the priest about getting some kind of support. We didn’t have any funds at that time to say, “We’ll give you a scholarship from the high school itself.” Now, that dinner the other night that we had up at the high school, the Alumni Association sponsors four partial scholarships a year from what we raise. So, they’re getting four kids every year some assistance in their tuition. That comes directly out of a whole different agency; we never had that at the time. If, for example, I had a son or daughter wanting to go to St. Joe and I had very limited income, I would go talk to the parish priest and say, “How can I get my kid into St. Joe, but I can’t afford to pay the whole bill?” and see what they would do. Now, some of the parishes would say, “If you continue to come here”— I’m assuming that’s what they would say—“we’ll help you out to this extent and you’ve got to cover this much.” That’s something strictly between the priest and the parents. But at the time I was there, we didn’t have anything quite like that. We didn’t have any ability to say, “We’ll just waive you entirely.” We would, for the most part, expect people to pay their own way. Obviously, some people wouldn’t, so at the end of the year you’d look at this and say, “Well, here’s Family A and Family B. Family A has paid everything, but Family B hasn’t. What are we going to do?” We’d have to try and work something out with ‘em, and for the most part 15 the parents really tried to respond and pay that. It was hard to do, but they did, for the most part. SS: How long has the Alumni Association been providing the four scholarships? PW: I would guess about seven or eight years. I’m not positive about that, but I think it’s about seven or eight years, because they started it before I moved back here, and I’ve been back here four years now. So, I know they were starting some stuff like that, but I would guess somewhere in that neighborhood. SS: After the three-year pledges were done, why did you decide to stop being principal? PW: I did not like administration. I never did quit teaching, I never did quit coaching; that was my first love. I was principal for two years, ‘78 and ‘79, and then my vice-principal, Bill Favero, became principal for a year. Then they brought in a priest, Father Lopez, Vincent Lopez, and he was there for two or three years. I left in ‘84, but I just went back to the classroom and teaching. SS: When did you start there as a teacher? PW: 1969. SS: 1969? I see. So, what was your experience there as a student? PW: It was a great experience. I was very involved in a lot of different activities at the school, I played basketball and baseball, and I was fortunate enough to get a full four-year scholarship to the University of San Francisco for basketball and baseball and my grades. So, it provided me with my education. SS: What do you think was the benefit of going to St. Joe’s versus a public school? What was the difference for you? Why did you decide to go that route? 16 PW: I had been in St. Joseph Elementary School, first of all. I’d gone through all the eight years, so I was what they call a “lifer.” I spent my entire education system in St. Joseph schools. I really think that we were fortunate; we had a faculty of Jesuits and Holy Cross nuns. There were very few lay people when I went to school, it was mostly nuns and priests. The Jesuits were great educators, they were good friends, they were people that really believed in educating young people and giving them a full value, and we truly did get, I think, a great education. We got a tremendous education. We didn’t have a lot of the stuff that maybe some of the public schools had, but academically we didn’t take a second-place seat to anybody, I don’t think. We were very fortunate that way. When I came back to teach, three of my kids, three of our five children, graduated from St. Joe. SS: Why didn’t the other two? PW: We moved. SS: Did they go to another Catholic School? PW: No. We moved to Park City, and my youngest was in the fourth grade and Melissa was a sophomore, so she went to Park City High School and graduated from Park City. Noah graduated from Park City also. SS: How do you think that the education that the kids get at St. Joe’s changed after the Sisters left? PW: Well, I would hope that it didn’t change a lot, but I’m certain that having a nun in her habit and the influence of seeing that and having those people there and having them with their perspective of things, had to have a little bit of an impact. 17 But I felt very strongly that we had a very good faculty and we were fortunate to still have the Jesuits there at that time. So, we still had a lot of good, strong, clerical influence from the priests, I think. That’s something that a lot of schools today don’t have. There aren’t that many priests and nuns left. Private schools have become pretty much a lay operation, there’s not a lot of religious people left in those. If you go to Judge in Salt Lake or you go to Juan Diego in Draper out there, there’s not too many priests and nuns in those faculties either anymore. I think that the quality of education, just from the standpoint of the experience and the education that those teachers had, had to drop a little bit. But we had some really good people, and we really worked hard at trying, again, to maintain that college prep atmosphere and push the kids and make them become as good as they could be in their academic field, whatever that was, whether it was science or whether it was math or whatever. Like I say, when I was there at St. Joe, we had the Jesuits, and so we still had a very strong math department, a strong social studies department. Of course, they taught the religion classes. Having the priests available just around [to] be there was a great asset, and they don’t have that anymore. I don’t think there’s one at the school anymore. SS: Do you think that the emphasis on religion changed? PW: I think it had to change. I mean, you still had to take a religion class, but having it taught by a lay person as opposed to a priest or a nun I’m sure had to be from a different perspective. 