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Dale Lewis Johnson ; The Weber and Davis County Communities Oral History Collection include interviews of citizens from several different walks of life. These interviews were conducted by Stewart Library personnel, WeberState University faculty and students, and other members of the community. The histories cover various topics and chronicle the personal everyday life experiences and other recollections regarding the history of the Weber and Davis County areas. ; 78p.; 29cm.; 2 bound transcripts; 4 file folders. 1 sound discs: digital; 4 3/4 in. ; Oral History Program Dale Lewis Johnson Interviewed by acquaintances, Matt and Kathy July 2010 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Dale Lewis Johnson Interviewed by acquaintances Matt and Kathy July 2010 Copyright © 2010 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. Archival copies are placed in Special Collections. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description The Weber and Davis County Community Oral History Collection includes interviews conducted by Weber State University faculty, staff and students, and other members of the community. The interviews cover various topics including city government, diversity, personal everyday life experiences and other recollections regarding the history of the Weber and Davis County areas. ____________________________________ 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 Special Collections All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Dale Lewis Johnson, an oral history by acquaintances Matt and Kathy, July 2010, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Dale Lewis Johnson July 2010 1 Abstract: This is an interview between Dale Lewis Johnson, referred to as Lewis, and two of his acquaintances, Matt and Kathy. The interview took place in July of 2010, just prior to his passing, and includes stories from his personal life as well as his theories on relationships. M: So how did you end up in Los Angeles? Maybe we should start with your immaculate birth. L: I'd been in a two year relationship in Salt Lake. When it ended, I basically had a nervous breakdown. I destroyed this man's life: I reported him to the IRS even though he hadn't done anything, I outed him to his family and I got him fired from his job. I made his life so bad that he moved to Texas just to get out of here. I was very vengeful back then. I wanted to get out of Utah. I figured Utah was part of my problem as far as the guilt of being gay and stuff. My sister was going down to Phoenix to trucking school, and I went with her down there. It was at that time that I really started drinking heavy. My sister was drinking heavy, and they couldn't keep a job. They'd finally had enough and decided to come back to Utah, but I refused. I was never coming back to Utah. So they left and I found myself homeless. I found a halfway house where I could live. You either had to go door to door asking for money, or you had to have a job and pay. I happened to have a job. I worked as a cocktail waiter in a bar. The guy who ran the house was a mean guy. He dealt drugs, and had the guys that stayed in the house go out on his drug runs for him. If you didn't do what he said, he'd just kick you out. Well, 2 he made the mistake of giving me and one of the other guys in the house $900 to go pay the mortgage on the house. We had the good idea to take that money and get out of Phoenix. So we took that $900 and went to LA. We drank it all away and within two days, we didn't have any more money. We got in a fight. He thought I was hiding the money, and I thought he was hiding the money. We just spent it all, so we went our own ways. That's how I found myself homeless in LA. The only thing I had was the clothes on my back. At that point I tried prostitution. I was still kind of a naïve Mormon boy, so that really didn't work well. I ended up pawning the Movado watch I had for fifteen bucks, and that got me into a bath house, that also served a buffet dinner. So I had a place to sleep for the night and dinner. I met a guy who worked in there, and he offered me a place to stay. I ended up falling in love with him. He got me a job in the movie industry, which I worked at for the next eleven years. He is also the one who introduced me to drugs. When I was involved in drugs, I never felt safe in the house, so I spent a lot of time on the streets. Survival on the street has a lot to do with the image you portray. So that's when I really started to take on that gangster look – the shaved head, the whatever to fit in. I was known as Dale up until that point. My family still knows me today as Dale, not Lewis. But Dale was too "white" for Los Angeles, so I changed my name to my middle name, which is Lewis, and started going by that. I kept that name. M: That's really interesting. What did you do in the film industry? 3 L: I worked for a prop company that rented props to movie studios. I worked in the drapery department, and so I made drapery and bedspreads and stuff for movies and TV. I really enjoyed that time. M: That's really cool. Can you come make drapes for my house? L: I could. When I came to Utah, I set up shop, but I was spoiled working in the movie industry where you get paid sixty bucks an hour, and they bring you and tell you exactly what they need. Here, people don't know what they want, they want you to go shopping with them for fabric, even if you make it they don't like it… and they don't want to pay you anything, so I ended up selling most of my machines. M: What happened to the guy you fell in love with? L: We spent two years together. Then, in 1988 is when I was diagnosed with Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome. He was diagnosed at the same time. I knew, from reading a book that was given to me by Louise L. Hay, You Can Heal Your Life, that I needed to change my life if I wanted to live. That meant everything. I needed to quit doing the drugs, I needed to quit the drinking – all of that. He did not want to do that, and I could not stay living with him, with him doing it and me not, so I left him. Within six months, he died. I had a lot of guilt about that for a long time. I was not able to be there for him. I since then, though, have talked to him in spirit, and everything's okay. M: When did you realize that the book by Louise Hay was actually working and that Human Immunodeficiency Virus was manageable? 4 L: You know, when I was diagnosed, it was a death sentence. They didn't give you any hope. That's why I really started to follow my intuition. I really started becoming aware of it, and what I was getting was, do not take the drugs, do not listen to the doctors. And so I didn't. In my lifetime, I have been to a hundred doctors that I have fired, because they basically told me, if you don't do what we say, you're going to die. And I told them, I'm not coming back to you. I honestly believe today that early on, the drugs they gave, which was Azidothymidine, they gave in a high enough dose that it killed more people than the AIDS. I don't know if that's true or not, but I believe that. So I really learned, as far as being sick and that, the only time I had fear was when I went against what my intuition told me. I was always fine if I followed what I felt inside. M: That's interesting. That's always an interesting process, that kind of finding out, you know, how your intuition guides you and that type of stuff. Can you think of any very specific things that happened during that period of time, besides the doctors, where you realized the power of that intuition? L: Nothing I can really think of right off. That was really where my focus was at the time. To answer another part of your question though, it wasn't until I'd been HIV positive for ten years that I.I spent the first ten years of being HIV positive waiting to die. After ten years I kind of realized I just wasted ten years waiting to die. It was time to start living. M: It's something weird when you feel that, 'Oh really? There is life?' you know, kind of thing. L: Yeah it doesn't end. 5 M: I've noticed that with forgiveness, which you've talked about before, usually with that, in realizing that it is an illusion. Usually there's a point where you start to feel, not only intuition, but love flowing through you. When did you first start feeling that? L: You know, that really happened slowly over time. I'll tell you my biggest breakthroughs with that were when I'd come back to Utah. I'd gotten sober and I'd gotten really sick at the time. They'd actually come out to LA and brought me back to die. Never thought I'd live for a month because of the drugs and the alcohol. (I had got back into that.) I'd started going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and I watched people at these meetings and I saw people that seemed to genuinely care about other people and I didn't. I didn't care about anybody but myself, honestly. But I liked that and I wanted to be that way, so I started asking in my prayers to care more about other people. What happened was that I started to notice the newcomers in meetings come in. They'd be scared and they'd be hurting and then you'd only see them maybe once or twice and then you wouldn't see them again. It was actually Dawn, who came into a meeting as a newcomer and I still was so introverted and quiet I couldn't reach out to help even though it was really starting to pull on my heart. I tried to introduce myself to her and did the best I could. She came into a meeting one time and she really reached out for help and I couldn't do anything because I was so self-conscious about myself. She left and I didn't see her again for like three months. It was at that point that I just said to myself, I cannot, cannot allow my being unsure about myself get in the way anymore with helping 6 people. Almost instantly that being introverted and quiet, that I prayed to be taken away my entire life, was gone. My whole life opened up and changed because I first stopped worrying about me and my focus changed towards other people. That changed everything in my life. M: Wow. That's cool. Kind of brings me to the next one which was: what's the most beautiful thing you've experienced so far? What's the most beautiful experience you've had? L: I can't really think of one particular thing, but overall I would just simply have to say the love that I have for people is the most beautiful thing there is. It's the most important thing for me. M: That's the most important for everybody. L: What's that? M: I said it's the most important for everybody. L: Yeah. M: What do you experience, and I know you can't really put it into words. I know there's been several times when I've been with you and when other people have been with you where that experience of the body drops away. I know it can't be described, but can you try? What's it like? L: I've had a lot of that in almost two years, simply because again the body's not been put in place to be here. I don't know. I would describe it as a freedom of certainly not being tied down to the body or the restraints of the body or the pain of the body. In a way it's a relief. It's freedom. M: Do you go any place? 7 L: No, I know I do, but I don't really remember a lot of where I go. I've had a few instances. I had one instance, and this was a couple years ago, where I had gotten pneumonia and was in the hospital, really sick. I saw my mom and my sister who passed away and I also had the experience of people on the other side and the absolute joy and bliss of those who were there. The only way I can relate it is it's like little kids playing ring around the rosie, just happy and innocent and pure. Then I also got the feeling, that grand admiration they have for us who chose to come here and what we're doing. I really thought that, since not everyone had the courage to come here and so a great, just, admiration for what we do. At that same time I had the impression of standing in front of the Creator and Him asking me if I was ready to come home. M: But you decided to stick around for a little bit longer? L: I did. At the time I was not in a good place mentally and I didn't really give an answer. I didn't know. I guess I decided to stick around. M: I wanted to know your take on relationships, especially romantic and just what you learned from them--having relationships. I know you've been in love a couple of times, we've talked before. I kind of wanted to know since it's a thing that it seems like we're all concerned with all the time, at least some of us. What's your take on that kind of refrain from this other context? L: It's concerned me, not any different than anyone else. I long to be in a relationship, though I do understand, today, that is simply symbolic of my wanting to be home with my Creator. My relationship with Robert, when it ended, he basically came to me and told me he wanted out. It was a surprise to me. By that 8 point in my life I understood that it wasn't all about me, and I realized that even though he was the one that wanted out, after eighteen years, it was going to be just as hard for him as it was for me. So I put all of my effort into how I could help him transition out of this easily. I'll tell you, that made all the difference in the world. We are still best friends today. With me being sick, he calls me every day, he comes and sees me. We never had one single fight or argument in our breakup, not over anything. I mean the breakup was the truly beautiful thing. So, I guess what that taught me about relationships, and I believed this even before, is that relationships are the perfect place to work on our defects of character because they bring it right to the surface. The person we live with is the person that we're the most who we are, that we put up one of those fronts for. So that is the best place to fine tune who we want to be. M: I think I'll let Kathy ask you some of the other questions that are up on the board. I think she might be, she doesn't really look antsy, but she might be antsy to get to talk to you a little bit. K: Have I told you lately that I love you? L: Yes, you have. K: Okay. L: Have I told you, I love you? K: Yes, you have. A little bit louder. We're having a moment right now. Alright, there are a couple of things. When I ask you about this taping I'm sure there's some common statements that you could make to all four million people that want to come see you, and want to hear what you have to say, and they're hungry to 9 have that information and you know that that's true. So are there some common things that are coming up for you as you think about what you want to say today? L: Well, first, I want everyone to know that I am okay. I am perfectly at peace with what's going on for me today. You know I've already been telling some people some things to try to help them. One of them is, it's time to take responsibility for your own feelings and stop blaming other people for how you feel. One thing is, you guys are throwing this party for me, and as I'm thinking about people to invite, one problem I ran across is there are several people I'm going to invite who don't get along. So for a minute I had this conflict, do I invite both of them or not? I'm going to invite them and not worry about it, but the thing that is sad is that we carry those kinds of feelings about people and may not want to be in the same room with them. That's not what life is about, at all. I would just like to see everyone just love each other and get along. Take responsibility for yourself and then you won't hate anyone--you won't be angry at anyone. K: That's an interesting statement. Take responsibility for yourself. So you're suggesting then that I have some freedom of choice and some decision making about what it is I think I feel and the meaning I give to that. Is that what I hear you say? L: You have all of it. It is all up to you. K: So if I get my feelings hurt, it's because of a meaning I gave to somebody, is that what I'm hearing? L: Exactly. Exactly. 10 K: So in taking responsibility, what would that look like? Because you got a lot of folks here that are gonna hear that but they don't know how to do that. What would be the process that you found to be… L: You know, one thing is, I have worked with some people to help them through this process. One of them is first letting them understand perception, and usually I go to the internet, and I go to YouTube, and there's a piece that is on perception. You count people playing basketball, and with each team, how many times they pass the ball. In the middle of this they have a moon-walking bear that goes across the stage. Nobody sees that because they're counting the ball. And so as I point that out to them, it's that we see what we're looking for. It's our perception, and so with that in mind, we can never think that what we believe to be true is true. Our perception is very faulty. K: So, in a world this complex, people are confused. Some people are ornery, some people are selfish, some people are all of those things. We're all gonna run in to those things. What's your counsel? L: Again, what my experience is, what I find for me, as I approach that today in my life, is when I return it with love, it dissolves any conflict. I don't have conflicts with people and I even have been asked to come in as a mediator between two people who want to kill each other. I simply bring love into the situation and they end up giving each other a hug afterwards, because that's all it needs is love. I don't, it's funny, people purposely do not swear around me just because they, I don't know, they instinctively know that I don't swear. People don't gossip in front 11 of me and so simply by approaching my life with love that stuff disappears. Even if it is there, I don't see it. K: Yeah, because some of us actually do swear like sailors in front of you. L: I don't, I never, I don't even know. It's not my perception. K: Bringing it that way, when we're worried about…you know, in Christian Miracles, it says that fear of God is the most insane belief mankind ever created. And our Older Brother says that God does not see our weaknesses, our sins, or whatever. How would you relate that to your experience? L: Well, you know, I don't have to do as much anymore. For about a year, I practiced recognizing that when I come in contact with somebody the mind automatically starts to run down this list of judgments about that person. What I would do first is, I would watch how my mind worked when I was out in nature because it doesn't do that, it doesn't judge a tree, it doesn't judge a stream, other than seeing it as beautiful. I simply took the way I looked at nature and put that in the way I saw people. I cut out the judgment. Then you could see just the beauty that is there. K: So if I heard you right, what you're saying is, when I allow everything just to be what it is without my projecting on to it, then I get to see the beauty of what it can be or who they can be? Right? Is that what I'm hearing you say? L: Yep. K: That's kind of cool. One of the comments you made to me a long time ago, not too long after we first met, you talked about when we first met that there was a response in you that caused you to feel uncomfortable. We all have times where 12 we run into situations and people that we think are not where we are or living on a different level that we can't relate to, or all of those things, and so we tend to withdraw from that. What I heard you say earlier was talking about when I bring love to it. What happens when you bring love to it, no matter who you meet--who they are, where they are, what position in life they have, whatever. How do you experience that? L: I experience it--I think, the same thing back. Whatever I put out is what I get back. K: And it doesn't matter who it's with, right? So, what I thought I heard you say when you were talking to Matt was, it overcomes every objection, every block that I have about communing with someone else--regardless of whether they make me feel insecure or whether I wonder if I'm good enough or whether I wonder if they're good enough. L: Yep. K: So, just bring love to it? L: Yep. K: Thanks. L: See, I think the hardest part with that is we get so concerned with how we look, or how we appear, or people are going to judge us, that that's when we put up the walls. If I feel inferior to you then I'm going to find ways to make you look inferior. But if we let all that go, if we just approach it with love…I had to get to a point in my life where I just had to say, it doesn't matter how I look. It doesn't 13 matter how I appear in front of other people. That doesn't matter. What matters is how I treat other people and what I do to help other people. K: So it's kind of a new twist on the Popeye principle? L: What's the Popeye principle? K: "I am one of them." [quoting Popeye] L: "I am one of them." [quoting Popeye] K: And just bringing them up assuming that everyone else is Popeye too. L: Yep. K: Cool. I kind of like that. But we may call it the Lewis Popeye Principle. Okay, so, you have gone through almost all the kinds of experiences that most people would fear. I could never do that. That would be awful. How do you come back? There is a resiliency and an aspect of you that as you know, in the beginning, you undermined yourself and sabotaged yourself so you experienced some of those kinds of things. But then there was the comeback, and the comeback, and the comeback, and then dealing with having the courage to say goodbye to someone you really love, choosing to love yourself more. Those are some of the principles that I'd like you to talk about--where you found that courage, that resiliency to deal with things that most of us will never ever have to. L: Well, you know, at first I'd have to say, and I think this is true for all of us, that if we knew what we were going to experience ahead of time, we wouldn't be able to fathom being able to do it. But we simply take each day as it comes and one day at a time we can walk through it. It doesn't mean that we don't cry. It doesn't mean that we don't back away from life at times. I've certainly had times where I 14 just needed to isolate away because I just couldn't deal with what was going on. There have been times where I've been done with life. I've said this is enough. But overall, I think I love life. I'm grateful for every experience that I've had. Later on in life, going through hard times, I'm able to realize that early life, I'm grateful for those experiences, even though at the moment I may not see the positive in it. If I wait around long enough, I will. K: So taking it one day at a time, sometimes we don't see the big picture. There's always a big picture for us? L: Yes. That's the other thing--realizing that as bad as something may look, we're not seeing the whole picture. We're not getting it all. K: I like what you said but I still want to go back to this idea. When you were hitting those walls, being diagnosed with the death sentence at the time, and that's what everybody considered it at the time, having long term relationships end, those big, big things, what do you think the trigger was to go from being upset, or fearing or not wanting to do this anymore--those statements that go through your head. What was that trigger, do you think, for you? L: Part of it is the fact that I'm very, very stubborn. I'm never wrong. Those two things really play a huge part. It's like when I was homeless. I never saw being homeless as being a fault of mine. I was proud that I could take care of myself on the street. Today, I see how absurd that is, but with my ego and my stubbornness, I was able to block out any responsibility. I blamed my circumstances on the world and everyone in it and would be proud of myself for going through it. I don't know if that answers it. 15 K: Sure. Were there any moments in all of those experiences where you thought to yourself, there's got to be another way? L: Certainly. Yes. I think as a kid from as early as I can remember up to age twenty-two, I pleaded and cried, I literally cried, every night for God to change my world, for God to change me, to change who I was. It never happened. At twenty-two I gave up that my prayers were ever going to be answered. I always wanted something better, but it just didn't seem like anything better would be possible. Of course, it did all change. But again, it only changed when it became useful for me to help other people, like being introverted and quiet. That's when it made sense to plead with God to change, and it never did, but when I needed it to change so I could help other people, it happened almost automatically. K: Now would you say that part of that went from pleading and maybe you meant it and maybe you didn't, to in the moment with Dawn, when you were blowing it, to change? You were willing to deal with a better way to express yourself? L: Yes. K: So there's a little bit of willingness and I guess that happens when you're stubborn, willingness comes a little harder than when you're not. That willingness to accept what may be available to us. I spent some time…oh, I remember what I want to say. I want to ask you about your book. L: Okay. K: I want to ask you what made you decide to write a book? L: Well, I actually have three books I'm writing. One is a fiction, and one is a self-help book and then the autobiography. The autobiography is the last one that I 16 started, but probably is going to be the first one that I finish. The reason that I started writing that was, I wanted to give hope to people who maybe were in a place in their life where they think that things can't be better. I could say that this was what my life was like and this is how that changed. Basically it's a book about giving hope to other people. K: Nice. So tell me about your other two books. L: One is a fiction and it's a…the first part of it is based around a true thing that happened. It takes place up at the monastery in Huntsville. I was staying up there a couple days overnight. Just me, and I'd taken up two other guys with me. We were the only ones in the building except for this one man who was dressed all in black, very sunken in eyes, sunken in cheeks and not friendly at all. So we're sitting down in the library like eleven o'clock at night and we hear these footsteps. We stopped talking and the footsteps stopped. So we start talking again and the footsteps start. We stopped and the footsteps stopped. So that was kind of freaking us out. This guy dressed in black, we finally went in to the kitchen to get some coffee and he's standing in there, it's eleven o'clock at night, with the small kitchen light on, reading a book. So he was really freaking us out now. So that fiction book, that's kind of how it starts. It's about me being up at the monastery and running in to this man. It goes on to where this man ends up. What I do is I turn this book into a thing where the monks actually have more power. They're able to live five hundred years, six hundred years. They're able to walk on water, all that stuff. To keep away from persecution, that's how 17 monasteries were started, where they could be out and away. So it goes along those lines. K: Nice. I like it. L: Thanks. K: Will this be ready? L: I don't know. I have to finish the other one first, which I am working on, so. K: Alright, so tell me about the self-help book. I'm going to need that, you know. L: You know, it's funny, I started that long before I ever started going to the course. The chapters I have written go right along with the course. K: Interesting how that works, huh? L: It's really.one chapter is really about perception. It's really about, I've been blessed to be able to work with literally hundreds of people to overcome addiction and help them in their lives and that. So it's based on what I've learned in helping other people. It's about perception, how we see the world, taking responsibility for ourselves. I learned early on, first part of my life I was a victim, but as long as you're a victim, you give up all your rights and you give up all your power. You are a victim, but that's your choice. So it's a matter of simply choosing not to be a victim anymore. K: Now that victim word is a big word. L: Yes. K: What do you see in your life as the primary perpetrator of your victimizing. L: Me. K: Really? You think a lot of people would be surprised at that answer? 