i Oral History Program Jerald Lamb Interviewed by Cameron Jones 20 March 2015 ii Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Jerald Lamb Interviewed by Cameron Jones 20 March 2015 Copyright © 2015 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Ogden Union Stockyard was a key fixture in the largest livestock market west of Denver during its heyday from 1916 to 1971. The activities at the yard brought Ogden national attention as a livestock center; the rise of the livestock shows, auctions, etc. at the site spurred the local and regional livestock industry, physically shaping the development of the agricultural landscape both near and far. This project documents some of the stories of the stockyard workers and visitors. ____________________________________ 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: Lamb, Jerald, an oral history by Cameron Jones, 20 March 2015, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Jerald Lamb March 20, 2015 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Jerald Lamb, conducted by Cameron Jones on March 20, 2015 in Clinton, Utah. Lamb discusses his knowledge and experiences with the historic Ogden Union Stockyards. CJ: We’re here interviewing Jerald Lamb about the stock shows at the Ogden stockyard. So, Mr. Lamb, when did you first start doing the stock shows? JL: Probably about the age of ten. The Golden Spike National Stock Show was always the last show of the year for us, raising our steers. So we always ended up at the Golden Spike National Livestock Show. CJ: Interesting. With those livestock shows, I know your brother mentioned the T-bone Club. JL: Oh yeah, T-bone Four-H Beef Club. CJ: He mentioned a lot of that was more about bringing the boys together, raising them better. I’m curious what your involvement was with that group? JL: It was a real comradery. Basically three families, the Reese Family, The Morgan Family, and the Lamb Family comprised the Four-H T-bone Beef Club. We seemed to go to all of the livestock shows together, in different places in Utah. Spanish Fork, of course the Ogden one, Utah State Fair, we all seemed to go together because we all raised steers. It just made it a natural thing. At one time I think it comprised of roughly twenty members, so it was pretty good sized. And we were well known throughout the state. When we pulled up with our vehicles, everyone wanted to see what we’d brought. We had a good reputation. 2 CJ: I know your brother mentioned a little bit about how you would stay at the stockyards. What was that like? JL: It was always fun. I mean, traveling out of town down to, let’s say Ferron, Utah, all of us kids would always sleep in the back of the truck. We’d put some straw down in the back of the truck and roll our sleeping bags out and we’d sleep in the truck. I’m talking a cattle truck, a big truck, not a pick-up truck. CJ: Wow, sleeping in the cattle truck. I don’t know if I’d call that my favorite idea of camping. JL: Hey, we were kids. But for me and my brother and sister, and well actually my family, those were our vacations when we went to livestock shows. Grandpa always made sure that we got down there. I don’t know how much Royal got in to Grandpa, but I can introduce you to him. [Holding up a picture of his Grandpa and Grandma Woolley] That’s Grandpa and Grandma Woolley. He was obviously the spear-head of it all, because my dad ran the ranch for him up in Peterson, Randolph, and Eden (Utah), and he always provided us with our steers for our Four-H projects and later on my FFA (Future Farmers of America) projects. We were lucky we didn’t have to buy our steers. We had to feed them. And we always fed them out of the proceeds of the sales of the steers and so forth that way. So it just kept it an ongoing thing. My last year of showing I had six steers that I showed. CJ: Really? Were they all the Herefords? JL: Yes, purebred Herefords. That’s all we raised on those three ranches. Grandpa had a commercial herd down in the House Rock Valley, Arizona, but everything 3 we had was purebred. And that’s where the auctions down there kind of come in. He would buy bulls; I’ve got several pictures of the bulls he bought down there. CJ: What do you remember about those bulls? JL: They were always nice and tame, because they were show bulls. So they were halter broken and they were tame, always very good looking. He was very picky about blood lines because he wanted to maintain, obviously, the purebred part of the herd that we had. And so he was real picky on blood lines and where he bought his bulls from, and that’s why the bidding secrets came into play. CJ: Bidding secrets; Royal mentioned a little bit about how he’d touch his eyebrow, or wave his finger or have one of you raise your hand. JL: He would always get with the auctioneer’s helpers before the auction and tell them what to look for. Other times we would be sitting by him, or mom or dad would be sitting by him, and they would actually do the bidding because he didn’t want somebody to run him up on the price. So as far as everyone else knew he was not doing the bidding, until he obviously won the bid. It was kind of funny some of the things that went through. CJ: Oh, like what? JL: Well like I said, some of the signals. My mom could be sitting next to him and she’d raise her finger and that was a bid, or like you said, Grandpa would touch his ear or put his finger to his nose, or some little sign, it wasn’t waving a paddle around, it was just some little indication and the helper would catch it and take the bid. So it got kind of interesting down there. 