i Oral History Program Mike Bachman Interviewed by Chelsee Boehm 17 March 2015 ii Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Mike Bachman Interviewed by Chelsee Boehm 17 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: Bachman, Mike, an oral history by Chelsee Boehm, 17 March 2015, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Mike Bachman, conducted by Chelsee Boehm on March 17, 2015 in his place of business. Bachman discusses his knowledge and experiences with the historic Ogden Union Stockyards. Also present is Cameron Jones, the videographer. CB: This is an oral history interview with Mike Bachman on Tuesday March 17, 2015, at Mike Bachman’s Plumbing on 24th street in Ogden. The subject is being interviewed as a part of Ogden Stockyards Project. Let’s start with some background on you. When and where were you born? MB: I was born in Ogden, Utah, on January 8, 1950, in the Dee Hospital on 24th and Harrison Boulevard. CB: What are your parents’ names? MB: My mother’s name is Joanne and my father’s name is Milton. CB: What did they do for a living? MB: My dad was an engineer and then a real estate developer. My mother was a real estate developer. CB: Do you have any siblings? MB: I do. I have two sisters and two brothers. CB: Can you tell us about your ties to the Stockyard? MB: When I was a young boy my father was always looking for something to make extra money and he started to deliver manure. He would go down to the Stockyards to shovel manure up and sell it to people to put it on their lawns. When I got to be 16, I thought that would be a good idea to have my own truck 2 and I started to put an ad in the paper and called it, “Corral Number Five.” And I sold manure, a half ton truck load of manure for $25. CB: Did you sell the manure just to people to put on their lawns and that sort of thing? MB: Just to put it on their lawns and their gardens. I had an ad in the Standard Examiner, and I think it cost me $8 a week for the ad. And I got so busy that I got friends that had trucks. I would have four or five different friends and we’d deliver manure all Saturday and all Sunday, and go to school on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc. CB: Was it hard for you to rope your friends into shoveling manure? MB: No, no. We were all out for the buck. CB: How often did you do this? MB: Did it every spring for a month or maybe two in the spring, and then the same in the fall and people put it on their lawns in the fall. I did it from probably 1966 to 1978, somewhere around there, quite a long time. CB: How much would you usually shovel? You said like a half a ton truck load? MB: A half a ton truck load and we would probably do ten truck loads a day each. So, pretty good money for a kid. CB: How many friends did you have that went with you? MB: Three other friends, there were four of us all together. Kent Beacher was the guy that helped me the most. John Flynn and Bruce Wade. CB: And these are all friends from high school? MB: Yes. 3 CB: Did you ever have any unfortunate experiences when you were shoveling manure? MB: Yes, after I’d been married, I had a young son that was, he was probably six or so and he’d go with me and ride in the truck. We went down and we were shoveling manure, and he came up missing. I was tending him, his mom wasn’t with me, and I couldn’t find him. I was frantic. There was a big pile of manure and I ran up the top of the pile of manure and he was down on the other side. The pile I was shoveling out of was dry, but on the other side it was wet and he was up to his armpits, stuck in this wet manure. Lucky it wasn’t deeper, he’d have probably drowned and I would have never found him. But his mother had a fit. She wouldn’t let him go with me anymore. He kind of wandered off and thought he could walk out on there and went right up to his neck. CB: Oh man. What year did you get married? MB: 1969. CB: So what did your wife think of you going out to shovel manure? MB: She was okay with that. CB: She didn’t mind? MB: I always did things. I also sold watercress. I’d sell watercress to all the grocery stores from Logan to Salt Lake. I had a patch of watercress and I would go harvest in the spring. I’d put it in bunches and sell it for 25 cents a bunch. I still get watercress in the spring. In fact, I looked at some today as I was coming down the canyon, thinking maybe I ought to go get some. I don’t sell it anymore, but I like to eat it. 4 CB: Very cool. So when you sold manure, did you ever have to share your profits with the Stockyards? MB: No, they didn’t care. I think they liked that I would clean out the stalls for them. It was all cement. Most of them were pretty smooth, some of the