18 L: I'm sure they would. I used to say to, like with Dawn, I used to tell Dawn this when I was working with her. She's the one, the woman that I worked with. I would tell her that if you're angry, you're wrong and it would make her so mad. I met a lot of people that I would say that to, and they would just get very frustrated and mad. If you're angry, you're wrong. K: So, let's see. I get mad and that should tell me I'm wrong, because when I'm mad I'm really wrong. I could see that that was a problem. What did you do when they reacted to this? L: I just chuckle. I've certainly been there. I understand where they're coming from but it certainly left them thinking too, to try and figure out what I meant by that. K: You're an incredible example to so many. What simply is my job in this place? L: To forgive and love. K: Every day? L: Yes. The way I look at it is, we can learn as much as we want to learn. We can learn by studying the course. We can learn all of that. But if we can't forgive and love then it will never do us any good. We can have healing powers, all the intuition in the world, but if we can't forgive and love, it's meaningless. K: So, my job is to forgive. Who am I forgiving? L: Everything. K: Everything? L: Everything that you see as being wrong, or that upsets you, or that makes you angry. K: Okay, I can do that except for that one thing. 19 L: That's probably the most important thing you're working with. K: Okay, so there's no withholding, is there? L: No. K: When you started practicing that, see I find it pretty remarkable that an eighteen year relationship, a partner that I love and want to spend the rest of my life with, walks in the door and says I can't do this anymore. What triggered your paradigm, everything you expected to have happen, with that one change, changed everything. What was the trigger for you, the moment, the process that took you to a place of I am just going to love them? L: I think it started before that moment. Over the last eleven years, I had started to not just see my side of what's happening, but try to see the other person's side. To realize that in any story there's two sides. Two people are getting divorced, there's two very different sides. It's really a matter of okay, I know what my beliefs are, but what is the other person thinking? What is the other person going through? I started to learn that before the eighteen year relationship ended. That doesn't mean that I didn't have moments where I didn't feel some anger that you know, I was twenty-seven when I got into this relationship and now I'm forty-eight, and now because you want out, I'm alone, and I expected to be with someone the rest of my life. I did have some of that, but at the same time, I admired him for having the courage. Our relationship wasn't that good. We'd grown somewhat apart and I admired him for having the courage. I wouldn't, because I had made a commitment that I was in the relationship for life. I don't care how bad it would have gotten. I would have never 20 left it. So he did us both a favor. He had the courage to do that. I admire him because the first part of the relationship he never had that self-esteem. I walked all over him in that relationship and I hurt him really bad, and he would never have been able to say enough. For him to come to a place where he could say I don't want this anymore, good for him. Good for him, and that his self-esteem has grown that much. K: You hear me rail about nice people all the time. Part of nice people is that sometimes, what you're talking about, really is the most loving way to deal with that situation. A lot of people would have thought, just out of the blue, that's not nice. Nice would have been any variety of things that we go through in terms of inside out and over, to try to come up with a story to justify what we do. Tell me about your idea of what it is to be an authentic human being rather than a nice human being. L: I would tell you that I have been a nice human being, the kind you're talking about. I've done that. My nature is to be nice so that people will like me. I admit that. One of the things I learned a few years ago was, because I used to have such resentments against people and what I finally figured out was part of my resentment was simply because I felt like I was being forced to do things that I didn't want to. The fact was, I didn't have the courage to say no. Once I learned how to say no, then I didn't have resentments with people. If I don't want to do something, I just tell them 'no I don't want to.' That kind of helped me get away from being a nice person. I can be more honest with what I'm thinking. I've said no to people and they'd be like, "Well, why? Are you mad at me?" I'd say simply, 21 'no, I just don't want to. It doesn't have anything to do with whether I like you or not. I just don't want to do what you're asking me to do.' The other thing that I really tried to do later on in my life is to be as transparent as possible. I have no secrets. I would tell you anything at all that you want to know about me. I try to live that way so that what you see is what you get. If I do that, then again, it's not about getting people to like me. It's just the way I am. How can I help you? K: So Popeye had it right after all? Eat your vegetables and be honest. L: Yep. K: That's a good thing. Let's talk about this graduation thing. L: Okay. K: That's the ultimate fear for most people. Obviously a lot people do it with grace. There's a difference though in how I watched you. It's that you look it straight in the face. I find that courageous--to be able to look it straight in the face and ask your higher-self the truth about things. Would you tell us how that feels? I would like, you know me, I'm a big person about wanting to throw closet doors open and let's bring these subjects out into the light. Let's talk about that. L: You know, I have to tell you that early on, when I was diagnosed, I did have some periods of some real fear. I've had enough time to talk to my higher-self and the spirit, and to work all that out. I have such strong conviction that it doesn't end here, that there's more than just this. In some ways I'm actually excited to be experiencing what is coming up. The only downside to that is the people around me. I can see they're really struggling and hurting because of it. 22 K: I know you said what I want them to know is, "I'm okay." L: Yes. K: That's important. The honesty, if we're going to be genuine, the honesty about how we feel is, I'll speak for me because that's more true, 'what in the hell am I supposed to do without you?' L: I hear that. I hear that. My partner, Robert, just yesterday he was on the phone with me and he was crying. He still calls me for advice. He called me yesterday morning and he's been fighting with a mechanic who supposedly fixed his car for five hundred bucks and it didn't get fixed. He's been thinking of taking him to court and all this other stuff. He called me yesterday morning and said what should I do? I told him, I said you know, if it was me, I would let it go. I said it's just not worth the anxiety, the stress, and the anger that it brings you. And so he did. He agreed to do that. He had been holding on to a tool that they left in his truck as hostage or whatever. He said, "should I take that back?" I said yeah, that's what you should do is take that back. So he did all of that and yesterday he ended up, his four wheel drive that he needed to get fixed would have been six hundred dollars only cost eighty-five dollars, his truck passed inspection and a couple of other things. He called me up and he's like, "You can't leave. What am I going do without you? Who am I going to turn to for answers? Who's going help me? I'll be all alone if you leave." I hear that from my sister, and I hear that from Dawn and I hear that from other people. K: There's a whole bunch more around you thinking that, but they don't say it. What can you say to them? 23 L: I have a nephew and niece who were having a hard time also and I had my sister tell them to come over so that I could talk to them. Basically what I told them was why I'm okay. For them to experience this experience, be aware of it, and to find the joy in my life rather than the pain of me dying. I told them, 'I won't be gone. You just won't be able to see me. I'll still be around.' K: They may see you once they understand the end. L: Yes. That's true. My sister Lori, she says that she wanted a sign. What she wants is a triple rainbow. I said, 'couldn't you make it any easier?' K: Okay, that's fair enough. I may come up with one or two myself. I had a friend that we said when we get to the other side, call us and about six or eight hours after she passed, one of things we all discovered, at her service was, every single one of our cell phones went off from her number, all at about the same time. It's so true and she was so joyous about it. She came to see, before she'd actually absolutely left her body, she came in and plopped down on the couch and my granddaughter could see her and was looking at her. Her response to me was, "I am released. I am so happy." Then she said, "Don't be too long." You hook up with her. She is one party animal. L: What's her name? K: Jeannie. L: Jeannie. Okay, you've talked about her before. K: Yeah. I've already told her to meet you. L: Okay. 24 K: So, what are we supposed to do without you? I mean, let's deal with this. It's about me. L: Well, okay. What I would say is, I understand the loss and I understand the longing and the hurt, but that doesn't mean that everything in your life stops. It only stops if you decide it's going to stop. You still can go on. You still can…you know, Robert who goes, "What am I gonna do without you?" Well, you know what, you lived twenty-seven years before you ever met me and it was fine. It's been fine the last two years that we've been separated. K: So there will be some who use your moving on as an excuse to drink again, as an excuse to be depressed. What do you want them to know and how can they honor you? Because the truth is, sometimes we feel like our grief, and our pain, and our self-sabotage has to be, we measure it with how much we love you. Look in the camera and tell them how they can honor you. L: If you love me, you will remember me for who I am and you'll smile and you'll laugh and you'll have joy. You'll remember the funny times and the good times, if you love me. It's not about being sad. It's not about beating yourself up and thinking you have to live on daily with the pain. If you love me, you'll embrace life and joy. You'll take whatever lessons I may have been able to help you learn and you'll use them to be happy. K: When in doubt they can say "What would Lewis say?" Right? L: Yep. K: What would Lewis say and what does Lewis usually say when they're in doubt? L: I don't know. 25 K: You don't know? You don't say I love you if you do this? L: Oh yeah. K: Buck up. Take responsibility. L: Yeah. K: You know, that whole vato scene of yours, I find that can be a pretty good spiritual threat. The vato you will come kick their back sides. [vato is either a Mexican word for "dude" or "man" or Chicago slang for 'homie.' Vato is also the title of a song by Snoop Dogg] L: Yeah! Except that most of them know me and so that's not really a threat. That vato scene is only good on people who don't know me. I get that all the time. It's like, "When I first met you, I was really scared of you, but then I learned real fast that you were just a sweetheart." K: I think you can be a sweetheart and get very serious. L: Oh, if I'm serious, people usually cry. If I'm serious they know that something's wrong. K: You could say just because I'm not in the physical, doesn't mean that I won't know if you're lying to yourself? L: Yep. K: And it doesn't mean that I can't come and kick your proverbial, spiritual butt and you'll know it, if you don't remember who you are. L: Yeah. K: I think I just helped you create a threat. No, it's not a threat, it's a promise. L: Yeah. 26 K: Let's talk about…we talked a little bit about your niece and nephew and we've talked a little bit about your sister. Is there anything specific you want to say to other family members or to the people that have been family in the heart? L: As far as my family, the one thing that really sticks out is, in spite of the life I've had, I never ever felt judgment from them. All I ever felt was love. I never felt like they were shaking their head, judging me doing what I was doing, whether I was involved in drugs, or whatever. They were just always there to save me when I needed to be saved or help me. For a large part of my life I had no self-esteem. I think it was really their being able to see past whatever was going on and still love me that helped me to go through those things. K: I think it's natural to review and wonder, have regret that maybe I didn't do enough, I didn't love enough, I didn't help enough, whatever 'enoughs' I didn't do. What would you say to your loved ones who felt that? L: As far as for me, what I didn't do? K: No, no. When they're wondering. L: You know what, I cannot even express how blessed I am in my life for my family and all the other people that have been in my life. I truly believe that I have got to be one of the luckiest people in this world. K: I think you're right. L: I have it all. I truly am blessed. K: Yes, you are. I want to address your dad specifically because to a parent it feels unnatural to outlive your child. I don't care who you are as a parent or how old everybody is. There is this feeling that I should have protected or there's this 27 frustration that comes from what feels like an unnatural process. What do you want your dad to know? L: My father, he's already said to me, he's lost a daughter. I had a sister who committed suicide a few years back. He's already said to me several times, a parent is not supposed to outlast their kid, outlive their kids. When my sister passed away I remember looking at him. He went from being sixty-five years old to ninety-five years old, just how hard that was for him. I think even today there's a little bit of denial about what's going on. I can't know what he's going through. I'm not a parent. I don't know what that would be like. I do want him to know that I love him and the intent was that I was going to stay here in Utah to take care of him as he got older. It just hasn't worked that way. K: I have a feeling there may have been a contract between you. So let's talk a minute about how meaningful it's been to you to have your dad walk this process with you. L: Me and my dad, I've been back to Utah with my father for the last eleven years, and we have become best friends in that eleven years. We help each other. Neither one of us have a memory, but I can fill in his memory and he can fill in mine. So both of us together make up one person, kind of. We walk about the same speed. He's one of my best friends. I love him. I can't imagine him not being here for me at this time in my life. Even now he's always coming into the bedroom, "Do you need anything? Do you need anything?" All the time he's so concerned about can he do anything. Just knowing he's there is enough. K: There's something about having that kind of fatherly…you feel safer, don't you? 28 L: Yes. K: This process is about safer and free-er because he's been there. L: Yes. K: Well, I think I've about covered everything I wanted to ask. What about you? Is there anything more you want to add? Any messages you want to send? L: We've covered just about everything I can think of too. I'm getting ready to have a new experience. I don't want you guys to hurry to get there but I'll be excited when you do come. K: I'm excited for you. I'm jealous. Grand adventure. L: And again, for all the people that I love and care about, just love each other. There's nothing else that I would like to say. Just for the people that I love to love each other. K: And that would honor you? L: Yes. K: We'll do our best. But don't expect us to wait too long. L: To wait what? K: Here too long while you're off having a party without us. L: I'm sure you'll come when you're supposed to. K: Well, that's probably true. I love you. L: I love you too. I appreciate all the help that you've given me. K: Are you guys satisfied with that? Is there anything you wanted? Hey, I do want to ask you a couple of things. If when you're there, God says he needs a lift, tell me the funniest story that happened to you. 29 L: I'll tell you one of the funniest. Me and my family were in Puerto Vallarta and we were going to dinner at this restaurant in this old hotel. It was on the top floor. They just had one elevator that was really slow. I had to go to the bathroom really bad so by the time we get up to the restaurant I decided, well, I'm in front, but I decided that when the hostess takes us to the table, I'm just going to watch and vere off and go, because I needed to go. So that's what I did. I get up to the urinal, I turn around and the whole family is standing behind me. Lori is right behind me and she's like "What are we doing in the bathroom?" They all followed me! K: I think that's what everybody's worried about. We just kind of follow you wherever you go. L: I don't know what the hostess thought when she turned around and there's no one there! [laughter from everyone in the room] K: Oh, let's ask some other questions then. If you had to, they said, who was the most profound person you ever met or a meeting that you had with somebody that was maybe one of the most profound? Is there a situation that happened to you that was a total surprise that…? L: I don't know about a total surprise, but I did just recently in San Diego, I was able to meet Louise L. Hay who wrote that book, You Can Heal Your Life, and tell her personally what that book had meant to me. K: How did you feel about that? L: I felt good that I was able to let her know how her book impacted my life. It was that book that I really believe allowed me to live twenty-two years with AIDS. It 30 was that book that started to change the way I thought. I stopped seeing myself as a victim and realized that I was responsible for whatever was happening in my life. K: Which, then, you turned around and taught others. That book was like the rock on the pond that you slipped on the pond and fell over. L: Yep. K: Pretty remarkable. L: Yep. K: If there was one thing, and I know you've done a lot of work on this, and sometimes it's the silliest of things, but if there is one thing that you could go back in your life and change? L: I have the tendency to say that I wouldn't change anything but I guess the two things I would change are, the way I destroyed my first partner's life. The other, which he's totally aware of, but Robert, cheating on him and doing it so blatantly and openly right in front of him and hurting him. I would change that. K: So let's talk about that. Would you change it when you think about it because you regretted the impact that that had on them, or now does it expand into more than that? L: I'm not quite sure what you're asking, but let me tell you, my belief and what I've tried to do over that last eleven years. I spent the first thirty-eight years of my life going through this wreckage and damage. Eleven years ago I decided to try and clean up the damage that I'd done the best I could and start adding positive to it, so, in that sense, yeah. 31 K: I guess I was fishing. Let me try that again. I think there's a couple processes that we go through. I would have preferred not to have caused carnage for someone else and then it gets to that place where, I would have preferred to have projected myself better. L: Oh no, not the second one. It really was about, I wish I would not have hurt him. It's not important how that makes me look. The fact that I sit here and talk about it. I'm not ashamed of it. I certainly regret that I caused him hurt. K: There's going to be people who watch this that are not going to understand the difference between regret and shame. Right? L: Yes. K: Will you talk to me just a minute about how you distinguish the difference? L: Shame is seeing myself less than a person. Regret is simply not putting a judgment on who I am, but wishing the circumstances would have been better. K: How do you get to that place? For somebody who has all these things in their life that they're beating themselves up over? L: I absolutely hated who I was for the better part of my life. Absolutely hated and was ashamed of who I was and ashamed of these types of things. What I have learned is that guilt or shame serves no purpose. It has no positive aspect at all. It does nothing for the person to beat themselves up over something they've done. It only adds to. It's kind of like taking a bad situation and making it worse. K: So the whole idea of penance? L: I don't, for me or for anyone else, I believe that we do the best that we can with what we have. Good or bad. That's one of the reasons that it's easy to not judge 32 other people because we all are living our life the best we can with what we have. As far as that goes and everything that we do, I think our contracts are made ahead of time with people, even to hurt them. K: So the process then is when you realize that maybe I did the best I could and now I realize there was maybe a better way to do it. What's that process for you? L: It's a matter of being honest with yourself and not justifying it. To take responsibility for your life and your actions. Part of our life experience is to experience who we are, not to get to a place where we can know who we are or remember who we are. K: Well, we could go on forever but I think we'll end it there. The following is Dale Lewis Johnson's personal message about his party. I have been to a lot of funerals and memorial services in my life, and I always think how nice it would be to have had this when the person was still alive. It seems that the only time a person can get everybody that they care about all in one place at one time is after they have passed from this life. I know that most of that is to help them deal with their perceived loss, and that's okay. I feel truly blessed that I have had some notice that my time here in a physical body is drawing to a close, and what an honor it is for me to be able to participate in the mourning process of those that I love and that I know love me. The intent of my life, at least in the last eleven years, has been about helping others on their 33 journey through this life experience. It is a joy for me to know that I can do that up until the end. This party is not about saying goodbye as much as it is a celebration of the gift we have had of being a part of each others' lives. The time here is short for all of us, but has more meaning than we realize most of the time. It is about how our life affects every other life on the planet. I don't see death as an ending as much as I consider it to be a continuation of life without the limitations of this life. We become free of the limitations of the body. The body works great when it works, but when it doesn't, it can become one of our greatest limitations. The body is also one of the greatest contributors that helps us to see ourselves as separate from everyone else, and alone. It also takes almost all of our energy just to be okay in the way of needing money, a roof over our head, clothes, and friends, and we won't even go into how much time we spend trying to fulfill the body's need for intimacy. Laying down the physical body simply frees us from all of that. I do want you to understand though, that even with all of those limitations I have absolutely loved this life. It is because of this that I know that once we lay the body down, it will only continue to get better.

