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Most military bases can be thought of as good-sized communities, containing all of the important resources that non-military communities contain including urban forests. These military urban forests have similarities and differences with urban forests in non-military communities, and their management is in some ways different. In this paper we describe the urban forest situation at Hill Air Force Base in northern Utah, an example of a military base still in the early stages of urban forest management, but with an improving and expanding urban forestry program. The base, in cooperation with Utah State University's Department of Forest Resources, began an assessment of its program and conducted a complete tree inventory in 1993. Inventory results and a qualitative assessment led to development of a plan with management goals and implementation strategies, which became part of an overall Natural Resources Management Plan for the Base. Besides increasing tree numbers and overall urban forest quality and tree management, the plan calls for increased emphasis on community participation as the key to a successful urban forestry program.

Frontiers provide a way to approach not only the narrative of military histories, but also key concepts in military history. This essay investigates each of these perspectives, indicating as it does key dynamics of change.

Mode of access: Internet. ; Bancroft KFX2109.O35.A32 1881: Formerly owned by the Joseph Parry Library, with their ownership markings

Edward Murphy, July 20, 2013 ; Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial houses flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. ; The following is an oral history interview with Edward Murphy. The interview was conducted on July 20, 2013, by Melissa Johnson. Edward discusses his experiences with 25th Street. ; 15p.; 29cm.; 2 bound transcripts; 4 file folders. 1 videodisc: digital; 4 3/4 in. ; Oral History Program Edward S. Murphy Interviewed by Melissa Johnson 20 July 2013 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Edward S. Murphy Interviewed by Melissa Johnson 20 July 2013 Copyright © 2014 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 Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial houses flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. After World War II, the railroad business declined. Some government agencies and businesses related to the defense industry continued to gravitate to Ogden after the war—including the Internal Revenue Regional Center, the Marquardt Corporation, Boeing Corporation, Volvo-White Truck Corporation, Morton-Thiokol, and several other smaller operations. However, the economy became more service oriented, with small businesses developing that appealed to changing demographics, including the growing Hispanic population. ____________________________________ 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: Murphy, Edward, an oral history by Melissa Johnson, 20 July 2013 , WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Edward Murphy July 20, 2013 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Edward Murphy. The interview was conducted on July 20, 2013, by Melissa Johnson. Edward discusses his experiences with 25th Street. MJ: This is Melissa Johnson and I am in the home of Edward Murphy in Layton, Utah. It is July 20, 2013 and we are interviewing him as a part of our Business at the Crossroads oral history project. Why don't you tell us a little bit about when and where you were born? EM: I was born in 1925 in Ogden, Utah. I was brought home to a loving mother, father, brother and grandfather. When I turned six-years-old in 1932, my grandfather died. In the morning, I awakened and asked my mother, "Where's Grandpa?" She said, "Grandpa's gone to heaven." I found out shortly later that he died of pneumonia. Two years later, my father died. I miss those two men very much and have missed them all my life. They loved and cared for me. Soon after my grandfather died, my other grandfather, on my mother's side, took me under his wing and brought me to his Indian trading post known as the Indian Curio Shop. Here I worked during the tourist season. The first thing I'd do was sweep the sidewalk, and in those days people were not as tidy as they are now and the sidewalk really needed sweeping. I then mopped the floor in the shop and washed the windows and the counters. I waited on customers as the tourists came into the store. Later, I would run errands until about 10 a.m. and then I would go home. In the evenings, I would return at 6 p.m. and work until 8 1 p.m. waiting on customers. This would last until September when I would return to school. I lived about six blocks from the store on Washington Blvd. My mother bought me a bicycle so that I could get to work sooner. My grandfather was very good to me. He would pay me 50 cents a day if business was good and occasionally he would take me to a movie. It was usually at the Egyptian Theater in Ogden. Before we went to the movie, he would take me into Keely's Café and we always had limeade. It became a routine. Often during the day, he would take me to the shooting gallery on 25th Street. He taught me how to shoot a rifle and then he would take me to one of the restaurants on 25th Street. There was the City Café, the Senate Café, Ross and Jacks and a Chinese place that is still there. I enjoyed my grandfather's company and the interesting people that we would meet. At this time, Ogden was called the Junction City and it was equidistant from the major cities of the West Coast: approximately 800 miles to Los Angeles, 800 miles to San Francisco and the same distance to Portland, Oregon. People at this intersection would have layovers ranging from three hours to sometimes all day. They would have time to come to this immensely interesting store that my grandfather established. During the day the Indian women would come in and buy their beads. It was my job to sell them the beads. On one side of the store were the cheap souvenirs, beads, and a few inexpensive items. On the opposite side of the store, my grandfather sold the products of the Indians such as the beaded gloves, purses, genuine Indian jewelry, baskets and rugs, and all the items that commanded higher prices. He also had a vast array of interesting 2 items that he collected in the West. We had an abundant supply of fossil fish from Kemmerer, Wyoming. We had woven blankets from Southwest Utah and Arizona. We had Apache baskets and pottery from the Zuni tribe in Arizona. We had moss agate rings made by white men from Montana. We had horse hair belts and leather belts made from prisons in Montana. My grandfather always wore a dark suit, white shirt and a tie, and was distinguished and also educated. He had a degree in accounting from the Valparaiso in Illinois. He came to Utah in the latter part of the 19th century from Colorado where he was employed as the accountant for the superintendent of mines, who later became my grandfather's father-in-law. He married the boss' daughter, which turned out to be an advantage because it was his father-in-law who gave him the money to set up the business. After my great-grandfather retired, my grandfather was en route to San Francisco to begin a new life when they stopped in Ogden for the birth of my mother. In their brief stay, they came to like it and negotiated with my other grandfather to set up a business in his building, which he did, and the work lasted a lifetime. In off season, when the tourist trade would decline, my grandfather would go on buying trips throughout the West. He would collect petrified logs from Arizona, which wasn't illegal at the time. We gathered obsidian from Yellowstone Park and buffalo horns which would be polished. We had copper souvenirs from Bingham Canyon in Utah. We had older guns and he had an array of rifles and pistols. 3 My experience occurred during the Depression and at that time people would sell their valuables to buy bread to live. There were always rich people to buy things; it was the rich people that traveled on the train. One of the interesting things I liked about working with my grandfather was meeting the people that came off the train. I met such people as William Randolph Hearst and Mrs. Hoover—but not her husband, as he rarely came in because the crowds would follow him and that was a bother to him. Mrs. Hoover always came in to visit with my grandfather, whom she liked very much. There were a number of movie stars I met. In those days, they traveled by train. I met Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and a number of others that I remember. Charlie Russell came in and I liked him. He was the eminent artist that portrayed cowboys. I also met Mrs. Zane Gray and her daughter. At the time I met them, Zane Gray had passed away. It was interesting to meet them. 25th Street was an interesting street. It was an intersection of life that lived to the fullest. There were good things and there were bad things that happened on this street. I won't go into the bad things because that was not part of my experience. What I remember of 25th Street are the good things. The people who ran the stores were people of character and personality that made them interesting. Across the street was the Healy Hotel, owned and operated by another Irishman who came to work on the Central Pacific Railroad, Patrick Healy and knew my grandfather. He was an immigrant from Ireland. My grandfather was not an immigrant, but his folks came from Ireland. His father died when he was very young and he was apprenticed out and raised in another 4 situation. One of his regrets in life was that he missed having a family. He missed family life, but he made up for it later. At 18 he was drafted into the Union Army and became an artilleryman. He engaged in three major battles with William Tecumseh Sherman, the General of the Army. After the campaign, he went back to New York barefoot as his shoes had worn out. There wasn't much for him to do at home, so he got on a boat to San Francisco and got a job with the Central Pacific where he became a surveyor. Both the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific employed a lot of young men, most of whom were immigrants. Most were young Irish men that had served in the Union Army, and these young men built the Union Pacific. On the Central Pacific, the Irish laid the rails because they were big. The Chinese worked on the track bed and that was the real hard work. When the rails were finished, my grandfather and Patrick Heely became roommates and got a job with the Central Pacific. Patrick Heely became the engineer and my grandfather became his fireman. They lived and worked together for a while in Corinne, and then my grandfather went to Salt Lake City and got a job in a bank. He was there a short while and the opportunity came to open up a business in Ogden, so he came to Ogden and put up a dry goods store at the very place where the Union Depot stands today. One day, after a trip to Salt Lake City, he came back and his business was burned down. This didn't deter him, however. He opened a new business at the location where the hotel was and put up a hotel with a number of retail outlets and a saloon in it. 5 My father and uncle grew up to become bartenders. They worked there most of their lives. It was an attractive saloon, in fact, the most attractive in the city of Ogden. It had three Italian arch windows facing the depot, one of which was later bricked in. It had revolving fans on the ceiling and a beautiful mahogany bar on the east side with a number of tables with chairs spread around. It reminded me of the bar I saw in the movie, "Casablanca," and brought memories back to me. It was here in this atmosphere that I grew up, which to this day I hold cherished memories of it. I remember the stores on 25th Street with their particular odors. You'd go into a bakery and you'd smell the wonderful odor of fresh bread. You'd go into Cave's pharmacy, which was across the street in a part of the hotel, and you'd smell the spicy smell of botanicals. You'd go into my grandfather's store and smell the peculiar odor of tanned buckskin, which was agreeable and distinguishing. You'd go into these other stores where people lived in the rear of them and you'd smell their cooking, although sometimes it wasn't very nice. Today it's different. Everything is air conditioned. You'd go into the department store on 24th Street in the summer time when it wasn't air conditioned and go upstairs and you would start perspiring. In those days there was entrepreneurial opportunity for plain people, something that I feel isn't present so much today. Times have changed and we all change, there's no stopping it. I am a poet. I've written two books of poetry and I'm now on my third one. Last Sunday, the church secretary came up to me and said, "I'd like you to recite a poem for next Sunday church services, would you?" I said, "Yes." So I went 6 home and wrote one. I wrote a poem that summarizes life, but this poem is special because it's written at the pinnacle of my life experience. I should like to end this interview with my impression of life from the experience that I have had. I was also a soldier in World War II. I was an infantryman and saw seven months of combat, so I can relate life from each stage. I'll read my poem. It's called, "A Viewpoint," "A lifting melody if filtering through discord. A resurgence with intent is giving form. The continuum of fury is fashioning a new design. An effervescence of ideas rise within instinctive fervor. The vigor of renewal ignites the eternal intention. For something to be will never remain the same. Since evolving pieces are meant to fuel change. Though a day may seem bland, time is churning. Surprise is often the remedy for oversight. Change opens the vent for good. For one to garner starch to meet affront. These earthly sounds bear the lifeblood for what is beautiful to become the pathway for reaching." MJ: Thank you. We really appreciate you taking the time to meet with us today and to share your memories, they are quite wonderful. JC: I have one question. When you were a kid, what did you do for fun? EM: I liked to play softball, tennis and hike. I had a friend my age who lived across the street that was like-minded. We would walk all over the city of Ogden, poking our noses into everything. We liked to go to the foothills and hike the trails. We would gather on a hot summer day and read each other stories. I remember in particular, we would read Edgar Allan Poe and scare each other. 7 MJ: Poe is pretty scary. EM: We read, "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Pit and The Pendulum," "The Black Cat," and we would read his poetry: "El Dorado," "The Raven," they are great works from a master. We would also get on our bikes when we were teenagers and pedal up to Pineview Dam and rent a canoe or a catamaran and paddle around the lake until we got tired and then we'd ride our bikes home. I had cousins and uncles that I would do things with, which left good memories. Once a year, my mother, brother and I would get in the car and we'd drive as far as Idaho Falls where the roads were paved and then take the dirt road from there to Yellowstone Park. In those days, the idea was to keep ahead of the car next to you. If you didn't, you would eat their dust for 90 miles. We would visit my uncle Carl, who had a store in West Yellowstone and stay there two weeks. We'd tour the park and go to the same places usually in July when all of the beautiful flowers were out in bloom. We'd "ooo" and "ahh" about the beauty of this wonderful national park. Occasionally, we'd go to Zion National Park. I remember one trip that we made with an aunt, uncle and cousin. We all got into the car and my sixteen-year- old girl cousin did the driving. We went to Bryce, Zion and the Grand Canyon; it was a wonderful trip. I've had a most fortunate life with many wonderful memories and wish to carry them over. Thank you very much. MJ: I'm glad we got to hear some of them today. Thank you. 8

Michael E. Nash, July 26, 2013; Michael E. Nash at 271 25th Street ca. 1966; Michael E. Nash at the Ogden Bus Depot ; Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial houses flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. ; The following is an oral history interview with Michael Nash. The interview was conducted on July 26, 2013, by Melissa Johnson, in Kaysville, Utah. Michael discusses his memories of 25th Street. ; 22p.; 29cm.; 2 bound transcripts; 4 file folders. 1 videodisc: digital; 4 3/4 in. ; Oral History Program Michael Nash Interviewed by Melissa Johnson 26 July 2013 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Michael Nash Interviewed by Melissa Johnson 26 July 2013 Copyright © 2014 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 Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial houses flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. After World War II, the railroad business declined. Some government agencies and businesses related to the defense industry continued to gravitate to Ogden after the war—including the Internal Revenue Regional Center, the Marquardt Corporation, Boeing Corporation, Volvo-White Truck Corporation, Morton-Thiokol, and several other smaller operations. However, the economy became more service oriented, with small businesses developing that appealed to changing demographics, including the growing Hispanic population. ____________________________________ 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: Nash, Michael, an oral history by Melissa Johnson, 26 July 2013 , WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Michael E. Nash July 26, 2013 Michael E. Nash at 271 25th Street ca. 1966 Michael E. Nash at the Ogden Bus Depot Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Michael Nash. The interview was conducted on July 26, 2013, by Melissa Johnson, in Kaysville, Utah. Michael discusses his memories of 25th Street. MJ: This is Melissa Johnson and it is July 26, 2013. I'm here in the home of Michael Nash in Kaysville, Utah and he is going to talk with us a little bit about his memories of 25th Street as part of our Business at the Crossroads project. Recording the interview today is Jordan Chavez. So, just to start off a little bit, tell us about where and when you were born. MN: It's nice to have you guys here, thank you. My full name in Michael Earl Serpa Nash and I was born on the 7th of May of 1947 in Ogden at the St. Benedict's Hospital at the top of 30th Street. The address that I grew up was 451 15th Street in Ogden. It was not too far from the Lorin Farr Park and the Ogden Stadium. MJ: Tell us a little bit about your family as well. MN: My biological father's name was Lembert (Lindy) Joseph Serpa. He and my mom divorced when I was fairly young. His family lived in Oakland, California. I'd see him once a summer until I got a little older through junior high and high school. One unique thing about my biological father, in his younger days played for the Ogden Reds baseball team. As a matter of fact, at Iggy's Sports Grill at the junction in Ogden, they have a picture of the 1939 Ogden Reds and his picture is in that group of the baseball team. He also played some Western Canadian baseball and served in the Navy. He. was aboard the U.S.S. Alabama during 1 World War II. My stepfather, William Leslie Nash Jr. and my mom married in 1957 and is from Aurora, Missouri. He was in the Air Force at Hill Air Force Base when they met, and got discharged from there. His line of work after the Air Force was in construction. He started at Waterfall Construction in Ogden, then worked for Gibbons & Reed Construction Company, which is now Granite Construction. My mom, Barbara May Lamb Serpa Nash, is from Ogden and was an LPN, a licensed practical nurse at St. Benedict's Hospital for a while, but the majority of the time she was a stay at home mom with me and my brother, Roger. My half-brother Roger Scott Nash, was eleven years younger than myself, but we still had a lot in common even though we were a bit separated in years. He was also born in Ogden. My grandmother, Hattie May Gail Lamb was a stay at home mom. She came from a fairly large family and they settled in Riverdale, Utah. My grandfather, Earl Ogden Lamb, was from Iowa. During Vaudeville, he was stage manager when they had the Vaudeville shows at the Orpheum Theater. When they converted to the talking pictures, he was a projectionist at the Orpheum Theater. It was the Glassman family that owned the Orpheum and the Paramount theaters. When my grandfather died, they gave my grandmother a pass for her and one other person to the Orpheum and the Paramount movies and only had to pay the tax. MJ: Just really quick, do you know what position your dad played on the Reds? MN: Catcher. MJ: You mentioned your mom being an LPN, was she trained here in Ogden? MN: Yes, she trained at the St. Benedict's Hospital at the top of 30th Street. 