stalls were pretty bumpy. But most of them were pretty smooth and we had big scoop shovels, short hand scoop shovels with the handle on the end. It was pretty easy to do, especially when it was dry in the summer and spring time. They had corrals that had cows in them and it was fresh, but they also had corrals that hadn’t been used for a while so it was pretty dry and it was pretty good. They had sheep pens, then cow pens, and then horse pens. The cow manure was what people mostly wanted. We sold some sheep manure, it was a little hotter. CB: Were you able to clean out, when you went, did you clean out all the manure or was there still a lot left after? MB: We would clean them pretty well, clean it out. It wasn’t really thick, they kept it pretty clean. It wasn’t like a foot deep. It was only a couple inches deep and it was like shoveling sawdust really, it was pretty light. CB: So, if you guys didn’t come to clean it up, do you know what they did with it? MB: They had guys that would clean it up, and they’d take it and drag it off with a tractor and we could get it out of the pile. But, it was harder to shovel out of the pile because it was wetter and so we like to take it out of the stalls because we could do it faster. CB: Was it a pretty big pile of manure? 5 MB: Big pile. If I remember right, it was on the west end of the stockyards. West of the exchange building. CB: Can you tell us about some of your memories of the Stockyards, like the time you purchased a goat on accident or something like that? MB: When I accidentally what? CB: When you accidentally purchased a goat. MB: Oh yeah, I would go down there to the auctions all the time and we would sit and watch them do the auctions. We’d talk to people, knew everybody around. And somebody came in that I knew and I waved at him and I bought a goat. They understood and they told me no more waving. CB: Do you have any other fond memories of the Stockyards? MB: We used to go down to the fights; they had fights down there, Golden Glove fights. We’d go down and watch the Golden Glove fights. Also, they had an ice rink down there and we’d go down and rent ice skates. Stinky old ice skates, they’d put talcum powder in them and stuff like they were sanitizing them. I thought I was always going to get athlete’s foot or something out of those old, nasty skates. But that was a pretty run-down place when I was a kid but it was fun. We’d always go down with mutual and we’d skate around and it was fun, we had a good time. CB: So you said you went there for fights? Like boxing? MB: Yeah, boxing fights. Golden Gloves, I believe is what they called it. CB: Was this just like local people or did they come from afar? Did they ever get pretty violent? 6 MB: I think it was just local people. Well, you punch a guy in the face, it gets pretty violent. It’s a little different now, I guess they still have prize fights and stuff but it’d psych you out a little bit. I mean when you went out there and you were revved up a bit. It was pretty interesting to see those guys. I never got in the ring. My father was a boxer, but I never did that. CB: Did your father ever box at the Stockyards? MB: I am sure that he did. CB: Very cool. You said you used to eat burgers at the Stockyards? MB: Well, when they had the Stockman’s Café across the street we’d go over and get hamburgers, and I remember eating pancakes over there. I would go in there with my grandfather, who was a plumber, and I would go help him, and we’d go and sit down and he’d always order for me. He would never let me order and he’d say, “A stack for me and a short stack for the boy.” I’d get pancakes in the morning and I hated pancakes, mostly because he wouldn’t let me order my own breakfast, but I didn’t want pancakes and that’s what I got. There was a restaurant in the basement of building, the exchange building, and I worked for a place called Monroe Pex and Distributing. We would deliver stuff down there, restaurant supplies to them. Pancake flour and ice cream syrups. I ate there a few times too; I don’t remember that quite as well. I just remember it being in the basement in the back, on the north side. I thought maybe I could remember the lady’s name but I don’t remember. I remember she had a hairdo and it was always the same, not a bit of hair was out of place, and it was stacked up on her head like, like a beehive. I don’t remember her name but 7 it was an interesting place. Then I worked for Gateway Distributing too, and we’d go deliver there. Both there and the Stockman’s across the street. To me, Stockman’s, was more like a chicken coop with a restaurant in it I think. It was just a funny little place and it wasn’t very big. It was