18 SS: You know, I’m sure that when you’re being taught by priests and nuns in an English classroom, there’s probably still emphasis on religion even in English, because you can relate it to other concepts. PW: Yeah, I would guess that. I’m sure that maybe just the choice of materials, outside reading and things like that, would probably be different if it was a nun coming up with a list of selected topics versus a lay person. But no, I’m sure that there’s something to that. I’m sure that you would have some of your personal persuasions being put across, whether you were talking about Macbeth or you were talking about World War II or whatever, if you were coming from the standpoint of a priest or a nun. I don’t think you can get away from that. But a lot of it, I don’t think, is necessarily something [bad]. I mean, Macbeth is Macbeth, and you may disagree with a nun teaching it, but still, there’s only one way you can really present some of the things that Macbeth put across, I think. You can’t sway that to “This is a Catholic point of view,” or “This is a Mormon point of view,” or “This is an Atheist point of view.” This is the way that it was put across by Shakespeare, and I don’t think you can do a lot with that. But I’m sure that it had to be out a little bit, maybe. SS: When you graduated, do you just know that you were going to send your kids there, too? PW: Not necessarily. I mean, I didn’t know where I was going to be, ‘cause I was going away to school. I left there and went to California, and there’s too many people in California for me, I knew I was going to come somewhere else. I took 19 my first job when I graduated in ’64. I went to St. Francis High School in Provo. There was a Catholic high school in Provo, and I was a teacher and coach there. SS: Was your major in college coaching or teaching? PW: No, my major was history and my minor was P.E. I’m a history major and a P.E. minor, but I always wanted to be a coach and a teacher, but I didn’t want to be a P.E. major, so I was a history major. SS: That’s interesting. PW: That was primarily due to a priest that taught me. That man right there. He was my history teacher, and he was a great inspiration. This guy married us. My mother passed away and my dad remarried, he married them. He married my brother and his wife, he married my sister and her husband, he baptized two of my kids. He was just a great, great friend and person. He passed away about six years ago now, but we were friends forever. Just a great man. SS: It seems like the kind of relationships that students had with the priests and the Sisters was a lot different than the relationships students have with lay teachers, or maybe it’s just the difference in school environment. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about how close they were with some of the priests and the fathers that were at the school. PW: You know, I think that depends on who you talk to. I could point you to a couple people, and they have a very different view of St. Joseph High School; they didn’t think it was that great at all. They didn’t like some of these priests and nuns telling them what to do or how to do it or whatever. A lot of that becomes a matter of if you talk to some people, and obviously some of the people you’ve talked to 20 are much more influenced by that than others, but when you have a class of 30 people and you go through four years or eight years or in our case 12 years together, you know each other pretty well, first of all. Your parents are also friends. They support everything you do. So, it becomes an environment that’s very much family oriented. These people are the people that are at your church on Sunday, and then they come to your kids’ dance on Friday, and they go to your kids’ ball game or whatever. It’s just everything is around that. You just see ‘em all the time and you get to have a different relationship all together. So, I think that’s one of the things. For me, personally, I can tell you that I came back to Ogden after being away for 25 years, and I can remember people’s names and their parents, where I could leave Park City where I had 300 graduates the last year, we had a school of 1,200, and I don’t remember 10 people like I remember 30 people down here. It was just a whole different association as far as how you got along and how you identified with people and the closeness that you had when you had that knit, tight, cohesive unit of everybody in this together. Public school, it wasn’t like that at all for me. Park City was a great academic school, it was a super, I mean, they were a great academic school. SS: What made you decide to go up there? PW: Well, I was 40 with no retirement. All I had was Social Security. There was no retirement for teachers at St. Joe. SS: Is there today? 