2 MJ: You mentioned to us before that your uncle had owned the Lyceum building and at that time had been converted into the liquor store in the bottom and apartments above. MN: Right. My uncle, Harold F. Gail was my grandmother's brother and he worked for The Standard Examiner for a while and then he had his own business, Gail Printing Company. When my grandmother sold our house on 15th Street, she moved to 271 25th Street in 1957. My mom, stepdad, brother and myself ultimately ended up moving to the apartments in approximately 1959. The Lyceum faces north and south, so Grandma actually lived in apartment number seven which was in the southeast corner of the building on the second floor. My brother and I, my mom and stepdad lived in apartment number one, which was the north end of the building that overlooked 25th Street. There was approximately seven apartments on the second floor. The first floor was the Utah State Liquor Store. A partial third level had just two apartments. MJ: Do you know how or when our uncle purchased the building? MN: I'm not sure. MJ: Okay. You said your grandmother moved there in 1957 and you guys moved there. MN: We ultimately moved there in 1959 and we lived there from 1959 to 1968. MJ: Okay. Before we talk a little bit more about 25th Street, what were some of the things that you did for fun when you were growing up? 3 MN: You know, it was probably just the normal things as a kid, I guess. Of course, having moved quite a bit when I was younger, I met a lot of people and had a lot of friends around the Ogden area, but never got to stay in one place for a long time other than on 15th Street. I stayed there from 1947 to 1957 then we moved to 25th Street. I went to a lot of movies, of course, at the Orpheum and the Paramount. There was also the Egyptian Theater on Washington Boulevard and the Ogden Theater. I didn't go to the Ogden very much because it mainly had adult movies. When I would walk to Madison or Central up to 25th Street, sometimes they'd have some pretty risqué pictures of the movies that were playing but a curious kid as myself you had to check them out. I had some good riends who were employed at the greyhound bus station and the coffee shop next door to the east. I remember a lady and her two daughters that managed the Helina Hotel for a while. I did just normal stuff, if you want to call it normal on 25th Street. Let me just say that even though we lived on 25th Street, we weren't necessarily of the street. There were a lot of different types of people that would come down there—people from the Ogden business district and people that hung out on the street all the time. MJ: All kinds of people. MN: Right. Exactly. MJ: What was 25th Street like when you guys lived there? MN: Wow, well there was a lot going on with the various establishments and I remember the Broom Hotel on the corner of 25th and Washington. Before even the federal building, there were a lot of different businesses and bars in that area. 4 Of course, there was just a wide variety of establishments from hotels to bars and cafes. It was just interesting. MJ: Did you see a lot of trouble? MN: A lot of different things. When you live in an area like that, you do. You see a lot of different people like husbands being abusive to their wives, especially sometimes when their cars were parked in front of the liquor store. I don't know if they were even partially intoxicated when they were there, or had an altercation of some type, but when your apartment, like ours was, facing 25th Street, you do see a lot. With everything going on you're bound to see all kinds of stuff. On a positive note, one thing that stands out in my mind are the buses— the greyhound buses that were coming and going. There was also the Lake Shore Motor Coach Lines, which was a local commuter bus from Ogden to Salt Lake and all points in between. I vividly remember one of the Greyhound routes that would be announced as follows: "All aboard the north bound car. Loading in lane number two for Brigham City, Snowville, Stravel, Burley, Twin Falls, Boise, Baker, Pendleton, Walla Walla, Lewiston, Spokane, Portland, Tacoma, Seattle, Vancouver." Just to the west of the Lyceum, was the labor temple. This is where a lot of the labor unions had their offices and where the members would meet. I can't remember the exact time when the labor temple caught on fire, nor the circumstances why, but it was late one night or early one morning and it was a fairly cooler time of the year. The fire department came and woke us all up, everybody in the building, to evacuate. So, we had to leave the building, but the 5 greyhound bus station closed at approximately 11:30 p.m., and it was after that that the fire happened, so we went over to the Trailways terminal which was just north across the street on the corner from the Greyhound bus station. We were all in our robes and pajamas and night gowns, and had to stay until they got the fire put out and until they deemed it safe to go back in. I remember for a long time afterwards you could smell the smoke from the fire at the labor temple. Another thing that stands out in my mind was, especially on Fridays and Saturday nights, there would be, just to the south of the back of the apartments was the Elk's Lodge. The Elk's faced east and west, but they would always have a live band usually there on Friday and Saturday nights and a lot of people and a lot of parties going on. West of our building was the Acapulco Club and they had a live band too so it was kind of a battle of the bands on Friday nights and Saturday nights. They'd have music during the week, but nothing like the live bands that would be there on the weekends. It was loud and pretty noisy, but it was fun. There were things going on at the park sometimes, different things at the park, which was just to the east of Grant Avenue. MJ: I think it's really interesting, a lot of times when people think about Ogden, they think about the railroad and that end of 25th Street, the hustle and bustle over there, so it's interesting to hear the hustle and bustle at the other end of the street with the buses. MN: Yes, that's exactly true. The old silver sides and scenic cruiser buses. Fred Holden, who was the ticker agent, had two of his sons that worked there, Terry and Tom Holden, and then there was a gentleman by the name of Gerald 6 Perkins. Oliver Albertson sold pillows on the buses when they'd come in, and there was an African American gentleman whose last name was Coleman, but they called him Coley and he would shine shoes in the men's restroom of the bus station. Good people. Really good people. MJ: They had a lot going on down there. You said that you worked at the coffee shop there in the bus depot, how did you get job? MN: Exactly. Well, living there and working close, or being there a lot, I knew Fred Holden and his boys and he basically ran the whole operation. Don Mueller was the first operator of the coffee shop. Then there was Welling Zundel who ran it for a while after Don Mueller left. June Barker was one of the waitresses at the coffee shop. Her husband, Tom Barker, was a Lakeshore bus driver. When Welling Zundel took over, he had a couple of his granddaughters, Mary and Jane Holmes that worked there. So I got to be really good friends with all them. MJ: Where in the depot was the coffee shop? MN: It was on the northwest corner of the building. MJ: What did the rest of the interior of the depot look like? MN: Restrooms, of course, but I remember they had similar waiting benches that the train depot had. There was the ticket counter, an area where people would put their bags to be checked because they had to be loaded on the buses or off-loaded when the buses came in or left. Basically, the exterior now pretty much looks like it did back then. 7 MJ: We talked a little bit about the theaters before and your grandfather working there. Any other memories of those downtown theaters? MN: The reason we went to so many movies is because of the passes my grandmother got, and the theaters were so close. I remember when they had, "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," playing and the big marquee out front. Adjacent and pretty much connected to the Orpheum Theater was the Dokos Candy Company, and the proprietor there was a gentleman by the name of Johnny Dokos. We would go in and get a few little refreshments and some candy. A lot of times Johnny would take me down to where they were making the candy in the basement. The Paramount was on Kiesel Avenue between 24th and 25th on the west side. I remember the old movie tone news that would broadcast before the movies. MJ: You had mentioned to us before the Mr. Softie truck. Did you work in the Mr. Softie truck? MN: Fred Holden got this franchise for Mr. Softie and it was actually a fairly large ice cream truck because it had an ice cream making machine. It reminded me of some of the larger post office trucks. We would park it over at the gas station on 27th Street and Grant Avenue and would plug it in at night to keep the batteries charged. During the day in the summertime, I would bring it over to the Greyhound bus terminal and park it on the furthest west end to get it out of the way of the buses. In the storage room on the southwest corner of the building is where they'd keep a lot of the supplies, so we'd load it up from there and then would go to North Ogden, the central part of Ogden and then to South Ogden. 8 MJ: You mentioned before too, the woman and her daughter that ran the Helina Hotel. MN: There was a lady and her two daughters that managed the Helina Hotel. They would come up to the coffee shop and would visit. I wish I could remember their names because they were really good people. MJ: We've got the Polk directories at the library, I wonder if we can look up the hotel at that time and find out their names. MN: The Helina Hotel still has the Helina Hotel name on the front of it. The Lyceum, that name was not, on the front of the building other than recently whenever they started redoing that whole area. MJ: That's good to know because I figured that it was original to it. MN: No, and from what I can recall, it was not. Even though it was the Lyceum Theater, that "Lyceum," was not painted on the building. On the north side there was just a small entrance to the apartments that you could go upstairs and we could lock it at nights or anytime. We'd usually leave it open during the day so the mailman could deliver the mail because there were boxes right at the approach. Then you'd go up the stairs into the hallway. A couple of the inner apartments didn't have windows and were used for storage, but the ones like my grandmothers and ours that had windows and some of the others along the east side were occupied. MJ: You had mentioned too, the Great Wall Café and Grill Tavern. 9 MN: You could look out our front window and just to the north was the Grill Tavern and just a little bit northeast was the Great Wall Café. In that same area was the Depot Drug. Also there was the Kokomo Club, which is still operating. There was Poncho's at 25th Street and Lincoln Avenue and the Marion Hotel on the one hundred block. We were in the two hundred block. There was Star Noodle and next door there was a little Judo or Karate place, they would teach Judo or Karate and you could go down in a basement area and actually sit and watch them do their practicing. Also, on Lincoln, between 25th and 26th, I believe it was on the east side of the street, they had the Sundowners Motorcycle Club hangout and then, of course, I remember Wonder Bread. That had been there for a long time, plus the thrift store and that was on Grand Avenue, a little bit south of the Elk's Lodge. I also remember the library. When I was going to Central and Ogden High School, if I needed to, I'd just go over to the library on the corner of 26th and Washington. MJ: The Carnegie Library, right? MN: The Carnegie Library, exactly. That was there for a long time, but I would go in and study and do whatever. It was a short walk home so it was pretty convenient. MJ: You talked about the park there and you said that you would sometimes walk over for Christmas Village. MN: Right. During Christmas time, they'd have it all set up like they still do to a certain extent. Since my brother was a lot younger than myself, when my grandmother and my mother would set out Christmas, Roger, myself, and my stepdad would take him over to the park and would just walk around and look at things and 10 spend about as long as we could, about a half an hour or 45 minutes until we figured the presents were all there under the tree. The apartments weren't very big, so we didn't have a huge tree, but we would go back and it was kind of special to Roger because Santa Claus had come. The park did a very good job in the Christmas village with the decorations and music. There were a lot of people there every night during the Christmas season. MJ: It's interesting doing this project because some people remember 25th Street as just rough and tumble and crime this problem area, other people remember it as being this very vibrant and alive kind of place. Where do you think your memories fit? MN: A lot of it kind of intermingles with everything you said because living there on a full-time basis, you see some good things and you see some bad things, but overall, it was just the area at the time. You could go not too far north, south, east, or west and be in the business district of Ogden. You could be over where they were doing all of the bread making at Wonder Bread. The post office was not too far. Before they built the federal building and when the Broom Hotel was there, you had more of the same kind of situation there so it was more extended before they tore that 300 block down where the federal building is now. So, there was still part of the, "red light alley." I got a book that I was reading on it called, "The Historic Two-Bit Street," and that brought a lot of memories back about the red light district. I remember that area. I don't remember exactly, but I think probably they had a lot of that cleaned up fairly well during the time that we were there. Maybe not totally, but I don't remember so much the negative things. It 11 was just the spirit of the time more or less. There was just a lot of stuff going on and just a lot of things happening. There was never a dull moment basically there. You had to be careful, of course. We would lock our door to the building at night and hopefully people in the apartments would remember to do that, but every so often you'd have different people come up for whatever reason if somebody forgot to lock it and they were drunk, or whatever by mistake or maybe they were just coming up to visit one of the tenants there. One thing I can remember in the building is on the partial third level, you'd go up right before you got to the two apartments, apartment 8 and apartment 9, you'd make a 180 degree turn and there was a little entrance that you'd have to bend down to go into a locked door, but you'd open the door with out key and go in. I remember there were closets, or dressing rooms that they had used at the time when it was a theater to store things. My mother's uncle would let the tenants store things there. That partial area where the storage closets were, was fairly large, but then actually you could look further north up in the attic area and could see all of the open beams. It was very dark. You had a light in part of the area where the storage closets were. They weren't a small closet. They almost looked like things where you could store wardrobe type stuff. I remember going up and just looking around seeing a lot of different things. When I went to Ogden High School I'd catch the Ogden City bus at the corner of 25th and Grant Avenue. I'd ride it all the way to Ogden High School and then catch the same bus back and it would drop me off on Washington and 25th. It was kind of different to ride the city bus line to school every day. The brief time I went to Madison and Central, I walked 12 there and back home in good and bad weather usually. It was a workout, but I made it okay. I remember the Topper Bakery which is still on Monroe between 25th and 26th. MJ: How come your family ultimately moved from there? MN: I'm not really sure because when they moved from 25th they moved to Gramercy between 25th and 26th. I joined the Air Force during the Vietnam timeframe and I went in 1966 and went to my basic training and tech. school and was stationed back at Hill for two and a half years, so when I was in the Air Force for part of that four year time, I actually just lived at home and drove to Hill. Then I got orders to go to Thailand from 1968 to 1969 and that was when my grandmother, my mom, dad and Roger moved from 25th Street to Gramercy. When I got back from Thailand, they had already moved. Why? I don't know if maybe they just needed a little bit more room. The apartments were fairly small and you had to put stuff in storage, so I think they just wanted to get a home and just press on from there. Grandma lived with us until her passing in May of 1969. MJ: I just have a few more questions for you to wind down. How do you think Ogden and 25th Street have changed since you lived there? MN: All that they've done to make 25th Street historic. Times change and you just go with the times. Especially where the Junction is now, there used to be a lot of small stores and stuff. Wow, because I grew up in Ogden a lot of big changes have taken place, most have been for the better. The inner city has taken a bit of a downturn. There are still a lot of old beautiful homes in the inner city. The buildings and the structure all seem to be, a lot of them are really still there. A lot 13 of them have been put on registers for the historical society and whatever. I know the Egyptian survived. I was kind of disappointed for the Orpheum, but I think when they were doing some construction there on that part of Ogden, somehow something fell on the roof there and it caved in and they had to demolish it. For the most part, the old city and county building is there from when I remembered it. Of course, I remember the jail being at the top there. I call it the city and county building referring to it as that because that has pretty much stayed in place. Overall, just with progress and different things, but I'm glad that a lot of the building on 25th Street, the bus station is still intact structurally and the Lyceum Theater. I think, I believe, that the apartments…well, let me back track a little bit, when I went down there and they were doing a little bit of the remodeling to the Lyceum building, when they were putting the Wiseguys and what's there now, I was talking with my Uncle Herold's son, Brent, who I believe is still living. Gary Gail, his other boy, died a few years back. He was an attorney in Ogden. Brent still lives up on Weelocken, but I was talking with him and I asked him if it was okay, and even the construction workers, if I went and just went through the building a little bit. Actually, I got a brick that I still have of the remodel of the building. Upstairs where the apartments were, initially I think they were going to turn that into office space because when I went up there, of course, they hadn't done it yet, but there were still a lot of mattresses and furniture in the different apartments. It was neat to walk through them, it brought back a lot of memories. 14 It was neat to go back through the Lyceum buildings when they were remodeling it for the Wiseguys play house downstairs. Probably back in the 1970's, Herold Gale had his printing company in there for a while where the liquior store was. I remember working for my mother's Uncle Herold when he left The Standard Examiner and had his printing business. It was initially in the old Ogden Utah Knitting Mill building just north of the old post office on Grant Avenue on the second floor. Then he moved from there to Ogden Avenue between 25th and 26th Street on the west side of the street. There were some buildings there and he occupied a small warehouse where he had his printing facility. Facing the entrance was a parking lot behind Glen Bros. Music Store. MN: We've covered a lot, haven't we? There are just a lot of things. I appreciate the opportunity to share some of these experiences because for the nine years or so that I lived on 25th, even though it was fine for me, you get labeled, "Oh, you live on 25th Street? Oh my gosh, you're living in a pretty rough part of town," which it was, but you dealt with it. I knew so many people that I wasn't really picked on as a kid. I mean, you go through different things, but I knew so many people from different parts of town that they pretty much left me alone. So, I was immune to a lot of the bullying that maybe went on. Thank you for this opportunity, it's been great. MJ: Thank you. Was there anything else you wanted to share? Did we get it all? MN: I think we pretty much covered most of it. 15 MJ: Good. Thank you very much for letting us come here today. We really appreciate it. MN: That's great. Thanks again. 16

Deane Kingsford; Deane Kingsford, July 2, 2013 ; Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial houses flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. ; The following is an oral history interview with Deane Kingsford. The interview was conducted on July 2, 2013, by Lorrie Rands. Kingsford discusses his time in World War II and his memories of 25th Street. ; 18p.; 29cm.; 2 bound transcripts; 4 file folders. 1 sound disc: digital; 4 3/4 in. ; Deane Kingsford Deane Kingsford July 2, 2013 Oral History Program Deane Kingsford Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 2 July 2013 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Deane Kingsford Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 2 July 2013 Copyright © 2014 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 Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial houses flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. After World War II, the railroad business declined. Some government agencies and businesses related to the defense industry continued to gravitate to Ogden after the war—including the Internal Revenue Regional Center, the Marquardt Corporation, Boeing Corporation, Volvo-White Truck Corporation, Morton-Thiokol, and several other smaller operations. However, the economy became more service oriented, with small businesses developing that appealed to changing demographics, including the growing Hispanic population. ____________________________________ 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: Kingsford, Deane, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 2 July 2013, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Deane Kingsford. The interview was conducted on July 2, 2013, by Lorrie Rands. Kingsford discusses his time in World War II and his memories of 25th Street. LR: Today is July 2, 2013. We are in the home of Mr. Deane Kingsford talking about his remembrances of the Ogden canteen, his time in WWII and his memories of 25th Street. Thank you, Mr. Kingsford for allowing me in your home. Tell me about where you were born and what brought you to Ogden. DK: I was born in Ogden and my family lived at 33rd Street and Washington Boulevard, which used to be clear out in the sticks. It was a street that went down to the city dumps, so the pavement on Washington Boulevard stopped at 36th Street and there was a dirt road that went out to where the hospital is now. A lot of people don't realize that Ogden wasn't very big, but it was still the second largest city in Utah. I think the population was something like 140,000. I went to Washington School and then to Ogden High School. I was a good student at Ogden High School and my sister and I graduated together by virtue that I happened to be home when they had the graduation ceremony. So, when I took my cap and gown off I was in uniform and that made me feel good. Realizing that I would probably be drafted anyway, by volunteering beforehand I had a choice to be in the Army or Navy and so forth. I chose to be in the Navy and they sent me to Farragut, Idaho, which is just a hop, skip and a jump from the Canadian and United States border. It was during the winter and it was cold up there. While I was there, my brother and one of my teachers were in the 1 barracks right next to me, so I got a chance to see my brother. A lot of my friends that I went to Ogden High with were there as well. From there, they sent me to Chicago where I was taught all the information about how to be a code operator for radio at the University of Chicago. It was pretty good duty. We were in a barracks that was a fraternity house and it was like a big donut. In the center was a big yard. The food was absolutely fantastic and they took us down to an old church building to learn code and all of that information. After learning the code they sent us to Schumacher, California to a military dispersing unit. Everybody would go through Schumacher, which was southeast of Oakland, California. I'd go up every morning to see what the schedule was and who got drafted into what unit. I met a guy who said, "Are you from Ogden, Utah?" I said, "Yes." He said, "Well, I'll tell you what, I'm from Ogden too and I'll give you this good deal called beach battalion. They'll just give you a rifle and you'll walk up and down a section of the beach in California to make sure that there are no Japanese that have landed there." I listened to him even though I should have been very suspicious. I signed the papers volunteering for duty in beach battalion. In those days, beach battalion was a volunteer outfit just like the Navy Seals. We were a very close-knit organization. All of these books that I have here are training manuals and list every guy that was ever in beach battalion. It was a very special unit. They had been to North Africa, Sicily, Salerno and Normandy. Then they came over to the United States and according to the system that was used then, they were a very unique outfit and some of the 2 guys like me were talked into it. We were the 400th unit, which is now called the Seals. After getting in this outfit, they shipped me from Camp Pendleton in Oceanside, California to a camp that's now been overrun with beautiful homes in San Diego. I have trouble remembering the name of that, but it was just an outgoing unit that you'd stay at for three or four days. They put me on an APD, which is an Attack Personnel Destroyer and I left Sand Diego. We didn't get out hardly beyond shot space and we had an emergency call for a ship that had been attacked by a submarine and