The Marriott,Slaterville City Oral History Collection was created by the residents of the town to document their history. Each participant was provided with a list of questions asking for; stories about their childhood, schools they attended, stories about their parents and grand,parents, activities they enjoyed, fashions they remember, difficulties or traumas they may have dealt with, and memories of community and church leaders. This endeavor has left behind rich histories, stories and important information regarding the history of the Marriott,Slaterville area. ; 28p.; 29cm.; 2 bound transcripts; 4 file folders. 1 sound disc: digital; 4 3/4 in.; 1 videodisc: digital; 4 3/4 in. ; Oral History Program 1an2Cd Fa e r2bl2 rH uM aoardyys 22o00n00 77 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Carl Hodson 12 February 2007 and 22 May 2007 Copyright © 2009 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees ( as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. Archival copies are placed in Special Collections. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description The Marriott- Slaterville City Oral History Collection was created by the residents of the town to document their history. Each participant was provided with a list of questions asking for; stories about their childhood, schools they attended, stories about their parents and grand- parents, activities they enjoyed, fashions they remember, difficulties or traumas they may have dealt with, and memories of community and church leaders. This endeavor has left behind rich histories, stories and important information regarding the history of the Marriott- Slaterville area. ____________________________________ 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 Special Collections All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Carl Hodson, 12 February 2007 and 22 May 2007, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii 1 Abstract: This is an oral history of Carl Hodson. These memories are from two different recordings conducted on February 12, 2007 and May 22, 2007 and concern his recollections of the history of the Marriott- Slaterville area. CH: I am Carl Hodson. I was born August 4th, 1921 in Marriott at my mother's Aunt's place. They lived in Marriott. They day that I was born my father was hauling hay and they were coming with a load of hay because he knew my mother was in labor and Carl Powell was helping him and he tipped a load of hay over on the way to the barn. They had to stop and take care of the load of hay. They always said they named me after him because my name is Carl. I have lived on West Wall Street all my life. Our old home is the home that is on the Nature Center today. My grandfather built the first part of it and then he deeded the place to my father and my father moved in with his father and mother and later on he remodeled the home and it is the way it was sitting in 1941 when the government took it from us, the remodeled home. We have pictures of the home when the government took it in 1941. I was married in 1941and my father moved what we called " the old wash house" from off of the old place and moved it across the street and made two rooms out of it. My wife Louise and I moved into it in 1941 and we lived there in the two rooms until we had three children. No running water, we heated our water on a coal stove and the bathroom was out in the backyard. Once a week was what we bathed at that time, we had a wash tub that we put our heated water in. 2 When I was young, 12th Street was practically a one lane road and it was dirt and hardly a car ever went up and down it. Once in awhile I used to drive a herd of milk cows up and down 12th Street to the pasture every night and morning. Once in awhile you would have to drive the cows off to the side so a car could go by. It was a dirt road and then it winded a little bit in asphalt. It has changed from that until today there is so much traffic on it you can hardly get out onto 12th Street. I don't remember the year it was paved, but at one time they didn't even have snow plows in Ogden. Weber County hired my father to put four head of horses on a big " V" and go up 12th Street and the city asked him to go right on up to Washington and he never did get paid by the city for plowing the snow for them. But he did it with four head of horses on a " V." As things went on, they kept widening 12th Street, industry changed. When I got a little older I started to farm, we started pretty young. In fact, I started thinning beets with my sister Dorothy. Dad would space them and we would crawl along behind him and thin the doubles out and take the weeds out. It was before I started school that we started thinning beets. As time progressed, we had a beet dump over next to the railroad track at 400 West. We hauled our beets over there with the horses and wagon. When I was in school my Uncle Dolph Perry, would always help Dad with the sugar beets and take them to the dump. My mother did the weighing of the sugar beets for years and years— probably as long as they had the dump over there. They had the dump there before I was born. 3 Later on, they did away with the dump and we had to take the sugar beets over to the factory. Julian Powell hauled them for us for awhile and then dad bought a truck and he hauled them with a truck for awhile. When the truck wore out we went back to horses. The last year I farmed I hauled 350 ton of sugar beets from 12th Street up where Peterson's is, that is the property that we owned and I hauled a lot of the sugar beets from there. I would make five loads a day with a team of horses. If I had them loaded up at night we made five and if I didn't have them loaded up at night then I got four. But I'd haul five and a half ton of sugar beets plus, with a team and wagon, over to the old sugar factory. By that time, the sugar factory had closed up. They piled them over there and shipped them up to the factory in Lewiston. I went from thinning beets and working in the field until they did away with sugar beets. We no longer have sugar beets around here. That was one of our main crops. Sugar beets, potatoes, tomatoes, grains, we grew everything. We had two tomato canning factories; Del Monte and Blackington. I hauled tomatoes to both of them with a team. I was about the only one that was still using team of horses. I hauled to Del Monte and I hauled potatoes to Stratford's potato seller with a team. I used horses until the day I quit farming for a living. I had farmed all my life but I quit farming for a living in the fall of 1951 and went to work for the Amalgamated Sugar Company stacking sugar over at the big warehouse on Wilson Lane. During the depression we had a drought. That was before Pineview Dam was built. My father was one of the instigators of getting the Pineview Dam up there. They had a drought and it got so dry that when we planted sugar beets, 4 there wasn't enough water to harvest part of them. The government put in a well and pumped water into the ditch but it wasn't enough to supply all the water we needed. Part of our crops we didn't even harvest that year. That was during the depression and that didn't help the depression situation either. I have lost my train of thought. With the canning factories here and the sugar beet factory it made a lot of difference to people around here because a lot of the women would work in the canning factories. That supplied a job for a lot of the women during the depression and even after the depression. After things got better, the canning factories were still here and a lot of the young girls and even some of the wives that were not tied down with their family would go to work in these canning factories peeling tomatoes and things like that. We raised peas— the old pea viner sits right in the middle of Marriott in the Marriott home and we would haul peas to the pea viner there. During the depression, the railroad was a main force here, it was the hub of Ogden. Anyone that had a railroad job during the depression was sitting pretty, and they were in good shape. One spring we sold potatoes we pitted them in the winter and then got them out of the pit in the spring and sold them for twenty cents per hundred, and they had to buy a sack to put them in on top of that. It was hard times, but I wouldn't change my childhood for anything. I would not trade my childhood for any of the childhoods of today. We were taught to work. Everyone had some milk cows, two, three, up to— we had between fifteen and twenty all the time and the milk check was our 5 main income until the crops came in in the fall. We traded veal calves to the grocery store for groceries. Even during the depression we were never hungry. We didn't have all the money that we wanted. I have a school ring, it cost eight dollar, and I graduated in 1939. Even at that time dad didn't have eight dollars to give me to buy a school ring. My brother Grant had eight dollars and give it to me and I bought my school ring and I still have it today. I remember the price of gas. Bingham's had a store on the corner of 1200 West and 1200 South. Gas was eighteen cents a gallon. I used to go home from school at noon for lunch part of the time if I didn't take lunch to school. I would go down to the old chicken coop and get three eggs and take it down to Bingham's store and trade the three eggs for an ice cream cone. Things were close, things were cheap, but everything was in comparison. Groceries were cheap so it didn't cost a lot of money for groceries and things like that. We had our own produce and our own potatoes and stuff like that, our own meat and milk so we were in good shape as far as something to eat. We never went hungry but we didn't have all the money we wanted to buy things. I had two pair of overalls, one to do the chores in and one to wear to school. I had two good pair I would wear one pair a week, one shirt and one pair of overalls a week and then they were washed the next Monday and I wore the other pair for a week. When I went to high school even at that time I had a pair of pants, one pair of pants for the school year and a couple of shirts. The teacher took us up to Malan's Peak, on a geology trip and I wore the whole cuff bottom of the pants off. The last two or three weeks of school I had to wear my 6 church pants to school because we didn't have enough money to buy another pair of pants. When I was over in the old home, we had a coal stove in the kitchen, and we had a dining room and a front room with a pot belly stove in there and it would heat them. That is the only heat we had in the house. We had the wash house that is my front room today. It was moved off of DDO and across the street when we lived in it. That was where mother did the washing. She had a coal stove up there and she would go up and heat the water in an old copper boiler on the coal stove and every Monday was wash day. She would heat the water up and that is the reason it got the name the wash house. We got running water in the house and we still had the coal stove, but we had a hot water heater where the water was heated with the coal stove, and it went through kind of a little reservoir in the side of the stove, circulated, and heated the water into the water tank. Then mother would get up at four o'clock in the morning and do the washing. In the winter time she would put the clothes out on the line and they would freeze dry and then she would bring them in and roll them up and put them in the basket. The next day she would iron them all. At that time we got an electric pump so we could pump water out to the barn so we had water for the horses and cows. Before that we had a well, with a bucket in it. You pulled the bucket up with a pulley and dumped it into the trough for the cows and the horses to drink. At one time we had a well out at the corner of the house, just off the corner of the house by the cement and we had a pitcher pump in it. Then we 7 would use the well to hang our butter and milk and stuff down into the well to keep it cool. A house was built so that the walls were thick and even when dad built on to the original adobe house he made a three brick wall where he built on. We never had pipes for inside the house even though we didn't have any heating in the house at night. Once in awhile they used to heat up an old flat iron and put it in the bottom of the bed and get your feet warm when you first went to bed. Ordinarily we never had to have anything. Me and my brother always fought to see who was going to get out behind the old kitchen stove. Dad would come out at a quarter to five in the morning and call us and he would light the fire in the kitchen stove. He would always have it prepared at night ready to light in the morning and he would light the fire in the stove and then we would run out and get behind the stove because it sat out a couple of feet from the wall. Me and my brother would go out and get behind where the heat was going up the stove pipes while we put our clothes on. That was our heat until we got out to do the chores. We always had the chores to do with the cows and the horses. We had six head of horses and around fifteen head of cows usually. We would go out in the morning, dad would get us up in the summer time, and we were up at quarter to five and we would go out. I don't know why but after I got older I loved horses and dad always let me get the six head of horses ready, curry them, feed them, water them, and put the harness on them. They would go and do the milking while I got the horses ready. Then we would go in and have breakfast and we 8 were out in the field by eight o'clock in the morning. In the winter we had to stable the cows so there were the stables to clean and the cows to take care of in the winter. We always had to feed and bed the cows and clean the stables in the winter. In the summer, sometimes we would put a little corral in the corner of the pasture and we would have our cows trained so we could just walk up and sit down to them and milk them right in the corner of the pasture and never had to put them in the stands to milk them. We fed our fields off in the fall that way. We would put the cows out in the hay field that had some after growth, the third crop hay and they would feed that off and we would go to the field and milk them. We had a place over in Wilson, forty acres over there and we usually left the cows over there until the first of the year because we had feed over there and the barn. We'd drive over there and milk them, me and my two brothers and dad. We'd put the two cans of milk in the back of the old car and the warmth from the milk would kind of keep us warm on the way home after that. I remember when we got the first side curtains for the car and we thought we were in heaven when we got those side curtains to keep that wind from jumping into the old car. The side curtain was just a flexible piece of canvas with a place in it we could see out. They just clipped onto the side of the car to the door and they opened with the door and stayed right on the door. I started school in the Marriott school in first grade and Miss Robins was my first grade teacher. At that time, if a teacher got married they couldn't teach school anymore. They only taught until they got married and then they couldn't 9 teach anymore. After they were married they were supposed to raise a family and take care of their family. So they wouldn't let married women teach in school. Dad and some of them talked to Miss Robins, she was engaged to Floyd Burnett and he was the principal of the Marriott school, and they were going to get married but they talked them into waiting a year and teaching one more year and she was the best first grade teacher that there ever was. I called her " Flossie," forget her name right now but they got married and they moved. Floyd Burnett was principal of the Marriott school and he started basketball in Marriott. He took us over to the old church, we had baskets in the top of the old Marriott church and they had the floor up there. The M- MEN even played games up there. He would take us over and practice us after school starting in the sixth grade. That is how one year, four out of the five starters on Weber High's team would have been from Marriott if Freddy Powell hadn't had a heart murmur. They wouldn't let him play first string, they used him as a substitute. But four out of the five of Weber High's team were from Marriott. Later on, we had three— the two Morris brothers, Clyde and Floyd Morris, and Delbert Bingham— they had been eligible to play on the M- MEN team but they decided to go up to Weber College. They were first string at Weber College for two years. It was just a junior college and then they went to Utah State and the three of them were first string at Utah State for three years. Marriott has had a good basketball team. I have a trophy that I am going to bring over here. It is a cup from North Weber Stake, at one time there was only four stakes, Weber, North Weber, Ogden and Mt. Ogden were the only four 10 stakes in the area. We played the M- MEN ball in those four stakes. They brought the other stakes in for a tournament at the old Weber College gyM-Menasium, that is where they held the playoff, and after that the two winners from that tournament went to the church finals in Salt Lake. The Marriott ward went to the church finals at that time once and later on we went twice. The last year was, I think, the spring of ' 44 and ' 45 Marriott went to the church finals down in Salt Lake. Julian Powell was our coach most of the years. We didn't have many players but we played Plain City the last year. We played Plain City three different times in three years and there was one point difference in all three games. They beat us twice and we beat them once. We both went to the church finals in Salt Lake. Marriott had a nice ward, a fairly good sized ward. We had all of what we called Butler's Bench and Broom's Bench. My mother was raised there and my grandfather farmed there, there were a lot of homes there. In 1940 the government decided they wanted a supply depot here in this area and the Ogden Chamber of Commerce was given the job of finding the place to locate it. There was a place out in Farr West that had about two homes on it, and it was just salt grass pastures. It would cost hardly anything, just the price of the ground to buy it. It wasn't even top soil. There was also a place out in Cainsville, and they both had railroad to them, they had spurs taken to them from the railroad. The place out in Cainsville was about the same, salt grass and sage brush and very few homes. The Ogden Chamber of Commerce said it has got to be close to Ogden. So they took— I counted them up one day and it was fifty- two homes just out of 11 Marriott that they took for— it was called Utah General Depot when they took it. We had to be out in 1941. I was married the twelfth of June in ' 41 and two weeks later my mother passed away— had a stroke or a heart attack because she was worried so much we had to get out with no place to go and no money to buy a place with. The government just foreclosed and told you to move out. She worried so much that she was standing at the table spreading my little sister a piece of bread and just feel over backwards. She lived ' til about four o'clock the next morning and passed away in the hospital. It cut the Marriott ward in half, it really upset things. The problem was, after they took it they never actually used over a third of the property that they took and then they gave it back to Ogden City and that is where the Nature Center is and where Defense Depot of Ogden ( DDO) is today. They just turned it back over to Ogden City when they closed up. During the war they had a prisoner of war camp for the German and Italian prisoners over on the northwest corner. They would bring the prisoners and have them work in the field. It really had an effect on Marriott. It was such a small ward that if you had a home that you could move off they would sell the home back very cheap. We moved our outbuildings off, moved them across the street. Our old home is the one that is the home on the Nature Center today. That is where I was born and raised, in the home that is still on the Nature Center. One of about two homes that is left in the whole area. It was there before the government took over. 12 After mother died, my sister and her husband, Mildred and Ellis Slater, moved the house that my uncle had lived in. It was a frame and they moved it off of the area and moved it across the street and just East of the railroad tracks. It was a fair- sized house. My father and my two younger sisters moved in with one of my older sisters and her husband. Dad lived there for eight years until he remarried. My other sisters finally got married too, a little later on. My uncle Leonard moved in with them too. We used to get by with what we had. Mother's death was quite a shock to us because it came so quickly. I had an old ' 29 Desoto car and she had been up to see my sisters, in it to see how they were getting along with the house. My sister and her husband were moving. She came back and got out of the car and I got in it to take one of the fellows home that was working for us on the farm and she went in and fell, had a heart attack or stroke, whatever it was. That was the last I talked to my mother. When Weber High School was first built they didn't have a football field. Dad let them use our pasture that was up there on 12th street to come down and practice football in. That is where they practiced football the first two or three years I think after Weber High School was built. When I was put in as Bishop, I think we had two hundred and eleven or two hundred and eighty- one members. It might have been two hundred and eighty- one members in the ward is all we had. Everyone had two or three jobs. At the time, before I was put in Bishop, I was explorer leader and superintendent of the Sunday school at the same time. I was in the Mutual Improvement Association ( MIA) and Clifford Blair was President and Martin Buck was the 13 counselor with me when we put on the ward reunions. The MIA used to put the ward reunions on at that time, so I had a chance to take care of that. I was the activity counselor so I am going to tell you a little bit about the ward reunions we used to have at this time. We used to have a two day ward reunion. On Friday they would let the Marriott school out at noon and we would go up there and they would have a program, dinner and a dance with an orchestra in the afternoon for the kids. Then on Saturday, we had a program in the morning, dinner, a dance in the afternoon, and then we would come back to another program at night and then a dance after that. During the intermission of the dance they would go down and finish up any food that was left down in the kitchen at night. We had to get the programs, at that time people were very giving of their time, it wasn't anything to ask a person to come and sing or play an instrument or to put on something. I remember getting the Osmond brothers. When they first started out they were stood them on what used to be our sacrament table. They were so small that the four of them stood on there to sing. They were just starting out singing and I got them to come and sing at our ward reunion. Marriott and Slaterville just traded back and forth. Everyone from Marriott would go down to Slaterville and everyone from Slaterville would come to Marriott. We had them in the old churches. In the basement of the old Marriott church we cooked everything on a coal stove, later we finally got two coal stoves down there. We cooked everything— had to pack water in and pack water out, dump the water in a tub and back it out. The toilet was out in back. We got 14 along with that for a good many years. We put the water in when I was a counselor in the bishopric. I went in the bishopric in ' 52 and that is when we got water in the church. Before, we had a pitcher pump that they used to put water in the boiler for the old heaters to heat the church. The old heaters would clang and clang when water would start coming into them. I was in the bishopric for nine years with Bishop Marion Powell and then I was called on the High Council and was in charge of the stake farm for six years until I got off the high council. When my oldest boy was old enough to go to Priesthood meeting I said, " I am going to take him, I am not going to send him," so I got off the high council at that time. I got back into the ward and then I was Explorer Leader and Sunday School Superintendent. Then I was made Bishop in June of ' 69. We were always one of the top wards as far as attendance for our Aaronic Priesthood. Even when I was in the bishopric over in the old building our ward was always the top ward in attendance, both boys and girls the MIA. We had real good attendance. That is the only way we was able to survive when they cut the ward in half. Everyone was so willing to work and we had good attendance, a high percentage of attendance. That made things work out pretty good. Dad was President of the Farm Bureau here in the ward for years and I remember when I was real small he used to have Farm Bureau days up at the Ogden Stadium. They would have horse pulling up there. Dad would always take us up to the horse pulling up to the old Warren Farr Park. Then later on they formed the Farm Bureau Baseball League. Dad got a team organized and they played up where Leland Stanger lives today. I don't know who the ground 15 really belonged to. Jimmy Reader put his cows in there for a long time, but I don't know who actually owned the ground. Whoever it was, let them build a baseball diamond on it. Then we had a Farm Bureau League in there for a few years. I don't remember just how many. Afterwards, the younger ones that played Farm Bureau ball had diamonds where they played. The Farm Bureau was quite important at that time. We had a good baseball team, I was old enough at the time, but we had a good baseball team. I never played. I went to the Marriott school for the first seven grades and then they moved the eighth grade from Marriott and Farr West into Harrisville. I went to Harrisville in the eighth grade. I played basketball on the Harrisville team in the eighth grade and then ninth through the twelfth I was at Weber High. For some reason they took Marriott and some of the ones around here. My sister said she started up there in the seventh grade, I don't know for sure but I think she said she went to school up there from the seventh grade on. I had four years at Weber High where most of them only got three. We didn't have a ball team in the ninth grade but I played for Weber in the tenth grade and the tenth grade league. I played for Weber in the tenth and then played for high school in eleventh and then the senior year I got cut off the team and I played M- MEN ball. We had a M- MEN team that year. I've lived here for eighty- five years now and it has been a wonderful place to live. I wouldn't trade my childhood for anything. We went out at night— when I was a kid, a bunch of us— we'd get together and go play " Kick The Can" or " Run Sheepy Run." After a hard day's work we would still have fun. We would go 16 swimming in the summer down in the old Mill Creek. just off of 1200 West. I was in Clifford Blair's place at that time and there was brush all the way around it, we didn't have to worry about a swimsuit. That is where I learned to swim. When we got older we went over to the river where there was a deeper hole. We had a couple of holes in the old river where we used to go swimming. I graduated from Weber High in 1939 and at that time, it wasn't actually during the depression, but things were not good. The economy was not good until after the war started, actually in ' 41 when the economy started to pick up. But, I have loved where I have lived and it has always been good to me. One thing that my dad pounded into our head was honesty. I have been tested so many times, I have been tested, I don't know why but I have always been given a little extra money or something and through dad's example I have seen that if my kids come out of the store with extra change I have seen that they took it back. When I was in the service down in Mineral Wells, Texas, my two oldest children and my wife were down there and my daughter wanted a whistle. Her mother told her that she couldn't have one and her and the lady she was with were walking down the street and here was this whistle blowing. She turned around and took her back and made her go back and give the whistle back to the man in the store and apologize. She was only three years old. That is the lesson we have tried to teach our children is to be honest. We have been tested. I found a ten dollar bill laying on the floor in the store one day and no idea who it belonged to. I didn't know what to do with it, if I gave it to somebody they would put it in their pocket, I didn't want to put it in my pocket so me and my wife just 17 stood there for a little while and there was a couple that came up and acted like they were looking around for something and they looked around and then they headed for the door. I just went over and walked up to the side of them and said, " Did you lose something?" The lady says, " I sure did. I lost a ten dollar bill. We were going to use it for a layaway for my boy for a Christmas present." She just thanked me. But I have been tested so many times that way. Just the other day I went to a store and bought some stuff and a fellow made a mistake so he didn't charge me tax and I spent almost a hundred dollars. So I called him back and told him and he says, " Well, don't make a special trip just to drop it off," then he stopped for a minute and said, " It was my mistake, just forget it." I told him, " If the mistake was the other way I'd be calling you too. I want to be honest," and he said, " just forget it." But so many times I have been given something extra and had to go and give it back because that is the way I was taught by my dad and the way he lived his life. When I was younger, 12th street went down and went on down past where the highway is today and then down through Slaterville and then over through Farr West andcrawled over the river and then into Plain City. I have seen the change from when we used to have to go over the old river bridge. There was no overpass. You went across the railroad and over the river bridge and over into Wilson Lane or else you went on down through Slaterville. Then they put the overpass in and changed and put 1900 West in and that was really a big deal for some time. Then they put in the freeway, it was another expansion and then the Willard Bay Canal went in. There has been a lot of changes that took place in 18 the years that I have been in the community. It has been a great community to live in. I had a chance to sell my place here awhile back. The government wanted it when r a contractor wanted it to build another Internal Revenue Service ( IRS) building. We told them we would sell and then my wife and I drove around looking for a place where we thought we would maybe like to build. We both drove back in the garage and said, " Let's just stay here." So we told them we changed our mind and we weren't going to sell and I'm still there today. 