21 PW: There’s some. But I mean, as a teacher in the private school system, you had Social Security and that was about it. I had spent 15 years there, and I had done just about everything I felt I had to do. I thought that because I did have the opportunity to go to St. Joseph and graduate, because of that I got my college education, that there was something I owed back to Catholic education, I felt. I mean, Catholic education had been good to me, so I felt there was a need to give something back. It was not always easy. We had five children, and you received about probably 75% of a public school teacher salary, and you didn't have a retirement, and you lived from payday to payday quite regularly, and it was just something you either had a commitment to or you didn't. So, that's where we were, and I finally had a chance to move to the public school system. I had a very good friend who, when I was principal of St. Joe he became the principal of Park City, and he turned that school in 180 degrees, because it was a bum. There were just a bunch of bums up there. He really put a lot of emphasis on academics and really made a big change. The coaching position came open and he called me and said, "Are you interested?" In fact, he was in the hospital having some surgery and I went to talk to him, and he said "Well, let's talk business, shall we? I got to have a coach.” I said, "Well it might be time, I don't know." I mean, it was mostly just to think about my future, getting something besides Social Security as a retirement, because I have a state retirement too from the state of Utah. SS: Wow. Is the pay still that there [is] great disparity between public and—? 22 PW: There's still disparity for sure, yeah. I don't know what it is; I haven't paid that much attention. But I know that you're not going to get as much money in a private school as you are in a public school. SS: So, teaching at a private school is really a sacrifice and a commitment to the kind of education you want to teach. PW: Yeah, for sure. And, you know, there's a lot of things. You don't have to put up with a lot of the same kinds of things that public schools do. Because public schools, everybody can be there. A private school, they don't have to keep you. If you don't want to play by the rules or if you become a real pest, they can throw you out, and there's nothing you can do about it. There's no obligation to say, "Yep, we'll tolerate you no matter what." There's a lot to be said for that, and I think that you just have a different academic atmosphere, I think, a lot of times in private schools. The kids are there and the parents are more supportive, generally. They're sacrificing to get you there, they're paying money, they see a commitment that they need to see through. So, I mean, I think it takes a different kind of person to make those sacrifices and put their kids in there, and they're going to be a little more cooperative, I think, and work with you. But even that has changed a lot. I mean, there's no question, just education has changed so much in the last 30 years. We were talking about that just the other night at dinner with a couple of classmates. Do you remember if you got in trouble at school, they'd say," I'm gonna tell your parents." 23 "No, don't tell my parents," because if you went home and your parents found out you got trouble, you get in trouble again. Now, today, if you get trouble at school, you go home and tell your parents and they get a lawyer and they're gonna take you to court and—[Laughs] Much different. Much different. SS: So, what are some of your favorite memories, either as a student or as a teacher and principal with the school? PW: As a student, it was just a great time for me. I mean, we enjoyed things. I was very active in athletics. I was very fortunate to be at St. Joe and play basketball and baseball for all four years, play on the varsity, and had a lot of great experiences that way. I was student body president my senior year; I got a lot satisfaction out of that. I had a lot of friends, a lot of people that I still can claim to be friends with from that time. I mean, just the other day, like I say, when we had that 50th reunion. When I went back to teach, I think the things that I probably take the greatest pride in is that the school, first of all, was still open. Because like I say, the bishop sent word, "We're gonna close St. Joseph High School." We went down and fought that, and we won, and it's still there today. I take a lot of pride in that. I'm not the only one, but I was in the middle of that fight, I know that, and I have a lot to say about that. So, I take a lot of pride in that. I think the fact that they've still got that fundraiser going after 32 years, 'cause that was primarily my brainstorm. These other people all pitched in after I convinced 'em, but that was my idea, "Let's try this thing. This thing looks like it 24 could work." It's still there, and it is making money for the school. I have a lot of satisfaction with that. I really enjoy the fact that the kids that I taught still remember me, will talk to me. I get cards and letters, I get notes going to that alumni reunion, some of those kids that I taught, that they will still come and sit and say, "Coach"—they call me coach—"How you