we went out. Somewhere between Pearl Harbor and San Diego, we came upon this ship that was guarding a couple of ships that didn't have any guns or anything on it. We followed them into Pearl Harbor, which was the dispersing point for all of the ships that were going out into the Pacific area. We had problems when we went after this ship and our engines were in as tough shape as the ones that we were going to help. We went into Pearl Harbor and they had all of the ships ready to go if there was an invasion. While I was there, I was injured and my hand was put in a cast. They wanted to cut my thumb off because I had broken my thumb playing basketball. We had a good outfit there and learned a lot and trained a lot and then they had what they call an incident at the Westlock. Westlock was kept very secret. It was an invasion fleet that they were going to use in the Pacific area. While we were there, they had a terrible experience similar to what happened to Pearl Harbor. Westlock was pretty damaged and I have books entitled, "The true experience of the story of Westlock." They lost more people than they did at 3 Pearl Harbor when it was attacked. A lot of the information I've documented with photographs and military pictures and so on. As you can see, my floor is loaded with photographs of some of the people that I knew and met like George Whalen and Paul Valentine. Some of the information I've got is stuff that nobody has ever seen. I kept it hidden away. My wife never got a chance to see it. They invited me down and presented me with 13 medals at the city and county building just one week after my wife passed away. Although she didn't see a lot of this stuff, I think she knew some of the things and some of the places that I've been. When we got to Zamboanga, at the tip of one of the main islands of the Philippines, I saw the first casualties and atrocities of some of the people that were involved in the war. It was pretty hard for me to take and I still have nightmares of some of the things that I saw. I saw an American come out shoot a Japanese prisoner that was in handcuffs and blinders as he walked by a mess tent. It had a definite effect on me. I wasn't used to that kind of stuff. We went to the old action in the Philippines and when we went into the Orient and into Hiro Wan, we were just east of Hiroshima and the admiral wanted to go in. He was kind of a photographic nut, that's what we used to call him. The Chicago Press article that's in the corner there was when he was awarded some of his accommodations. Every place that he went I had to go with him because he had to have a communication person with him at all times so that if he had to make a decision, it had to be quick and precise. I spent a lot of time with him and he and I ended up being the first two people to go into Hiroshima. He wanted to see what it was all about. We landed in Hiro Wan which was about 20 miles from 4 Hiroshima. He tried to go up there and the very troops that we landed stopped him and he said, "You can't stop me, I'm an admiral." The soldier who was probably just a buck private put his gun up and said, "It ain't going make no difference because you're not going by me. My orders are to keep anybody from going up." So, the admiral came back to the ship and he was kind of put out. He said, "Well, they can stop me on land, but they can't stop me on water." He got a few of his staff together and we got into a BP Vogue landing craft and up we went. We went around to the water and landed it on the outskirts of Hiroshima. He took most of the pictures of Hiroshima that were in Life magazine and a lot of the stories that went with it. He was a darn good photographer and he had no idea what it would stir. They have had me talk about my experiences at different churches and meetings that they had for the military. My memory is, sadly to say, not as good as it used to be and I keep the stuff that I've got. There are pictures and I've got a flare pistol that I shot in the air when the war ended. I took the pistol off of the torpedo boat that was what they called a PT. It was a fast speed boat that had a couple of torpedoes on it and I think the President of the United States was on a boat like that. I didn't have the ability to get photographs like the admiral did, so I made drawings. My drawings are there and I have drawings of the night that the war ended. They almost match in detail of what it looked like. I went to a lot of places. I went into Japan from both sides that they were trying to block the Japanese fleet in the Inland Sea. They had ships that were every bit as deadly as anything that we had. Every place we went to, we had to 5 get different money. They had a ritual in the service where every place you'd go you'd get to trade money. They had what they called a short snorter. You'd take the money and tape it together in a big string and when they tried to find out who was the old salt out of the group of Navy people. The guy that had the longest short snorter was the old salt. So, I had my short snorter and I got a lot of money down to where I got a one cent bill. Some of the bills are remarkably well-made so that they couldn't be duplicated. I have a Japanese gun that I brought back and it's got a folding bayonet on it. They've had me show that gun to a lot of folks. I have a trunk load of stuff out in my garage. I've got bayonets here on the floor and a code key similar to the type that we used. I use it to practice my code once in a while. Code is like speaking a language. Once you learn it, it stays with you pretty well. I can still sit there and thump out some pretty good messages. LR: So it's like Morse code? DK: Yes, it's Morse code. There are lots of pictures of George Whalen and me. He was a wonderful guy. I have some of the pictures of him when he was given the medals that he got. George was the kind of guy who could have been buried in a national cemetery, but he elected to be buried here in Ogden. They brought in the whole staff that normally buries people in the national cemetery. Occasionally, I'll go out to his grave. LR: While you were a soldier during World War II, your mother worked at the canteen at the Union Station. 6 DK: Yes, in fact, Mom had three people in the family that were in the military. The brother that was just a little older than me was in the Office of Strategic Service, which is a highly documented unit that helped in keeping secrets of war nature from getting in the wrong hands. My other brother, Richard, was a hospital foreman in an Oakland hospital a few miles away from Oakland, California. Incidentally, that's where I was sent. It was an outgoing unit and I was sent there before I got into this unit and I got my discharge also from there. I've kept most of the photographs and the histories that have been written in book form by some of the family. I get a little bit broken up when I start through that stuff. It's tough to take and the tears roll down my cheeks just like it was happening yesterday. There are my marine greens. I was in the Navy, but a lot of people don't realize that the Marine Corps is part of the Navy. I had a lot of respect for the Marines and they respected us. We worked very well together. I liked all of those guys. They were all my friends. I've got pictures of me when I still had hair on my head and pictures of my family. With four of us in the military at one time or another, it was quite an experience. LR: Why do you think your mother worked at the canteen? Was it because all of your brothers were in the military? DK: Well, there were a lot of people that volunteered. In my window here, there is a little gadget sticking up that holds a flag. There's another gentleman down a couple of doors and was an ex-Marine who has his flag up. I had a lot of friends that were in the military like Fosse Filega, who was a little boy when all that came down, but he was from the islands and he said a lot of that still rubs off. He 7 collects military things and I've given him a lot of my stuff. He's been a good friend. LR: You have a great story of coming through Ogden and being able to see your mom while she was working at the canteen. DK: Everybody in the family was doing their thing. Mom worked in the canteen and would meet the trains. They had a huge system and they'd give the GI's a cup of coffee or some of them wanted soda pop and donuts. Mom spent a lot of time there and she gave a lot of time for the military boys. She called them, "Her boys." A lot of guys would break down and they knew they were heading west and they'd send them through Ogden down to Oakland. Mom would go there every day and everybody in our family gave a lot to the servicemen. It wasn't unusual to come home to the GI's at our house. My mother put in the hours and she'd come home and she had people stopping at the house. It didn't make a difference whether they were wearing khaki or blue, they were GI's and they were all good guys. My brother, Eugene, being in the OSS, had an address that was in Washington D.C., but I suspected that was just an address for his mail. They picked a lot of L.D.S. guys for those units because they knew when to keep their mouth shut and they were pretty trained individuals. I got a lot of stuff from George Whalen. I have one of his books and they only printed a few of them. When I say a few, I'm talking about maybe four or five books. I had so many people that wanted to borrow my book on the quiet hero that Mrs. Whalen talked George into getting a box-full of them printed. There are 8 not too many guys like that that are still living. They gave everything they have and then gave their lives. LR: There is a moment that you were able to surprise your mom at the canteen, do you remember that? DK: She was giving everybody a cup of coffee and she was not expecting me there. I was on a troop train and we stopped at the canteen. Before she even realized what was happening, I had my arms around her giving her a big hug and surprised her. She worked at the canteen for hours and hours and she was proud of it. LR: I have one last question for you. You've been more than generous with your time and I love the stories that you've told. My last question is; what memories do you have of 25th Street? DK: One of the memories I have is of the porters and waiters. These were good, honest hard-fighting African American people. They were wonderful guys. They took people into the one building that was on the south side of the street in the last building. In the basement, they had a place for the African American people and they had some wonderful times there. When different entertainers would come through on the train they'd have them over there. What do you call it when they just get together and have a great big music thing? LR: A jam? DK: Yes, like a jam. They were all happy people and wonderful guys. I knew a lot of them and they were good guys to team up with. By nature, they were big guys 9 too and when you're as small as I am and looking for help, that's the kind of guy you'd want to have help you. I got along well with those guys. LR: Did it bother you that they were segregated? DK: During the war, it wasn't near as bad as I'd seen before. When things got tough and you were lying in the dirt, you were not checking to see if a guy is African American or happens to be a Mexican. You were just lucky you were not alone. You had people with you. I gave them the best shot I could and treated them like my mother taught me to do. She had a very kindly personality and lived a life where it didn't make any difference whether the guy happened to be African American, Mexican or Native American. She was born and raised on a reservation in Laramie, Wyoming, so she got used to it and she could smile and hug those guys just as good as the next one. She had a love for people. I was so dog-gone young when I went in the service. I've got a picture of the whole company and I think I was the youngest guy in there. When you go in at 17-years- old, you think you know everything that's happening in the world and then you find out there are lots of things you don't. LR: Mr. Kingsford, I really appreciate your time and the memories that you've shared with me today. I look forward to getting this all worked up for you into a packet. DK: Well, how about that? 10

DeLoss M. Eggleston, September 17, 2013 ; Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial houses flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. ; The following is an oral history interview with DeLoss Eggleston. The interview was conducted on September 17, 2013, by Lorrie Rands, in Ogden, Utah. DeLoss discusses his experience with 25th Street. ; 24p.; 29cm.; 2 bound transcripts; 4 file folders. 1 videodisc: digital; 4 3/4 in. ; Oral History Program DeLoss M. Eggleston Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 17 September 2013 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah DeLoss M. Eggleston Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 17 September 2013 Copyright © 2014 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 Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial houses flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. After World War II, the railroad business declined. Some government agencies and businesses related to the defense industry continued to gravitate to Ogden after the war—including the Internal Revenue Regional Center, the Marquardt Corporation, Boeing Corporation, Volvo-White Truck Corporation, Morton-Thiokol, and several other smaller operations. However, the economy became more service oriented, with small businesses developing that appealed to changing demographics, including the growing Hispanic population. ____________________________________ 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: Eggleston, DeLoss, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 17 September 2013, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii DeLoss M. Eggleston September 17, 2013 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with DeLoss Eggleston. The interview was conducted on September 17, 2013, by Lorrie Rands, in Ogden, Utah. DeLoss discusses his experience with 25th Street. LR: It is September 17th, 2013. We are in the home of DeLoss Eggleston in Ogden talking about 25th street and surrounding Ogden. Caroline Olmstead is doing the camera. So DeLoss, I appreciate you allowing us into your home for this, a lot. Let's start out simple, when and where were you born? DE: I was born at the old McKay-Dee or the Dee Hospital on 24th and Harrison in 1926. LR: Okay, and where did you grow up? DE: I grew up in Eden. That's up in Ogden Valley. You have Huntsville, Eden and Liberty and then you go over the mountain to Paradise. LR: So your family would commute over into Ogden to work and go to school? DE: Well, we had a farm. My father hauled the milk from Eden and Liberty, down to the Weber Central Dairy. That used to be on Ogden Avenue between 25th and 26th street. LR: Where was Ogden Avenue? DE: Between Washington and Adams. So, it's a half street. LR: So kind of like Kiesel. 1 DE: Yes. LR: It's not there anymore, is it? DE: Yeah. Oh yes. LR: Where did you go to school then? DE: I went to Eden Elementary School until I got to the fifth grade and then they closed that school and transferred us to Huntsville. So I went to Huntsville for junior high and then Weber High School. Which was at the time on 12th and Washington, where the market used to be, it's not there anymore. LR: So, you mentioned last time that you had a job on 25th street. So, what were some of your jobs and experiences on 25th street growing up? DE: Well, actually, we ran the milk down there and I would run down if we got a chance to go down to Ross and Jack's for a bowl of soup. They would always give us plenty of crackers, so we would crack up all the crackers and put them in the bowl of soup and this would be our lunch sometimes. After I was a junior at Weber High School, I got a job at Walgreens drug store on the corner of 25th and Washington, in the main floor of the Broom Hotel. And that Broom Hotel was one of the best ones. The Ben Lomond Hotel was on the other side, or across the street from us and we had a lot of business there, in that drug store. LR: How long did you work there? DE: Oh, about six months. LR: So, what was one of the reasons why you quit? 2 DE: I had a little disagreement with my father and I went down to live with my sister who was living in West Ogden and her husband was in the service and he was transferred to San Diego. So she decided to go down there and that left me all by myself there at her place. And I couldn't get up early enough to go to school and I wanted to graduate from high school. So I moved to California to live with my sister, Alice, down there and graduate from a high school down in El Monte, California. LR: So, while you were working there, did you see any interesting things that would occur on 25th? DE: Oh, lots of interesting things. During the war, and this was in '43 or '44, there was a lot of soldiers and they invariably would walk up 25th to Washington and usually stop in for refreshments where we could serve drinks and malts and things of that sort, and we had plenty of pie. We would compete with Ross and Jack's down the street. LR: So you would see a lot of the soldiers coming in. Would you ever have an opportunity to walk down the street? DE: Oh yes. I would walk down the street there, 25th to Lincoln, or, 25th to Grant. There was the Grey Hound Bus Station. I would walk that way and once in a while would go down to the railroad station. It was interesting to watch all the soldiers. LR: It wasn't something that was common practice then to just walk up and down the street. 3 DE: Yes, it was. LR: Why do you think that was? DE: Well, I was just a kid. LR: Okay. You mentioned last time about a friend you had that knew about the tunnels on 25th street. DE: Oh yes. This friend of mine who taught school with me actually, he had business down there and he would go down to stores to get the rent, he owned the buildings and then would rent them out. So he would go in to collect rent and things of that sort. And he talked about the several hotels that had tunnels going from one to the other. So that if anything that happened to one they could just go to the other and close the door and hide themselves. Then once in a while, we would walk down behind the hotels. There was an alley way that we would go down there and it was interesting to see various things and the windows and apartments that were on that street and the red lights. LR: So walking behind in those alleys, did you notice the little cribs they had, behind those buildings? The little shacks. DE: Well, yeah. I always thought they were just storage unit. But they may be. LR: So in 1943, '44 you enlisted correct? DE: I was drafted. When I went to California. I tried to enlist in the navy and they turned me down because of a scar on my shoulder and so I thought I was 4F. So when the army came along, they drafted me. LR: So the story of the bus and… 4 DE: Oh, gas was rationed and there was no automobiles being sold. So automobiles were old. And transportation was a real problem. At the bus stations, the war effort, they told the drivers of the buses that they had to let the soldiers get on the buses first because of their scheduling and such. So soldiers and their wives could get on the bus first. The soldiers who were not married would come up there and there would be a group of young ladies watching them. Well, not necessarily young ladies, but ladies watching them and as soon as they came up and as soon as they realized they were single, they would come up and ask them if they could be their wives, for the purpose of getting on the bus and making the trip. When I was in the army, I went on my 30 day leave before I went overseas, I went to California and I rode the bus from Los Angeles to Baltimore, Maryland, which is a long ride. I had five wives on that trip going there. When I got to Maryland, I went to get my haircut and I didn't realize but it was a long ride and I hadn't had a bath. I went in to get a haircut and the barber looked at me: "I gotta wash your head before I cut your hair." LR: So after the war you, you came back to Ogden. DE: Yes, I came back to California. Then I went on a mission for the church to France and then came back and went to Weber College to get my education. LR: So, while you were at Weber College, did you ever just walk down the hill a little ways? DE: Yeah, I did. There were stores down there that, oh, a couple of them had interesting things, loan shops and such and I used to go down to them. 5 LR: Can you remember any in particular? DE: Well, the one down there, just up the street from Wall Avenue, Ogden. LR: The Gift Shop? DE: Yeah, the gift shop there. LR: And what about that did you find interesting? DE: See, at that time the train station was a big station. They were doing a lot. They had underpasses up there to the various lines that could go out. It was kind of fascinating to watch people. I enjoy people. LR: That seems to be a common thing. A lot of people going on 25th street just to watch. DE: Yeah, yeah. LR: So would you do that often? DE: Not too terribly often, I was too busy. LR: But when you did, it was always fascinating? DE: Yeah. Before, when I was going to Weber High School, this friend of mine had a car, actually it was his dad's car but we drove it and we would run the boulevard and also go up and down and watch people going in there. Once in a while you would find a drunk that was laying on the curb and you'd look at him and wonder what to do with him but we never did anything with them. LR: So after you graduated from Weber College, what did you decide to do as a career? 