19 Interviewee: Carl Hodson May 22, 2007 (" UV" stands for " Unidentified Voice") CH: I am Carl William Hodson. I was born in 1921 here in Marriott. I have lived in Marriott all of my life. I lived in this house here since we were married. This room that we are in right here now was our home for the first seven years of our marriage. I think it was seven years. It was moved from over where the Nature Center is today. It was a storage shed, we call it the wash house because mother washed clothes in it all the time over there until we had water in the house. Mother used to have a coal stove with an old copper boiler and she would heat the water in this room and wash the clothes in the summer and winter in there and hang them out on the line to dry. When the government took over, Dad moved this over here and had it remodeled into two rooms. There was a petition put down. I suppose we had a bedroom and a kitchen and a coal stove and we had a big old radio that stood in the corner. We had three children in this one room and then for awhile my brother- in- law would pull up a cot in the kitchen and he slept here with us for a short time. This room here has been very special to us as a family. This is one of the Marriott ward basketball teams before I ever started playing with them. Starting from the right side on the back row is Clyde Hipwell, Deloss Bingham, Cornelius DeFriez, Marvin Buck, Wesley DeFriez, Clyde Morris, Euki DeFriez, Wayne Stanger, Julian Powell and Alma Slater. Clifford Blair was the coach and Delbert Bingham, Boss Bingham they called him, he assisted him at this time. He wasn't coach with him very long but he was at this time. The Marriott ward had some of the best basketball team there were in the state. They 20 took a lot of the championships and we got trophies and that. We had been to the church finals in Salt Lake three years for the Marriott Ward. This is Bill Morris's grandfather. Clyde was an outstanding athlete. He never did play high school basketball. He played M- MEN basketball and then he and his brother Floyd and Delbert Bingham decided to go to college. They went to the old Weber College when it was just a two year college and they played first string there, all three of them, for two years. Then they, all three, went to Utah State for two years and they finished their education and they were first string players on Utah State's team for two years up there. My first memories of growing up in Marriott were quite special to me. I was born in the home where the Nature Center is today. There were seven of us in the family and I had a wonderful childhood. Growing up on the farm, I started driving a team of horses before I was eight years old. I loved the farm and being able to be out on the farm. My sister and I started thinning beets before we was old enough to use the hoe. We just went along and took the double beets out after dad went down the row and spaced them. That way we could help him load faster and do some of the work with him. We had a wonderful childhood. It was during hard times, but we were never hungry and we enjoyed our family life when we were little. We played games in the evening and all together as a family. Especially the children would get together and play Crokinole and games like that. We enjoyed each other. Crokinole was you played on a board and it had four pockets, one in each corner of the board. It had rings that you flipped with your finger and you had 21 what they called a " tah," which was a white ring, and you put them all in a pile and you split them with this " tah" and then you would see how many you could get in the corner pockets. You played as partners. The two partners that got the most at the end would win the game. There was a black ring that you put it in the center of the pile. The one that got the black ring in got an extra twenty- five points. That is how you played the Crokinole game. We played " Kick The Can" when we would get together. We'd get some boys and go down on Bingham's corner. There was an arc light down there. In the summertime we would go down there and place a can out in the middle of the road and you'd go hide and somebody was supposed to go watch the can. You had to be able to slip in behind the one that was watching the can and kick the can. Everybody that had been caught was turned free again and they went and hid. Everyone had to be caught before the one that was watching the can got to go and hide. Then " Run- Sheepy- Run"— I am not as familiar with that right now as I used to be, but it was another game where we went and hid and someone would have to come and find you. In the summertime sometimes we'd go over a quarter mile away and hide. We'd have to go and search out the fields and find where they were hiding. My Grandmother come from England. They went up the Mississippi to Missouri, up the Missouri to Ashton, Kansas and at Ashton, Kansas they got off. They had been so short on food on the boat when they were coming that her father had left all the food for the kids. Just a few days after they got to Ashton, Kansas he passed away, and he is buried in there. Grandma was sixteen years old and she walked as a pioneer all the way to Salt Lake City. She came with 22 David Valentine, the company clear from England on the boat and he brought them right on out to Salt Lake. They came as a wagon train, not as a handcart company, but she walked all the way. There was not room in the wagons so she walked, a lot of it was bare foot. Grand- dad came from England too. He came a little later. He was about sixteen years old when he was in Nauvoo with the Prophet. He and his father, John Hodson, bid the Prophet goodbye as they went down the martyrdom trail and went to Carthage Jail where he was killed. My great- Grandfather was a wagon maker and they stayed— after they left Nauvoo they just went across the border, I don't know which state, and he made wagons for the pioneers to use to come out here to Utah. They both settled in the Kaysville/ Layton area and that is where my Grandmother and Grandfather met. Grandfather came up here, cleared ground and homesteaded. This is the ground that he homesteaded when they were first married out here. They lost seven children before they were five years old. Grandma lost her little girl and it upset her so bad she didn't want to stay here anymore so they went across the street and bought two acres of ground off of Allen who had married Grand- dad's sister. He had homesteaded across the street and sold them two acres over there. They built a log cabin on that and the log cabin is still here in the ward that they lived in. They raised several of their family in this log cabin. Dad farmed all his life. The boys all wanted to be farmers, but things were changing. There wasn't enough ground at that time for three or four to make a living on one farm. I farmed for several years after we were married, then I had 23 to go out and get a job. My brother Grant wanted to stay on the farm so I went and got a job and he went to work off the farm. I have had some ground to run even though I had a job on the side. I farmed all my life. Farming is what I was going to do so I never thought I needed to go to college. That is one occupation you need college experience for now, learn all these new techniques and all the pesticides and insecticides and everything. You need a college education to be a farmer nowadays. I think the golden age of the community here was when I was real small. Life was so simple, we traded farm equipment and we did everything together. The farmers would get together and take care of one another. If something happened to one of the farmers the others would go in and harvest his crops and do whatever they had to do. I think that was the golden age. It was a real special time in my life when my mother died. It was the time of the pea season. The whole ward turned out and harvested the whole pea crop and took them to the pea vinery and took care of the crop for dad when my mother died. She was only fifty- five years old. We had just been moved out of our home over where it was DDO. She was worried and had a stroke/ heart attack or something. She died and the ward came in and took care of us at that time. I think the greatest disaster that I ever remember in the ward was the first few months when we were married we lived in the upstairs of my Uncle Rudolph Perry's home. It was a two story building down on the corner of 1200 West and 1200 South. One Sunday morning it caught on fire and the fire department responded. They got down there but they didn't know how to get the water out of 24 the ditch. We had it all backed up so they could pump it out of the ditch, which they had to do at that time. The fireman wasn't experienced enough so the pump sucked air and they couldn't get it primed again and it burnt the house to the ground. All of our wedding presents that we had— all of the nice things that we didn't have room for in the two rooms here we had left down there in storage and it burned all of our best wedding presents that we had. That was the biggest disaster that we ever had in our life. I think some of the most influential people that I have known in the community is Bishop Richie and his counselor Lawrence Slater and some of the old timers that were leaders in the church. Bishop Richie was bishop for twenty-two years. Lawrence Slater was in there most of the time with him. They were a great influence on a lot of people. The Powell's have been a great influence. Bishop Marion Powell was bishop for eleven years. I was a counselor to him for nine out of the eleven years. He had a great knowledge of things and he really got the ward going financially after we were divided. They took away so many members when they took the DDO. He was a great influence. Julian Powell lived here and was quite an influence in the ward. There have been a lot of people that have been outstanding members of the ward. The DeFriez's— they were Dutch and they had a large family. They were a great influence to the ward. This is a Marriott Corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- Day Saints seal that has been in the Marriott ward for ever since it was organized I 25 guess, and even before it was organized. I am not sure when it was made but it is the first seal of the Marriott Ward Corporation. I feel that the stamp, the corporation stamp, was the leadership of the church and the leaders of the community. They had these stamped to seal their official business as a corporation at the time that the ward was formed and when it was incorporated. The Bamburger railroad was an electric line that ran from Ogden to Salt Lake. I guess it must have took care of Salt Lake. My parents used to go out to Salt Air on the Bamburger. When I went into the service in 1945, the Bamburger was still running and I caught the Bamburger and went to Salt Lake. I was inducted into the army at Fort Douglas down there. At one time the railroad went clear to Manti. Whether that was the Bamburger I do not know, but my mother and dad were married in the Manti temple in 1911 and I was wondering why they went clear down to Manti? They went on the railroad, so the Bamburger must have been clear to Manti and my Grandmother's family, many of them were working in the Manti temple. That is where they wanted to be married, so they went on the railroad down there. When we were young there was a new family that moved into the ward and it was a young girl and a family. I kind of had my eye on her but she had her eye on somebody else. She moved in when she was twelve but I didn't get to know her for awhile. After she got older we were in a roadshow where the wards took roadshows around to all the different wards in the stake. We were in the roadshow together and on our first date we went to Farr West. It was our last 26 place to show the roadshow and I asked her if she would come home with me and mother and dad were kind of in charge of the roadshow at mutual, so there was the van and some of the others in the family and all the room left was for her to sit on my lap in the back seat. That was our first date, the first time I took her home. Then we got together and we were married in the Salt Lake temple on the 12th of June 1941. We moved in to these two rooms here and then we had Donna and Brant. I went into the service and then my wife Louise and Donna and Brant, they decided they were going to come down to Camp Wolters, Texas and be with me while I was in basic. Them and another girl whose husband went at the same time, they went down and stayed at the Crazy Water Hotel in Mineral Wells, Texas. Then they came home and I came home and went over to Korea as occupational forces in Korea at the end of World War II. I was gone a year to the day. Nancy came along, she was born in 1947. So there were the three children and Louise and I here in the home together. We have raised seven children. We lost a daughter when she was twenty- five or twenty- six years old. We have still got seven out of the eight with us and we sure have appreciated our family. Our courtship went for about four years, but we didn't have an expensive courtship, we had a lot of fun. There were four couples of us that got together and we were the only one of them that wasn't married actually. We went to all the dances in the ward and the stake and different activities. We went camping together especially after we were married. We had a wonderful time together. Some of us was playing basketball so we went to the basketball games. That 27 was the reason we were with the others mostly, were because we was playing basketball together. One fellow didn't play basketball. I remember one incident— we went to a formal dance. The oldest fellow that wasn't playing basketball— he had a Jeep Willey. They were just a little car and we went to a formal dance and eight of us got out of that little Willey. People stood there with their mouth open wondering how we all got into that Willey with the women having formals on. Julian Venice Powell was real close to us too. We did a lot of farming together and we used to get together and take potatoes out of the pit. We would go down and sit in the old barn at night with the lights on and cut the potato seed. Juke and Venice would come down and help us cut the potato seed. Then we went and planted them. When we were in the sugar beets we would harvest our sugar beets and then go down to Julian Powell's and harvest his sugar beets. We worked together on a lot of farm projects. They were very close, here in the second house east of us for many years. They came in to our home one night and our daughter had— it was our son that night— had croop and they had come down and were going to take him to the hospital for us and take us with him. When they got here the croop kind of loosened up so we didn't have to. They were always real close to us, and we went on trips with them. Our first trip up through Idaho and Oregon— the six out of the eight of us that are together in this group went as far as Vale, Oregon on a trip. We were real close and shared a lot of experiences together. Julian has had a lot of influence on our lives. 28 One other thing that I didn't find out until I was going through the records was that Hyrum Willard Marriott was the one that confirmed me a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- Day Saints I am not positive, but Moroni Marriott was the second bishop of the Marriott ward. My Uncle Dolph Perry bought his home from Moroni Marriott and there was a grainery on the property, and I am not positive but I would say, that Moroni Marriott probably built the grainery. After my Uncle died, my cousin Sarah Perry gave me the grainery and I moved it up here and it is still sitting behind my house here today. The house that Uncle Dolph lived in, it burnt down in the fire. It was on the northwest corner just off of 1200 West and 1200 South in Marriott.

The Marriott,Slaterville City Oral History Collection was created by the residents of the town to document their history. Each participant was provided with a list of questions asking for; stories about their childhood, schools they attended, stories about their parents and grand,parents, activities they enjoyed, fashions they remember, difficulties or traumas they may have dealt with, and memories of community and church leaders. This endeavor has left behind rich histories, stories and important information regarding the history of the Marriott,Slaterville area. ; 31p.; 29cm.; 2 bound transcripts; 4 file folders. 1 sound disc: digital; 4 3/4 in.; 1 videodisc: digital; 4 3/4 in. ; Abstract: This is an oral history of Julian Morris Powell. It was conducted September 23, 2007 and concerns her recollections of the history of the Marriott-Slaterville area. JP: I am Julian Morris Powell. I was born January 20th, 1911. I am getting a little older now. I am ninety-six years old. I don't think quite as fast as I used to. My dad was Thomas Ezra Powell and my mother was Catherine Morris Powell. I am the only child born of the two of them. I don't have any full brothers or sisters. My dad had a family and his wife passed away, my mother and him lived in the Marriott ward close together for years and years and their partners had left and my dad had six children and my mother had three. They married, and I am the only child of that marriage. Dad and mother and ten children and I was the youngest of any of them. Here is a picture of the Marriott ward basketball team. I will talk real short about them. Well over here in this left side is Clyde Hipwell. His dad Bill, moved over there from West Weber, and his mother was born and raised in Marriott where he was born. Deloss Bingham was the son of Dell Bingham. He was born in Marriott and grew up there and lived there all his life. His mother died when he and Delbert were just young children. The other one is Cornelius DeFriez. He is next to the youngest in the big family of the DeFriez family. He played basketball with us for maybe a year or two, but not too much. The next one is Marvin Buck. He was born and raised in Marriott, a son of Luther and Sara Buck. He lived there all his life until a few years after he was married. The next one is Euki DeFriez. He played with us for several years. He is an exceptionally good ball player. I would have to say at this point that he was the best athlete in the DeFriez famiy. There were quite a few of them and they were tall but he played with us several years and a good all around player and fast man. The next one is Clyde Morris. He played with us some and then he went and played up at the Agricultural College in Logan. He and his brother and Delbert Bingham went up and played and won the championship up here in high school. Then they went up and played, the four of them, up in the Utah State Agricultural College and they won the championship up there. The other DeFriez one that I said was Wesley and he played with us several years. The next one is Wayne Stanger. He played with us a few years. The next on is myself. We went to the Salt Lake tournament eight consecutive years and then the war came on and we were out for a couple of years. Then we went back again and I coached the Marriott team and we went to Salt Lake for the finals eight consecutive years and then we went back another two or three years. The next one is Elmer Slater. He didn't play with us too much. He was kind of short and small but he was always on the job and did the best that he knew to do. The one sitting over in this left hand corner was Delbert Bingham and the one on the right hand side down was Jay Clifford Blair. He coached us for several years. We went up here in Weber and Ogden City and we went down there under his direction as the coach for about five years. Then he quit and I took over as a player and the coach for several years. Clifford was an exceptionally good athlete and he played for the Farm Bureau for Marriott. The Farm Bureau league has one of the best catchers in Weber County. Well this was a good team. This picture doesn't have one of the better players that was on the team named Sam DeFriez. He wasn't as fast as some of the players but he was real tall and he was real strong. A lot of times he would never come back on defense. We played a five man defense and a lot of times he would never come back on defense because he would stay close to the basket and very few times he would miss. He shot if he was close to the basket. One of the best players—he didn't play with us too many years, but when he did play I would say he was the best score man that we had. We were playing up in the Weber gym up 24th street in a tournament and he said to me, "When I put up one finger I want the ball and I want it now." He put up his finger for me to throw it and get him the ball. He was in a good position to score and a kid from up in the balcony hollered down, Sam and his family all came here from Holland and this kid from up in the balcony hollered down and said, "Where's your wooden shoes?" He turned to look up there to shake his fist at them and I had let the ball go. The ball hit him right on the side of the head and dropped him just hard right down, and he hit on his shoulder. I ran over to him and rubbed him and got him up, and he played the rest of the game but he hit right on his shoulder. I thought maybe it had hit his head but it didn't. It knocked him flat down. He was an exceptionally big man and a good player. One time I was playing and about five or six players were under the basket pushing it up trying to get it in, he didn't jump, he stood there and he had his one leg bent and I just ran in and the ball was up bouncing around the basket. I ran in and I stepped right just above his knee right on his leg with a basketball rubber shoe and tipped the ball to his brother Euki and he scored. Sam come back and was rubbing his leg. He said, "I wonder what went wrong with my leg." But I had stepped on it with a rubber sole and it had kind of burned his leg but he was an exceptionally good player. Never to give up. We went down eight consecutive years from this area to play in the church finals in Salt Lake. We went eight consecutive years and then missed a few. We were playing and they notified us—I was coaching them then—and they said that they had one too many teams in the tournament at Salt Lake for the finals. Then we'd flip a coin to see if we went or if we didn't go. I said, "Well who is the other team?" And they said, "You and a basketball team from Pocatello, Utah were tied to go in," and it was up to one of us to go. He said, "Would you like to flip a coin?" And I said, "No. Send them down and we will play them." They sent them down and we beat them. Then one time, nothing to do with the church basketball but they had a tournament up at Malad, Idaho and they sent a team from down here up there. They went up for one night and played at Malad. Marriott got beat so the kid that was going to drive that day said he wasn't going up to play anymore because they got beat. So we had a guy working there, his name was Lee Dopp. He had his car in the shop getting it fixed and they would give him a V8 Ford. So we got our heads together and Clyde and Floyd Morris and Delbert Bingham, and Riley Shaw who was my brother-in-law and me. We had to drive fast to get up there to play that afternoon. We didn't know we were going until noon. We drove up to Malad and played in a tournament there and we played the Fort Hall Braves and we beat them in the afternoon and we went out and got something to eat and came back and played the Mendon Wildcats again that night for the championship. We beat the game in the afternoon and we won the next one again at night. When we came back they had fixed his car from the Ford motor company and they came out to bring his car back to him and his wife said, "Well he is out of town." They said, "Where is he?" She said, "He is in Malad." They said, "Oh he can't take that car across the state line!" But we came back, we got back after midnight. We went up the next morning to the Ford motor company and I said well we was broke down and this guy took us up there and brought us back and they said, "Okay." They wouldn't press any charges against us. While we were in the process of playing a lot of basketball for the church, some professional teams would come here and play. Sometimes we would play them a full game and sometimes we would only play them a half. But they were professional players. A team came from a clothing store in Wichita, Kansas and they were all white players. I have never seen a team with as pretty of suits as they had on. They were professionals and we played them and they liked to shoot long shots and not play any rough stuff. I don't think I ever did see them shoot a long shot that went in. It just seemed like they didn't score up close and they were a professional team. They would pass the ball around in back of their selves and to another player and that was the best team that we did play, the Wichita Kansas Clothers. Then we played the Iowa Ghosts. They were all black and they were traveling across the country. We played them maybe two or three consecutive years. They would come through and they would call and say they would be here on certain dates and they would pick someone and we played them. The center's name was Sue K. Simmons and we both got the ball in the center of the floor so the referee called a tie up ball. He was about seven feet tall. I crouched down just a little bit, and I thought well maybe if I