doing, Coach? How you been? What's going on?" That's neat. That's really neat. I really appreciate that and enjoy that. So, just the whole thing. We were very fortunate to have a lot of really good kids. They were talking the other night, I think, when Bob was talking about, if you were listening, he said something about they had three kids in one class go to the academy. This group right here... [Pages flip] Honors at admission to the University of Utah, Annapolis, she had honors at Weber State, she went to MIT, he went to the Coast Guard Academy, he went West Point. That's a class of 22 people. We were the state champions in speech and debate. This is one senior class. We went to the basketball state tournament for the 1A schools, and in four days we played the number one team and beat 'em, we played the number two team and beat 'em, we lost to the number three team in overtime, and lost to the number four team in double overtime. So, we played the top four teams in the state and beat the two best teams with a bunch of kids that nobody even thought much about. I mean, this is a tremendous group of kids right here. This class of '78 was just a great group of kids. They had their 30th reunion a couple years ago, and 25 they called me. Their president, Kate, called me and says, "Want to make sure you're there. We want to see you. Be there and sit at our table with us," and that was cool. SS: As a coach, was it hard to find enough players in the school, since it's a small school? PW: No, basketball and baseball were okay. We were okay with that. SS: Was it hard to compete since you were a 1A school? PW: Oh, we competed against other schools our own size. I mean, the schools we competed against were schools of 150 or less. But you traveled. I mean, you went to Randolph. You know where Randolph is? You go into Wyoming and come back just across the Utah border. We went to Lake Town, which is up by Bear Lake, just on this side of the Idaho border. We went to Manila, which is over up by Flaming Gorge. We went to Wendover, which is by the Nevada border. We went to Dugway Proving Grounds out there in the middle of the desert, the West Desert, where Dugways is. We went out there to play. You have to go to those kind of places to find schools your own size. So, we travel all over the place. SS: How did that affect transportation costs for the teams? Did the parents drive 'em, or did you have a bus? PW: When I was a student, we got a bus most of the time. But because the finances, when I became principal, we bought a van for the school. So, I would drive the van and take maybe eight or ten kids in the van, and then we had parents that they'd come to the school and [they] basically were parents whose kids were playing, but some of 'em weren't. They were just parents who were—the 26 Boosters Club at St. Joe's is just unbelievable. They're just great people. They would come and say, you know, "I'll take two or three in my car," and they'd drive in a caravan. When we finally got to the point that we didn't need all those parents, the parents would start chartering a bus, and they would go to Wendover on a bus to travel with the team. Parents were unbelievable. They were just great people. They were great people. This guy became the principal after I left. He's in a wheelchair. He's paralyzed from the waist down from polio. Great guy. SS: So, you met your wife at the school too? PW: She was the year behind me, yeah. SS: Was she a lifer as well? PW: No, no, she moved here from Pennsylvania in the fourth or fifth grade. SS: So you've known her for a long time? PW: Yeah. When I retired four years ago, a friend of mine who's a travel agent took me to a football game at Notre Dame for a retirement present. Notre Dame is right next to St. Mary's, where the nuns live, and she's there [taps book]. SS: Really? PW: I got to visit with her. SS: And she was...? PW: She was the principal when they [the Sisters] left. SS: And she's at St. Mary's in... PW: South Bend, Indiana. That's where the home house for the Holy Cross nuns is. In fact, that's their school, St. Mary's. St. Mary's sits here and Notre Dame sits here, 27 and you walk between the two of them. It used to be the all-girl school associated with Notre Dame. Notre Dame is now co-ed, but they've kept their own school, and it's run by the Holy cross nuns. She's in charge of missions or something right now. I got to visit with her. I got see her when I was back there. We keep in touch with email. She and my wife are real good about that. I'm not real good about it, but she keeps in touch with my wife real good. SS: I wonder how they felt when they found out that they were getting moved, if it was their decision or if they just kind of said, "Well, there's not enough going on," or if they needed 'em for something bigger. PW: They needed 'em for something probably a little bit more challenging and maybe a little bit more towards a line of work that they saw as more beneficial in the overall than just, you know, teaching 120 kids. Because if you get involved—and some of 'em, like when she left the first time, because she left and came back, she was like a chaplain at Holy Cross Hospital in Salt Lake. So, you're dealing with people every day from a standpoint of just doing social work and gathering people, you know, grieving and stuff like that and working with people. That's what a lot of the Sisters would do. They