6 DE: As a career? LR: Yeah, as your career. DE: Well, I went down to the Y and graduated from there. Weber was a two year college and I had been over in France and after I had finished my mission I went to Sorbonne for a quarter. So when I came back to Weber, between military and that language, I could get through a little faster. So in reality, I got through four years of college in three years. Not counting the quarter I did in France. But then I went into education and weird things happened. I was at the Y and I was married. My wife was expecting and I needed a job. So I kept hounding the employment office and one day I was in there and their phone rang and I waited until she answered the phone and then she says: "Have you ever taught driving. Driver education?" I said: "Well I haven't done it but I could do it." "Well they want somebody at Provo High School for adult driver education." So I went down there and got the job, did a little class work to help out. After I graduated I was looking for a job and I would hit the employment office every once in a while. Anyway, one day I was in there and I came out and I was thinking about what they had done, I was concentrating. I came out and I ran right into the superintendent of the Ogden City schools. I didn't really know him but anyway, I somehow got to talking to him and he said well give me an application. So I made out an application and then I moved up back up to Ogden after graduating and graduated from the Y. So I came back up here and I was living with my in-laws, looking for a job. And he came up to the house, this is funny, and I wasn't there but he came up to the house where I was staying and knocked on the door. My 7 wife, who was pregnant and barefoot, greeted him. Anyway, he offered me a job and I started teaching driver education at Ben Lomond High School. I was on the original faculty at Ben Lomond. I got involved in the National Organization for Driver Education. It was just beginning and we went through the legislature and got permission and funding for driver ed. and when you get a driver's license, you give them an extra dollar for driver's education and we got that bill passed. Here in Ogden, they started building automobile driving rangers around the country and so I went to the superintendent and asked him what we could do and he said that we had a location for an elementary school but they were building the elementary school in another place. I asked, "Can I have that land and build a driving range on it." "Yeah go ahead." So, I built the driving range that is used by both Ogden and Ben Lomond High School down here on Mountain Road. The elementary school, Horace Mann, was the one they were going to build down there but they decided to build it up here. LR: So, what year did Ben Lomond open? DE: '53. LR: And you were on the original faculty? DE: Yeah. There are three of us left, of the original faculty. LR: You said Ogden City uses the driving range. Do they use it? DE: Ogden High School, just Ben Lomond High School. Just the high school. LR: Just the high schools. I thought you said the city. DE: No. 8 LR: Now you mentioned last time that you were on the committee to help change the speed limits here in Ogden. DE: I knew the fellow who was the Mayor at the time and he asked me to serve on a traffic and parking coordinating committee that the city council had established. There were about, well it varied, but around 10 to 15 on that committee. As far as I know, I'm the only one still alive of that group. There was a judge that was on there but he passed away last year. And we worked the kind of parking problems that they're still concerned about in town but you're never going to solve all of those. But at the time when the automobiles first started out, the state legislature said that all speed limits in cities would be 25 miles an hour. Now this is the '50s and '60s and cars were much better than when they set that limit. So with the use of radar, which was new, they just started using radar, we could measure the rate of speed which traffic was going and we would use unmarked cars, we would always note the time, location, the weather, and anything else that was important on the streets. We found that in the majority of streets, traffic was going much faster than 25. Personally, and I believe and I persuaded the others, that 85 percent of the drivers, are pretty good drivers. You may want to argue that but anyway, we came to the conclusion that the speed should be set at about what 85 percent of the drivers were driving. So we raised a lot of the speed limits in a lot of the streets. East, west, north, south streets, main streets, we raised that to 35. After we raised that to 35, I have to say there are two streets where the people on those streets, really argued that's too fast, you're going to kill our kids. But anyway, we, after we gave people time to use to driving on the 35, we check 9 the speed they were driving on every street in Ogden but on, the traffic was going slower with the 35 mile per hour speed limit than it was with the 25. Now the next question you ask is what that other street is. The 24th street viaduct. LR: And how fast were they going there? DE: Just slightly over 35. LR: That makes sense. It's a long stretch. DE: Yeah. But the two streets that people objected to, we measured that several times in the driveways of the people who were objecting and found that traffic was slower at the 35 mile an hour speed limit than the 25. Today, the city council has lowered the speed on those two streets and watch out. Because they can set up a road block and give tickets. LR: And those two streets are? DE: 16th Street and Collins Boulevard. LR: And remind me again where Collins Boulevard is? DE: As drive out on Harrison and come past 2nd street, 1st street, there's Collins Boulevard goes down and circles and then goes onto North Street. So if you're going down to Walmart, you out there on Collins Boulevard down to Walmart, or, Lowes, which is on the corner there of North and Washington. And you can also go down to D.I. from there. LR: So being on this committee of parking, did you ever have the opportunity to look at the parking on and around 25th street. 10 DE: Yes. LR: And how did that change? DE: Well, we went from angle parking to parallel parking so that you could have more traffic lanes. LR: Okay. DE: Now they are back to angle parking. LR: Which do you think is more effective? DE: Well it depends on what you want to do. The reason they went to angle parking is because they'd have a lot of people that wanted to park there. But for every person who pulls in and backs out, they block traffic, because there is only one lane. So with the two lanes, our philosophy was, traffic would flow smoother but there wasn't as many parking places. So it's a ball game, there is no answer to those. LR: So did you enjoy being a part of that? DE: Oh yes. LR: Why was that enjoyable to you? DE: I interviewed people after we raised the speed limit and I said: How come you're going slower? And people would say: I don't know, I didn't realize I was. I'm thinking more about traffic and the traffic controls and I don't worry about the speed. Where the speed limit is lower, you're watch your speedometer all the time to watch out and see what is happening. 11 LR: Kind of going back in time a little bit. You mentioned that you would take hay, I assume from up in Eden, down to the POWs during the war. DE: During the second World War, out where the fair grounds are out in the DDO, out in the north area there, approximately where the fairgrounds, the race track and such, that was a cavalry unit. I mean that's cavalry with horses. Just south of that was a prisoner of war camp where the Italian prisoners of war were. We did have a few Germans but the Germans were put up into Idaho. When we were hauling milk for the dairy, we had two trucks. One truck we'd pick it up in Liberty and the other we'd pick it up in Eden and then put it all on one truck to bring it down here, so we'd have the other truck available. So I would use that truck to haul straw from Eden down to the cavalry unit there. The Italian prisoners of war would come over and unload my truck for me. Then so, those Italian prisoners of war were used for the cannery, for beets, sugar beets, if you know what sugar beets were, they were work. To pick the beet up, cut the top off and then throw them in the bin. But they made sugar out of that, the sugar beets. They worked in those areas too. There were a bunch of those after they went back to Italy, they returned here and if you found out whose those names are, there are some prominent names from those Italians who came back. LR: Do you remember some on those? DE: Well, the one had a store, a restaurant, on the corner of 27th and Washington, on the northeast corner. And If I remember right, that was Rigo. I think the Marconi's were involved there too. 12 LR: Were you even able to communicate with these POWs or were they able to communicate with you? DE: I couldn't understand them and they couldn't understand me. No. Although some of them knew a little bit of English. But they were busy doing the work. LR: So, have you been on 25th street in the last 10 years? DE: Oh yes. I go down there, that pawn shop down there at the bottom. I've dealt with him a bit, yes. LR: Do you think it's changed for the better? DE: Yes. They have some real nice restaurants there and this farmer market bit down there on Saturdays, that's big. See, the original building there on 20, well the city and county building that was there, that was built by the WPA. Do you know what the WPA was? LR: I do. DE: WPA, PWA. LR: I couldn't tell you what it stands for but I could tell you what they did. DE: You know what buildings they built here? LR: I do. They build the city and county building here, Ogden High and the Forestry building. Les Hobson designed them. DE: Now, the CCC Boys. Up in The Valley, they had a CCC boy's camp. Actually, the lake covers that location right now but it was right next to where David O. McKay's farm was down there, which is under the lake. The CCC Boys built the 13 road up to snow basin. The reason that old road was so nice and curvy is because they had the maximum of man power and the least amount of equipment and so they took the easiest way and curved that road. You're too young, you don't remember that road. It's closed now, but it was the old road that went up to Snow Basin. This friend of mine worked with the CCC Boys, now they had two scrapers that they would use with teams of horses to pull the scraper. The Fresno was a lower one and I can't remember the name of the other one but it had a big boom on it and you'd raise that one up like this and dig down to get a load of dirt in there and pull back on it to lift the blade so that you could haul that and then dump it where ever you wanted. So this one friend of mine, some of those CCC Boys were not familiar with that kind of work, so this one young man told this one boy: "Always hang onto that bar, don't let go of that bar." Well, what's going to happen if you're digging in there and you hit rock, that blade is going to flip up! And this kid hanging onto that bar hit a rock and sailed over the top of the horses. But anyways, that was a big project for the CCC Boys. They also did a lot of terracing. In 1937, they had a real lot of rain like this and they had floods coming down the canyons. If you go along the highway 89 headed for Salt Lake, you can see some rock figures where they blocked that off. Up in Willard, that flood is so bad that it raised that road and you'll notice that the houses on the west side of Willard are down lower because that mud came down there and they have that one rock fixture for run off of that canyon. That was a wet year. Consequently, the CCC Boys would go up into Willard Bay, in Monte Cristo and terrace, so that the rain wouldn't come down. This is what some of 14 those people need to do with these fire zones, is to go in and terrace those so that the water will not go in an wash down and fill their houses with mud. LR: That would be a smart thing to do. So you were starting to talk about going into the gift shop. DE: The pawn shop. LR: Yeah, in recent years, have you dealt with Scott, the owner of that. DE: Oh, I just know who he is. LR: So you actually went into that shop earlier, right? Do you think his shop has changed much or do you think it's kind of stayed the same? DE: The one part of it had pretty much stayed the same. But he has enlarged a little bit there. He's an interesting person. LR: Yes, he is. I agree with you. So you think 25th street had changed for the better. Do you think there is anything else they could do to make it a better street? DE: I don't know. I think they got the right idea. I think they're going the right direction on it because some of those stores are doing good, of course, they could make museums out of a couple of them. LR: Well, I have pretty much asked all of my questions but I wanted to ask if there was anything else you wanted to add? DE: Well, just that I enjoy this area. I lived in California, down in the Los Angeles area and I'll tell you one story there. This was back in '45, '46, no couldn't have been. '46 or '47. They had just laid out the plan for the freeways and they had a unit 15 down there in Los Angeles where they were showing this and I went in there and I looked at that map of those freeways and this friend of mine, well there were four of us there, and I said: "This is going to be the biggest traffic jam this area has ever seen." And I went to describe that, not realizing that the guy who designed it was standing right behind me. Well, anyway, he didn't change anything, he didn't believe me. Later I went down there and that was the biggest traffic jam down in that area. In fact, we had a convention down there and it was going to be in the big stadium they had at the time. As I got onto that freeway heading in there I was with other people who were going with us to that same location and I took one look at the traffic on there and I jumped off because I had driven around there, because I knew the area, so I used the other streets and I got there to the convention. I was there for an hour and a half before those other people came. LR: So did that experience help you with, I know you didn't design streets, but did that help you with when you were trying to figure out speed and what not? DE: At the time I was on that committee, they built Harrison, the road from Harrison and 21st street to 12th street coming down the hill there. They built that and it was real nice, that's a good street. Our debate, what should the speed limit be on that street. So we put radar up on that street to measure the speed what traffic was going and debated, we had an argument. But I won out and that speed limit was set at 50 miles an hour and today you'll find people going a little faster than 50 miles an hour coming down that hill. But coming down that hill you've got to 16 watch out for deer because the deer will go across there. But anyway, that was one yes. LR: Well, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate the interview you have done with us and we'll wrap up. DE: Well, it's been enjoyable. LR: It has been. DE: Thank you. 17

Joseph Prantil, July 17, 2013 ; Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial houses flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. ; The following is an oral history interview with Joseph Prantil. The interview was conducted on July 17, 2013, by Sarah Langston. Joseph discusses his experiences with 25th Street. ; 17p.; 29cm.; 2 bound transcripts; 4 file folders. 1 videodisc: digital; 4 3/4 in. ; Oral History Program Joseph Prantil Interviewed by Sarah Langsdon 17 July 2013 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Joseph Prantil Interviewed by Sarah Langsdon 17 July 2013 Copyright © 2014 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 Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial houses flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. After World War II, the railroad business declined. Some government agencies and businesses related to the defense industry continued to gravitate to Ogden after the war—including the Internal Revenue Regional Center, the Marquardt Corporation, Boeing Corporation, Volvo-White Truck Corporation, Morton-Thiokol, and several other smaller operations. However, the economy became more service oriented, with small businesses developing that appealed to changing demographics, including the growing Hispanic population. ____________________________________ 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: Prantil, Joseph, an oral history by Sarah Langsdon, 17 July 2013 , WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Joseph Prantil July 17, 2013 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Joseph Prantil. The interview was conducted on July 17, 2013, by Sarah Langston. Joseph discusses his experiences with 25th Street. SL: This is Sarah Langsdon and I am interviewing Joseph Prantil at his home in South Weber, Utah. Today is July 17, 2013. Joe, tell me a little bit about when and where you were born. JP: I was born in Ogden in 1943. So that makes me 70-years-old. I've lived here all of my life. I've been out of the state for periods of time, but I have lived here almost all of my life. SL: Where is your family from? JP: My grandmother and grandfather on my dad's side, who are the focus of our interview today, were born in Prio, Italy and migrated here. It's just a guess, but I think it was around 1900. My mother's parents migrated to America from southern Italy. SL: What was your grandfather's occupation? JP: In Italy, he was a stone mason and the family had a marble quarry. That was one of the major industries of that particular town in addition to orchards and vineyards. The quarry is still in operation today. I was there about five years ago and had a chance to see the whole operation. It's still in operation by the Prantil family. SL: When he moved here, what became his business? 1 JP: The story is that he went to Argentina first. My grandmother had brothers living there, so he stopped there. When he came here he worked as a coal miner. For a brief period of time he went to Elkhorn, Montana to mine, but ended up in Superior, Wyoming working in a coal mine. Shortly afterward he went back to Italy and brought my grandma to America. SL: How did he end up in Ogden? JP: He contracted Black Lung disease from the mines, which many of the miners did at that time, so he had to leave the mine and a lot of his friends from the same area of Italy lived in Ogden. Most of them were dairy farmers out in West Weber. He moved here to be with them and they encouraged him to come. SL: What stories were you told about his business at the Utah Hot Springs? JP: After my grandparents arrived here, my dad was born in 1910 in Superior, Wyoming and so were some of his siblings. My dad was the oldest of four siblings. I think that my grandfather came to Ogden around 1917 and he used the money that he saved and bought the Utah Hot Springs. I think that was probably one of his first purchases. My dad told me that at the time that they had a big hotel, the mineral water pools and swimming pools. It was quite an operation and people would come from all over to stay there. They had a railroad spur that went near there. He operated that business for quite some time until it burned down. I'm not sure when it did burn down, but Dad mentioned that they lost a lot of their possessions in that fire. They never did rebuild it. People in that day didn't believe in insurance, so when they had a disaster of some kind they just lost the 2 money. Around that time he bought the property on 25th Street and started operating that business as well. SL: What was the business on 25th Street and where was it? JP: It was on the corner of Lincoln Avenue and 25th Street. SL: What business did he run? JP: According to what Dad told me, it was an ice cream parlor, but in those days they called it a soda fountain. There was another area in the back that was a drug store, which they called an apothecary at the time. I think he may have rented that out and had somebody else run it because he wasn't a pharmacist. There were two businesses in there and then there were rooms upstairs. It was like a small hotel. SL: Was he ever arrested for bootlegging? JP: Yes. Before prohibition, the place may have been just a bar and they sold alcohol there. Prohibition came along and it was natural for him to turn it into the soda fountain. During those days, they were also selling alcohol on the street. I think downstairs they were probably gambling and having card games too and doing what they did back in those days. SL: Do you know what his set up was for running the alcohol? JP: Dad tells me that since my grandpa was a stone mason, he built a false wall in the basement and put a tank behind it. They plumbed the tank up into the faucets in the sink in the bathroom and had valves that would turn on the faucet and the booze would flow through it. They also had a tank above one of the doors where 3 there was a false ceiling. How many other tanks I don't know, but those are the two I know about. SL: Do you know how he was caught bootlegging? JP: I don't know how he was caught. I'm sure there was some kind of an informant that tipped them off to that. I heard stories that my uncles were caught bringing the booze from West Weber. The farmers were growing corn and they had stills where they made the alcohol and then they'd run it in. My uncles got caught one time running it in, but that's all I know about that piece of it. SL: Did he end up having to shut down the soda shop? JP: I think the local police were overlooking what was going on, but the federal police were not. It was federal police that arrested him for selling booze there. He was also arrested for selling booze at the Hot Springs, so he was arrested a couple of different times. In one of the articles I read (and I didn't know this before I got the article), but they listed his name as Luis Smith. He didn't give whoever arrested him his proper name. He didn't have to shut down the soda shop. SL: What was your grandfather's name? JP: It was Luis, but it was Luigi originally. SL: And your grandmother's name? JP: Her name was Josepina, but she he went by Josepine. As a kid, I didn't know their names. I only knew them by the Italian name for grandma and grandpa which was Nono and Nona. That's how I knew them and that's what I called them. Later, I learned their names. 4 SL: They also owned a gas station on 27th Street? JP: Yes, he bought a gas station and they ran it for a lot of years during the depression. According to what Dad told me, people would barter for gas. Someone had chickens and he had gasoline so they'd barter for food and other things. Growing up, I remember there was a Dr. Moyes who was a dentist and he would give us dental services for free and I never knew why until Dad eventually told me that he owed the family money for gas during the depression. SL: Where was the gas station? JP: The gas station was on the corner of 27th and Grant. It was a Mobile gas station, but I don't know what they named it back then. When I was a kid they had rented it out to Clix Swaner Sr., who ran it for most of the time that I was a kid. He's quite a well-known figure in town too. He lived to be 103-years-old. SL: Going back to the soda shop. They're most famous for the rooms upstairs being the Rose Rooms. What were you told about the Rose Rooms? JP: I wasn't told a whole lot because I don't think they talked about that other than when Dad told me that it had been a brothel upstairs. By the time I was old enough to remember it wasn't a brothel anymore. It had been shut down by then and I know that they had a lot of single men living up there. They were renting them out by the room. He did tell me that the Madame had a big cat and I'm not sure if it was a leopard or what it was, but he told me that story and that's about all I knew about that. SL: What about the doors? 5 JP: Oh yeah. When I went in there I'd help him do maintenance on it and that sort of thing. There was a door that went upstairs and came in from the street. It was a separate door and it went up the north side of the building and it had a separate stairwell that didn't actually go into the ice cream parlor or anything, it was its own entryway. At the top of the stairs there was another door and Dad told me that there were electric switches on it and there was a little peep-hole with bars over the window so they would watch to see who was coming up before they would let them in to make sure they weren't police. I asked him about all the holes around the window and he told me that someone had shot it with a shot gun, so I guess it was a pretty rough place. SL: Probably. What were some of the shops that you remember being on 25th Street when you were growing up? JP: The only thing I remember really is that they were bars. I don't remember a lot of shops down there, but there were businesses that may be still there like the Gift House, but it was when they were a pawn shop. That's how they started out, they were a pawn shop and they sold pawn items and guns and that sort of thing and still do to this day. The street was full of bars and some restaurants, mostly Mexican and Chinese food. SL: So not very much shopping. JP: No, not very much shopping. SL: Was that more a long Washington? JP: Yes, there were more along Washington. 