4 CJ: Now I remember Royal telling a story about you and him when you were about ten, raising your hands a bunch of times just to annoy the stock worker. Do you remember that story? JL: I don’t remember that one. I mean that’s fifty years ago. CJ: I just remember him saying you accidentally bought a cow. JL: That must’ve been him because I would’ve remembered that. But it could be done. It could be done real easily down there. So you really had to watch, you pretty much had to sit on your hands or they’d take it as a bid. CJ: It sounds like it got pretty crazy. JL: It did, during those moments. CJ: I know the Coliseum was also turned into an ice rink during the winter. Do you have any stories about that or trips you took there? JL: I think, as a teenager, several times I went down there and went ice skating. I can’t remember if I took my current wife down there on a date or not. But I remember going down there several times and ice skating at that rink. It would just amaze me because when we would go down for the stock show it was all sand and dirt, but then you’d go down later in the year and it was an ice rink. There was, and I don’t know if Royal mentioned this or not, but we stayed at the Coliseum, too, during the stock shows. Right up above the auction arena, which went up two stories, there was a big long room like a dormitory that had bunk beds in it, and they provided those for the people that came and did the stock show. So you could go up there and spend the night so you would be right there for the show. 5 There were a lot of out-of-state people that came to the livestock show. People from Montana, I remember some from Idaho, and I think some from Washington came to that livestock show. But here again it’s about the last livestock show of the year anywhere. So if they had any steer they’d bring them down. They usually brought some pretty good stock down. It was a good competition. CJ: I had no idea it had that many participants from out-of-state. JL: Yeah, that’s why it’s called a national. It was quite a popular show. CJ: Well, your brother did mention you went to 25th Street one time, do you remember anything about that? JL: I don’t. I really don’t. CJ: That’s okay. JL: Different memories come in. CJ: From what I understand 25th Street’s not worth remembering. JL: Not at that time frame. What I remember about 25th Street was that it was pretty seedy, let’s put it that way. Obviously it’s not that way now, but there were a lot of bars down there. It was a pretty seedy place; you didn’t want to wander around down there. Like I said Ogden’s cleaned it up quite a bit now. When I got back from Arizona it wasn’t bad at all. In fact my cousin owned a pawn shop on 25th Street. CJ: So what took you down to Arizona in the first place, because I know you were working on the ranch up here for a while? 6 JL: I had some experience in electronics through the government, and went to Weber State for about a year in electronics. Well, actually radar repair. Then I worked for Hill Air Force Base for about seven years. I got tired of the politics and decided to move to Phoenix, the electronics capitol of the world. I got down there and couldn’t find a job in electronics, but I found other work and we liked it down there so we stayed there for about twenty-two years. We moved back about 1994. CJ: So how long was your grandpa’s business running? JL: I was reading some genealogy the other day, I want to say he bought the ranch in the thirties, up at Peterson. And it operated until my dad retired which was in about 1972. It was going for quite a long time. I know when my mom and dad got married they moved up there to operate the ranch for him. That was basically the only job my dad had the whole time he was married, working for my grandpa. CJ: Well, it was a pretty stable job from what I understand. JL: It didn’t pay much, but it was good hard work, because there were about two hundred acres up there that we ran the cattle on and grew hay, and harvested the hay. I started hauling hay when I was about six years old driving the tractor. As my dad would go out and feed the cattle in the wintertime, he’d do it by pick-up truck and I got to go out and drive the truck for him while he dumped out hay for the cattle feed. And then he had the hundred acres up in Randolph which he would move the cattle up there in the summer so we could grow the hay on the ranch in Peterson. In the later years he bought, I think it was fifty acres over in Eden, which we also used for summer pasture. He had a pretty big operation. 