would work in the social end of things, social network of things. So, necessarily, education wasn't always just their primary forte. I think as schools became more pressed, and obviously with the smaller schools, too, 'cause they still have nuns in some of the bigger schools. There's a couple of big schools in California that still have Holy Cross nuns, I know that. But there's not that many nuns anymore either. SS: Why do you think that is? 28 PW: That's a good question. I just think that lifestyle is not something that fits anywhere near the contemporary person's idea of a way I want to live. The materialistic world we live in now, that's not a very appealing lifestyle, I don't think, to take a vow of chastity and obedience and go where you're told and shut up. [Laughs] No, those things don't work for many people anymore, I don't think. SS: Do you think that with times being more modern that the church has stopped pushing that kind of life? PW: I don't think they've stopped pushing it, no. I just don’t think there’s many people responding to it. SS: Norm was telling me about one time he was in a thing with someone, and the priest stood up and said, "When you guys all grow up and get married..." PW: [Laughs] [Recording stops] [Recording resumes] PW: 1979, so those are the two years that I was principal, and then this is the year that I left and Bill became principal. SS: When the Sisters left, what did you do with the convent? PW: The diocese took it over and it became a retreat house. It still is used for some of that purpose today. See, the convent originally was done between 24th and 25th and Quincy. I don't know if you've ever—the Holy Cross convent was a four story, four- or five-story building. It was a tremendous building. It was a neat building. They leveled it. They just tore it all down. 29 SS: When I was down at the diocese archives, I had read something about a Sister saying, "Oh, we live at this address", and it was on 25th and I want to say like 925 East, just above Monroe. There's just a one-story... I don't even know what that building is. PW: It's a medical professional building now. SS: With the big, huge parking lot and the just one story? PW: Yep. SS: I didn't know what it was, 'cause I saw in the back they have a playground, and I was like, "Huh, I wonder what that is." PW: No, it was, see, Ogden doesn't necessarily use the 9th East and 8th East, they use all the presidents. So, it was between Quincy and Jackson, I think, if I remember right. But it was between 24th and 25th, and it was almost a square block. I mean, it was really a nice old building, and had been there since the 30s I'm sure, maybe the 20s, because the Holy Cross nuns have been around that long. SS: Was it just next to where, oh gee... PW: St. Joseph Church? SS: No, that big girls'—Sacred Heart, was it just next to where that was? PW: That was it, Sacred Heart Academy. SS: Oh, so they all lived [there]? 'Cause I've seen pictures of that building, but I didn't know if the convent was separate from that. PW: Yeah, Sacred Heart Academy was where the nuns were. That's exactly right. 30 SS: Oh wow. So, did they stay there after that closed as a school? 'Cause it closed I think in '38. PW: Oh, they lived there after that closed as a school, yeah. See, the old elementary school was down on 28th and Lincoln, and that's where I went to grade school. Then, oh gosh, when did they move that? They moved up to Quincy. SS: In I think 70s. PW: 1970s? Yeah. SS: Like '78, '79. PW: They bought the old Quincy school from—well the public school, Quincy School, they sold it to St. Joe, and they bought that, and then they added on a little bit to that. But they moved up there. Yeah, I guess it was in the 70s. The old grade school's gone. The old St. Joseph school on Lincoln is gone. SS: Yeah, everything is. PW: Yeah, it's all torn down. SS: Everything is gone. They had the original Sacred Heart Academy before they opened the big one, that's gone. It was down on Washington and 26th, I think. Then they had opened the one on 28th and Lincoln and the grade school, and that's all gone. Lots of stuff. It still boggles my mind why they would tear down that building. PW: That was one of those really hard things to understand. Obviously it had to do with money, I'm sure. I don't know. But anyway, when they tore that down, that Sacred Heart Academy was really a neat building. But I'm sure they weren't going to put the money in to preserve it. 'Cause it was at least four, maybe five 31 stories, so when you talk about earthquaking, you know, making it proof from earthquakes, and you start talking about fire codes and start talking about plumbing and electricity and everything else, it was just gonna become an expense that they just said, "No, it's not worth it." Then they built the place for the nuns up there behind the high school. They had the property up there and they built that convent up there and they'd stay up there. Again, the number of nuns, what it used to be and what it was didn't warrant having a building that big. They didn't need anything that large. SS: So, when you went to St. Joe's in the late 50s, where did the nuns stay? PW: They were at Sacred Heart Academy. Yeah, they were there into the 60s. SS: I think that the one on the St. Joe campus opened in, I want to say, '62. PW: It very well could be. That's about right. 