6 SL: Do you remember any of the shops along Washington that your family used to go to? JP: Yes I do. There was a Woolworths Store and everyone would stop in at the soda fountain there. There was B&B clothes shop and Nye's and Perkin's had a clothing store along there. It was the place to go for shopping. In later years, as we all know, everything left Ogden City and it became pretty dilapidated, but it was the place to go. It was fun Christmas shopping there because of all the shops and stores and clothing stores along there. It was a fun place to shop. SL: Did you ever go to any of the theaters there? JP: Yes, there were several theaters in town and that's where we would go on Saturday morning. We'd all go see the show for cheap. SL: Was it usually the Egyptian or Paramount? JP: The Paramount Theater, the Egyptian, the Orpheum are the ones I remember. SL: Did you ever go to the Ogden Theater? JP: I don't remember that one. SL: It was across the street from the Ben Lomond Hotel on 25th Street. JP: I don't remember that one for some reason. There was also a big hotel on the corner of 25th Street and Washington and I think it was called the Broom Hotel. There were shops along the bottom of the building and the hotel was above it. SL: I think that's where Woolworths was. JP: That is where that was. 7 SL: Speaking of the Broom, do you remember any other buildings that are no longer there on 25th Street or Washington? JP: There were different shops and stores along there, but I don't remember exactly what they were. I know there was a sporting goods store called Wolfe's on 23rd Street and they tore that down and built other things. SL: Did you ever go to the Berthana or White City? JP: We'd go there to roller skate, but they were major dance halls and people would go dancing at Berthana or White City so they were ballrooms more than anything, but then we'd go roller skating there. SL: What were some other places that you'd hang out or what did you do for fun? JP: When we were kids we didn't have a television, but we had the radio. I remember sitting by the radio with Dad listening to the fights and to some of the shows like The Shadow. There were a lot of different radio shows that were mysteries, so we'd listen to the mystery sometimes. Television came along as time went on and we'd watch some, but not very much. It was something you watched on the weekend or occasionally. We mostly played outside. We had fields down below where we lived on 15th Street and the Mill Stream went through here. We'd play by the stream and go fishing in the summer and there was a little pond down there that we'd ice skate on in the winter. We spent most of our time outdoors. SL: Do you have any other things you'd like to share with us? JP: We talked some time ago about tunnels under the street. I do remember when Dad took me down there the first time in the basement of the building and by 8 then it was called the El Borracho and they had rented it out. After my grandpa died they rented the whole building out. He died in 1948. He was a pretty young man really, but I think Black Lung was part of his demise. You probably know the story of my grandmother being arrested. It was her building and the brothel was upstairs so they arrested her too and she had to quit renting it to the Madame. SL: How long did your family own that building? JP: I don't know exactly when they bought it, but I think it was somewhere in the early twenties and they didn't sell it until after my grandma died in the 1980's. They had everything all rented out and my grandma lived on the rentals from the buildings and the gas station. She lived on that and whatever my grandpa left her. Getting back to the tunnel issue, my Dad took me downstairs and I could see where they had cinder-blocked an area that was kind of a squared out area and Dad said that there was some kind of room back there and he talked about tunnels, but that's the only conversation we ever had about some kind of egress out that way. SL: With the reputation of El Borracho, did your family ever get caught up in the things that were happening down there? JP: Not really. They rented it out, so I know my dad would go collect the rent for my grandma and I remember going in there with him several times to collect the rent. I know that he was a little bit cautious depending on when he went in there because there were some pretty rough characters in there. 9 SL: It had quite a reputation. JP: I think what happened is that as time went on, the city wanted to try to close all the bars and that sort of thing down there and had plans to redevelop it, so they were involved in the purchase of the building. SL: So the city bought it from your family? JP: I think they did. They had a ghost buyer. Dean Perkins bought it, but I think he was actually a ghost buyer for the city as I understand it. SL: Well, thank you Joe. We appreciate it. 10

Jayeson Vance Leading Tour at Alcatraz, 2012 ; Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial houses flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. ; The following is an oral history interview with Jayeson Vance. The interview was conducted on October 10, 2013, by Lorrie Rands. Jayeson discusses memories of Ogden and 25th Street. ; 35p.; 29cm.; 2 bound transcripts; 4 file folders. 1 videodisc: digital; 4 3/4 in. ; Oral History Program Jayeson P. Vance Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 10 October 2013 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Jayeson P. Vance Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 10 October 2013 Copyright © 2014 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 Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial houses flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. After World War II, the railroad business declined. Some government agencies and businesses related to the defense industry continued to gravitate to Ogden after the war—including the Internal Revenue Regional Center, the Marquardt Corporation, Boeing Corporation, Volvo-White Truck Corporation, Morton-Thiokol, and several other smaller operations. However, the economy became more service oriented, with small businesses developing that appealed to changing demographics, including the growing Hispanic population. ____________________________________ 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: Vance, Jayeson, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 10 October 2013 , WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Jayeson Vance Leading Tour at Alcatraz 2012 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Jayeson Vance. The interview was conducted on October 10, 2013, by Lorrie Rands. Jayeson discusses memories of Ogden and 25th Street. LR: Today is October 10, 2013 doing a phone interview with Mr. Jayeson Vance who is currently residing in San Francisco, about 25th street and Ogden. My name is Lorrie Rands and I will be conducting the interview. Jayeson, I, again, appreciate your time and your willingness to help us out with this. Let's begin with the simple basics of when and where were you born? JV: I was born at the old St. Benedict's hospital on 29th and Polk in Ogden, on June 26, 1947. LR: Where did you reside, where was your home in Ogden? JV: Our home was, when I was a boy, we were, first we lived in a post war housing, emergency housing for the GI's. My dad was at Hill Field as an Air Force Sergeant, an Army Air Corp Sergeant. That was at the old Bonneville Park, as they used to call it. It was an old cinder block, post war or emergency housing that, I don't know who paid for, probably the federal government. Then they, at some point around 1950 or 51, they destroyed those homes and we, my dad was able to get a home on 1362 Hudson, between 5th and 6th on, at just above Harrison, and we were just a quarter block below Polk. That's where I spent my early years and then we later moved to 108 Harrison, at first and Harrison. LR: So was Harrison at that time, was it paved all the way through? 1 JV: Yes, Harrison was paved, Hudson was primitive, it was unpaved, thank you for asking. We actually did not even have a phone in the house and my mother had to walk to Hudson and Polk, to a little phone booth as did all the neighbors in order to place a phone call. Actually, it seems funny now, and the street was dirt and it had a curb and gutter but it didn't have the sidewalks and it didn't have, you know, it was very primitive. It was like living out on the frontier in a way, and my grandfather used to say, "You can hear the coyotes at night up there where you live." He lived on 256 Harrisville Road which is still there, that structure is still standing. LR: You grew up then in that part of Ogden? JV: Yea, on that northeast bench, I went to Ben Lomond High and then my dad had gone to Weber and my mother, actually my mother was a USU graduate. I just said, "Well," I couldn't decide what to do after I graduated from Ben Lomond, so I decided on Weber, which was a great choice. I was pleased with, I always thought it had the best—a lot of people say about Weber that we had better professors than bigger schools because you didn't have teaching assistants teaching classes, you had Ph.D.'s teaching classes quite often and so I think in some ways we got a much better education at Weber than people maybe at the University of Utah had in some ways, so anyway, it was a good time to go to Weber. I briefly was the sophomore class president for a brief while, filled in for Mike Howe I believe was his name, cause he couldn't finish his term. My name at that time, I changed my name in 1982, and my born name was Clark Walker. So that's always strange, and I have to explain that, that I 2 changed my name. I was one of those kids that had kind of an identity crisis and so my legal name is Jayson P. Vance. I don't know how much you want to know about my personal life, but just to explain, if you look me up, you'll find me under Clark Walker. Weber State records, well, except I changed my diploma reads Jayeson Vance now, so I had that changed. LR: So, I'm just curious, why did you choose Jayeson Vance? JV: It was just one of those things that I had a friend who was a counselor, which said, "It's time for a change." I had just left a federal job and I wanted a new start in life and she said, "This would be a good time to change." She had done this to, she had changed her name and she said, "I don't know, it's great," and she was able to persuade me that I should do it. Then once you do that, and we'd had a house so we had to change the mortgage records so then and I had to go to court, to district court and officially change my name by law. I can't ever use the old name again and legally, so anyway, I have, for better or worse, that's my name. So I just have to accept that. In some ways I felt shouldn't be changing that because it's my family history, but then as I researched my family history, I found out that my father's father, who was an English immigrant during World War I, which is kind of odd, how do you get to where my father was born in California? It's a long story, but his father deserted the family, his name was reputedly, Sylvester Hodgson Walker. He deserted this mother and this infant boy, who was my father and said, "I'm a British subject, I don't want to have a kid." And he ran off to Canada, and he said, "You can't touch me, I'm a British subject." I don't even really know the man's name, I never saw a picture of him 3 and it's one of these great mysteries of life that I would love to see at least what he looked like and how did he end up in California during World War One. The British would have wanted any young man to be in the Army or something and so it's a—was his name really Walker, you know, all these mysteries like that. I didn't feel troubled about dropping the name Walker, so that's, anyway, we got off on a tangent. LR: No, that's great, I asked so, let's go ahead and go back then. You said that your dad worked at Hill Field as a sergeant in the Army Air Corps, what did your mom do? JV: My mother was a teacher in her later years, well, when they were first married she was a school teacher, then she dropped her job as a teacher to be a house wife and about 1959 she went back to Ogden public schools, worked at Edison school teaching second grade. Her name was Bonnie Ruth Murphy Walker and she passed away this month, just earlier this month, ten years ago the start of this month, she's been dead 10 years now. The family is all gone, my brother, my father and my mother are all gone and my wife and I live here. LR: You're kind of cutting out on me. JV: Oh, maybe if I hold the microphone up closer here. LR: I'm not sure if it's you or if it's me. That seems to be better, okay. I hate it when I get off on my flow. As you were growing up, what were some of the things you liked to do for fun? JV: I used to draw maps of the city actually. I loved history form early on. I read Land Mark Books, I was a boy scout. I got an Eagle Scout Award, I was an Eagle 4 Scout. I was very interested in police and crime, the FBI. I wanted to be an FBI agent at one time and I studied the history of, I was reading adult literature written for adults about the FBI, you know like the FBI story by Glen Whitehead I think it is, when I was twelve. I was trying to—it was not easy to read—but I was trying and I was just obsessed with that stuff and I saw the world very black and white, in a very black and white way. I remember giving—I had some really conservative, very, very conservative opinions about law and order and I wanted to—we had some milk stolen and I wanted my mother so badly to call the police department because I wanted to look at a real policeman in the face and we hardly had any crime in that area. I was so excited that was my amusement, anything to do with law and order or police, any TV show, Texas Rangers or Broderick Crawford, who starred in California Highway Patrol or anything like that. The Lone Ranger and all that stuff, I just loved all that. We played Army, it was post World War Two so we had, almost everybody I knew was the son or the daughter of a GI or a sailor from World War Two or a Marine. We had tons of Army Men and toys about World War Two and I had a whole Army and Navy set of toys that I just spent hours with. Then we would—the little kids in the neighborhood—we'd organize into tiny army, little army training things. Then I would build little model cities in the back yard with rocks and build a highway. I had a lot of fun doing that. I made a model of Ben Lomond peak at one time in my back yard out of clay and rocks and so I had a lot of fun as for Mount Ben Lomond and all that. I tried to make of Ogden out of rocks but it was a little over whelming. 5 LR: I'll bet. So did you ever have the chance to meet any Ogden Police officers when you were younger? JV: Yea, one of my friends, Gary Greenwood, became a police officer in Ogden and he and I were golfing buddies for quite a while, and I met him, just before I moved out of Ogden—I got married and moved away, I remember seeing him in his uniform with his shoes all polished. I was so proud of him and I so wished that I could be like him, be a policeman, but I never became a policeman, I became a park ranger. Not quite the same, but he was just kind of an inspiration when I saw him standing there with his highly polished shoes and his nice neat uniform and he was very proud of it, rightly so. I lost track of him, I would like to talk to him again but I tried to locate him on the internet and he was a probation officer for a while and I couldn't find any more about him. I haven't, if you know him or anybody knows him, I would love to talk to him. He was a great guy. I'm just joining the auxiliary law enforcement team here for the San Francisco police, I just applied to join that. It's a volunteer position, but my fantasy, my interest in crime and law and order has been lifelong. I guess it's no wonder I ended up on Alcatraz. LR: Did you ever hang out downtown? JV: Yea, we did, one of my stronger memories, my father would take me, well my father was a—after he left the Army Air Corps, he became a postman at the main post office and then later Gorder's station as they used to call the post office over there on the bench. He was, his route was the businesses along 25th and along Washington. He was the downtown postman, and he would drive all the 6 packages, they didn't have a UPS, and he would do all the package deliveries all over downtown. He was a gun lover, he loved guns and there was a gun shop on 25th that he loved to go to. He knew 25th very well, he knew the Porters and Waiters Club, he took me into the Depot Drug and there was some girly magazines one time. Oh, it was a little embarrassing, I was going through puberty. Oh we looked at those girly magazines a little bit, but that was among little things like that that I remember. Depot Drug was a hive of activity. It was scary, it was frightening, but it was exciting also. They had these barrels of toys. I loved anything with a plastic army man, or army soldiers like that, and they had just piles of that stuff. Even in the front window, or I think it could even have been on the sidewalk, I could remember my heart just pounding about it, and I only got to go in there a couple of times, but it was a just a hive of excitement. There was also a fear about 25th of course, the legend of all the possibility of heroin and prostitution and all those things that were going on around there. I could even I guess sense it in my father that he was a little bit on edge, but he never had anyone bother him or threaten him in any way while he was delivering mail. He had some rude business people that were pretty rude to him, you know, kind of abusive, but he didn't ever have any threats. He was very close with the black community in Ogden, he knew a lot of the black folks and he was very pro civil rights and he felt that they had gotten the bad end of the deal. The Porters and Waiters Club was famous, of course, for the railroad porters that worked on the Union Pacific that brought Jazz to Ogden. 7 It was also a street of sin certainly. Later in life, my best man at my wedding was Arnie Jacobson and his father was chief Jacobson of the Ogden police. Arnie told me some stories, but these are now second hand stories that he got from his father, so I don't have direct access to that information but it came through Arnie. His father put on black face because they didn't have any black police officers and went down onto 25th to purchase heroine, because the dealers on 25th were black. They did make some arrests and the Ogden police were known as the toughest police in Utah because of the street, because of patrolling 25th street they had to be tougher than the Salt Lake police, according to Arnie anyway. They would have this annual football, I believe football game between the Ogden Police and the Salt Lake police and the Ogden police would always win because they had to be tougher, even though it was a smaller department by far than the Salt Lake department. It really had quite a story there, I mean you could write a lot of, I could easily see someone writing a novel or a historical novel about it. Maybe that's what I should do, I don't know. Then my mother told me about working at the Union Laundry but she did all that Union Pacific linen as a young woman. She was a pretty young brunette and her father, Clarence Murphy, would warn her, he was a Union Pacific engineer. "Now Bonnie, you get down to Washington Boulevard and get on that street car and you run to Washington Boulevard," or somebody told her, or she told me that she was so scared on 25th that she ran all the way from Wall Avenue to Washington Boulevard as fast as she could run to get to Washington Boulevard to where she felt safe, and then get on the street car to go north to 8 Harrisville Road where they lived. She had a palpable fear of that street but she again never had anything happen to her so it just, there's a lot of stuff about that street. I've seen that, I don't know you've probably seen that DVD that that fellow put out about the history of Ogden I imagine. Are you aware of that one? LR: Yes, The one that was in 2007 or 11, not too long ago? Yes. JV: They explained that, I guess they alleged that Al Capone may have been on 25th, which I've never found any—I tried because I studied Al Capone quite a bit having been on Alcatraz where he was locked up for about five years, and I've never found any evidence, have you? To support that he was ever there. LR: I haven't, the only thing I have heard about are the rumors. JV: Yea, it's just legendary. When I worked on Alcatraz we'd have people from Canada and Saskatchewan Province was a place where he was reputed to have been. Oh, Al Capone, you hear this all the time, in Wisconsin he went to honey lodges and it is conceivable that he may have been in Ogden that he was really on, and it was called Little Chicago at one point. It was one of the nick names of Ogden, of that area of Ogden as you may know already. Of course, today, it's a very different street than it was and I'm looking at a picture of it right now, a modern picture. I guess there were some movies made there with that famous noddle parlor sign? LR: Yea, the Star Noodle, the one with the dragon? JV: There was a little China town there too of course, from the Chinese workers on the railroad. My grandfather, as a boy, his mother died when he was a youngster and his father was of course a railroad worker too, an engineer, and he was 9 basically raised himself on the streets. This would have been about 1900 or 1905 around in that era, used to run opium on a bicycle around China, the little Ogden, and helped these opium dealers. It was legal at that time to sell opium, and he would, as reprehensible as it sounds now, would sell opium to the Chinese, and make a little money that way, because they didn't have much money. He and his sister and his father, no mother, were kind of, you know, they had some kind of rough edges in his early years, and he remembered being pretty mean to some of the Chinese as a teenage boy, pulling there queue's. They used to wear their hair in queue's on the back of their head, doing some mean things like that and of course the Chinese were abused everywhere. Out here in San Francisco they were abused even more. The word Chink was frequently passed around. It was a racist time it was not fun to be black or Chinese in those days. It was rough for a lot of people. LR: So did you ever witness any of that discrimination in that part of Ogden? JV: No, that was way before my time. I think it went underground, I'm sure there was a feeling that Asians were odd or you know, they were kind of a curiosity. I don't remember. We used to eat at the Utah Noodle Parlor a lot and have the other—I forget the other noodle parlor name on Grant there. We used to, and we enjoyed all the food, the chop suey and all those things. So you'd hear little remarks like that, that were racists but it was, and of course it was. My grandfather had actually been a member of the Klan when he was a youngster. He had no education, he was brought up on the streets and he picked up whatever he picked up, and he picked up a lot of racists attitudes. I remember he, as a young 10 man—he wasn't that in his older years—but as a young man, there was a Klu Klux Klan Chapter there in Ogden. The Klan was all over the United States if you study the history of the Klan and it was very powerful in the early twenties and that's about the time he was starting his family. My grandfather was out there on Harrisville Road, but he I guess they had some Klan meetings up on the foothills in the early twenties where they burned crosses and stuff up on the foothills above. You can imagine how it must have felt to be a black person and see that going on, especially a tiny minority, there in that part of the world. A feeling, you must have been pretty much an emotional, a very unpleasant emotional experience anyway for a black or an Asian too. I think they were pretty mean to Asians, the Klan was, as well. He never said much about that, he did express racist