7 [Grandpa Woolley] was well known in the cattle business. He had more run-ins with the Bureau of Land Management down in Arizona than anybody could imagine. CJ: Really? JL: Oh yes. They always wanted to take his grazing rights down and tell him how many cattle he could run on that down there. He didn’t like that. CJ: I don’t imagine. So with driving the tractor at six were there any incidents or did you ever crash the tractor? JL: I never crashed the tractor; I don’t remember crashing the tractor. The nice thing is that when I was six I only had to drive the tractor, I didn’t have to lift any of the bales of hay. So I would drive the tractor when they went to pick up the hay and then I would get to go into the house while they unloaded it and they would pick me back up on the way back out. Until I got big enough that they decided it was time for me to start chucking the bales. Of course as a teenager that’s what I did all summer long. I got paid for it eight hours a day, a buck and a quarter, and thought that was big time money. CJ: Well that’s ranch work for you. JL: Well, that’s true. CJ: So at the stock shows, were there any bulls or steers that you liked better or remember specifically? JL: 1965, I got the grand champion steer at the National Livestock show there. It was the first time our family had earned the grand champion down there. Some of our other T-bone Club members had gotten grand champion down there, but in 1965 8 I won the grand championship. That one sticks out real predominately. And going through pictures, I’ve got more pictures of that steer than probably the rest of my family I think. I couldn’t believe how many pictures we had. In fact this might be of interest to you [holding up the Grand champion banner from 1965]. This is the banner that they gave me for the grand champion. CJ: That has lasted nicely. JL: All of the pictures you’ve seen and all of the newspaper clips have this banner and my grandfather was very, very proud, and I was too, but he was just walking on cloud nine the whole time he was down at that stock show because it was one of his steers, his breeding’s that won it. CJ: Wow. So I know with purebreds you have to do the registering and the bloodlines, but were there any particular bloodlines your grandfather preferred to get bulls from, or a ranch? JL: Not really. He always looked at Jensen Brothers as one place to get his bulls. The pictures of the bulls that I have here, I don’t know if they have the ranch that they came from or not. But I know that last year, 1965, he bought a bull from Jensen Brothers and he paid a pretty penny for it. I think he paid about twenty-eight hundred dollars for it. Which, during that time frame, was a lot of money, but he liked that bloodline of the bull. And you’re right, purebreds had to be registered. Every year we would have to bring the calves and cows into the corral, separate them out, and pair them up because each one of the cows had a number brand so that we could track it. My mom did all the tracking of all the 9 bloodlines and the registration. All of the calves were registered as purebreds. It got to be quite a process. CJ: I imagine. So, with the bulls again, I know your brother mentioned Liberace. JL: Like I said, I don’t remember Liberace. CJ: Are there some others that do stick out? JL: Yeah, Bear Claw. [Holding up a picture of the bull] That’s this bull here. CJ: He’s certainly a big one. JL: He was a big one. And probably the only reason I remember that one so well is because I was dating my wife at the time. We were up in the corral and she had never been around cattle and there’s this big, big bull up there in the corral and she was very leery of it, and I just jumped in the corral ran over to him and jumped on his back. He was that tame. And a very good sire, he sired off a lot of calves. Like I said Liberace I don’t remember, but Bear Claw I remember. CJ: It sounds like he was really sweet. JL: Yes, he was and my wife to this day still brings that up every once in a while. She couldn’t believe that that big of a bull would let me just jump up on his back and let me give him a little kick and he’d walk around the corral no problem. CJ: I know from stock shows you take the cow out, fluff up the fur and everything, to hide imperfections. What I’m curious about, when you gave the grand champion away, or sold it, was that hard to deal with? JL: Not really. Probably my first couple of steers were the hardest ones to sell and get rid of, because you get the