jump as hard as I can jump he will stay flat footed and just tap it. Maybe I can jump as far as he would just reach and I could block the ball. So I crouched down and when the referee blew the whistle to start I jumped as high as he stood flat footed and he just reached out with his right hand and put it around me and put me right around his hip and reached up with the other hand and knocked it down to one of his players. His name was Sue K. Simmons of the Iowa Ghosts. The Globe Trotters were all black and we played them several times, when they were traveling through, particularly toward California. They would call in here and sometimes we would play them a full game and sometimes we'd only play them a half game, but they were all professional players. We tried to beat them but we never could come close in doing it. One—I can't remember what his name was now—he was black and little and he was a guard. He went out around me, I was over close to the side and about half way down the gym, and he stepped right out around me and down to the basket. A little later in the game he wanted to do the same thing and he came right around the sideline dribbling and when he went to go out around I just leaned over and caught him on my right shoulder and he lit about the third bench up on the bleachers. I can't recall his name right now. He was a play guard and was fast but he wasn't that big. One time when we were playing mutual ball and going, like I said, eight consecutive years down to Salt Lake and after that we went a few years after, after the war. We had a good team. The Marriott family had moved up in the twelfth ward, and it came our turn to play them to see who was going to Salt Lake, and it happened to be my Aunt Nell Marriott's birthday that day and so they said, well, they would close her birthday a little earlier in the evening because they wanted to go to the ball game because Marriott was going to play the twelfth ward. They brought a couple of guys down to Salt Lake to play with them and when we were in there warming up that night Deloss Bingham came over to me and he said, "Did you see the shoes that Russell Marriott has got on?" And I said, "No." I looked at his shoes, we were just getting ready to play them and warming up and he said, "He has got all leather shoes on. I have never seen anyone with all leather basketball shoes on." I said, "Well, we don't care what kind of shoes he has got on but we have got to beat them." So we started to play. Russell was a good player. He was left-handed and he liked to go up and play next to the wall on the outside, just inside the boundary and then cut in to the basket and he would shoot with his left hand and he was hard to guard. We were well aware of that fact and they had one of their best players with him. I remember his name was Fred Shots. He was an exceptionally good player and Russell was expecting him to score real well. He had played with us several years and we knew where he liked to play. He liked to go up the left side and stay just inside and then come in and scores with his left hand and to reach over a lot of times you would foul him. But we were aware of that so before he would cut in to the basket we would travel right along the side of him and crowd him a little bit so he couldn't get that left hand up. He would have to cross over. Sometimes he would lose the ball and he would whirl around. When he went to do anything that was real hard for him to do he would always stick his tongue out to the side like that. He would stop and stick his tongue out and whirl around with his fist but by the time he got turned around everybody would be gone. He would turn around several times with his tongue out, biting and swing with his right hand because we wouldn't let him score with his left. We beat them and we got four points ahead of them right on the start and then they never did catch us. Just a little while before the end of the game they put Woodrow in and he was a younger one, they put him in but he only played a couple of minutes and they took him out. We never did get behind. We stayed ahead of them all the way through. They had a cheering crew there and a group of young people in a section for the twelfth ward and they were really trained to cheer for them. But when the game was over, Russell's dad, Will Marriott, he was there sitting with the twelfth ward. They had just moved in the twelfth ward about a year before that. We all had suits on with Marriott written across them. When the ball game ended and we were still ahead of them, we stayed ahead of them all the way through. Russell's dad, who was my uncle, got up and was real cold and he went down off of the bleachers a little ways and with his hat in one hand and his overcoat over his arm on the other and turned and walked in front of the twelfth ward cheering crew and he said, "What the hell is the trouble? Can't anybody smile?" And then he came over and congratulated us for beating them. I always thought that he wanted us to win although he had moved into the twelfth ward. We had his name Marriott wrote right across our suits. I was always of the opinion that he was glad that we beat the twelfth ward but he came over and congratulated us and then smiled and walked out of the gym. It was cold that night. There were only about sixty-five families in the Marriott ward. They had a dance hall there and a stage in the one end. They took that stage out and that gave us about another thirty feet so it was a pretty good sized gym for us to play in. Some of the toughest teams we had to play in the league for the mutual was probably North Ogden and Plain City and the Eighth Ward of Ogden, the Fourth Ward of Ogden, and the Seventeenth Ward of Ogden. Other than the Plain City—they were all pretty well city wards. They had a big group of people to pick from because they were big wards. And we only had about sixty-five families in the ward. Sometimes they had good players and they would find out where the best team was and so they could go over and rent an apartment. Some of them were married guys and some of them were single. They would go and rent apartments in that ward so they could play with them. One night I remembered I was playing and Clifford Blair was coaching us for several years. I don't remember right now just who we were playing but we were getting to the end of the game and we were only three or four points ahead and Clifford called a timeout. Deloss Bingham was playing forward, he was not very big but he was fast and a good scorer. Coach called a timeout and we went over to see what he wanted and we were real close. We were just a few points ahead of them. He said to Deloss Bingham, "What the hell is wrong with you? Why aren't you going like you are usually doing?" He said, "I got the skin off of my foot and I have got a sore foot." And Clifford said, "You'll go back in and forget you got a damn foot!" Now that is the kind of coaching we did get. He came back in and we won the ball. We played four nights to get to go and we had to win. I played the first night and I turned an ankle. That was the only time in all of the time I have played that I ever turned an ankle, but I turned an ankle that night and we still won the ball game. The next morning I went up to Doctor Seidner. He was in the office and I pulled off my shoe and I said, "Can you see anything wrong with my ankle here or what you can do for it?" He said, "I don't see much of anything wrong with it." So I thanked him and pulled my shoe on and walked down the hall to Doctor Clark Rich. Now his dad was a doctor before him, Ezra and Edward Rich. They were half brothers but they were both doctors. Technically Ezra Rich came to our house when I was born to deliver me. But I walked down the hall and his son Clark Rich was the only one in his chair. It was in the morning and he was looking at the early newspaper. I went in and pulled my shoe off and I said, "Can you see anything wrong with my ankle?" He said, "A blind man could see what is wrong with that!" So he took a bandage and bandaged it up and he said, "Now I'll undo that and you watch how I do it. You bring it up the outside; you take it down on the inside and bring it up on the outside." And he banded it up again. He said, "I'll tie that up for you and you keep this, I won't put it that tight." Then he said, "Tonight, when you get ready to play you tighten that up real tight and at the half your foot will maybe go a little numb. At the half you come out and loosen it and then before you go back in, tighten it back up again. Always pull it up from the outside out." I did that and I played alright and at the half I loosened it a little and pulled it back up. It did get a little numb but I played that night and went down to Salt Lake and played in the tournament. It never bothered me; I just tied it up every night for the rest of the season. I was born in 1911 and World War I with Germany was in 1918 and so I was seven years old when the war was on. They took one of my brothers. Carl went up to Logan to the training camp and Clifford Blair, he was twenty-one on the fourth of June. He had to register on the fifth of June. He said, "Oh why couldn't I have been born later and I wouldn't have had to register?" When that war came on, I was only seven years old, but we had a lot of sugar beets and they took him and Frank Tribe who was my oldest sister's husband. Guy Wecker was my other sister's husband, and Clifford Blair and then a lot of the men of our neighbors in our community, took them in World War I. They took them in the late summer. My mother went up and got a letter. I remember going with her, I was seven years old and we went up in the Eccles Building and saw Caleb Marriott. He had just graduated and opened an office as an attorney. My mother had been to an attorney and wrote a letter to the government to see if Clifford could come home to harvest the sugar beets. We never did hear from them so we went in the Eccles Building and kicked on the door. Caleb Marriott had just graduated and he was admitted to the bar. He would take his lunch with him, eat his lunch, and then he would take a nap for an hour. The door was locked but his dad said he would be there. So I went there with my mother and I kicked on the door. I remember kicking on it with my shoe and he opened the door and he had taken a nap. It was just after lunch. My mother went in and told him what we wanted and he said, "I will write a letter." He wrote a letter and in two weeks Clifford came home. He was in Presidio, in California in the camp. He sent that letter there and he released him and he came home. We got all the sugar beets out and then he went back. Well when—I was going to tell you about General Pershing. When I went there with my mother when they marched them all from 24th street down and down 25th and into the railroad yards, I would guess that they must have had 150 men in uniform, young ones that they had picked up then. My brother and our neighbors were among them. I went with my mother and they marched them down off of the hill and into the railroad yards. They had a passenger train there and it had bars on the window. They didn't let them stop to speak. You didn't bother them at all. They had officers with them and they stayed right in line. They walked up the steps and into these cars, a whole trainload of them with bars on the windows. I stood there with my mother and I know I cried. I cried a little bit because I thought I would never see them again with the bars on the windows. They went to the camp and later on in the early fall, they sent General Pershing. "General Pershing is coming to town! He'll be at the Depot and he'll talk shortly." I pleaded with my mother and we went with a buggy and a horse, tied it up, and then walked over to the Ogden Depot on 25th street. We waited just about five minutes and they switched the car. They had a wooden platform there on wheels that they had made. It was just a platform on wheels but it was high. They pulled the passenger car in and it stopped right in front of us and a couple of men went over and wheeled this wooden platform over to the door and they opened the door on the passenger train and General Pershing walked out onto that platform. He had all the ribbons and the citations on his suit. He didn't have a hat on, he was gray-headed. He was a medium sized man and he walked out on that step and he said, "We are going to end the war and we are going to send your boys home." I thought that was the best news that I had ever heard. He talked for, oh, maybe two or three minutes at the most, then he waved goodbye and stepped back in and they moved the car I guess to some other place for him to speak. I waited for that time and sometime after—that was in about August I'd say and along in November all the whistles started to blow. There weren't many cars around then but there were a few. They were honking the horns but there were a lot of whistles blowing in Ogden City and you could hear them out where we lived in Marriott, just down 12th street. Our family was gone working on milk routes and farming and whatnot. Just my mother and I were home. She said, "The operator won't talk to you on the phone, so you go catch that gray horse and go from where we live over across 12th street and the railroad track over to 17th street and ask Mrs. Wecker." Her boy was Guy Wecker and he had married my sister before he went in the military. "You go over and ask Mrs. Wecker if she can get the operator to tell her what the whistles are and the trains blowing." So I got on the horse and rode over there and they had a little fence up in front of their house. Her daughter was there and she said, "What can I do for you?" I said, "I want to talk to your mother." So her mother came out on the sidewalk and I said, "I want to know if you can call the operator and find out what all the horns are blowing and all the whistles are blowing." She said, "You tell your mother that you can't talk to the operator, but she just keeps saying, 'They have caught the Kaiser.' And then in a second or two she'd say, 'They caught the Kaiser.'" So I said, "But she wants to know what the whistles are." And she said, "Well you tell her that they have caught the Kaiser." So I went on home and my mother was standing in the yard by the house as I rode in on this old gray horse. She came right over to the horse and she said, "What did she say?" I said, "She said to tell you that they have caught the Kaiser." She put up her hand and smiled all over. She said, "The war is going to end. The Kaiser is the head of the German army and they have gotten him so the war is going to end." I thought that was the happiest time that I had. Sure enough, in about December, just about Christmas time, they shipped those boys from our community and a lot of other soldiers home. They were home for Christmas. Years after that, I was seven years old then, and when I was about sixteen or so I was in a meeting and they said, "Other than your dads or your fathers, who would you think was the greatest man that you ever saw or talked to?" I guess there was about fifteen in that circle and I was almost to the end, not quite, and they went around. When they come to me I said, "It was General Pershing. He was the best man I ever knew and ever did see." They said, "You didn't know General Pershing." And I said, "Yes, I did. I went up to the train and he walked out on the little platform and he said, 'We are going to end the war.' That was in about October and then in November, about a month or so later, I guess that was about August and I said, "He said we are going to end the war and send your boys home." I said I thought he was the greatest man I had ever heard speak. If I knew the future, like I remember the past I would be pretty smart. It isn't hard for me—at times I recall lots of things that have happened in the past and I grew up pretty active. Like I said, when the war was on I was seven years old and when it ended I'd had a birthday and the war ended in 1918 so I was only seven years old that winter. Then coming in the spring in January I became eight years old. I was active, and we had a big family, four girls and six boys. I don't have any full brothers or sisters. My dad lost his wife, she died with a heart attack and my mother married my dad and I was born when she was thirty-four years old. She had three children and he had six. They had known each other, born and raised in the same ward. They decided they would get married. They had lost their partners so I was the tenth child. When I was a kid I enjoyed growing up with this family. Although I was on one side and some on the other, that didn't bother me and didn't seem to all the way through my life. I respected them as my full brothers and sisters. My oldest sister on my dad's side was Ethel and she used to curl my hair. I was blonde. I had kind of golden colored hair and she used to put it up. They didn't have bobby pins and stuff like that then, they had hair pins. She used to tear strips of cloth and put my hair up in curls. When I got three years old I thought maybe somebody would think I was a girl, so I said, "I guess I had better go have my hair cut." My mother took me up the next morning and just down 24th street, right by the Eccles Building there was a barber shop, a big long barber shop. I walked in there and climbed in the first chair. It was in the morning. The barber got a board and put it across the arms of the chair and set me up on there so he could reach me. He cut my curls off and laid them all in an empty chocolate box. He laid it in there and wrapped it up and tied a string around it. That was the first cut I had ever had. I guess I was about three years old. I took the box, and when I went home I had this box under my arm. I handed it to my sister Ethel; she is the one that always curled my hair. I handed it to her and she cut the string on it and undid it and my curls were all laying kind of golden color in there and she cried. She put her arm around me and she cried because that was the first hair cut I ever had. Like I say, I was born in Marriott in 1911 and I don't remember much about Ogden City until I was about three years old. We had a dairy farm and a crop farm and whatnot and ran that all with the horses on iron towered wagons. My dad had two retail routes and two wholesale routes. There was no refrigeration then. You had to pack things in ice in the summer and cover them in the winter to keep them from freezing. When we would go into town—in Ogden City we sold all the milk. My dad had a big herd of cows and then he bought a lot of milk. Ten gallon cans and then processed it. We delivered that into Ogden. You might say we had to put ice in the bottom of the wagons in the summer because the jarring of the wagon would churn the bottles of cream and we'd have whipping cream and coffee cream and milk. The jar of the wagons would shake that whipping cream and when you would get it into town it would have about an inch or half inch of yellow butter on top. We had to pad those wagons all up with canvas and then put ice on them or whatever to keep them cold in the summer and keep them from freezing in the winter—drove them all with the horse wagons. Then there were a few grocery stores around and I remember going to town once in awhile with my mother. We drove a horse and buggy, and up in the front was a dashboard and you had a lap robe you threw over your legs, and there was a socket where you could put the whip if you had one, and we drove a single horse on that buggy. It had a top on to keep the storm off you and put a lap robe on you, then go into town and tie them up on the side of Washington Boulevard. When the circus would come to town, a man would come along on his bicycle and he said, "Take care of the horses because the elephants are coming." People didn't want the horses jumping around. I thought that it wasn't the elephants and he wouldn't go any farther. He'd go to the South or the North but he wouldn't go any farther up to the circus grounds. He could smell those animals. When we were downtown there were a few grocery stores here and there. Henry Tribe ran a grocery store and it was out this way in Ogden. As you went over there was another grocery store. Then there was somewhere—what was the name of them—Piggly Wiggly. My brother Carl decided he was going to go and get a job and he went to work and they gave him a job in the store, Piggly Wiggly's but he only stayed there about two months. He said all he was doing was stacking shelves. Piggly Wiggly's was in and then Safeways. But the grocery stores were far apart and then they were long. There were a lot of people on the street then. Very few cars, maybe a car here and there, maybe a Ford car and then a Buick car, a few long but very few cars. At the grocery stores a few and the clothing stores, clothing store—there was one on the West side of Washington—it was called the Golden Rule Store. It was a clothing store. Wright's was another store on the northwest corner of 24th street. Wright's clothing store was across the street from the Eccles Building which is still there. Bank buildings then weren't there. A few grocery stores, a lot of clothing stores. It was wet until 1918, and then it was against the law to sell or have liquor or whiskey. Of course, there was some bootlegging going on where they made their own whiskey and sold it. As I grew up as a kid, going along the sidewalk, there were a lot of people walking on the sidewalk and not many vehicles, so they would be walking along the street and it wouldn't be anything to see two or three men sitting with their feet in the gutter, they would be sitting there drunk and then you would go over here a ways farther and there would be a few more. Then they had policeman come along. They didn't take them in all of them, but they tried to keep the streets cleared up. Then a lady would come along and maybe have a package in one hand and a couple of kids trailing along her side. She would stop a young man here or there and ask them if he would go into the saloon—saloons were over there where you would buy whiskey and drink. This was just before 1918 and she would ask them, "Would you go in and see if you can get my husband to come." They would go in and sometimes they would go in and sit at the bar and other times they would bring them out and they were wobbling, they were drunk, and sometimes they couldn't get them to come out. It wasn't anything to go along the street and have several drunks on Washington Avenue. You don't see that now. Lots of people walking. Like I say, 1918 it went dry so they couldn't have any alcohol. Then in Ogden City, 25th street was noted as one of the special streets in Ogden. The trains stopped—all the passenger trains then had a big station just below Wall. You walked off of Wall onto a big passenger—oh it was five hundred feet long and two hundred feet wide where you went to go in and seats were all in there where you went in to wait for the train to go out of town or for one to come in and meet people and then they came. There was hotel right on the corner of 25th and Wall and they had a lot of business in there for people that rode the passenger trains and then came up the street and the Marriott Hotel and then you'd get up farther and the Broom hotel was there. That was a prominent hotel on 25th street, the upper part. Then across the street, the skyscrapers you might say went in as a hotel over across Washington. It wasn't anything then to see quite a few people. There were saloons all over—three along 25th street and a couple or three along Washington. That all "went dry." Then in just a few years they come along with "three-two beer." Old man Becker was in the Brewery business in the eastern states and he and his boys Gus Becker and Albert Becker. He had come down and opened a brewery on about 21st and Lincoln. There was no Wall Avenue come across there. He opened a brewery in there and they run that and they were allowed to make "three-two beer." So he opened that and built the brewery there. He first put it in and they sold Becco, didn't have any alcohol in it but it had Becker's Becco. The people drank that. He sold quite a lot of that. People thought that that helped their health and the doctor's recommended it for some people. Then they made all kinds of soda water and different brands of soda water there. Then two percent beer came in. So they had to make that. We had a contract with them to haul all the malt that was there—it was a three story building, the first one was the ground floor and then on the second was the big kettle, it was as big as these two rooms and that is where they brewed it. The next one was the barley and the hops and that. They had a big copper kettle there and they made that. You could see the thing going out of the top, little pipes going out where the alcohol went out. That was a "three-two beer." It couldn't test any more than that. They brought one of their son-in-laws from California and he was a doctor in California. He came in and they put him in the chemistry room. He had to test it so it couldn't go over three-two in two-three beer—two-three I guess it was. You would go into a store and as soon, and as you went in they had a clerk who would come, the same in the grocery stores. In the clothing stores someone would wait on you as soon as you went in—try to sell you a suit of clothes or a pair of shoes. The best shoes you could buy were five dollars. Suits would cost you maybe thirty dollars for a suit of clothes, as good of clothes that you could buy. Shirts and whatnot—people wore shirts and then they had a collar—you brought a collar and put it around you and fastened a little brass button here and then you would put the necktie on. The shirts you would buy didn't have any collars, work shirts did, but the dress shirts never had any collar on it. They would just come around and button here—then you put a tie on top of that. It was quite a job for our family to keep all the collars and all the shirts—they had to wash them and iron them out and then they put the tie on top of that. Maybe wear the shirt a couple of times with the collars. I remember several of the stores that came along, like Piggly Wiggly and Safeway and others. Then there was—I remember the Egyptian theatre. It was later in years and they had the stars all show up in the ceiling. The Peery's owned the Egyptian and the Ogden Theater and Glassman's owned the Orpheum Theater and the Alhambra was down on Keisel Avenue. You would go to the shows and it would cost you—when I was a kid it would cost you fifteen cents to get in. Adults were about thirty-five cents to get in to the shows. I remember when Willard Marriott went back to Washington D.C., he met his wife Anna Sheets. He met her in the University of Utah. He had been on a mission. He went on a mission and when he came back he went to Weber Academy here and Aaron Tracy was the President then. When he came back they had closed that and he went down to the University of Utah. There is where Willard Marriott met Anna Sheets. She was going to the University of Utah and he met her there, got acquainted with her and he married her. Before he married her he bought a new model-T Ford and went up north and sold woolen goods, most of it from the Utah Woolen Mills in Salt Lake where they took the wool and refined it and made woolen clothes. He went up there and stayed all summer. When he came back from his mission he went up there and stayed all summer and sold woolen clothing and blankets and everything. That is where he met his wife and then he came back and went up again and then he got married and I remember him, Willard Marriott, stopping at our house in the morning—it was about eight o'clock in the morning—and he had a model-T. He had come in and my mother and I walked out to his car with him and Anna Sheets was sitting in this model-T and my mother said to him, "Have you got good tires on this car?" I walked around it and I couldn't see a bit of tread on any of them. They were all bald tires. She was sitting in the seat there but we wished him well. Now here is what he said and I shouldn't tell you this but I will anyway. He wouldn't care. My mother said, "Well that is a long ways to drive this model-T to Washington D.C." He had come from up north and a lot of places that he went, he couldn't collect his money where he had sold clothing and