'Cause it was while I was in high school that that thing opened, if I remember right. Or shortly after, excuse me, shortly after I get out of high school, not when I was in high school. SS: 'Cause then I know in '65 it caught on fire and they had to rebuild part of it. Lightning hit it or something. Looks like a lot of people liked the idea of you being principal. PW: They were being nice. They were glad to see the school still open; I think that was part of it. That was part of it. SS: It seems like there was a lot of, you know, like you said, there was a lot student and parent support to keep it open. I read an article in the Standard-Examiner about a student, Lee Forsgren, going and seeing the Ogden City Council asking them for support, and they pretty much told him no. 32 PW: In fact, Lee went to the Merchant Marine Academy when he graduated. He went to the academy for the Merchants Marines, which is in... Is it in New Hampshire? I saw his mom. Ask about him. He's in Washington, DC. He's kind of a bigwig in Washington DC. SS: Yeah, I've had contact with him. I had to order a thing for this so I could record telephone conversations, so I'm waiting for that to come. Hopefully it will come today or tomorrow, but I've talked to him and I'm going to do an interview with him, too, about student involvement and keeping it open. Yeah, he's a really nice guy. PW: Lee has done very well for himself. His mom was on the faculty at Weber. SS: Oh, was she? PW: Forsgren. Forsgren was her last name. Was that right? SS: Well, that's his last name, so it might be. PW: Because she was married to somebody else. SS: Oh. What does she teach? PW: I couldn't tell you. I think she was in something like development or something like that, but she was over there at Weber. I knew her because she and her brother and I grew up together down on Wall Avenue. Her name was Edith George before. She was the older sister to Ronnie George, who I grew up with on the wrong side of the tracks. SS: People that you've been friends with, is it weird teaching their kids? PW: You know, that happened a lot. Yes, it is, when you start realizing. It happened in Park City too. I was in Park city for 23 years. So yes, it's really interesting when 33 you start seeing kids of kids. I'm going, "Wait a minute, you've been around a long time." Yeah, it is. It's very different. SS: I can imagine, you know, my best friend, I'm imagining if I ever had to teach her kids, I would probably—there would be a little bit of favoritism there. I think it would be hard to— PW: Try not to let that get involved. I mean, you work on that pretty hard, I think. I've got a lot of friends in Ogden. There's a family in Ogden that my family, my mom and dad, and these kids' parents were just like this. Forever. I taught all of their kids. Then I taught some of their kids' kids. It's just a very different thing, yes. SS: Yeah, I think it would be hard when it comes to discipline. PW: But no, it's something I try very hard not to let that get involved. In fact, one of my classmates, her daughter was in my daughter's class, and when I was principal I had to call her up to deal with her because her daughter got in a little bit of trouble. She still remembers that, and she said, "What am I gonna say to Paul?" [Both laugh] "My daughter did this and she's not supposed to be doing that, but I got to go deal with the principal, and it's Paul, it's my classmate." SS: Wow, that's just a whole new kind of relationship right there. PW: Yeah, it is for sure. SS: So, when the school's going through all those problems, what kind of things did students do besides, you know, their parents helping support it financially? PW: Well, I think a lot of it was they carried on their academic life and their school life with kind of a renewed zeal. Like I say, they won some state tournaments. I think it was speech and drama that they took the state championship in in '78. I haven't 34 got the supplement, 'cause that would give you some of the accomplishments at the end. [Pages flip] But those are the different things. See, the cross-country team I know did quite well. The girls' tennis team, this wasn't the year they won the state championship, but it was pretty close. See, there's something that we always did, the junior class put on a spaghetti dinner to raise money to put on the senior breakfast. The seniors got a breakfast from the juniors the day of graduation. They raise their money for the prom and for this breakfast with this junior class spaghetti dinner. SS: Do they still do that? PW: I don't know. Some of the things that they had for the kids were... It used to be called the Sodality, but it was called Christian Life Community, and every year at Thanksgiving and at Christmas, we would adopt two or three families. Kids would bring in food, and then we'd make the delivery to those homes for Thanksgiving and Christmas, take 'em a food basket, turkey, and all the trimmings and things like that. You know, classes would do stuff like that. That was kind of a neat thing that they did. Oh, they were involved in all kinds of stuff. They had the Honor Society going on, and they had the symphony devs, and the Key Club, and we had all kinds of different organizations. So, there's a lot of different activities for the kids to get involved with. Obviously the yearbook, and our parents' support. Just all kinds of stuff that they went on. All kinds of dances. Everybody had a dance, different kinds of dances, sophomore hop, girls' choice. 