attachment. But over the years you kind of harden to it, let’s say, and you know it’s got to be done. That particular one, my only 10 thought was the kind of money I was going to get for it. If I remember right I sold him for about a buck eighty-eight a pound on the hoof. I’d have to go back to newspaper articles to verify that, but that’s what sticks in my mind. CJ: Still that’s a pretty good price. JL: It was. I’ll share this with you too. There’s another little interesting story that goes along with the grand champion. When you’re down going through the judging, this can be an all-day process. We started at about eight o’clock in the morning with the FFA and I ended up getting grand champion FFA, but then there is another, what they call open class, which means anybody can show a steer in that class. My dad and I decided we weren’t going to show in there, we were going to let the steer rest. That took a while, but then they brought the champion of the FFA, 4-H class and the open class champions together to decide the overall grand champion. Well, it so happened that day that I was involved in the school operetta first scene and it was an assembly for the whole high school. I had the whole high school waiting fifteen minutes for me to get up there because I was so late. I hit that door and the girls just hit me with makeup because they couldn’t start without me, I was in the first scene. I remember that one pretty good. CJ: Still, it sounds like the fifteen minutes was totally worth the wait. JL: For me it was, everybody else was kind of antsy, but for me it was. CJ: What other work went in to these stock shows? JL: It all starts when you first get your calves. And you get the calves when they get weaned from their mother, that’s when you start with them. There’s a lot of work 11 involved, you’ve got to train them to lead, you’ve got to halter train them, and tame them so that people can walk up to them and not have them get scared away or anything like that. It’s a lot of one-on-one contact to get them to that point. And then when it comes time for the stock show, the hooves have got to be trimmed, and their faces have got to be shaved. For the Herefords we always shaved their faces. You haul them to the stock show and then you’ve got to give them a bath, and brush them and curie them, get them all nice and clean, and make sure the white on them is white and not yellow. And there’s a lot of work involved in that too. And then comes show time and you’ve got to take them out and show them to the judge. You have to work with them with a stick because to show them to the judge you want them standing properly with all four legs square underneath them and spread apart, and so forth, so it shows off the muscular part of them the best it can be. There is a lot of work, but it was fun work. We always enjoyed it. CJ: You mentioned the shaving, was that like all the way down to the skin? JL: Yes. Well, let me clarify that. We cut them with clippers which left, probably a quarter inch of hair. What you were doing is removing all of the curly hair off their face, which is normal for Herefords to have. We’d shave all of that off to really back behind their ears to their neck. We’d take it down to that height, let’s say. So it wasn’t really down to the skin, but it took it down to a quarter inch. It was just to make them look better for the judges. That’s all it was, to make them look better for the judges and hope they liked the way they felt. Of course he’s feeling 12 them to see what their fat content is and how much fat they have and so forth, their composition, that’s how they’d pick them. CJ: I didn’t know the finer aspects. I knew a little bit about the showing, but that’s fascinating to know those finer aspects. JL: Yeah, and it took a while to train them to be able to set them up properly. And then they had to be trained well enough, because you went into the showmanship contest, which now they’re judging the handler on how well they can show the steer along with the way the steer element is, especially down at the Ogden livestock show. The judge made us swap animals to see if our animal would do as well with another person as they would with us. That was part of the competition. It kind of threw me there for a bit, but he did it. CJ: Did that happen every year or was that one particular judge? JL: I just had it happen the one time. I think it was just that one particular judge. I think what his problem was, it was between me and another gal from out of state and he couldn’t distinguish between the two. We were both running about equal. He threw that in there just to see if he could throw a curve. I ended up winning, so that pleased me too. CJ: Wow, that’s pretty impressive. Most people can’t take another animal and make it do what they want. JL: Not really because your animal is used to you and there’s a bond there, when you throw somebody else into it that’s different, but it worked out okay. CJ: So you won grand champion in ‘65, were there other years that you won grand champion? 