blankets and things. When he came back he said, "Mrs. Sheets," that would be his mother-in-law, "gave me five hundred dollars and said you can use that and go on your honeymoon from here to Washington D.C." So he said, "I have plenty of money." Anna Sheets mother gave him five hundred dollars. Now that is what he said right there in front of our house. They were going to drive this model-T back there and go on their honeymoon. He went back there and he and another man, Sterling Colton, went back to Washington D.C. and opened the A & W Rootbeer stands. Russell and I once in awhile we'd go in to town and walk over by the Egyptian Theatre and they had a barrel going around of A & W Rootbeer. Once in awhile Willard would send a letter, an envelope that would have some A & W tickets in there. We'd go in there and get a couple of mugs of A & W Rootbeer on the tickets he would send for it. That was quite a treat to go in and get free A & W Rootbeers. Ogden City has grown in the last several years, then they put the mall in and it fell apart and there is a lot of Ogden City that has moved into the upper bench and over into Riverdale and out into places. Ogden City isn't anything like it used to be. They put the big mall in there and then they couldn't make it financially. Other than the banks—the city itself has slipped away. Years and years ago, 25th street was well known all over the country. The trains would come in and stopped in the depot at 25th and Wall. Then people went up and there were several hotels in there and restaurants. When you got almost to Washington, right there by Kiesel Avenue, by Washington and Kiesel, was a place opened by two men, it was a long restaurant. It was Ross and Jack's Burger with spuds for a quarter. They had more business there than they could take care of hardly. You could go any time of the day or the night and they had customers there. My dad furnished them all the dairy products for that place. It was Ross and Jacks and you got a big hamburger, potatoes and gravy, and a vegetable for a quarter. That is what it was advertised—Ross and Jacks dinner for twenty-five cents. You got a big hamburger, the potatoes and gravy and a vegetable for twenty-five cents. Ketchup and other things were all sitting there, you could help yourself to them. I remember they had a sign there one time it had come out and it said, "Go easy on the butter boys, it is forty cents a pound." It was a long restaurant, the cash register in the front and rows down here and clear down there, and there were people there—twenty-five cents. J. W. Randall came and wanted me to put in one hundred and thirty thousand ton of sugar beets in two big piles. They were a half a block long and eighteen feet high. I told him, "I don't want to." He said, "Yes, you put them in." And I put in one hundred and thirty thousand ton of beets in with beet forks, with just men by hand. He said, "Don't hire all the guys." The depression was on then. "Try to hire them all around Weber County where they have grown sugar beets." I finally agreed to do it and I paid those men four dollars and twenty cents a day. The twenty cents went for insurance. Each one was insured for everything for twenty cents. They got four dollars and they worked for eight hours. I put that in and he said, "Don't hire everybody in your community, hire them all around Weber County." I had to turn guys down and they put it on an endless belt, here was the pile a half a block long and another one here. It had a pipe flume with the top lids, you took them off. The water would run fast, pumping it and it circulated and washed the beets in and we put them on a belt and they went over and dumped into this flume. I put a hundred thirty thousand ton of beets in with beet forks. Not one man did I ever have to correct, never had one quit, never had one get sick, never had one get hurt, and I never told one he had to do more work or correct him in his throwing. It never stormed. We put them in, through all of November, the factory guy would look up there and if you would watch the moon, the moon will be up here and as it goes down it isn't the moon. It looks like it has turned but it hasn't. He would look up at the moon and say, "That is a wet moon, you'll have to hurry Juke, it is going to storm." We had a platform and you'd come up here and it had a tent of canvas. So if it did storm they were under it. It had a little caterpillar electric on each end of it. It was as long as the pile of beets was wide. It had a little electric caterpillar end. Steve Crowley worked for the sugar company and he stayed and when they would throw the beets in from here to there and have to reach for them, it was electric and he'd put it in and it would crawl up close to the pile. When they reached them—a lot of those guys would sit with their rump right on the edge. It had a four by four along here and a belt, the belt kept going and they would sit right with their butt on that and throw those beets on. That was in 1935, it was the year Sharon was born. The year that Franklin D. Roosevelt took the presidential election by a landslide, was in November of 1932. Remember that the President goes in on an even year. He goes in on '32, '36, and right on up. When they picked those potatoes up I gave them six sacks, six hundred pounds apiece. Some worked 'til noon and they got three hundred pounds. They were red bliss potatoes, just perfect and I said to them when they left that night at five o'clock, it would have been the day before Election Day and the night after election in 1932 it started to snow. You never saw the ground until spring. That was the toughest winter I ever saw. They went over and voted and that night they put Franklin D. in and the next day we got through. The price of potatoes—I took them out in the spring, I carried them upstairs, downstairs, Wesley Hewitt didn't have a job and he lived in a house that charged him seven dollars a month. He couldn't pay the rent so he worked it out. We delivered those potatoes, upstairs, downstairs, traded them in for groceries. They were thirty cents for a hundred pound bag. Uncle Will Marriott moved into town. They had moved into town off of the farm and he come to me and he said, "Do you want to rent the lower farm?" I said, "Well yes I would rent it." So I rented that lower farm for him. I put it all in sugar beets, and if you crowd it there was seventeen acres. The Warren canal ran along the east end and the riverbed was on that end. I ran them from there right through. I put that into sugar beets and I got three dollars and eighty-five cents a ton for them. Now, earlier, a few years before that, the sugar beets were up to twelve dollars and they stayed there. My dad was a bishop for a dozen years. My mother and my dad went down to conference and when they came back we had a long table and there was twelve of us at the table. I sat at the far end and my dad sat at the head end. When they were there one of our family said, "Well what did they tell you at conference?" My mother said, "President Smith,"—Joseph Fielding was the President—he got up and he said, "If you are in debt, get out as fast as you can and if you are not in debt, stay out because the price is going to go down." Sugar beets were twelve dollars a ton. We had every piece of ground around in sugar beets. In fact, we got a furlough for Clifford to come home and dig sugar beets in September. They were twelve dollars a ton, and they started going down in 1932, Uncle Will and Aunt Nell Marriott and Russell and them had all moved into town. They had moved up to the 12th Ward. The spring of 1932 I put it all in sugar beets, seventeen acres and I got three dollars and eighty-five cents a ton for them. I grew that whole field down there and I got a check for eleven hundred and something dollars, I had a good crop. I dug those potatoes and quit and went down and hauled beets for everybody. I hauled over sixteen hundred ton of beets on a 1932 Chevrolet truck and I loaded them all with beet forks. I hauled them beets in and I had almost three hundred ton and I got a check. When he came, they were all good beets and I dug these potatoes and quit and went down and the next day and that night I finished the potatoes it snowed. It started to blow from the east and it snowed. I still had about four acres of sugar beets, I left them right by the road, right on this end and I had to dig them in the snow. I went down the next morning and I had four—this is a coincidence—I had four toppers, topped them all by hand and put them in wind rows. I had two red-headed guys, Wesley Hewitt and the Dana kid. I had Joe and Bill Elmer, they lived on 17th street and were both married men. These two topped the row and these two topped the row and I drove right down the middle of them. I put a team of horses on the truck and I never drove them. They were good horses, I had used them all fall. They were the last beets I got out. Here is the seat, the mirror stuck out here, I hung the lines on the mirror and I loaded this corner and a man here and then the two would throw, all with beet forks. Guys would come and say, "I'll come on and drive those horses for you." I would say, "Nope we don't talk to them." I left them standing, I got out right here, didn't shut the door, leave it open, when I got in all I would do is touch the gas and they just knew to go. They would start to pull and when I let the gas off they stopped. We rent right up and never got stuck a load. Uncle Will came down there, he came down there and Myer and Wright, Myer and Wright was in his arms. He came down in the spring they were all like this. Myer would run out over here and I said, "That sand is hot." That was in the spring. He said, "He'll be back in a minute," the old man said, Uncle Will. He did, he ran about from here to the front door and here he had come back. He had burned his feet because the sand was hot. He picked him up. That was in the spring. In the fall, the same place Uncle Will came down there alone and I was getting the last of them out the last day. I had a team of horses on there and no driver, they would pull right up and when I put the gas down that is just like saying "get up" to them and when I take the gas off they stop. We loaded them and he drove down there with his car and stopped outside the bridge of that lower field and he said, "I have never seen horses pull like that without a driver." They would go right up and come right out. They listened to the gas. When you would give them the gas they went. When you quit the gas they stopped. When Aunt Nell and Uncle Will come to my mother's house and came in the front door and talked to my mother a little bit, my mother said—her and I were there, the only ones—she said, "Willard is making a lot of money. He is about a millionaire." Aunt Nell spoke up and she said, "Yes, the poor boy. It has cost him over ten thousand dollars income tax." Then Uncle Will chuckled and laughed and she was real serious and he chuckled and laughed. He said, "I have come to get the rent," from the farm I had rented. I walked in the other room in the bedroom and I had the cash there. I got a check for eleven hundred dollars. I counted it out and Uncle Will was sitting here and she was sitting here. I gave him half—I didn't get quite eleven hundred, but I gave him five hundred and fifty dollars. That was half of it. I went there to give it to him in cash and Aunt Nell spoke up and she said, "No, he don't get it, you give it to me." It put me in a spot. I said, "Well, he come and ask me if I wanted to rent it and I rented it off of him for five hundred and fifty dollars and I will have to give him the money." So I give him the money, I gave him just a few dollars over half of what I made. They got up and left. I guess Aunt Nell thought that I made too much money so they didn't rent it to me anymore. I sold the potatoes at thirty cents a hundred and I sold the sugar beets for three dollars and eighty-five cents. I went camping with Russell Marriott, Roy Hodson and Clyde Covington, they were cousins, and myself. We got up there we slept way out in the wild and the first night, we had our own food and some blankets and stuff. We camped out there the one night. The next night we came in and we were still out quite a ways from the camping grounds so we pulled up there and the car was like this. We made the bed here and we had plenty of food. The running board was on the outside there. We put some food under those running boards. Clyde Covington wouldn't sleep outside, he was scared, so he slept in the back seat. Russell slept here and Roy Hodson here and me here. Our heads right by the running board of the car. I woke up for some reason, I guess by the noise. I woke up and it was just coming daylight. I woke up and I could hear something. I sat up in bed and I looked about—oh judging thirty feet from where we were sleeping there was a black bear and it was standing facing us and it was growling. I think that was what woke me up, it was growling. I woke up and I looked up there and she was standing on all four feet facing us. I said to these guys, "Hey! Do you want to see something?" "Nah," they slept. They finally woke up and Roy Hodson was in the middle, he raised up and he saw that bear and he went right down in and pulled the covers over him. Clyde Covington was in the car and he was jumping around like a squirrel in there and Russell was over here. I looked that thirty feet away and they got calmed down a little and that bear just kept growling. I reached around here and Uncle Will and Russell and Woodrow and them had just shingled the barn on the farm over there and they had the shingle—so I took one of the shingling hatches that they had and put it under my pillow. I reached around and I thought, "Will I give that bear time to move?" She didn't want to move. I think it was a female bear. So I reached around and I felt there and I got that hatchet in my hand and took a hold of the handle of it. A hatchet is a long blade but it is narrow. I got up on my left knee and that bear still stayed there and she kept growling, and I would say it was twenty-five feet. I got up on my knee and I looked at that and thought, "Maybe if I throw that I can pin her right between the eyes." When I brought my hand up like that, that bear whirled around but it was too far gone. I brought it back like that, she whirled around, and I let it go just as hard as I could throw it and it stuck up right the side of her tail. The full length of the blade went right in her. She ran about twenty-five feet with her hind legs looked like they were going faster than her front ones. She was hunched up but it was a female bear. She ran about twenty-five or thirty feet and the hatchet fell out. But it stuck in her that long. I jumped out of bed and run out there and got it. It was covered in blood all over the hatchet. I brought it back and showed it to them. She never came back. We gathered up camp and right here, she had been in there before, and never woke anybody up. I think she had a cub—I am satisfied she had a cub bear back—a bear will come and get the food and leave the cub back there. Right here by Russell Marriott's head, here was the car, that high and right under the running board by his head we had some bacon and a little sack of sugar, maybe a five pound and half of it was gone. That bear had come and reached in right the side of his head and took that little sack of sugar and we traced it and it had sprinkled a little sugar all over here and there. It had torn the sack a little. All the way out there was a little bit of sugar. She had taken that—she had to get within six inches of his head but she must have reached in with her paw and got that sack with the sugar in and brought it out and took it. Then she fed the cub. That is how close she had come to that kid's head and never woke him up. We never saw the bear again.

The Marriott,Slaterville City Oral History Collection was created by the residents of the town to document their history. Each participant was provided with a list of questions asking for; stories about their childhood, schools they attended, stories about their parents and grand,parents, activities they enjoyed, fashions they remember, difficulties or traumas they may have dealt with, and memories of community and church leaders. This endeavor has left behind rich histories, stories and important information regarding the history of the Marriott,Slaterville area. ; 17p.; 29cm.; 2 bound transcripts; 4 file folders. 1 sound disc: digital; 4 3/4 in.; 1 videodisc: digital; 4 3/4 in. ; Abstract: This is an oral history of Orvil Holley. It was conducted March 1, 2007 and concerns his recollections of the history of the Marriott-Slaterville area. OH: Hello. My name is Orvil Holley. I was born in Slaterville, Utah on the 15th of November 1925. I was born in the old Echins home. That home still stands this day. In the spring of 1926 my family moved to the Rhoan Wheeler property, which is still there, and at that time it was across the road from the Slaterville Creamery, which was a cooperative association of dairy farmers in the area. It was active for some twenty years. My father was a dairyman and a farmer raising all kinds of crops such as peas, corn, alfalfa, wheat, barley, oats, beets, and some other crops. My father had married my mother who was a widow and he was a widower. He had a family, and when he married my mother she had three boys and a girl. I am the only child of my father and my mother. My mother was Amelia Echins Alan Holley and my father was Henry Ezra Holley. My father was in his forties when I was born and mother was a few years younger. I remember the early roads. When I was a youngster I particularly remember the grater pulled by what looked like a caterpillar tractor. It came along and grated the roads. Also there were a number of artesian sulfur wells that were drilled in Marriott and Slaterville. These wells were drilled for the purpose of filling up a tanker that was pulled by an old tractor or a team of horses that used to go along and water the roads to keep the dust down a little bit. I don't know if any of those old wells are still in existence or not. I also remember the kids walking to school. At that time the Slaterville School was located on the property where the Slaterville park is now, right where the backstop is in fact. It was really an interesting thing to me because it was the only building that I knew of that had inside plumbing. All of the farm boys enjoyed that particular part of the schoolhouse. There were many great things that happened in that school house. I'll have to tell you one. I think I was in about the fourth grade—maybe it was the third grade. The teacher was a man from North Ogden by the name of Charles Chandler. We only had Charles for one period. That was the last period of the day. Normally, our class was down in the basement, but for this class, the class that Mr. Chandler taught, we would go upstairs. It just so happened that on this particular day three of the boys decided that they would sluff. They were older boys. Their names were Clyde Hunter, Raymond Bowans and Delore Echins. For some reason, they decided that they would get in the closet upstairs and hide in that closet as the classes changed and then they would sneak out of the closets and open a window and go out onto the roof of the restrooms and slide down on the ground and away they would go. Well…it just so happened that Mr. Chandler saw them going into the closet. He called our class to go into that room where the closet was. In those days the children's seats were all on runners. They would put a row of seats and maybe six or seven, maybe eight seats to one runner. So when you move the seats you had to move the runners too. He had us move those seats right over next to the closet. The closet had two doors that opened to the outside towards us. Then Mr. Chandler got his chair and put the back of it up against the door and his feet on these seats that we were sitting in. There was no way that those boys could get out of that room. Well about two-thirds of the way through the class we could hear some rustling going on inside that room. It was a very small room, they were in cramped conditions. Then all of a sudden we could hear what sounded like water—a trickle of water running into a can. But what the person didn't know in the closet was that this was a flower can that had holes in the bottom and pretty soon a little yellow stream came out from underneath the door and into our classroom. You can imagine what the class was like in that particular incident. I thought you might be interested in that. It might be interesting to say a little bit about those old country schools. They weren't very large. The Slaterville School for example had four rooms, two downstairs and two upstairs. But only one of the rooms downstairs was used for teaching. The other room was never fixed up for teaching. It was still dirt, dirt floor—the only things that I can remember that connected that with any of the other rooms were the heating pipes that went through the room. That was a wonderful place for the kids to play in the wintertime. But it was a little dusty and I can remember seeing dust so thick that you couldn't see from one end of the room to the other. Now generally speaking, school went through the eighth grade, but when I started school, school went through the ninth grade. The way it worked is, we had three classes in each room. So in the basement we had the first, second, and third grade all in the same room. Then the two rooms upstairs had third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and on up into eighth or maybe ninth. I don't remember which. Anyway, it was kind of an interesting thing as one teacher handled all three grades. My first grade class—the most it ever had in it was about eight and sometimes it only had five, most of the time it was about six kids in the first grade. And some of those kids are still alive today and still live in Slaterville. In as much as my mother was born in a house that was almost on the borderline between Slaterville and Marriott. She attended the Marriott School for some years. We know that some of the Marriott kids attended the Slaterville School some years. In fact, I remember when I was in school that Marriott—when we were in the sixth grade, Marriott had no sixth graders and we did have Marriott fifth graders over in our school. So it is kind of an interesting setup in these schools. Well let's go back to the very earliest days, before there was a Slaterville, before there was a Marriott. About 1850, there was some movement of people out into this area of the county. At that time there was no Marriott, there was no Slaterville. In fact, one of the things that we are trying to find out at this time is "when did Marriott become Marriott and when did Slaterville become Slaterville?" So far, we can't nail that down. But the first settlers in Slaterville were the Steven Slater family—the Steven Perry family. They settled on the North side of what became known as Mill Creek. Right across from Mill Creek was Marriott. Just when Marriott was settled was, I understand, about the same time. We still have some of the descendants of Steven Perry living in Slaterville today. The man for whom Slaterville is named, Richard Slater, came into Slaterville in 1853. As you can tell he wasn't one of the original settlers so it wasn't named Slaterville because he was an original settler. Tradition has it that was named Slaterville after Richard Slater because he was a member of the Mormon Battalion. I think that was why Slaterville became as it was. The earliest documentation of the name Slaterville comes from the Deseret News and it is at about 1860. It mentions Slaterville as one of the little communities West of Ogden City. Naturally it had to be named Slaterville before that appeared in the Deseret News but just when, we don't know. Irrigation was very important to the people in all of Weber County. If you think of Slaterville, it was a very good place for those early settlers to make their homes because of the water sources. On the South end was the Ogden-Weber River. In the middle was Mill Creek. And on the north end was Four-Mile Creek. They had three water sources going through the community. Now they had to have a way for getting the water from those ditches—those creeks and streams—out to the farms. This is an amazing thing to me. Those old pioneers had some system of knowing where to put those canals and those ditches so they flowed easily with nothing but gravity to pull them along and yet they are still in existence and still being used today. It is magnificent. Now because the water was so important, it was important for those canals and ditches to be clean. That was quite a thing. The presidents of the companies would call to their members and say we are going to clean on such and such a day and we would like you to show up. There would be a huge turnout of men with horses and with cultivators and scrapers and men with shovels and hoes and rakes. They would start—sometimes they would start on each end of the canals and work towards each other. In those days, they cleaned those canals—they were really neat and clean. The ditches were the same way. They were very cooperative one with another even though they may have had some difficulties religiously; they still were together in those community projects. Now I mentioned something about even though citizens in the city or in the town of Slaterville particularly, may not have been together religiously but worked cooperatively on community programs such as cleaning ditches and so forth. I might say, in about 1860 there was a man that came into Slaterville by the name of Joseph Morris. He was very successful in teaching his religious views to particularly the western half of the Slaterville community. So successful was he, that he was invited to leave by the ecclesiastical authorities here in the community. So he left and he took with him almost all the western half of the community, over fifty people were involved. They went to South Weber. I might tell you one little story that comes out of that settlement. When Joseph Morris left Slaterville he went to South Weber. It has always been our belief—in fact, it was so written in a Master's thesis that I did, that this happened to William Jones of Slaterville. But within the last six months we learned that it is not William Jones of Slaterville but William Jones of Marriott that this happened to. We are just learning that the people of Marriott were also involved, more than one, in having people who have succumbed to Mr. Morris's work. They all moved over to South Weber. At the height of the community there is believed to be about seven hundred people in the South Weber area who were connected with the Morrisites. The story goes that Mr. Jones was disappointed with some of the things that Morris was teaching. For example, he was teaching that the advent of the Savior was imminent. He even set the day. When the savior didn't come, Mr. Morris found that he had made a mistake in his calculations and so set another day. He still didn't show up so some of the Morrisites started to get a little bit nervous. Brother Jones from Marriott decided that he would leave and take his wife and away they went. One of the problems that they have is they had to give everything that they owned into the Morrisite Prophet Morris. If anybody wanted to leave they were allowed to leave but they couldn't take anything with them that they had brought such as grain and flour or food stuffs of any sort. That had to stay and that kind of bothered Mr. Jones. One day after he and his wife left he saw a wagon load of wheat coming out of Kingston Fort which was the name of the area where Mr. Morris and his people lived. This wagon load of grain was headed for the grist mill. Mr. Jones knew that he had contributed much more than one load of grain to the Morrisite cause and he didn't have anything to live on so he decided to commandeer this load of grain, which he did. But when the news got back to Mr. Morris, he sent some of his people to regain the grain. He also took into custody Mr. and Mrs. Jones. This caused a lot of trouble. The Jones' relatives went to the legal authorities to try and get them to go and see if they could get the release of Mr. and Mrs. Jones, which they tried