right on the canal and right across the street from the ice rink, between the road and that little canal there and it wasn’t very wide. But it always had cowboys in there, always. CB: So you said it was like a chicken coop? MB: It looked like a chicken coop. It might have been nicer, but I remember it being a dumpy, little, chicken-coop like building. CB: Was it open the whole time you were going there? MB: Yes, it was open. I remember when they tore it down; I don’t remember what year, but I remember them tearing it down. CB: Was it a pretty busy place? MB: It seemed to be. They seemed to do pretty good. CB: And you said you ate at the restaurant in the exchange building just once or twice? You don’t remember much about it? MB: I remember it was in the basement. But that’s about all that I can remember about that. After that they closed the exchange building and they still had the auctions down there, they had a lady come in with a little trailer, she had a grill and a pop machine and stuff in there and she would come and park there. She had the best hamburgers. They were just really, really good. They had the auction every Tuesday. We went every week until just a couple years ago when they stopped the auctions and moved them to Willard, and get a hamburger. 8 We’d buy hamburgers for everyone in the shop. She had breakfast down there too, but about 10:00 or 11:00 we’d go down there and get a bunch of hamburgers and bring them up to the shop every week. We miss that. CB: Do you remember what her name was? MB: I don’t. CB: Did she have a name for her little business or anything? MB: She didn’t, she just had a white little trailer with a door on the side that opened up and the cash register and the pop machine and the grill. CB: Do you know if she was using cows that she bought from the auctions? MB: I am sure that she was. CB: So, the exchange building, did you ever go in it, other than to go to the restaurant once or twice, did you ever go in the exchange building? MB: I went in the exchange building more than once or twice to do the deliveries, but I never had any business in there. I would always go through the front door and it seemed like a pretty bustling, going place at the time. I am sure it was, but at my time, was when the stockyards were winding down. It wasn’t like it used to be, that’s for sure. CB: Do you remember when the skating rink opened, was it already open when you started going? MB: It’d been there for a long time. It was just part of the deal. CB: And you went there pretty often, with your friends and that sort of thing? MB: Yes, a lot, we went there a lot. CB: Can you tell us about when the skating rink burnt down? 9 MB: Yes. I had bought this property here on 24th and B Avenue and we’d just put up a building, gosh that was, I don’t remember. It was probably in 1990. Anyway, I lived in Pleasant View and I woke up in the night and looked out I could see a fire from my house in Pleasant View and it looked like it was right at my shop. It was in the middle of the night, so I got up and got dressed and came down and of course it was the Golden Spike Arena. Anyway, we sat there and watched it burn all night long. It was hot, it was really hot. We were standing across the street and you’d have to turn away because it would be so hot on your face. It burnt right to the ground. CB: Do you remember why, was it like arson or just kind of an accident? MB: I don’t remember why. I know that the fire department saved the foundation. Everything burned but the cement. CB: Oh no… MB: The facade was still standing, and it was there for a long time. CB: So you said you went to the auctions, did you ever go to any of the shows, like the animal shows? MB: I did. I remember those pretty vaguely. We went a few times when it was my grandfather, my mom and dad. We weren’t big cowboys or anything but they had Montie Montana, I think. Some kind of hot shot and he was down there and they were doing something for the rodeo, I don’t remember exactly what. Hopalong Cassidy, he was around, I remember seeing him at the Ogden Pioneer days at the rodeo grounds over on Canyon Road and Jefferson. And also Zorro came to 10 town, but he didn’t have anything to do with the Stockyards. I remember seeing him at the Ogden Pioneer Days. CB: Did you ever see any of the trains or the trucks coming through to bring livestock? MB: Oh yes. They were just big cattle trucks and they’d bring them in there and take them off on that spur and then unload them. I know that lots of times they got loose and you’d come across the viaduct. The old viaduct was made of steel, and you’d look over there and you could see a goat running around or a horse or a cow. The last