13 JL: Not at the Ogden stock show, but at the other ones yes. I won grand champion in Spanish Fork one year, based on the pictures I was looking at I was probably eleven, twelve maybe. My sister and brother had all won grand champions elsewhere. Normally any show that the T-bone 4-H Beef club went to, one of them had the grand champion and reserve champion both. We had that good of quality of animals. CJ: That’s pretty impressive. Your brother and you both mentioned the ranch down in House Rock, Arizona, did you ever go there? JL: Oh yes. I made many trips with my dad down there. CJ: And what all did you do there? JL: I was young at that point in time so there wasn’t an awful lot that I could do. Primarily what he would do is take loads of salt or mineral lick down. He’d buy it up here and transport it down there. Periodically we’d take some, what we’d classify as “cull” cattle, and put them in with the commercial herd down there. Sometimes he’d go pick up a horse from down there and bring it back up here that Grandpa wanted moved around and used elsewhere. We didn’t do an awful lot of work down there. I think Royal did. I think he went on a couple cattle drives down there, but I never did. I know every fall we’d have to go out and round up all of the cattle off all of the square miles he had down there and bring them up to market. CJ: Still very interesting. So, on the ranch, while Royal was down there, what did you have to do back home? All of his jobs? 14 JL: Pretty much. I had to feed all of the steers and take care of all of them while he was gone. I mean we shared all of that anyway. During that time of year there wasn’t an awful lot going on as far as training with the animals. It was pretty much just the feeding of them. And when Dad and Royal were gone, I had to milk the cows. We had a little bit of a dairy herd at that time also. I think by the end, when I was a teenager, we were down to about three cows and that was it. Some of those chores had to be done, obviously, and my Mom pitched in on it quite a bit too. She was a hands-on farmer. CJ: I imagine you kind of have to be. JL: You do. She had her dad’s blood in her. CJ: I’m curious what involvement you had with your Grandpa’s full company, with the selling and so forth. JL: Very little to do with the selling part of it, just the day-to-day operations at the ranch up there. Like I said, every fall we’d have to bring all of the cattle in and separate them out, and match up all of the calves with their mothers, and record all of that information, castrate all of the bulls to make them steers, vaccinate them, that type of work I got involved in quite a bit. By then it had pretty much refined down. I think Royal and my sisters got involved a bit more than what I did because I was the youngest. It was just day-to-day operations, nothing special, at least not to us. Our cousins would come up and just be thrilled to death to help us out, for us it was “eh.” Even to this day my wife loves to ride horses, and I’ve never really enjoyed riding horses because every time I got on a horse it was for 15 work. We get frustrated every once in a while because she’ll want to go riding and I’m like, “Nah, no big deal.” CJ: That’s sort of how everyone views stuff like that. Waders are either for fishing or field work, as it were. So your cousins coming up to help with the work, did you ever use that to your advantage? JL: Oh yeah, I always did. My one uncle built a little cabin on the property up there. They would come up an awful lot during the summer and spend time up there. They lived in Salt Lake but they would come up and spend time on the Ranch there. My one cousin was about my age; well he’s a year older than me, he actually came up and worked a couple of summers with us. But any time they wanted, they’d come up. Of course they wanted the horses saddled so they could ride them. But they would jump right in and try to help with what they could. Most of the time they got in the way, but they tried. That was the key thing, they tried. CJ: Well, I think that’s all of the questions I can think of. If you’ve got any other stories you would like to share feel free. I can always justify another story. JL: Probably not, unless you wanted to look at some of the newspaper articles and pictures that I’ve got. That’s up to you. CJ: Sure. Well I guess we’ll wrap up the interview part. Thank you so much for sharing these stories. It’s been great. JL: I’m glad my cousin saw the article and called me. She caught me way off guard because I haven’t talked to her in years, but I’m glad she saw it. I’ve got 16 memories of those stock shows down there. We spent ten, fifteen years I spent showing steers down there. CJ: Well thank you again.