to do but were unsuccessful. Finally, it got so bad that they asked the Governor of the state to send the militia to South Weber. The Governor was not in Utah at the time but the person who took his place was in charge and he did call out the militia. They came into South Weber and we can't go into detail on that but just to say that the militia at a certain time open fired and I have held in my hands the cannonball that came down the side of the mountain, bounced along, went through the fence where Mr. and Mrs. Jones had been kept in custody, landed in the lap of Mrs. Jones. That cannonball is still in existence and the descendents of the Jones family still have it. Just a little story to let you know how things went sometimes in those days. Going back a little bit to my early days—needless to say, my mother and father never owned a home of their own until they were both at sixty years. They always rented. They worked hard. Their families that were with them worked hard. We always had good living conditions. I was born in a brick home. When we went to the Wheeler place it was a brick home. When we moved back to the Echins place it was still a brick home. We had a good home. We also came up through the '30's, which was the depression. You could go to town—when I was a boy, about seven or eight years old, once a week we would go to town on a Saturday. I always went with my cousin. Either we rode with his folks or he rode with ours. One of the great things that we lived for all week was to go to Ross & Jacks and eat. You could get burger, spuds for fifteen cents, which was enough to feed a man. Then for ten cents more you could get a pie. So for twenty-five cents you could get a meal. Then we would go to the movies, it was a double-feature for a dime. We were well taken care of as far as that type of thing was concerned. A lot of the boys rode horses in those days. A lot of the boys had some really fine horses. They liked to swim in the river. It was dangerous. My older brother almost drowned in the river but Alvin Cobabe who now owns Powder Mountain and Arthur Slater saved his life. They remember it and he remembers it even better than they do. We used to have what was called ward reunions once every year. Everybody was invited back to that particular ward on a particular date and they had the most fun and the greatest time that you can imagine. Slaterville's reunion was always on the last Thursday of January. Marriott's reunion was in February, I don't remember the date but they still hold their reunion. Marriott still holds their ward reunion. All the other towns around—Farr West, Harrisville, Plain City, Hooper, Taylor, Riverdale—they all have their reunions. It wasn't unusual for our people from the Slaterville area to go to Marriott and Marriott would come to Slaterville, then they would go to Plain City. It was something they looked forward to that they could have a really wonderful time once each month and sometimes more than that because some of the other communities held their reunion the same month. You can't imagine, unless you see it, what the dancing was like. The dances were learned dances—quadrilles—and everybody did the same steps, the same moves on the floor. They had Virginia reels, which sometimes people still have today but those kind of dances, where everyone knows what the dance is and they all dance it. It was just beautiful to see. They would dance their shoes off and just have the greatest time. It was just wonderful folks. Not being familiar with how all the wards handled their reunions, I will just tell you how Slaterville did theirs. Normally it was on the last Thursday of January. The first program started at about eleven o'clock in the morning. It continued for about an hour and a half and then it was time for the dinner. Even though the areas they had to prepare those dinners, you wouldn't expect that they could do the jobs that they did. They had everything. You can't believe it. And what a spread they would put on. And all the wards were the same. They all just went all out. When people were so full that they could hardly walk back up the stairs, they would go back up and there may be another program for thirty minutes while the dinner settled and then they would go to dancing. This is in the afternoon. They would dance until time to go back down for the evening meal. They would go back down and have the evening meal, then they would come back up and they would have another program. These programs folks were great. Those people were talented. They could do anything. They were great actors. They would do—it was just amazing. When that program was over, usually about eight-thirty at night, we pushed the benches back and pile them up on top of each other to make room on the dance floor and then the dance began. It never finished until one or two o'clock in the morning. It was just great. I have been asked to say a little bit about my college years. I have to confess that it took me three years to get through two years of work at Weber College. I only would go two quarters a year and then in the Spring I would have to go home and start to plant and get ready for the next year—the harvest for that year. Then in the Fall I could go back to College and I would go for two quarters, Fall and Winter. While I was at Weber College I became involved with a group of young men who were musicians. I was not a musicians, I had never had a music lesson in my life. The three other fellows were studying music and were fine musicians. Somehow they invited me to join them in a quartet. This quartet lasted for quite a number of years. We sang professionally all over the state of Utah, Idaho, we sang at Sun Valley for the Union Pacific Railroad who owned Sun Valley. In fact, we were invited to go back to Sun Valley and sing for a big convention which hosted President Truman. I wanted to go so bad my teeth hurt but the other fellows said, "No, we have got finals coming up and we are not going to do it." So we didn't get to do that. Following that year, my final year at Weber College, these three wanted to go to the University of Utah to school so we went down there and had a great time. We lived together in an old army barracks. The war was now over, World War II was now over. We practiced our singing every day. We were on the first television station that broadcasts out of Utah, old KDYL. We had a program every week which gave us a little money to spend and we also were hired to sing at big conventions all over the city in Salt Lake that year. The next year our quartet kind of broke up a little bit because I was called on a mission and was gone for two years. When I came back we got together again and even had an agent. I often laugh at the agent's name, his name was Bill Risky. We always used to laugh that it was "Risky business" that we were in. They had graduated college by the time I got home. I went back to the University of Utah but an unusual thing happened. The President of Weber College had been Henry Aldous Dixon. He had been called and given the chance to become President of Utah State. I got a call from President Dixon one afternoon and he said, "I'd like you to come up and take care of the program bureau here at Utah State." I explained to President Dixon that I only needed thirteen hours to graduate from the "U" and I knew that it was required that you have fifteen hours from the institution from which you were to graduate. He said, "I think we can work that out." So I went up to Utah State and headed the program bureau up there and formed a quartet up at Utah State. We traveled all over the country for Utah State, advertising Utah State to the high schools in Idaho and Wyoming, Utah, we even went to California on one big trip. We had a great time, a wonderful experience. So I graduated from Utah State with a Bachelor of Science degree in speech and dramatics. I taught two years in public school and then was hired by the LDS church to teach seminary. It was required that we go down to BYU for a symposium which lasted six, seven, eight weeks every other summer. We decided instead of just going down there let's work on a degree. So many of us worked on a degree down there and I graduated with a Master's degree from BYU in 1966. It has been suggested that I give a little ecclesiastical history of the area. I think that has been well written up as far as the early days of Ogden City and Weber County is concerned. I know that Lorin Farr had a great deal to do with both the ecclesiastical and political history here in the Ogden area. There were some others who were very influential. Before there was any ecclesiastical authority in Slaterville, we were no doubt part of the Northern Stake of Zion at that time—two stakes of Zion, one in the Northern part of Weber County and the other in the Southern part. The first ecclesiastical person to hold an office in Slaterville was a man by the name of Thomas Richardson. He was something like a Branch President. He served faithfully for quite a number of years. One of his counselors was Edwin Smoot. After several years had gone by, Thomas Richardson began not feeling too well and also he was going to receive the call of Patriarch, so it was decided that Slaterville would probably become a ward. During the time that Thomas Richardson was not active as the Branch President, Brother Smoot being next in line did most of the ecclesiastical work in the Slaterville area. We are very grateful to Mr. Smoot for keeping a journal. In it he records the things that he did ecclesiastically—setting people apart, baptizing them, helping people do this and do that. He was very active. But a sad thing occurred when they held a meeting to announce the new Bishop. Brother Smoot thought that it would be him and it turned out to be John A. Allred. Brother Smoot withdrew from the church and took a good number with him. In reading his journal, you read up right to the day when they chose Allred as the Bishop. He recounts his great work in the church. Following the Bishops choosing and ordaining, Brother Smoot never says one more thing about the church except, "I asked them to take my name off the rolls." Kind of a sad day. We have been quite fortunate in this Slaterville area. Towns all around us have seen a great deal of growth. The old farmers have tried to hang on to most of the property that they have had and have tried to farm it. But we have finally seen a change in the last several years. Now within about the last year we have two fairly large developments in the Slaterville-Marriott area. It is sometimes a little difficult for us old timers to realize that other people need homes to live in too. We think we have a beautiful area here. The people have been united in the things that have been going on as far as organizing the present city of Marriott-Slaterville, which is now approximately sixteen years old. It has been amazing how the people have worked together. Before, Marriott and Slaterville didn't always get along the best. I could tell you stories about that. Maybe I will. Today, Marriott and Slaterville have a church where we meet together. We have three wards in that building and we are getting along fine. I am sure it is different than what some of the older folks thought we would be able to do. When Slaterville first decided that they needed a new building—they had no Bishop's office, they had to meet in the coal room, the furnace room of the building, to hold their Bishop meetings. Things were just not good for that particular time. Things were changing in the church. More meetings were being held. Finally, the bishopric of the Slaterville ward decided that they would see what they could do to make the old building suitable for the situation of the day. They got an architect to draw up some plans. When he finished the plans they looked good to the ward leaders and so the ward leaders asked the architect how much this would cost. He said nineteen thousand dollars should do it. So the bishopric scratched their heads and tried to figure out who on earth they could borrow nineteen thousand dollars from to build the building and pay the man back so much a month—if we could find somebody. Finally, one man came up as the one who could loan us nineteen thousand dollars. He was a bachelor, he had never married. He wasn't a member of the church. In fact, he was descendents of people who had joined the Morrisites. His name was Joe Stevens. We made an appointment and met with Joe and visited with him a few minutes. Then the bishop told him why we were there, that we had come to ask him if he would loan us nineteen thousand dollars to remodel the old church. Joe came up out of his chair and he said, "My goodness, I haven't got that kind of money." So we chatted a little bit and the amazing thing was before we left the house he wanted to know if he could be baptized. Shortly after, he was baptized. He died within just very few weeks after we had visited with Joe in his home. But he died a member of the church. Now how did Marriott and Slaterville get together? Well nobody thought they could. Half of Slaterville didn't think they could get along with Marriott and half of Marriott didn't think they could get along with Slaterville. But the two bishoprics got together and they had determined that they would look for a place to build. They picked a place on the old Marriott farm over in Marriott where California Pack had purchased one acre of property from the Marriott family to build a pea viner. The two wards purchased that piece of property from California Pack. Then the two wards were trying to decide how they were going to go about raising money and whatnot to try and move the project along. In the meantime, the committee in Marriott had written a letter to the first presidency, President David O. McKay, explaining that they would prefer to build their own building. Well not long after that letter was received by President McKay, the two bishoprics received word from our Stake President, President Wimmer, that two of the General Authorities, Bishop Vandenburg, the presiding Bishop of the church, and Elder Thomas Monson, a new member of the Quorum of the Twelve, were assigned to come up and meet with us. So the day was set and we met with Brother Vandenburg and Elder Monson in the basement of the old Slaterville church. After the pleasantries were over, Elder Monson looked at Bishop Buck, Bishop of the Marriott Ward, Clarence Buck, and he said, "President McKay has received your letter and read your letter and he has told us that we are not to come here and try to push a building down your throat. If you want to build a building, you are welcome to do so. However, be cautioned, you won't be able to afford the kind of building that you need, and it is our desire that you two wards get together if you possibly can." Then there was some discussion between Bishop Buck and the General Authorities concerning the problem, and with how many people were opposed to it in Marriott. There was sufficient number that it would cause some concern. Bishop Vandenburg, all of a sudden, he lighted up like a light and said, "Well I am from Ogden and I know Marriott. There are some Dutch people in Marriott aren't there? And Bishop Buck said, "Yes, there are." "Well they'll support you won't they?" "Well they are the worst ones in the whole ward." Bishop Vandenburg dropped his head and Elder Monson looked over at me and smiled and then he said, "How do you change a Dutchman's mind, Bishop?" Bishop Vandenburg sat there for a second, looked up and said, "You can't." Anyway, we got together and rode with the General Authorities around to look at different places where we might build and they picked out the spot where the church now stands. We dedicated that building in 1968. So it is almost forty years old. I think we have gotten along as good or better than most of the wards have who just had the wards divided among themselves. It has been really quite a wonderful thing. Now since those two wards went together some sixteen years ago, Marriott and Slaterville, the residents of those two communities, by a huge majority of vote, voted to go together to form a city. The city's name is Marriott-Slaterville. There was some opposition to that. Some people said, "That was too long a name, make it simpler." They pointed out other communities that had done that. But we knew the makeup of Marriott and Slaterville. Slaterville didn't want to lose its identity and Marriott didn't want to lose theirs. So why not Marriott-Slaterville? The wards today are Marriot-Slaterville 1, Marriott-Slaterville 2, and Marriott-Slaterville 3.

This is a myriad of items throughout the UC/UI collection. It includes the minutes of the stockholder's meetings with both Utah International and General Electric, correspondence, a reel-to-reel tape of the merger meeting and the official merger documents. ; 4.25 x 6.5 - 8.5 x 11 in. handwritten or typed on paper ; Edward M. Greene 610 Round Hill Road Greenwich, Connecticut 06830 November 15, 1976 Mr. Edmund Littlefield, Chairman Utah International, Inc. 550 California Street San Francisco, Calif. 94104 Dear Mr. Littlefield The enclosed Management Proxy material contains a vote against the merger of the Utah International, Inc. as a wholly owned subsidiary of General Electric. I cannot believe that a comparatively few companies for any great length of time will be permitted to control nuclear energy without some form of government regulation. This merger lessens competition. These dire forethoughts of mine, however, do not detract from my respect and admiration for your administration of Utah. Very sincerely, Edward M. Greene

Abstract: Transcription of Utah International shareholder's meeting to finalize the merger with General Electric. The meeting took place December 15, 1976. Speakers are Edmund Littlefield (EL), Bruce Mitchell (BM), Charles Travers (CT), and seven unknown speakers labeled by number as they appear. Also, when the audience speaks as a group, it is labeled All. This document is transcribed verbatim, with a few changes included to provide clarity. December 15, 1976 Transcript: EL: I see we are playing to a packed house and I would like to suggest that there is a whole row of seats down here in the front that we would be glad to have you come use. Well good morning ladies and gentlemen, would the meeting please come to order. Welcome to this special meeting of the shareholders of Utah International, called for the purpose of considering the proposed merger with the General Electric Company. I am Edmund W. Littlefield, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer. On my left are Alexander M. Wilson, President and Chief Operating Officer and Director, and Bruce T. Mitchell, Secretary of the company. It is my privilege to introduce to you the other members of our board of directors who are here today, Alf E. Brandon, Senior Vice President of the company; Val A. Browning, Chairman of the Board, Browning; Thomas D. Dee, Vice President of First Security Bank, Ogden, Utah; William R. Hewlett, President of Hewlett-Packard Company; J. B. Ladd, President of Ladd Petroleum Corporation, a subsidiary of the company; Arjay Miller, Dean, Graduate School of 2 Business, Stanford University; Paul L. Wattis Jr., President of Wattis Construction Company; and last and certainly by no means least, a gentleman who's served on this board for fifty-six years, Marriner S. Eccles, former President and Chairman of the Board of the company and now Honorary Chairman of the Board. [Applause] Thank you. These gentlemen, together with the two of us on the platform, who you met earlier, constitute the Board of Directors. Unfortunately, Ernest C. Arbuckle, Chairman of the Board of Wells Fargo Bank and our host for this meeting is unable to be with us today. Fred J. Borch, George Eccles and Bill Kimball are also unable to be with us. Ernie, unfortunately, is undergoing some surgery at this time. We also have with us today representatives of Arthur Anderson, our auditors, Pillsbury Madison and Suite our counsel, and Lehman Brothers and Dean Company, and our investment brokers are also present here today. I now ask the secretary to report on the notice of the meeting, the presence of a quorum, and other matters relating to this meeting. BM: Mr. Chairman, there are available the following documents: 1) A list of the stockholders of Utah International Inc. as of the close of business on October 29, 1976 being the stockholders, entitled to notice of and to vote at this special meeting. 2) An affidavit of the company's transfer agent to the effect of written notice of the special meeting was mailed to each stockholder entitled to vote more than twenty days before the date of the meeting as required by Delaware general corporation law. 3) A signed registration of all stockholders and proxy holders 3 present at the meeting. Management proxies received and other proxies who are personally present represent more than the majority of 31,540,032 shares of stock entitled to vote at the meeting, and constitute a quorum for the transaction of business. This meeting is accordingly properly called and constituted, and is empowered to proceed as a special meeting of the stockholders of Utah International Inc. EL: Thank you, the Board appoints Mr. J. B. Nelson and Mr. Swineheart of Utah International Inc. and Mr. Dennis Conco of the Crocker National Bank, inspectors of election to inspect assigned proxies and credentials presented to the meeting and to conduct a voting to receive and count the votes and to determine the results of the meeting. In the notice of the Special Meeting in the attaché proxy statement, the only item of business to be considered by the stockholders is a proposal for the adoption and approval of the agreement in plan, the reorganization and agreement of merger as amended by which Utah International Incorporated will become a wholly owned subsidiary of General Electric Company. The secretary is requested to submit the resolution which has been prepared for this purpose. BM: Mr. Chairman, the resolution is as follows: resolved that the merger of G. sub of Delaware Inc. with an end to this corporation as set forth in the agreement and plan of reorganization dated as of April 1, 1976; as amended by an amendment dated as of August 13, 1976, attached are annex one and annex two respectively, and the agreement mergers set forth as exhibit A to said annex one to the proxy statement dated October 29, 1976, and mailed to stockholders of record at the 4 close of business on October 29, 1976. Also included are the terms and conditions of the purposed agreement and plan of reorganization as amended, along with the agreement of the merger, providing among other things, for this corporation to become a wholly owned subsidiary of General Electric Company, and the mode of carrying such terms and conditions into effect; as well, the manner and basis of converting the shares of common stock of this corporation into shares of common stock of General Electric Company, as therein provided be and hereby are, approved. 1: Mr. Chairman, I'm a stockholder and I would like to move the adoption to resolution. EL: Thank you. Is there a second? 2: Second. I hereby second the motion. EL: Thank you. It has been moved and seconded that the resolution which the secretary has read be adopted. The affirmative vote of a majority of the outstanding shares of the corporation will be required to carry the motion and adopt the resolution. Before opening the matter for general discussion, I would like to make some comments. This is a special meeting of the shareholders of Utah International Incorporated. It is special in two ways, first in the statutory sense in that it is not a regular annual meeting, but calls specifically to consider and act upon the merger of Utah and General Electric. It is also special in the sentimental sense in that it is destined to be the last public held meeting of this fine company whose antecedents go back to January 1900, when its 5 predecessor was incorporated with six shareholders. When the business of the day is done, Utah International will be merged with a single shareholder. General Electric has of record some 529,000 shareholders, Utah 23,000. These are located in fifty states and in many foreign countries. The actual number of shareholders is far greater. For often the shareholder of record is a broker or trust department of a bank acting as a nominee for many, many shareholders. You received a rather weight proxy statement. If the proxy material required and printed for the Utah and General Electric shareholders meetings today were stacked one on top of the other the pile would be over three and a half miles high. If the individual pages were laid end to end these would cross the continental United States three and three-quarter times. The proxy statement contains, and it's a hundred and seventy-six pages, considerable detail of the terms of the merger, historical financial and operating information of both companies, formal statements of the merge company and other information which the Board of Directors of the respective companies and or the Securities and Exchange Commission deem pertinent and appropriate to put before the shareholders so they may arrive at an informed decision. The merger has been recommended by each Board of Directors. It has been examined on Utah's behalf by the investment banking firms of Lehman Brothers Incorporated and Dean Whitter and Company Incorporated. Each of whom has expressed the opinion that the exchange ratio is fair and equitable to the shareholders of Utah. The same information has been put before the shareholders of General Electric, who met today, this morning, in Stratford, 6 Connecticut at 9:30 AM eastern standard time and they have approved the merger. The Utah shareholders have also considered the merger, and the company is in receipt of proxies representing over 86% of the shares issued and outstanding. The proxies have been instructed how the shares are to be voted and as a consequence, the outcome of the voting on the proposals before us has already been determined and from a practical standpoint, nothing we can say or do here will in fact change that. Even though the outcome is ordained I have no intention of conducting these proceedings in a perfunctory manner. Many of us in this room have devoted most of our working lives to the furtherance of the fortunes of Utah International and we come to today's proceedings with mixed emotions. We recognize and stipulate that it is in the best interest of the Utah shareholders and its employees, that over the years we have given much of our substance into making this company what it is today. We are proud of our handy work and I believe properly so. We do not intend to let this moment pass into history, without noting these accomplishments and recording the concerns that caused us to believe that a merger between these two great companies would serve the best interests of the shareholders of each. Let's pick up the story twenty years ago when the company had 257 shareholders, some 2,400 employees and gross revenues less than 43 million dollars of which 76% was derived from performing contract construction. The stock was traded over the counter at a book value of $1.12 a share and trade from a low of $1.18 to a high of $1.51. That year the company earned 4.2 million dollars or 16 ¢ a share, and paid a dividend of 4.9 ¢ a share. With that as a 7 starting point let us examine the progress that has been recorded. Gross revenues grew, not always steadily, but over the years have climbed to over 944 million in the last fiscal year. The composition of these gross revenues has changed as the nature of the company has changed. Until we sold our heavy construction assets in 1969, construction was the major source of gross revenues. With the sale of construction assets to 1969, and the dredges in 1971, mining became and remains overwhelmingly the dominant business of the company. Gross revenues from land development have been on the decline. More recently through the acquisition of Ladd Petroleum and other companies, gross revenues from oil and gas have become a significant item. As our business grew, so have our earnings, from the 4.2 million earned in 1956, earnings have risen to 178.8 million dollars the past year and have set record highs in each of the last 12 years. In only three out of the last twenty years have earnings been lower than the preceding year. Earnings have increased from 16 ¢ in '56 to $5.67 this year and the dividend has gone from 4.9¢ to $1.15 this year. As the company grew and prospered the stock was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. As you can see the number of shareholders has increased very substantially. Inevitably, death and taxes forced the estates of some of the long time shareholders to bring shares to the market. The company sold convertible debentures to obtain funds for expansion and conversion of these debentures, and our merger with Lucky Mc, Ladd Petroleum and LVO have also contributed to the increase in the number of shareholders. There has been some modest decline in the number of shareholders since the acquisition of LVO in 1974, but 8 today we still have almost 100 times as many shareholders as we did twenty years ago. The increase in the number of employees required the conduct growing business of the company has not tracked the change in either gross revenues or net income. Construction is a labor intensive activity, while mining is capital intense. Our employment peaked in 1958 at 12,000, dropped sharply when we sold our heavy division assets, but has gradually expanded as the company's mining activities have grown rapidly. Our mineral sales backlog was insignificant twenty years ago, and even ten years ago was only about a sixth of its' size today. Nevertheless, the creation of the mineral sales backlog was and is an important aspect of Utah International's character and one that distinguishes it from most other mining companies. Very frankly, when we were embarking upon the rapid expansion of our mining business, we had neither the capital, nor the credit to finance the growth at the pace we wished to pursue without resorting to forward sales of new production to strengthen our credit. We made a virtue out of a necessity and today Utah's mineral sales backlog has grown from a modest 1.1 billion dollars in '66 to 6.1 billion dollars today. 