one was just before they closed the Stockyards down; a goat got loose and was living over there in the railroad yard. He was there for a couple years, we’d see him all the time out grazing in the railroad yard. I think some transients got him and ate him after a while so he wasn’t there anymore. But, horses would come up here, they’d get loose and come up here to 24th Street a lot after I built this place. I’d see them get out all the time. Then guys would come up the road on horses and herd them back down to the Stockyards. CB: So with the goat, did they just kind of let him be? MB: I don’t think they could catch him. He was pretty wily out there and I never did see anybody chasing him, but I am sure that they probably tried to get him. But he was out there for years. He was out in the railroad yard. CB: Did he have a name? Something that you guys called him? MB: I didn’t name him. I just looked for him in the morning and the evening when I’d go home from work. CB: Did you ever visit the Coliseum building? 11 MB: Yes. Well that’s where the skating rink was, I am pretty sure. We went there and saw rodeo type stuff and they’d have stock shows there. I am sure the 4-H was there and we’d go down and see the kids, if we knew somebody that was going 4-H. We would go down there and see them run their cows through there, or their pigs or whatever they had. It was a pretty big building. It had a real neat front on it. When the building burned down, it stayed standing up there and it was there for a long time. I am trying to think what it said on there. I think it said Golden Spike Coliseum on the front, but I am not really sure. It was interesting shaped, the front. CB: Kind of arch-y? MB: Yeah, arch-y, yeah. CB: You were still going to the stockyards to buy burgers and stuff when it finally closed down? MB: Yes. CB: Did you still go to auctions and that kind of thing? MB: For the grandkids, but it’s up in Wyoming now. CB: Did you take your kids there after they were born? MB: Yeah, my kids would want to come. All my kids went down there. CB: That’s cool. Did you feel any personal impact after the stockyards closed? MB: Made it smell a lot better up here. CB: Did it? Did it smell pretty bad always? 12 MB: Not always, but it’d get the wind just right and you knew you were by the Stockyards and we had a lot of flies, a lot more flies back then than we have now. CB: Did you notice any impact (in the local economy), like people complaining about business or that sort of thing? MB: No, I wasn’t close to the cowboy guys and stuff so much. I know when I was a kid there was a red light right here on the corner. It’d hang from the poles and it had wires come over and the light hung in the middle, I guess they called it Semafor. There was always a light there so you could turn and get on to 24th street and off 24th Street. I don’t know when they took that out, all the sudden it was gone. I don’t remember when it was, but I remember it being there. The viaduct used to be made out of like a railroad trestle and it had an off ramp about three quarters of the way to the west and it went down and across the river and dumped out right at the Stockyards, instead of coming over here and going down. If you were going to the Stockyards you just got off that little spur. When they tore that down and built this new bridge, they didn’t put that back on. CB: Did your parents go to the Stockyards pretty often, before you were around, or that sort of thing? MB: My dad probably did because he did that manure thing when he was in high school also, so he probably went down there a lot. I know that my grandfather was, you know a plumber, and he would talk about going down there and fixing the plumbing and doing different things down there for them at the Exchange building. 13 CB: Can you tell me your grandfather’s name? MB: Milton. CB: Your grandpa’s name was Milton too? MB: Yep. CB: Alright, is there anything you would like to add or anything you feel like we haven’t covered? MB: No, my family came here because of the Mormons on both sides. My great-grandfather married a Wheelwright, had my grandfather Milton, he married Marianna Stratford, and her mother came on the wagons across the plains. My grandfather worked for, his father worked for a guy named A. W. Meek, who was a plumbing contractor. They started digging wells and then that became work into plumbing and then 1915, my great-grandfather Kaspar and my grandpa Milton started Bachman Plumbing and that’s a hundred years ago this month. CB: Very cool. MB: So, we’ve been around a little while. The family, been around here. CB: Awesome. Thank you so much for your time and thank you for doing this interview with us.