35 SS: How did, like, the Civil Rights Movement and all that that was happening in the nation, how did it affect St. Joe's different than it did, you know, other schools? PW: I don't know that it affected 'em differently, because it wasn't... I mean, if you look at our student body, obviously there was a mix of Hispanics, some Blacks and whites, and that just wasn't an issue there. There just wasn't anything going on there. If you look in this class, I'll just show you in the seniors alone. [Pages flip] Right here. There's a group picture, but if you look at these pictures, there's Archuleta, Carmelo. There's an Asian. Where's my little black girl? Where's Gretchen? Here. I mean, we didn't have a lot, but it wasn't like, you know, you were looking at a lily white non-segregated outfit at all, there was a lot of—it was nothing, no big deal. There was nothing I think that I ever remember it being an issue. That was just something that those people down south had to deal with. SS: Did you have a pretty diverse mix when you attended there, too? PW: There weren't many Blacks. In fact, there weren't any Blacks when I was a student there. But there were a lot of Hispanics. I don't know if you need some other insight too, but there's a couple of parents that would be really good to talk to about some of this. One of 'em would be Dick Molumby, who's been very active in being on the school board several times, and he was very active during this time that we were going through saving the school too. Bob Evans is deceased, but his wife, Mary, is still around. She's not here right now. In fact, I talked to her daughter, and she's in Minnesota for a couple weeks. But Mary Evans, that Evans family, like I said, they were key to keeping 36 the school open. She would be somebody over the course, if you've got some time that you're not pressed for, you know, she would a good person to talk to. Joe Schwartz would be another one. These are parents that were just super, super supportive and very much involved in the school, to the point that they're even involved today. Their kids are long gone out of there, their grandkids have come through there, and they're still supporters. SS: That's interesting that they stay involved that long, 'cause you don't see that in the public schools. People leave the PTA as soon as their kids are gone. PW: See, they don't have a PTA per se that these people are involved in, it's the Boosters Club. That's what I'm saying. The Boosters Club, this was just an unbelievable group of people, and seriously, some of these people—we started the Booster's Club in 1968 or '69, so these people were on the ground floor and their kids were in school. They have gone through with their kids, and now their kids' kids have gone through, and they're still at the steak fries, at the fundraisers, still participating in the SPREE, and they're in their 80s. That's quite a commitment. It's pretty strong commitment. SS: Is the Booster Club, is it for both the elementary and the high school, or they're separate? PW: The Boosters is for the high school. It's for the athletic program at the high school. That's their primary thrust, was funding the things for the high school athletics so that the school doesn't have to pay for that. So, buying uniforms, 37 paying for some of the transportation costs and things like that, that's the primary emphasis of the Boosters Club, to run the expenses for high school athletics. SS: I see. The kids at the school, do they have to pay extra on top of their tuition to be on the football team—or, well I guess there's not a football team—you know, participate in the extracurricular stuff? PW: There was a fee. Like, we had to have a physical, so the kids would have to pay for a physical, but as far as some of the other stuff, when I was running the school, no. Today they may, I don't know. Have to ask Norm that question. Because the public schools have it. SS: Yeah. I was on the color guard in high school, and I know we had to pay to do that. PW: Like the cheerleaders, I'm sure, would buy their own uniforms. The basketball team, I know they didn't buy their uniforms. The school would buy them, but the Boosters Club would be responsible for raising that money and paying for that. SS: Wow, that's a lot of money. PW: It is. SS: So, the Alumni Association gives scholarships and the Booster Club pays for sports. PW: Yes. And, you know, the Alumni Association is still pretty small, it's not that large yet, and we're not giving full scholarships. We're giving partial scholarships, but we're giving the equivalent, probably, of one— SS: Any amount helps. PW: Yeah. I think it's like twelve or fifteen hundred dollars each for four of 'em. 38 SS: Yeah, that's quite a bit when you're paying $7,000, $8,000. PW: Well, yeah, certainly. SS: So it helps. PW: To do that and to be—and again, I have no idea what the number is in the Alumni Association. SS: How long have you been in the Alumni Association? PW: Five years, I guess. First couple years. SS: So, since you came back from Park City? PW: Yeah, pretty much. Maybe the year before I came back. 