96% of this backlog is represented by long term contracts with escalation clauses protecting against future cost changes. It was the existence of this backlog which in considerable measure excited investor interest in the shares of Utah International and caused the price of the stock to increase dramatically over the years. From a low of a $1.18 in 1956, the stock has closed at a higher price than the preceding year in sixteen out of the last twenty years, including the $65 price of the stock on October 31 the close of this 9 last fiscal year. In the early years, the stock sold close to its' book value. Again, in the early years, price earnings ratios on the stock were also modest, generally below twelve times the earnings. As the investing public came to realize the growth, earnings and the qualities of those price earnings ratios rose and remained for several years in excess of twenty times earnings, until the last few years, when investors have not been willing to accord so high a multiple for Utah shares, nor in fact for virtually shares of all other growth companies. Those who have invested in Utah shares and maintained faith in its management and its future have fared well. Earnings have grown at the compound rate of 19% for the last twenty years, 23% for the last fifteen years, 28% for the last ten years, and a startling 37% for the last five years. If you had invested a thousand dollars in the stock in 1956, you would have received in the interim dividends of $4,291, and the stock would have appreciated to $42,900. If you had made the same investments, but reinvested your dividends in Utah shares at the last price for each of the ensuing years, your $1,000 investment would have been worth $69,800 at the close of fiscal 1976. While I have not attempted to research the matter thoroughly, certainly there are few, if any, companies who have served their shareholders so well and so consistently in a period measured in five year, ten year, fifteen year or twenty year spans. Why then would a company who has so outstanding a record consider a merger even with the best of companies? The reason lies in the changing nature of the company's business and the source of its profits, present and prospective. Twenty years ago the company derived 87% of its' gross revenues from North 10 America, Later, even though we were heavily involved in contract construction outside North America, our gross revenues were well balanced for most of the time during the last twenty years. Ten years ago, only 8% of our mining revenues came from outside of North America, but this has been changing drastically in the last six years. As the next slide shows, 1976 witnessed 74.3% of the gross revenues earned outside North America and only 25.7% within North America. All of our land development and oil and gas gross revenues are earned within North America, but today only 22% our mining gross revenues are earned within North America and only 13.6% in the United States itself, far more significance, in my view, than the source of gross revenues or the sources of gross profit and other income. In the remarks that follow, I shall refer to this income account category simply as gross profits, but please consider it includes income from affiliates, joint ventures and partnerships as well as the gross profit earned by the parent company and its subsidiaries. This figure has grown from 8.7 million dollars in '56 to over 353 million dollars this past year. In the earlier years, the share provided by affiliate companies like Marcona and Cypress Pima, joint ventures and partnerships was a significant factor in the total. Reaching a high of 51% in 1967, but earnings from these sources have not been significant the last two years, dropping to a half of 1% in 1975 and actually producing the loss of 9 million dollars in 1976, the decline being primarily the result of the ill fortunes that have befallen Marcona. Mining has become increasingly the source of the company's gross profit. As you can see, ten years ago in 1966, mining contributed 31% of 11 the total of 22.7 million dollars gross profit, while in 1976 it contributed 344.7 million dollars or 97% of the gross profit and other income of 353.7 million dollars. However, it is not the concentration of gross profit and mining that so concerns us as it is the concentration of mining gross profit in a single commodity in a single country. Let's compare gross profits in '66 with those of '71 and those of '76. The well diversified business we enjoyed in '66 and indeed even in '71 has given way to a growing concentration of earnings from coal. Not only was our business increasingly concentrated in coal, but the earnings potential was increasingly concentrated outside North America. Earnings from North American sources provided 56.4% of gross profits in 1966. This has followed the 7.7% in 1975 and 14.2% in 1976 when the sharp increase in uranium increases did boost North American income. However, this trend toward increasing concentration of earnings from metallurgical coal produced in Australia is likely to continue for two probable reasons. The first indication is found in the mineral sales backlog which total 6.1 billion at the close of '76 with 71.3% of this related to future production outside of North America and 69.3% represented by metallurgical coal. The second reason this trend is likely to continue comes because of the undeveloped reserves that we have in hand. Certainly, one of the companies most promising investment prospects is the new metallurgical coal mine called Norwich Park in Australia, and we have abundant other coal reserves in the Queensland area that can and should be developed in the future using both surface and underground mining methods. Pursuit of our most promising prospect will make Utah less 12 diversified rather than more diversified and more dependent on Australia for the major share of its' gross profits and its' futures growth. I repeat that this concentration of mining was not in our view in and of itself alarming, but the composition of the mining gross profit and the concentration coking coal produced in a single country, and so primarily is a raw material for the steel industry in Japan and Europe, was too much concentration of risk for our company standing alone to bare. We cannot, and we should not, be so dependent on either a single commodity or single country no matter how solid either or both now appear. The attitude of the Australian government when the Labor Party was in power was a matter of extreme concern to us and this concern was no doubt deepened by having Marcona's assets in Peru expropriated by the government. We have great confidence in the people and political institutions of Australia and in the present government, and we are proceeding to increase our investment there because we have the coal reserves to do so and an attractive investment opportunity. However, with this abiding faith in Australia, in our view, this concentration of earning power in a single country and in a single mineral is too great a risk to be born alone, either by the shareholders of Utah or the employees of Utah whose livelihood while employed or in retirement are necessarily deeply affected by the fortunes of Utah International. This concern about the concentration of Utah's earning power was evidently shared by the investment community, which no longer was willing to assign a price earnings ratio of twenty-six to twenty-seven times earnings that prevailed in 1971, 1972 and 1973, but dropped the ration to 13.9% in 1974 and 13 to 13.3% in 1975. Thus we found ourselves faced with a paradox of having both our earnings and our dividends sharply increasing and the price of our shares flat and failing to respond. Certainly in these circumstances it seems only prudent to seek diversification of this risk. There were two broad courses that could be pursued. The first was to go on an aggressive acquisition program and seek to acquire other companies. This course of action posed considerable peril. First, the magnitude of the assignment was mind boggling, even if we were to attempt to reduce the risk to say roughly 50% and on the assumption that we could acquire other companies at ten times the earnings, we were faced with the necessity of attempting to acquire in short order, assets of around 1.5 billion dollars. Obviously, any effort to do this in the mining field would very quickly bring us under attack from the Federal Trade Commission or the Department of Justice. This in turn meant that we had to seek these investments outside the field of our expertise and in areas of business we knew little or nothing about. We were almost certain to make mistakes along the way. All in all the prospects of trying to diversify by a series of acquisitions seemed an unpromising and even perilous course to follow. The other broad path to diversification was to seek merger with a company already diversified, but the company had to be large enough to digest a 2 billion dollar bite. This narrowed the field. There are indeed companies larger than General Electric, but none so well diversified nor in my view so ably managed. 14 The risks that were of concern to Utah International standing alone were not the least unreasonable to take when the assets of General Electric and Utah were combined. General Electric is one of the largest and most diversified industrial corporations in the world. It is engaged in well over a hundred different businesses and in most of these it occupies a leading position in the market it serves. These businesses range from consumer items to capital goods, from fairly simple and well known technologies to the most advanced technologies required for aerospace and the jet age. While General Electric operates in more foreign countries than does Utah, its' business is far more oriented to the domestic market, and the merged company will be nicely balanced between domestic and foreign operations. There will be no undue concentration of merged company. Out of the merger, the Utah shareholders will in my view be exchanging the prospect of a faster rate of growth with its attendant risks in exchange for greater diversification, higher yield, and a premium on their shares as the other parties to the bargain. The General Electric shareholders will acquire assets with earning power and potential for growth that would indicate an increase in General Electric's earnings per share, entering into the natural resource business giving GE still further diversification and what I believe to be, although my views are obviously biased, the best mining organization and the best mining company in the world, each of the parties to the bargain is benefited. It is the biggest merger ever undertaken and I am confident that history will prove it to have been the best. 15 Before entertaining discussion of the motion that is before us, I would like now to introduce to you the principle officers of the company who are with us today and whose labors are responsible for the record of accomplishments that I have presented to you. First, Edwin C. Demoss, Senior Vice President Manager of Mining Division and newly named President of Lucky Mc Uranium Corporation, Ed Demoss; Keith G. Wallace, Senior Vice President Manager of Australia Division; John S. Anderson, Vice President Manager of Domestic Coal Operations: James T. Curry, Financial Vice President and Treasurer; W. Drew Leonard, Vice President of Corporate Purports and Internal Audit; Ralph J. Long Vice President Manager of Australian Operations; Charles K. McArthur, Vice President Manager of Metal Mining and newly named Manager of Mining Division; Boyd C. Paulson, Vice President Manager of Construction Services; M. Ian Ritchie, Vice President of Technical Services and newly Manager Operations Lucky Mc Uranium Corporation; Robert O. Wheaton, Vice President Manager of Exploration. Thank you. Nor would the list be complete without acknowledging that there are others in the audience that have made great contributions, but who are now retired. Let me ask those that I have spotted here to stand and be recognized: Albert L. Reeves, formerly Senior Vice President Secretary of the Director of the company, Albert; Orville Dykstra, Financial Vice President; Joseph K. Allen, Vice President; Weston Bourret, Vice President; and Charles Travers, Vice President. Thank you very much, and now the chair will entertain the discussion of the motion and will be pleased to answer such questions as we can regarding the purposed merger. Are there questions or discussions? If there is no 16 discussion of the resolution, if not the matter will… the meeting will proceed to vote upon the motion to approve the purposed merger with General Electric. 3: Mr. Chairman? EL: Yes? 3: Would you describe the status of the attitude of the federal government towards this motion? EL: What we did was to put the matter before the Department of Justice and asked in advance for their approval under the business advisory clearance procedure. While it was sometime in coming, it was forthcoming. To meet the concerns they expressed about it, Utah has agreed and has put its uranium assets in a separate subsidiary company that is now called Lucky Mc Uranium Corporation. When the merger becomes effective, the voting stock of that the company will be put in the hands of five independent voting trustees who will see to it that the company will elect the board of that company, and see to it that that company's affairs are conducted in a way that does not help GE in such things as the sale of its nuclear aspects. That company is not allowed to sell uranium to GE, but from the standpoint of the government we think we are completely in the clear. Any other questions? If not, any stockholder who is present who has not executed a proxy should raise his hand in order that the inspectors of election may give him a ballot, which he may now cast. If you have sent in your proxy you need not cast a ballot unless you wish to do so. Are there those that would like to vote in person? One here, one there, Boyd, one up here too. Boyd, 17 there's two in the back of the room, three. Will the inspectors of election proceed to collect the ballots? Those who have ballots would you raise them when they are completed so they can be picked up? Thank you. Over here Boyd. If the ballots are all collected would you please advise us of the inspectors report? Are you ready to speak to that? John, there's another one up here. You will bring them to me and I'll read the numbers, right. BM: Mr. Chairman? EL: Mr. Secretary? BM: The inspectors report that more than 27,147,464 shares of common stock of the company were voted in favor of the resolution and that not more than 200,456 shares of common stock were voted against such resolution. Accordingly, the purpose merger has been approved. When the exact number voted for and against the resolution has been ascertained, the inspectors will execute a certificate setting forth such number. EL: Thank you Mr. Secretary. We have acted on the business that was to come before the meeting. Is there any other business to come before the meeting? CT: Mr. Chairman, I would like to present a resolution at this meeting of these shareholders. My name is Charles Travers, I am a stockholder and I retired from the company. You've heard the view from the top. I think now maybe you ought to get the view from the ranks. The view from the top had to necessarily be 18 austere, maybe Mr. Chairman I can be a little more lighthearted. I started at Utah about twenty-four years ago. Mr. Littlefield hired me. I remembered the office in San Francisco as a very small office, very small and compact and you had to go in the front door, which was the only entryway, and there was a row of offices on your left as you walked in. Those were the executive offices. Mr. Littlefield's office was the first office as you came in the door and he assigned me an office down at a sharp right angle off the main corridor. I also remember as a young fellow reading Horatio Alger's book, Ragged Dick, and in that book the way it said to get ahead in business, one of the ways at least, was to get to the office early and beat the boss in if you could. Well I found that was a very difficult task at Utah. You had to go through the front door and Mr. Littlefield always kept his door open, his light on. The first morning was a Monday morning and I got in about ten minutes ahead of time. I think our starting time was 8:15, but Mr. Littlefield said hello to me as I came in the door. We went on through that week. I got my time narrowed down a little more each day. By Wednesday, I was down to five minutes to 8:00 and on Friday I got there at twenty minutes to 8:00 and Mr. Littlefield said good morning to me every time I came in the door. So that weekend I figured out that there was a better way to do this and I'd get in real early and I'd beat him to the punch. So on Monday morning, I got there twenty-five minutes past 7:00, I walked in the door and the office was dark there was no light on, the door was open and Mr. Littlefield was not there. So I went to my office and at 8:15 I came sauntering down figuring now this is where I get my punch line. He's going to see me going out the door, he's 19 there and I say hello to him this time first. I looked in, the light was on, but Mr. Littlefield wasn't there. So I walked over to his secretary and said, "Where is Mr. Littlefield?" and he said, "Oh, he went to Chicago." [laughter] He left on the seven o'clock train. With all that due diligence I figured we ought to get ahead pretty fast some way or the other. And so I waited for my first year. You had to be in the Utah profit sharing plan one year in order to get your first statement. I waited my first year and I got my first statement. I have it here with me and I'd like to tell you that the date of it is December the 15th 1954. That's exactly twenty-two years ago to this day and here is what it says, extract: "Seasons greetings. Utah Construction Company retirement plan based on profit sharing, December 15, 1954. Dear fellow employee, your account in the retirement plan based on profit sharing on October 31, 1954 stood as follows: balance on October 31, 1953, zero. Added during the year by income, zero. So October 31, 1954, zero. And then it says during 1954, the net profit earned did not reach the levels your profit sharing permits. Your company would be required to make a contribution to the plan." And then it says, "Despite the fact that it is not required to do so, your company through its management is desirous of sharing with you a portion of the profits earned during 1954. To accomplish this, the board has approved a contribution of $50,000." Then it says, "we're going to try to get the IRS approval for that, and if so we will contribute the $50,000 to your fund, but if not we'll have to pay your share in cash. If the amount is received by you in cash, you will have to pay income taxes on it. Your share of the $50,000 contribution would be $201.75." I was beginning 20 to think that Horatio Alger wasn't right after all, $201.75 for getting in all those first eighteen months at 7:30 in the morning didn't seem fair to me, but nobody quit. I didn't, management didn't. About three weeks ago, I received this news release from the company in the mail, it's dated as of December 3, 1976 and here's what it says in the first few lines: "Utah International Inc. reports record earnings for fiscal 1976, San Francisco. E. W. Littlefield, Chairman of the Board, reported today that Utah International earned $178,821,000 or $5.67 per share. This fiscal year ended October 31, 1976." We have come a long way since those days in 1954. But Utah had more than profits. It had the forward look. My view from the ranks runs something like this: Utah's profit sharing and incentive plans were way ahead of their time back in those days. Mr. Littlefield, to my knowledge, had a rare understanding of the corporations standing in the social structure, what the corporation's obligations were to society. Utah's mine lands were restored to better than what nature had them long before that became a primary concern of many people in the United States. Utah's mining operations were conducted on a basis of we'll go sell the merchandise and then we'll get the production and that reduced the risk very greatly. Even today, Utah's section on environment stands out as a very aggressive and important function that helps to finish the project properly in the eyes of the people of this country. Well, I could go on and spend many more minutes saying that, but I think it's time now for me to present my resolution and I would like to do that. Mr. 21 Chairman, I will give you a copy of the resolution so you will have it for the record and I would like to read the resolution. EL: Thank you, Charlie. CT: The resolution says resolve about the stockholders of Utah International Inc., meeting for the last time as public shareholders in San Francisco, California on this 15th day of December 1976, do hereby express their gratitude and sincere appreciation to Edmund W. Littlefield, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer; Alexander M. Wilson, President and Chief Operating Officer and the Director; Marriner S. Eccles, Honorary Chairman; and to all the officers, directors and employees of Utah International Inc. for their devoted services in behalf of the shareholders. 4: Mr. Chairman, I move the resolution. EL: Thank you, Mr. Travers. I must say Charlie, you always speak well, but you don't speak briefly. [laughter] I think that comes from attending too many meetings of Town Council in Alameda. The motion has been presented to the shareholders, is there a second? Thank you, I must say that those of us at this end of the room, I'm sure have an abiding faith and agreed with its sentiments, but since we do not control the vote. I will put it to vote. All those in favor please say aye. All: Aye 22 EL: Opposed? Thank you. Thank you very, very much. And thank you Charlie. [applause]. There's no other business, the proposed merger has been approved. I thank you. Excuse me. 5: On behalf of all of the stockholders, I wish to thank all of the officers and directors of Utah International for having worked so well for us. I also think at this time, it would be appropriate to bow our heads in silence for one minute in memory of E. O. Wattis who was founder of Utah International and also for all of those who worked and lost their lives to make the company what it is today. Amen. EL: If you would amend that to include all of the founders the chair will entertain it. On the assumption that it is so included, we will so do. Thank you. With the merger approved and not further business, I'll entertain that motion to have the meeting adjourned. 6: I'll back the motion. EL: Thank you, is there a second? 7: Second. EL: All those in favor, please say aye. All: Aye. EL: Opposed? Thank you, the meeting is adjourned. ; This is a myriad of items throughout the UC/UI collection. It includes the minutes of the stockholder's meetings with both Utah International and General Electric, correspondence, a reel-to-reel tape of the merger meeting and the official merger documents. ; 4.25 x 6.5 - 8.5 x 11 in. handwritten or typed on paper ; Reynolds Securities Inc. Transamerica Pyramid 600 Montgomery Street San Francisco, Calif. 94111 Telephone 983-8000 Members New York Stock Exchange, Inc. and other leading exchanges Main Office 120 Broadway New York, N. Y. 10005 December 13, 1976 Mr. Edmund W. Littlefield Utah International 550 California Street San Francisco, Ca. 94104 Dear Ed: I regret that I will be unable to attend the meeting Wednesday because I will be in the East for a Directors meeting. This is an occasion that I hate to miss, but I am sure that many of your other happy stockholders will be there. Sincerely, Gerry Gerald F. Brush GFB: 1c

A collection of the Board of Directors meetings for the Utah Construction Company. The minutes cover 1900-1952 with the year of 1909 missing. The meetings covered jobs the company was bidding on, financial outlook of the company, and the daily business of the company. ; Microfilm

A collection of the Board of Directors meetings for the Utah Construction Company. The minutes cover 1900-1952 with the year of 1909 missing. The meetings covered jobs the company was bidding on, financial outlook of the company, and the daily business of the company. ; Microfilm

A collection of the Board of Directors meetings for the Utah Construction Company. The minutes cover 1900-1952 with the year of 1909 missing. The meetings covered jobs the company was bidding on, financial outlook of the company, and the daily business of the company. ; Microfilm

A collection of the Board of Directors meetings for the Utah Construction Company. The minutes cover 1900-1952 with the year of 1909 missing. The meetings covered jobs the company was bidding on, financial outlook of the company, and the daily business of the company. ; Microfilm

A collection of the Board of Directors meetings for the Utah Construction Company. The minutes cover 1900-1952 with the year of 1909 missing. The meetings covered jobs the company was bidding on, financial outlook of the company, and the daily business of the company. ; Microfilm

A collection of the Board of Directors meetings for the Utah Construction Company. The minutes cover 1900-1952 with the year of 1909 missing. The meetings covered jobs the company was bidding on, financial outlook of the company, and the daily business of the company. ; Microfilm

A collection of the Board of Directors meetings for the Utah Construction Company. The minutes cover 1900-1952 with the year of 1909 missing. The meetings covered jobs the company was bidding on, financial outlook of the company, and the daily business of the company. ; Microfilm

A collection of the Board of Directors meetings for the Utah Construction Company. The minutes cover 1900-1952 with the year of 1909 missing. The meetings covered jobs the company was bidding on, financial outlook of the company, and the daily business of the company. ; Microfilm

A collection of the Board of Directors meetings for the Utah Construction Company. The minutes cover 1900-1952 with the year of 1909 missing. The meetings covered jobs the company was bidding on, financial outlook of the company, and the daily business of the company. ; Microfilm