attitudes which were part of that generation, occasionally. I had that wonderful contrast in my father who just really loved the black folks in Ogden. Marshall White, the police officer who was killed there, who was a hero of the police department. After they finally got a black officer, and then he got killed, but it was a rough town. There was somewhat open prostitution, if I remember, right along parts of Grant Avenue and Lincoln Avenue. Even in my early years, even as late as maybe 19, probably about 1970 even, there was still open prostitution going on, it was very limited, but it was there. As I've studied the street I know there was a back alley that ran heroin and a tunnel that ran heroin from the depot all along, I think on the north side of the street. Maybe that tunnel is still there, I've seen 11 some references that indicate that the tunnel went all the way to the Ben Lomond Hotel apparently. Are you aware of that? LR: I'm aware more of the rumors. JV: I saw something online about historic tunnel tours of Ogden and they, if I remember correctly were going into the basement of the Ben Lomond Hotel and somebody was leading a ghost tour or something like that. They were able to go under Washington Boulevard possibly and they said, "Well, who knows." Of course they want to enlarge everything and make it more exciting so they bring in Al Capone and all that. The danger of history is always that somebody tries to enlarge things or exaggerate things. I was never able to see that myself and I didn't even know, I'd heard rumors about it but I've never been in it. LR: Well I know that most of the businesses now have closed up there tunnels, so most of the people we have talked to, yea, it's possible, but now they're all closed up so. But yea, we've had a lot of references to them, a lot of people that remember being down in them, but none actually going form Ben Lomond to the depot. We can't actually verify that, so. It's fun to hear about though. JV: Well that was the big fancy hotel, I guess the Ben Lomond was built about 1927, and being a big, the highest building in town and anybody who wanted a prostitute probably would have wanted to bring them in underground into the hotel or something like that, or wanted maybe drugs and happened to be at the hotel. It does kind of make sense if you were in the, in the world of vice and you had money enough to stay in a nice room there and you wanted something, knowing the hotel business as I do, because I worked with it for a while here, 12 there are people in the hotels are bribable a lot of times, and if you want—they want some cash and if you have the cash, they'll find a way to get you what you want. Who knows, I wouldn't be surprised, I don't have any evidence of it, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was something like that going on. LR: I wouldn't be surprised either. Do you remember any of the people that used to live or work on 25th street? JV: Yes. Well, my mother worked at the Union Laundry I guess it was called as a— this would have been—she was born in 1919, so it would have been roughly around the time she graduated from Ogden High in 1938. So she was working at the Union Laundry, and that's where that tale about running down the street as fast as she could run, her heart pounding came from, that era. And then my grandfather, Clarence Patrick Murphy, a real Irish name, half Danish, but in fact his mother was Danish. He was working there from about age 16 and he was born about 1885 I believe, so he would have been there about 1901 and he was already working as a fireman as a teenage boy. He couldn't finish school, at Sacred Heart School on upper 25th where he went. He would bend over all the way to Wyoming shoveling coal. He told a tale later that even as a 16 year old boy of working with his back bent to shovel coal all the way from Ogden to Evanston and back just almost constantly shoveling coal to get up that grade to that high plateau in Wyoming. It was not the life that any of us would want to live I am sure, to spend back breaking hours to make a living. He was a devoted member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineman and Firemen throughout his life and was a lifelong democrat of course, because of the 13 Democrats alliance with the labor unions. He was also one of the shop stewards of the Union Pacific in his later years. He also worked on the old Oregon Shortline Railroad, which was, he fondly would say, "Oregon Shortline," and his eyes would drift off as he thought about it. I guess the Oregon Shortline was, ran from Ogden to Pocatello, if I'm not mistaken, and didn't obviously it didn't go all the way to Oregon. He was the switching engineer which would be, he would build trains by bringing cars from one train and hauling them to join another train and then back and forth all day in the yards of Ogden. He'd go over those yards, and of course today, there's even I guess some activity there, but back in those days the yards were just a hive of energy and the sound of the rails and the squeaking of the iron against iron and you would hear all the noises associated with all that. The station where I went as, this would have been approximately 1955. My grandmother, my California grandmother, my father's mother, would come up from across the Lucin Cutoff across the Great Salt Lake on the Union Pacific from Promontory Point to West Weber and she would, we'd meet her at the Union Station whenever she'd come to visit us. That's where I got to see the Union Station quite a bit as a boy. There would be three or four taxi cabs, several cars coming and going and people were dressed—in those days the women wore gloves and hats and high heels all the time and the men wore business suits and big fedora hats. The railway express, REA railway express agency had a large outlet in the foyer of the station. 14 Just going in to the foyer of the Union Depot was to me, one of the most exciting things of my childhood because I would go in there and look around and seeing people coming and going, people making orders and carrying tickets, porters carrying baggage and porters with red caps on and white uniforms and white jackets. All black men, the only black people I had ever seen at that time in my life were down in the depot. Sorry, I get a little emotional sometimes when I'm talking about these things. I have to take a breath here for a moment. There was a very busy barbershop with an old fashioned striped aprons that, or whatever they called those things that they, smocks, that they would put around people being, having their hair cut. They had the talcum powder brushes and the barber clipping away furiously, and people in a hurry to get on, "I don't want to miss my train," and all those things. The station itself, getting inside was just, it seemed like the biggest building I had ever seen in my life at that time, probably was, and it, the big chandeliers and it was just, in its heyday was just packed with passengers and train schedules and the public address system announcing what was going on. I didn't even know what the people were doing as a boy, I had no concept of what riding a train was because we didn't actually get on the trains, so we never went out on the platforms and so all I saw was just the results of all that. What I observed was a little confusing because I didn't put it together that these people are coming from California or Chicago or wherever it may be. This really was the junction city of the Mountain West and it really was a big deal. It was so sad to see the old down town, as I'm sure you've heard from a 15 lot of people, to see what happened to that wonderful downtown on Washington Boulevard. Again, that's another subject for a book you could write about, Washington Boulevard in its heyday. Beuhler Bingham and B and B Clothiers, the Blue Door and all those fabulous clothing stores and Fred M. Nye that were able, because the economy was so powerful then with Hill Field and the Army Depot and the Naval Supply Depot and all those things, and then the railroad. Everybody was making money and it was sort of the golden age of Ogden. I guess from about the end of World War Two till roughly the time I graduated from Ben Lomond, about 1965, for about those twenty years that downtown district was just thriving. There was Watson and Tanner and 24th street was almost equal to Washington and its level of commercial activity and it was a really nice feeling to the town. There wasn't a lot of crime for the most part, you didn't hear about a lot of—we had, my mother had a friend, Officer Keith Burkdahl, who was a policeman. I remember she got—I guess one of the early beat nicks, there were a handful of beatniks I guess, in Ogden, that maybe were smoking marijuana and this guy hit her at 25th and Monroe. It was at night and he had dark glasses on, and he had sideburns and this would have been 1955 or 56 around the time Elvis was big. We just thought that was so bizarre that this fellow was dressed in this leather jacket and he had sideburns and he had dark glasses on and it's nighttime, you know, why are you wearing—it is kind of odd even now. Keith Burkdahl investigated this because my mother happen to. His wife was a good friend of my mothers and he was a patrolman and so he said, "Yea, we caught 16 this guy and arrested this guy." They finger printed him and everything. I was excited by that. It was, there were some rough characters in Ogden and who knows maybe he was using heroin or something too, or maybe he was associated with 25th street, but we never found out. Whenever I would encounter the Ogden police, I can remember in 1956, the Ogden Police had four brand new blue Fords that they got and they all, they had no markings, anywhere on the car. They were painted, I think, if I remember correctly they were a dark royal blue and they had just about the size of a coffee cup, maybe a large coffee cup, on top was a red, just a red light, and that's all, and a radio antenna, and not anywhere on the car did it say police, anywhere. It just is so funny to look back at that, we'd walk through City Hall Park and of course that was the police station back then. It was in the back of the city hall building, and you'd walk through city hall park and I'd see maybe eight or nine Fords with that bubble light on top, and maybe a couple of unmarked cars. That was the, such as it was, the Ogden police at that time. There's another story, you could do the history of the Ogden Police because they must have some tales to tell if you come across one of the retiree's from the Ogden police or somebody, the son of a police officer, I'd bet you'd get some great stories. Arnie Jacobson might be a good source because his dad. I don't know what became of him, I haven't been in touch with him in years, but his dad, I know was the chief about 1970, they had the police radio in their house because his dad was the chief, so he would hear all the radio calls in Ogden as a 17 boy. You get into some personal information sometimes, but he got run out of the house. LR: Well speaking of growing up, did you ever attend any of the theaters downtown? JV: Yes, the movies? LR: Yes. JV: Yea, we loved the Orpheum, thank you for reminding me. The Orpheum and the Egyptian, but the Orpheum even more so, it was sadly destroyed. The most exciting, fun thing we ever did I think was about 1959 and Ogden was just in its glory days at that time. We, there was a girl next door, Susanne Sylvester, who I had a crush on, and I forget who else. Anyway, we were all about 12 or 13 years old and our parents escorted us, and we got all dressed up and went to, I put on a tie and a sports coat and the girls were dressed up and we just, we just thought that was the most fun we had ever had. We went to the Orpheum and saw a movie, I can't remember what the movie was now. It was just going to the theater down, either the Egyptian or the Orpheum was just one of the special things about that time in life when you are coming of age. I think for almost anyone who was there at that time would remember it well. LR: So is that the theater that had the Popeye Club? JV: I don't know. You know, I don't know about the Popeye Club. Actually when you said that it was the first time I've heard that term. LR: Oh really, okay. JV: I must have missed out. LR: It might have been Paramount. I get my theaters mixed up, I apologize. 18 JV: The Popeye Club, maybe the Paramount was, Popeye Copper Club, Ogden, or Popeye—it says here, I am doing a little web search. I remember the Paramount was where the Paramount Bowl was, is that right? LR: I'm not sure. JV: Where the river, by the river bridge? Where the Ogden sign, is that right? LR: I'm honestly not sure, I thought it was downtown myself. I know the Orpheum and the Egyptian were. I thought the Paramount was too, so. JV: Let's see here, we had a friend who lived right by the Ogden bridge, the Ogden sign, where the Ogden sign in on the east side of Washington. There was this very interesting neighborhood there that reminds, as I got older and look back at it, I thought, "Oh my gosh, that's a lot like big city's back east." It reminded me of, in some ways. I remember the Paramount Bowling alley. When you said Paramount I thought more of a bowling alley then I did of a theater. Then there was a drive in too, and there may have been called the Paramount, there was the Riverdale Drive-in, and there was a drive-in on the south end of town was the Riverdale and going up towards North Ogden was, that Harrisville area there was a drive-in out that way, the North Point Drive- In. The drive-ins, of course, when you're a teenager in those days, it was where all the necking and all that went on. Exciting dates or all the wishful thinking for boys mostly was going on. I know there was a Paramount theater, maybe if I put movie theater, Ogden Utah, my search engine isn't generating a lot right now on that. Let's see, as it opened on the, oh, here it says, "The Paramount theater opened as the 19 Alhambra theater, March 17, 1915 with a concert by the Ogden Tabernacle Choir." There's one reference there, its Cinema treasure. Oh, here we go, 2429 Keisel Avenue. LR: Ah, that's right. JV: Oh, the Alhambra. So here is a, I vaguely remember this photo, I mean this store front. It's located on Keisel, just off of, I think just off 24th, because that looks like the Fred J. Keisel building. LR: Yes, it would have been on the opposite, it would have been closer to 25th. It's actually not there anymore, they tore it down. JV: Yea, I bet it's gone. That's my granddad's era for sure, those old street lights and globe street lights and the old early automobiles. LR: What are some of your favorite memories of downtown Ogden then? JV: Well, to be honest, it was the pretty girls you would see. You would see very, very pretty girls, you'd see dozens of girls that would just you know, traffic stop kind of thing where you'd go, "wow." It was also just the feeling that it was exciting, it was a pleasant city. There was a lunch counter near 25th and Washington, Keeley's Café. You'd go in, it was a bustling café, downtown café—going in and having lunch there. There was also a toy shop near there, and my grandfather doted on me, I was his favorite, out of the five grandchildren I was the oldest one and he liked, I don't know, he and I just bonded and he would take me in as a boy and bought me a pistol set, a cowboy pistol set from this store and I don't know the name. It was a toy store near the Broom hotel and it had just all kinds of cowboy toys all 20 over the walls, and this was a pretty big, pretty large, you know, reasonably large toy store and he bought me this holster and toy gun and toy bullets and I think it was probably one of my happiest moments in childhood. Then going on that date to the Orpheum was another one. The Utah Noodle Parlor was always fun to go to and having the big butterfly shrimp that they still make I think, I think they're still there somewhere. LR: No, they actually closed down. JV: Oh, they closed down? LR: Yea, it hasn't been that long, but Utah Noodle is no more. JV: Oh, that's too bad. That was a great tradition, but I guess Jimmies Flower shop is still there probably. That was a great flower shop. I didn't know the Glassman's, I guess you've come across A L Glassman, the name A L Glassman, but he was the operator of the Orpheum it says. Have you come across the Name Ira Huggins? He was the great attorney, probably the most famous attorney in Ogden. LR: I'm not sure. JV: Ira Huggins was—my mother would speak of him very fondly. I found a URL here, its Cinema Treasures, and it has a lot about the Paramount Theater, 2429 Keisel. This might be a page you want to look at it. It's Cinematreasures.org/theaters/26282, [some of the information that follows come directly from this website.] This is a lot of information I wasn't aware of here about the publisher . Glassman, of course, owned the Standard Examiner and apparently owned this theater also at some point and one of its premier 21 attractions was Cecil B. De Mill, The Ten Commandments. In 1925 it was leased by Public Theaters and renamed Paramount Theater so it started as the Alhambra, I guess. Glassman also owned the Orpheum but he bought the Alhambra in 1923 and then, according to this web site, during the summer months, Orpheum Vaudeville moved to the Alhambra, so they had Vaudeville, wow, now that's very interesting. In 1925 the Alhambra was leased by the Publix Theaters and renamed Paramount Theater, so that's where they got the Paramount. It underwent a complete renovation and seating was reduced to 1900 one of its premier attractions was Ten Commandments. Not the one in the 1950s but the original. By 1927 the theater was under the direction of Brooklyn-born Louis Marcus, who also owned major theaters in Salt Lake, including the Capital and other theaters in Idaho. Fanchon & Marco "Ideas" supplemented the screen attractions at the Paramount. With the demise of the American Theatre in Salt Lake in 1929, the Paramount boasted being Utah's largest theatre. Wow, I didn't know any of this. In 1929 Marcus said he was selling his interest to Publix Theaters and retiring. He was elected mayor of Salt Lake from 32 and served four years and died in 1939. 1934 it came under the ownership of Paramor Theatres who also operated the Orpheum Theatre, Lyceum Theatre and Colonial Theatre. The local Ogden Theatre was an independent. So there is quite a story there of just the theater industry in Ogden. In July of 1954, Paramor Theatres completed renovations which gave it all new seating and a 42' by 21' screen. In time for Christmas 1954, a new marquee and Paramount vertical sign in addition to the Formica snack bar 22 was added to the interior. And that's when "White Christmas" came out with Bing Crosby. So, you'll probably want to look at that website for sure. LR: Yea, I wrote it down so I'll be able to. JV: It's not that much information but it has this one wonderful old photo of the Alhambra. LR: Hmm, that's cool. JV: Yea, also, I would recommend to you to see UCR.edu. LR: Right, I wrote that down too. JV: Yea, and if you can't—that website is a little obtuse—it's something like digital newspaper survey and it's California papers, but remarkably, like I say, especially the San Francisco papers, have lots and lots of Ogden's lore and stories, especially around the time of 1890 to 1930, which would be of great value to anyone doing research at the university there. Then you can form a partnership with the UC Riverside, maybe the two schools could maybe get together on helping each other, because I know that educators always need support and they have to help each other and there is always the threats of budget cuts and things like that. I know he was, that fellow at UC Riverside was saying, "Oh we've got to prove to the regents of the university that we are doing something of value to the community so that they won't shut us down." I wrote, personally when I was a park ranger, wrote a couple of paragraphs saying how much value I've gotten out of it. You're able to, or course with your printer on your computer, you're able to print stories up if you want, or photos. They also have photos too, because you're looking at the actual paper and you can see the old historic ads. 23 LR: Right, that's fun. JV: Yea, it's really fun. You sound like you're a history lover too, so you'd have a field day with that probably. LR: I have two more questions if that's alright JV: It's been a lifelong love for me. ___________ being a park ranger, it was one of the great joys of being a park ranger was being able to give history tours, you know how it's just limited to Alcatraz history, which has quite a colorful history of course. LR: I know it's kind of getting, this has kind of gone long, but I have two more questions if that is ok. JV: Yeah, sure. LR: My first one is, you talked about your grandfather being involved in the Klan in Ogden, do you know much about that? JV: No, he was, I think he was a little ashamed of it. He, I know, it's really unfortunate I can't ask any of these folks any questions or maybe my aunt, who is still alive might know something about it. She lives in Portland, Oregon. I could ask her but she would have been embarrassed about it too. I know that he talked in racial terms about when he would watch the prize fights, Gillette Prize fights on television and he would, there was definitely a palpable racism present when he would—see a black man fighting a white man or something in a Prize fight. The only reason I know about the Klan was that my mother told me that, he didn't tell me himself he was a member of the Klan. I think he was embarrassed. He was certainly not proud of it. 24 I heard, now, I'm trying to place where I heard the recollection by some, probably from my mother, that they had put some burning crosses up on, I think the north east bench, up around, somewhere around where Ben Lomond High stands today. Up on 7th or 7th street, upper 7th street probably or somewhere where it would be seen for miles around or hoped anyway. Just to terrorize the poor black folks a little more, and probably it would have been, I'm sure they didn't like Asians either, or Jews of course. There were a handful of Jewish people too in Ogden so those groups would have been not too thrilled, I'm sure, to see that. I could try and ask Aunt Patty, she's Jennings Olsen's sister by the way, my aunt. He was the professor there at Weber for many years. She may know something about it also, and if you want, I could call you back if I'm able to find out more. The KKK was organized in all 48 states in the 1920s per public television documentary. LR: It's just a curiosity. I will leave that entirely up to you. It was just a—really, someone who was involved, so I wouldn't complain but I don't want you to feel like you have to do that or anything. JV: Well, I'm always willing to help, it's fascinating. What I have found with history and the more you dig, the more interesting it is. LR: Well this is true, I agree. JV: You reminded me of that little neighborhood around the Ogden sign there on the east side of Washington that, I wish I could relive that. Also there was something— I went to visit a friend who lived right there. There was a little alley that shot off of Washington and I think it said Paramount Bowl and it was across 25 from Bigler's Desert Inn, which was an old structure that is no longer there either. We fished in the Ogden river briefly, just once, it only happened once, I went to see him and we fished in the river. It was kind of odd, it seemed like, because here it is almost like in downtown but also almost like out in the country at the same time. It was a really nice little district there that I haven't seen any photos of, but I can picture it in my head as I close my eyes I