'Cause they started it, and I wasn't really around and didn't know that much about it, and they get a little more organized and I got a little more aware of it, and it's been five or six years. SS: How has the Alumni Association been around? PW: I think it's only been about seven or eight years. I don't think it's much longer than that. Bob would be able to tell you that, he's been very active in that and instrumental in that. But I think it’s been about seven or eight years. SS: Do they advertise it to people who have graduated from there, or do they just have to hear about it? PW: No, they advertise it for 'em for sure. They send stuff out and let 'em know. SS: What about the Browning family? 'Cause I know that they donated the land that the school is on. I had read that they had donated some money for... PW: The library. SS: Yeah, the addition that was made in 2000-ish, the library and the soccer field. Did their kids go through the school? They're just big supporters of it? 39 PW: Benefactors of the school. Philanthropists that were willing to support the cause. There may be a connection to the Brownings with another name, but I'm not aware of it. In other words, there may have been an in-law or something like that with the Brownings, but my original association with the name Browning was they were associated with a couple of the priests. They were very good friends with some of the Jesuits. SS: I was wondering, because when I was talking to my professor that I have currently about my project and I'd told him that they had donated the land, he told me that they're a big LDS family. So, it just surprised me, you know, made me wonder about what their motivation was to donate to a Catholic school if their kids weren't going there. PW: It has nothing to do with St. Joe, but there's a very interesting story. You know Juan Diego High School? SS: Yeah. PW: The Catholic Church couldn't buy that land, they wouldn't sell it to 'em. The people that owned that land wouldn't sell it. You know who bought it? Mr. Skaggs from American Stores, who's an LDS guy, and then gave it to the Catholic Church, then gave 'em $50 million to build a first-class school. That's how Juan Diego came into existence. SS: Really? PW: Yeah. He's not even Catholic. SS: See, and it just surprised me that there's all these Mormons donating land and things. 40 PW: Well, he bought the land when they wouldn't sell it to the Catholic Church. Somehow, I don't know what the deal was, I'm not sure, but he heard about it and he bought the land and then he gave it to Catholic Church. They built Juan Diego up there, and he gave 'em the money to build it. That's a first-class outfit out there. SS: My little brother went to that school for preschool and kindergarten before they moved. My dad and my stepmom, they moved back up here, and he had gone to that school and my aunt taught there. I don't think she does anymore, but she did. PW: See, the other part of that story is, you know where Carl Malone and Larry Miller live up on the bench up there in Salt Lake? That's where he lived, Mr. Skaggs. He gave the home to the bishop. That's where the bishop lives. SS: Mr. Skaggs, did he pass away? PW: I don't know that yet. SS: Or has he just given away his house and moved in somewhere else? PW: Well, he's got other things going on. I mean, he's a multi-millionaire. I don't know if he's still alive. I'm not sure about that. SS: Wow. That's interesting. PW: So yes, there are some very affluent Mormon families who have been very supportive of both Catholic Church and Catholic education. The Brownings are one of 'em, yeah. But like I say, there may be some connection with some other part of the Browning family to the St. Joseph High School. I'm not sure. But I know that there was a connection between Father Louis Kearn, Uncle Louis, and 41 the Brownings. 'Cause they used to have a Chevrolet dealership in Ogden, Browning Chevrolet, years and years and years ago. Father Kern, he was one of the very first Jesuits to come here. He was a skier and he knew those people and got to know them quite well, and the Jesuits are very good at finding people who will support their cause. SS: So they like to go make rich friends? [laughs] PW: There's something to that, yes. But some of it's kind of a natural thing too. Some people, they may not be looking for them, they may be looking for the priest, too. They may be looking for that connection, you know, somebody that has some things that, whether it's some kind of counseling or some kind friendship or whatever, I don't know. But it's interesting that it does happen. SS: That's interesting about Juan Deigo; I didn't know that. That's a beautiful school. PW: Yeah, it is. SS: It's nice. Well, I can't think of anything else. Is there anything else you can think of? PW: Not right now. I think, you know, like I say, at this time, the thing that would stand out most would be the parents coming up with the pledges and then starting SPREE, and those are the two of the things that really, I think, brought the school through a tough crisis. The fact that the nuns were leaving and there was nothing we could do about that, the Jesuits hung in there, but they didn't want anything to do with the administration. They said, "No, we'll just be teachers in the school. That's all we want to do." That's how we transitioned to a lay administration there. 42 SS: So, when you were a principal and teacher there, what was the percentage of Catholics versus the percentage non-Catholics as students there? PW: Oh, I'm sure it was probably still 90%-plus Catholic. SS: All right, well, thank you. 43