can see it. There were store fronts right the river and I think a concrete fence or something against the river bank itself, but I'm sure it's all gone now. All that's left is the historic sign there now, but it's fun to reminisce anyway. LR: Well, my last question is this, how has Ogden changed since you were growing up here, do you think? JC: It had that timing, you know, 24th and Washington was the heart of the city and it was the heart of Ogden, it really was like the heart. It was just like a human body has a heart, it was the heart of the city and it was a thriving heartbeat. I remember a young boy yelling, "Standard," and he used to actually hold up the newspaper in his arm and wave it and people would run up and buy a newspaper. It was from the Bon Marché store which was at 22nd to about 26th or 27th along Washington, was just bustling with traffic, excitement. The ladies were dressed in their finest clothes and men were dressed in business suits, and not everyone dressed that way, but it was certainly a thriving place and then along 24th, almost the same scene. It's just sad to see that, well it's happened to many cities; it's not just Ogden, that the core of the city got gutted and changed irreparably. It's too bad 26 that it couldn't have been like what was done with Trolley Square in Salt Lake where they at least maybe changed the buildings, but don't gut every, just don't tear everything completely. The W. T. Grant store was a big deal on 24th and Washington and there was the Kiesel building and the Eccles building and the First Security Bank building and it had this little sky line and it was just, I don't know, it just seemed like a really, really positive. Overall, 25th kind of gave you the vice and a little excitement and drama, which was also kind of fun, and it just kind of was a really nice place to grow up. It sort of represented America, to me. I wrote a little article when I was a boy about it and I took a world book and I followed the outline they used to write about Chicago or New York and I just took every element, and Ogden had it all, in miniscule amounts. It had a little Asian neighborhood, it had a black neighborhood, it had everything in America and it was a, in a microcosm, it was the country. It's sad to a, I'm sorry, LR: It's okay. JV: Makes me feel bad to see that all that is lost. I know there is some of it there still. The Egyptian Theater is still there, but, LR: You're right, most of it is gone. JV: We would get, to go down to Washington Boulevard was a big deal and we would put on our best clothes and we would, yea, it was just a big deal. Even when I started working at the highway department on 17th and Wall or near, just off Wall, at the Utah Highway, Utah Road Commission, we looked forward to driving along Washington Boulevard just for the fun of seeing people on the street and seeing 27 all the excitement that it used to represent. I don't know, it's just, thank you for letting me share all that, and if I can come up with some more goodies I'll certainly call you. Also you're always welcome to call me if you need any more that I can provide, and thanks again for what you are doing. LR: Well, thank you for being so willing to help us out, I appreciate that, and for your stories, they've been wonderful and I appreciate you're willingness to work with us and to do this. We've been on the phone now for almost an hour and 20 minutes so I appreciate your time and your willingness, it means a lot. JV: Well great, Okay Lorrie, keep in touch, and any time I can be of assistance, who knows, maybe your or I or both of us may write books about it, who knows. LR: That would be fun. JV: It's worthy of some good books, I can think of three right now that would be worthy books about that era. But anyway, have a great day. 28

Frank Lucas, June 27, 2013 ; Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial houses flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. ; The following is an oral history interview with Frank Lucas. The interview was conducted on June 27, 2013, by Lorrie Rands. Frank discusses his memories of his mother's and his own involvement with the Ogden canteen during World War II. ; 17p.; 29cm.; 2 bound transcripts; 4 file folders. 1 videodisc: digital; 4 3/4 in. ; Oral History Program Frank Lucas Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 27 June 2013 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Frank Lucas Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 27 June 2013 Copyright © 2014 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 Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial houses flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. After World War II, the railroad business declined. Some government agencies and businesses related to the defense industry continued to gravitate to Ogden after the war—including the Internal Revenue Regional Center, the Marquardt Corporation, Boeing Corporation, Volvo-White Truck Corporation, Morton-Thiokol, and several other smaller operations. However, the economy became more service oriented, with small businesses developing that appealed to changing demographics, including the growing Hispanic population. ____________________________________ 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: Lucas, Frank, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 27 June 2013, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Frank Lucas June 27, 2013 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Frank Lucas. The interview was conducted on June 27, 2013, by Lorrie Rands. Lucas discusses his memories of him and his mother's involvement in World War II and the Ogden canteen. LR: Today is June 27, 2013 and we are in the home of Mr. Frank Lucas. We are conducting and oral history interview about his memories of his mother's and his own involvement with the Ogden canteen during World War II. Mr. Lucas, thank you so much for allowing us to be in your home. To start off, when were you born? FL: I was born July 26, 1930. LR: Were you born here in Ogden? FL: No, I was born in Salt Lake City. My mother had to have a certain woman doctor who practiced in Salt Lake. I was the fourth of four brothers and the family was living in Ogden at the time. LR: So you're an Ogden native then? FL: Yes. LR: What do you remember about the Union Station canteen in Ogden and your mother's involvement with it? FL: Well, as I looked at the DVD, "Ogden-The War Years," it quickly came to my attention that there was more that needed to be told and the first thing that came to my mind was the Union Station and the Red Cross canteen where my mother worked many hours as a volunteer. The war years were an exciting period of 1 time for me. I was a teenager and I was just excited about a bunch of things. I like trains, so I was down at that station every opportunity I had. With Mother volunteering there, I had additional opportunities to be in the station and see the volume of servicemen, and other passengers. Most of the servicemen were on troop trains with just a few on the regular passenger trains. So many trains came through Ogden that most of the stations ten tracks were usually occupied. Because all the trains were powered by steam engines, which require periodic service maintenance, the layover was long enough for the passengers to visit the station and possibly spend some time on 25th Street. 25th Street was a pretty famous place and I'm sure a number of them wanted to get out and see just what 25th Street was about. When I discovered the records at the Red Cross and the details they had of the women that worked there and what went on, it just blew my mind even though I grew up right there. Being a young teenager, I didn't realize the impact of it. The documents indicate the number of loaves of bread used to make sandwiches and so many dozen cinnamon rolls and cookies, but there were donations as well. People from Box Elder County would bring a bushel of apples or a bushel of peaches and then I thought, "You know, they document all those things, but I don't think they documented the amount of coffee my mother made." And I remember. She smelled like she had jumped into the coffee when she came home. She made a volume of coffee and my mother was very proud of the quality that she could put into the coffee making. That was really interesting. 2 As I looked through the roster of the ladies, there were over 200 of them. I ran across a number of names that I was familiar with growing up like Mrs. Cross from the Cross Western Store, she lived down by us. She was just one of the Crosses, they were a big family. Then, I discovered the name of Laura Blanche whose son is my back door neighbor. He was telling me how upset he was one year when he was around 9 or 10-years-old and his mother had to work at the canteen on Christmas Day. He thought that wasn't very good to ruin his Christmas while she worked at the canteen. The canteen was a marvelous thing. As the servicemen came up the stairs from the underground tunnel, there was the canteen right at the top of the stairs, just before you went into the door at the main station right out on the platform. It was just part of our lives for a number of years and Mother worked there and that's what she enjoyed. She started her work in the First World War at the Red Cross and wore a Red Cross uniform. At that time, they made bandages and she was in with a bunch of girls that liked to entertain the servicemen. Of course, my father was one of them. My mother was very patriotic. I had three older brothers in the service and what gets to me is that the spirit that was in the community at that time was something we don't see today. Our whole lives were affected by the war effort every day. It wasn't just one or two neighbors being in the service, it was whole families. The Holt Brothers were three brothers in the service and in my family there were three brothers in the service. Every family in Ogden that had sons, those sons and some fathers were in the service. So most every family had someone in the military service, the 3 canteen was like a little touch of home for all the service men traveling through Ogden on the trains because they had good things to eat and good coffee to drink. LR: You mentioned that the canteen was located at the top of the stairs, was it in the station? FL: No. It was just outside the southwest doors of the main station lobby on the covered platform at the top of the stairs. LR: Did you ever get to watch you're your mom working in the canteen? FL: Occasionally, I'm sure. I was her buddy and I was around most likely. I don't really have anything to tell, but I could make myself visible. LR: You're mother also worked at the USO. Do you remember some of that work that she did there? FL: Yes, she was a hostess. During this time, she was probably about 50 or maybe a little older. They had some young ladies that were also hostesses. The USO was located in an old church on the north side of 24th Street just below Adams Avenue. It had been renovated for the American Legion. They moved to another church on the south east corner of the 24th and Adams making their old building available for the USO. It was just an open place that had programs, entertainment, dancing and they had places where you could just sit. There was no television. They had to do their own entertainment. They could probably read and there was a little refreshment area. The thing that made it special for us is that we had a large 30-foot long living room and my mother would bring home a half a dozen or more servicemen plus some waitresses and they would roll up 4 our carpet and dance on our hardwood floor to our 78 RPM records. Every so often that was something that happened in our house. These servicemen would come into our home and just have a place to relax. LR: Did you enjoy those moments? FL: Oh yes. I've always been the type to talk to everybody. LR: So you interacted with some of the soldiers she brought home? Do you have any stories about some of those? FL: No, not that I know of, I just was part of it and probably helped roll the carpet up and what have you. LR: Your mother was a busy woman. She also worked in the bond house. Can you describe what that was? FL: You talk about her being a busy woman; she was also the bookkeeper for our family business. The bond house was a cinder block building they built right on the sidewalk on the west side of Washington Boulevard just south of 25th Street. It faced east and it took up the whole sidewalk. It was a colonial motif building, with a wood front porch built out over the gutter and into the street. Those needing to use the sidewalk had to use the front porch to get past the Bond House. The government had quite an active program to finance the war by selling bonds. The smallest denomination of bond was $25.00 which cost $18.75. This bond house was the center of the thing and I'm not sure just who was fully in charge of it. My mother worked there one day a week and I was there quite a few times and I became very proficient in rolling coins into the tubes. I spent many 5 hours doing that. In fact, I built a little tray to put the coins in so I could roll them easy and faster. In addition to that, my mother was a coordinator for the schools where the government wanted every penny you had to spare, so the kids at school wouldn't have enough money to buy bonds, so they sold stamps and I don't remember what the denomination of the stamps were, but you pasted them in a book and when it was filled it could be converted into a regular war bond. They had a day at school where they collected money and gave you the stamps for your stamp book. One other thing I remember taking all our mashed soup and vegetable cans to school to be recycled for the war effort. Something of interesting note, all of the soda pop was in glass bottles, so there was no aluminum cans. Another thing about this bond business is they did everything they could to promote bonds. I'm sure every family had a few bonds, because the first day of a new show the price to get in the show was buying a bond. People would line up on the sidewalk in summer or winter to get into these shows. I believe there are pictures that show the people lined up at the movie house to get into the movies. LR: What are some of your memories of 25th Street? FL: Well, 25th Street, that's very interesting. My memories of 25th Street, when I was 16-years-old and just got my driver's license, the activity of the day was to go down on 25th Street and people watch because every other place on 25th Street was a bar and of course, the most famous place on 25th Street, the porters and waiters club is one of outstanding places. It was really a professional place and it served its purpose because all of the trains that came through had the porters 6 and waiters and this was their place. There was also the notorious red light district. When it came time to restore 25 Street, the question in my mind was, "What are they going to restore it to?" They did a good job I think. It's too bad that they ripped out the Broom Hotel and the other hotel on the other end by the railroad station that had several different names like the Earl Hotel and the Heely Hotel. They tore down those buildings and then decided to restore 25th Street. I could give you a quick rundown of what was on 25th Street in that block from Washington to Grant. There was the Broom Hotel and in it was a barber shop and out in front was this wooden Indian thing that was quite famous around that period of time. Just west of the hotel was a very famous restaurant called Ross and Jacks and that had something very interesting happen. They evidently had a falling out, so they came in and just cut the restaurant in half and it was no longer Ross and Jacks. Ross had his café and Jack had his café. In Ogden, I only remember two types of restaurants—American and Chinese. The Chinese restaurant that was there was very popular. There were also two clothing stores and I don't know how to describe them because they were different than the clothing stores along Washington. They had a different type of clothes and served a different type of person. Those were some of the things that filled up that space where they now have a bank and the federal building. LR: Are there any other memories you have of your mother during that time period that you'd like to share? 7 FL: One of my brothers was six years older than I am and another was eight years older and the other was nine years older, so I was mother's baby even until I was over 16-years-old. We did a lot of things together. She and I went on a trip to Yellowstone and at that time you could stop and a bear would come up to your car and knock on the window hoping to get a handout. You wouldn't dare leave your car open, especially if there was any food in it because the bear would just climb right in and that happened fairly often. In 1939, my mother, her younger sister, my 15 year old brother and myself went to California to see the San Francisco World's Far. For a nine-year-old, this was one real exciting time. We were traveling in a 1934 Chevrolet. There was no trunk, so my father built a rack that he bolted to the rear bumper. We covered the suitcases with a canvas and tied it all down with a rope. My mother and brother did all the work. I got the impression from the service station attendants that two women with two kids driving across desolate Nevada was something you seldom saw and quite risky. My mother was not afraid and would drive most anywhere. She was quite a competent traveler. For me, the fair was the most awesome experience of my young life. LR: Well, Mr. Lucas, I am so grateful that you have taken a few moments to share with us your memories of your mom, World War II and the canteen. Thank you very much. SL: You mentioned your mom made a lot of coffee, did she make anything else that you remember? Did she make it at home? FL: Oh no, it was all done there. We're not really coffee drinkers. 8 LR: That is quite interesting that she was so proud of her coffee. FL: The soldiers loved it. LR: Do you remember the coffee pots? Were they just the old percolators? FL: No, the coffee urns were of about three to five gallon stainless steel pots. They had a spigot (faucet) at the bottom to fill the coffee cups. There was a glass tube running up the front above the spigot which showed the level of coffee inside. Just how the water was heated and circulated to drip through the coffee grounds at the top, I do not know. I do believe it was a chore to clean out at the end of the day. LR: Did she use some of her rationings like sugar or flour or anything for the canteen? FL: No, not any of our private rations. They had means of getting whatever they needed. This was not a hide in the midst thing, it was a big operation. You could tell by the fact that they served 1,644,798 servicemen. If you lined that number of people up two or three at the window at a time, you can figure how long it would take to get that many people through there. It was a massive undertaking. It was something else that was really enjoyed. You would enjoy it too if you could get off the train and have a nice snack. It would be nice, especially if you were bored and didn't know what was going to happen to you. LR: How many hours did your mom work? FL: That's very interesting because on the records they have all of that documented and while my mother didn't work the most hours, she worked 777 hours. Mrs. Lowenstein worked 1600 hours. That's a lot of time. With 200 hundred ladies 9 making up the three shifts seven days a week, they worked mostly five hours a day, but I know my mother also worked seven or nine hours sometimes. It was supported by the community. I don't think they had trouble finding ladies to do it. They didn't have to go out and beg people to do it. People wanted to do it. LR: Did she work a specific day at the canteen or did it rotate? FL: I noticed that she worked on Thursdays and Garth Blanche said his mother worked on Monday mornings. It could have been other days, but I don't know. I was just amazed at the records that they kept. On last thought. All the auto manufacturers stopped making new cars and retooled to make tanks, etc. for the war. We went four or five years without any new cars. 10

Eric Zenger, September 6, 2013 ; Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial houses flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. ; The following is an oral history interview with Eric Zenger. The interview was conducted on September 6, 2013, by Lorrie Rands. Eric discusses his business and experiences with Ogden and 25th Street. ; 22p.; 29cm.; 2 bound transcripts; 4 file folders. 1 videodisc: digital; 4 3/4 in. ; Oral History Program Eric Zenger Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 6 September 2013 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Eric Zenger Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 6 September 2013 Copyright © 2014 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 Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial houses flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. After World War II, the railroad business declined. Some government agencies and businesses related to the defense industry continued to gravitate to Ogden after the war—including the Internal Revenue Regional Center, the Marquardt Corporation, Boeing Corporation, Volvo-White Truck Corporation, Morton-Thiokol, and several other smaller operations. However, the economy became more service oriented, with small businesses developing that appealed to changing demographics, including the growing Hispanic population. ____________________________________ 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: Zenger, Eric., an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 6 September 2013 , WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Eric Zenger September 6, 2013 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Eric Zenger. The interview was conducted on September 6, 2013, by Lorrie Rands. Eric discusses his business and experiences with Ogden and 25th Street. LR: It is September 6, 2013, we are in Great Harvest Bread Co., talking with Eric Zenger about his business, 25th Street and Ogden in general. I'm Lorrie Rands doing the interview and Rebecca Whitesides is filming. Eric, when are where were you born? EZ: I was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. Do I have to really give my age? Way back in the 50's. I'm a Utah boy. Where did you go to high school? Actually, growing up I moved all over the country, east coast, west coast and in between, but finally came back to Utah to go to high school at Olympus High School and college at Utah State and the U. Sorry, Weber. LR: Did you major in business? EZ: Some, but more minored in business and majored in German and geography. I liked all three of those areas of study. LR: What was your driving factor in starting this business with Great Harvest? EZ: Well, I had sold another business in Salt Lake that I owned and operated for five years and was looking about for another opportunity. I cast my net pretty wide, I looked at jobs and existing business and this and that and finally found Great Harvest, which is a franchise from Montana. After a long evaluation, that just seemed like the best fit for me. I loved their corporate philosophy and their 1 product and the way they did business and they liked me. So, we came together and decided to open a new franchise in Ogden, not in Salt Lake because the Salt Lake territory was taken, so I had to come north. LR: What brought you to 25th Street? EZ: Well, nothing brought me to 25th Street. 25th Street to Salt Lakers was pretty much an unknown quantity. I stumbled onto 25th Street. When I was doing a location search for my store, my bread company, I looked all around. It was easy to identify the up and coming retail districts as Riverdale and Harrison Boulevard and other points, and one day I think I just came over the 24th viaduct after getting off the freeway and stumbled upon 25th Street. That was my introduction to it. LR: Did this building specifically draw you? EZ: No, the district as a whole. The whole two block span just had a charm and attraction to it that immediately said something to me. LR: When did you open your business here on 25th Street? EZ: Back in 1989. In August of 1989, so it's almost been 25 years on 25th Street. We've had quite a run here. In fact, it's now becoming a second generation business, which is kind of typical to what 25th Street used to be back in the day when it was in its earlier prime. Small family businesses were run and passed from one generation to the next and that's what's happening with us. LR: That's fantastic. You mentioned last time about Margaret and Daniel Hunter. How much had they done, work-wise on this building before you? 2 EZ: They had done quite a bit. To the best of my knowledge, which may not be one hundred percent accurate, they purchased about four or five buildings right here contiguous to my building—and started developing them. They had, with the exception of one, pretty much done 75-80 percent of the work. All the main floor retail spaces had been refurbished and remodeled, with the exception of the upstairs, the upstairs had not been completed. They were by and large done, not necessarily particular to our specific use as a bakery, we eventually had to come in and put a new floor in that was more durable, but the substantial part of remodeling had been completed. I think they took a large leap of faith to do that because even though Ogden City, the government, had confidence in the historic district and could see what it could become—because they as professional planners had seen it happen in other parts of the country—I don't think Weber County and Ogden City residents were quite ready for or recognized the opportunity of 25th Street yet. They were early pioneers who risked a lot and in some cases sacrificed a lot to get things going here. LR: So, Margaret and Daniel Hunter, they had spent so much money that they ended up losing the building is that correct? EZ: To the best of my knowledge, yes, they lost not only my building, but a couple of others back to the bank, so they weren't able to profit from their endeavor. We ended up purchasing from the bank. LR: Once you opened, how did you draw business to 25th Street? 3 EZ: I think it was not so much my personal efforts as the quality of the product and the company that we represented. It was also the fact that we married a really neat, unique concept, (whole wheat bread wasn't being offered by and large in Utah) to a great historic building and district. We had this great product with a wonderful way of delivering it. Everybody who came through the door got a free slice of bread with butter and frequently older customers would say, "Boy, this brings back memories of the way it used to be." So anyway, the fact that we had this product and a company that had a good name, and then we married that with a historic building created community buzz. So, can you imagine this warm smelling bakery with free slices to everybody who walked through the door, in a unique old building that evoked certain memories or impulses or emotions in people? Awareness of us just quickly spread by word of mouth. Sure, we did a little advertising and such. One thing that we did that was kind of our gorilla marketing campaign, we took out free loaves of bread on wooden bread boards to various businesses with a knife and a big block of butter and a honey bear and so forth. Right before lunch at about 11:00am when it was hot out of the oven so it really had an aroma, we would take those to various new businesses and say, "Hi, this is our new business, here's a coupon, can you slice this for your customers as they come in your salon or your store and let them know who we are and give them one of our coupons?" They were more than happy to do that because it was a little treat for their customers, something out of the ordinary. By that means and others, we were able to get word of mouth moving quickly and people just 4 started to show up. That just worked and before we knew it we were getting busier and busier with each successive month. LR: How many businesses were on 25th Street when you moved in? EZ: Not many, maybe half a dozen at most in the whole two block stretch. It might have been a few more than that, because there were some of the old bars that kind of represented the earlier history of 25th Street, but speaking more to newer businesses that were part of the comeback of 25th Street, there were only maybe four, five or six. Thomas Hardy's Salon, run by Thomas Hardy, and Trends and Traditions, run by Mary Gaskell, and Panache Interiors, run by Peggy Holmes, and the Bistro Restaurant run by I don't know who at the time (and it's changed ownership several times since), but those were really the only players on the street. There was very little foot traffic and a lot of vacancies. LR: You mentioned before about being on the Downtown Ogden Association. What were some of the changes you helped to make? EZ: Well, the Downtown Ogden Association was trying to, of course, reinvigorate downtown Ogden. Outside of the Ogden City Mall, which was between 24th and 22nd Streets, there wasn't a whole lot of street side activity, it was all inside what everyone called the fortress. One of the first initiatives I thought we needed to pursue was changing traffic patterns in downtown Ogden. Two of the major thoroughfares in downtown were one-way streets, Lincoln and Grant, going north and south and then another two, 20th and 21st Street, that went east and west were also one-way streets. I felt strongly that it needed to be changed and that it 5 was an inhibitor to free flow and convenient access to the businesses, especially 25th Street. The Downtown Ogden Association let me run with that and we built up a plea and put that before the city council and they agreed with us and decided against their own planning department and traffic engineer to change those streets back to two-way streets to facilitate easier movement of traffic. We also encouraged them to implement more angle parking because it increased the number of parking spaces available compared to parallel parking. They weren't quite as accommodating there, but in subsequent years they have designated more spaces on more streets in downtown Ogden to angled parking. I thought Ogden City Government was pretty receptive and responsive. LR: That's great. EZ: I might say something while you collect your thoughts about why I chose 25th Street. The company I worked with, Great Harvest Franchising, had a very liberal and open franchising policy. They aren't like a typical franchise, in fact, they call themselves the "unfranchise," like the "Un-cola, 7-up." They ask their franchisees to do very few things really and then otherwise, they say, "Anything else is possible, do what you want," which is so uncharacteristic of franchises in general. In locating my business, I wanted my business to have my imprint on it. Most franchises will have very specific guidelines for where you can locate and what the traffic counts have to be and so on and so forth and how much visibility you have to have and all these other criteria. Great Harvest had some criteria too, but one of their criteria was identity and that spoke to me a lot. They wanted a 6 location that had identity, which meant that you could tell any person in Weber County where your store was and if you could tell them that in just two, maybe three, words, it would conjure up a mental image in their minds that would stick, then that was a good location that had identity. As opposed to some address on Wall Avenue or Washington Boulevard or Harrison Boulevard, that if they tried to recall that later they probably wouldn't be able to. They'd figure it was within a mile or two section of one of those roads, not a block or two. So, historic 25th Street offered that. Everybody in Weber County knew what historic 25th Street was, it was the old red light, wino district. It was the old rip-roaring forties and fifties, the old Junction City railroad soldier traffic from all over the country and war time traffic and all of that is what constituted 25th Street. People knew and understood that, so if I had met anybody anywhere, trying to drum up business for our store and said, "We're on historic 25th Street," that's all I had to say and they could find it. Also, I chose 25th Street too because I lived in Europe for a couple of years and have been in other places where I felt a deep appreciation for a community that had identity and history and community. I wanted that for my place of business. Even if it meant that I had to sacrifice some sales and profits to be there. I would rather be in a place where, when I got out of bed each morning, I wanted to go there, rather than someplace I could go just to make more money and have a business. I wanted to not just be in business, I wanted to have a lifestyle and to me 25th Street enabled me to do that, to go someplace I wanted to be in a place where I felt community with other small businesses. 7 Many of which own their buildings, which isn't always an option in other retail districts that are primarily run by developers and large commercial interests. We could own our own buildings and so could my neighbor and the next neighbor and we could walk to the post office, walk to the bank, walk to our accounting office, all of these things it felt just like where I wanted to be. That, to me, was more important than maybe locating my business somewhere where I might have made greater sales and more profits. LR: When you originally moved in, how many Ogdenites thought it would be a profitable location? EZ: I can't say that I know for sure, but we did frequently hear comments when we initially opened that made us think that we had, perhaps, made the wrong choice. Many of our first customers had said, "Why did you choose to locate here? You really should have been up on the east bench or out south or by Smith's Foods or somewhere," other than where we were and many would look at us with kind concern and say, "We hope you make it here," implying that they didn't think we would. Here we are 25 years later and still successful and thriving. I just don't think that local folks at the time were quite ready to see historic 25th Street and its old reputation change into something new and prosperous. Maybe it took a few people from outside the area coming in and recognizing what a gem Ogden had in 25th Street to help some of the locals realize that this was something they had taken for granted. LR: How long after you opened do you think other businesses started to come into 25th Street? 8 EZ: It happened, I think, actually fairly quickly, within two or three years. A lot of people started showing interest and some of the iconic or landmark businesses that are on the street today started showing up such as, Rooster's restaurant and The City club and a few others, La Ferovia restaurant. They all started to take notice and started investing in 25th Street. It was fairly quickly that things started to happen. LR: Once that happened did you notice a change in the atmosphere of 25th Street? EZ: Absolutely. It seemed that, fairly quickly, Ogden City residents and Weber County residents quickly started to see what potential this street had and started to appreciate the good vibe that was developing here. LR: How much has that changed since you came in 1989? EZ: It's been pretty significant. Nowadays it's hard to find a good spot on the street, whereas at that time it was pretty easy. Nowadays, the parking is always full and is actually a concern. We'd love to see Ogden City maybe address that somehow with increased parking options. From some of those practical standpoints like parking and so forth, it's changed significantly and vacancy standpoints it has changed significantly. Property values have certainly been boosted two or three or who knows, maybe even fourfold since we first came here. LR: When a business moves out of 25th Street, how long does it take before that building is snatched up? EZ: It's all relative. Even, believe it or not, on a two block stretch of road and on a south side and a north side of the street, the old adage of, "Location, location, 9 location," still applies. It can be as little as a waiting list, someone is waiting at the door for someone to leave, or it could even take six or eight months. Especially if the building has not been remodeled and updated. LR: When you first moved in, there's lots of talk about tunnels, was there anything in your basement that maybe hinted of that? EZ: Well, in our basements, they were dirt floors and rock foundations. They hadn't really bolstered, in doing the remodeling, they hadn't changed much of that because they'd stood for a hundred years. I guess they figured that they would stand for another hundred years without drastically changing the foundations. We didn't find any tunnels, but we do have old whiskey barrels that are part of our foundation. I guess those were meant for concealing things in. The building next door to the Great Harvest Bakery where the Queen Bee gift shop is, we found little fire pits still in the basement with old box springs and mattresses where, apparently, I was told, that gypsies had still been living within five or ten years of our assuming ownership of that building at 270 25th Street. That would have been even in the early to mid-eighties. Folks were still camping out down there and making fires and all of the floor joints are charred black, so apparently quite a few fires had been made there. Some of the rudimentary furnishings that they used were still there. LR: In the upstairs was there any evidence of what went on? EZ: Upstairs? No, that was really just a stripped out vacant space. I was able, though, to find an old newspaper article dated from 1949 or 1950 that spoke about our building in particular, naming it by the address, showing a sheriff's raid 10 had been conducted there and that a lot of gaming equipment and illegal alcohol was being sold out of that location. It had two or three pictures of the stuff that had been confiscated and laid out on tables, showing a little bit about the history of this building. LR: I actually found that and it was fun to read, so that was cool that it happened here. Is there anything else you can think of about your being here that you'd like to add? EZ: Well, not really, I'd just say that I don't regret our decision one bit. The sense of place that we feel here is tremendous. We've had good economic success here. The people of Ogden City and Weber County have received us with open arms and Ogden is a great place to do business. Despite some of the perhaps negative attitudes that some local Ogdenites had about their own town and it being a good place to do business, it is a good place to do business. 25th Street is a great place to do business. We love being here and despite some of the difficulties in parking and such, I wouldn't be anywhere else between Salt Lake and the Idaho border other than right here. We just love being a part of history and being a part of the community and we love the reaction that our customers seem to get out of it too. They like coming to a place that has history and identity and personality. We look forward to another 25 years. LR: Do you find that there's a sense of a more family oriented space than…? EZ: Absolutely. All day long, mothers with children walk in. Everybody seems to be comfortable down there now. Whereas, in the earlier days, even for five or ten years after we opened, people were quite reluctant still to come down. Not 11 everyone was, because we were thriving, but many who hadn't tried us yet or who hadn't been to 25th Street in 20 or 30 years, were still reluctant to come down and they had to be persuaded. Now, it's a place where families and children are everywhere. In fact, photographers, almost a day doesn't go by that a photographer doesn't show up with a wedding couple to take pictures. It's just become that kind of an environment now. RW: No. I'm just a huge fan. What's your favorite bread that you make here? EZ: My favorite bread is probably the simplest and most common bread that we sell and that's our honey whole wheat bread. It just has such a rich, moist, nutty full flavor that you can eat it every day of your life and not get tired of it. LR: The second building, you were leasing it, is that correct? EZ: What happened is we bought our original bakery building in 1989 and then Margaret Hunter, who hadn't quite developed the space to the west, 270, it was run down and the ceiling was caving in and the floors were caving in because water had been penetrating for years and maybe decades. She offered to sell that to us undeveloped about three or four years later and we decided to take her up on that. So, we purchased it and we remodeled it top to bottom and initially leased it out to other business owners who opened gift shops or English tea shops of one form or another. Finally, we opened our own deli operation here maybe in about 2004 or 2005. We operated them as independent, separate businesses for three or four years and then finally breached the wall between the two buildings. We breached 12 the heavy, thick, brick wall with a substantial opening about eight feet across and eight or ten feet high to allow free flow of people between the two and it was a real good decision. Most of these buildings are very narrow. In fact, ours are only about 17 feet wide so they kind of can be a little bit claustrophobic, but when we put that opening between the two, somehow it just made the space really work. It made each individual side seem even wider, like they were 20 or 25 feet even though they were still 17 feet. It really made everything much more open and free flowing. LR: You mentioned that it's turned into a family, two generation business. How has that happened? EZ: Well, my son, several of my children, I have four children and three of the four at one time of another worked in the bakery as kids trying to put themselves through college or what have you. The environment just really clicked for one of my kids. He's just made for it, my son, Christopher. He's very outgoing, very creative, and when I got to the point where I was looking to scale back and looking for someone to fill my shoes, he expressed interest and I gladly received that interest because he is made for it. He knows how to engage people and to serve people and he has a passion for product quality and organization that's needed in small business management. It was just a natural fit, so he's the man now and we'll be going forward and who knows how long that might be. LR: Is he doing both sides? EZ: No, he does the bakery side. On the other side, where the Queen Bee is, it used to be a full service deli occupying the entire space, but in the last few years we've 13 modified that a little bit and consolidated the deli up front a little bit more and opened the rest of it to a unique gifts shop. It's primary emphasis, however, is books and chocolate and then it does have other gift items. My daughter, Hailey, who is awaiting news as to whether her husband gets accepted into medical school, is running that business. So, it's become quite a little family operation. LR: There has to be a certain sense of pride in knowing that your children are continuing your legacy. EZ: Yes, they are good, hard-working kids who are pursuing good things and that's neat. I'm not just saying this to say this, but I honestly feel that 25th Street is partially responsible for that—not just me as their father and as a business entrepreneur. 25th Street just kind of breeds that kind of desire in people and families. My children love this street as much as I do, if not more, because they've grown up with it and they appreciate it. They wanted to be part of it too. Even if it might only be for a temporary span of a few years or what have you, they want to be part of it too. Being able to own my own buildings and control my own destiny as far as landlord ship and so forth, enabled me to make that opportunity available to them. They love the prospect of doing that. LR: That's great. I wish I had more questions. I've kind of wracked my brain with everything that I had. I appreciate your time and it sounds to me like you were almost instrumental in bringing business back to 25th Street. EZ: Well, I don't know if that's necessarily true. We did do our part and a lot of folks have credited us with being one of the early ingredients that helped bring in more foot traffic and vehicular traffic to 25th Street, in more than just a few numbers, 14 but in larger numbers and to re-introduce people to 25th Street. So, we'll take a little credit for that, but there are certainly others and some who were here before us like Thomas Hardy and Mary Gaskell and others. We certainly feel like we contributed something to it. LR: That's great. I thank you for your time and your willingness to sit and do this with us. EZ: Thank you. 15

Shinji Ichida, October 7, 2013 ; Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial houses flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. ; The following is an oral history interview with Shinji Ichida. The interview was conducted on October 7, 2013, by Lorrie Rands. Shinji discusses 25th Street and his memories of growing up in the Japanese community in Ogden. ; 30p.; 29cm.; 2 bound transcripts; 4 file folders. 1 sound disc: digital; 4 3/4 in. ; Oral History Program Shinji Ichida Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 7 October 2013 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Shinji Ichida Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 7 October 2013 Copyright © 2014 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 Business at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories related to changes in the Ogden business district since World War II. From the 1870s to World War II, Ogden was a major railroad town, with nine rail systems. With both east-west and north-south rail lines, business and commercial houses flourished as Ogden became a shipping and commerce hub. After World War II, the railroad business declined. Some government agencies and businesses related to the defense industry continued to gravitate to Ogden after the war—including the Internal Revenue Regional Center, the Marquardt Corporation, Boeing Corporation, Volvo-White Truck Corporation, Morton-Thiokol, and several other smaller operations. However, the economy became more service oriented, with small businesses developing that appealed to changing demographics, including the growing Hispanic population. ____________________________________ 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: Ichida, Shinji, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 7 October 2013, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Shinji Ichida October 7, 2013 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Shinji Ichida. The interview was conducted on October 7, 2013, by Lorrie Rands. Shinji discusses 25th Street and his memories of growing up in the Japanese community in Ogden. LR: It is October 7, 2013; we are in the home of Shinji Ichida talking about 25th Street and his memories growing up in the Japanese community. I am Lorrie Rands, conducting the interview and Melissa Johnson is with me as well. Mr. Ichida, I want to thank you for your time and allowing us to come back and do this interview. Let's just start at the beginning, when are where were you born? SI: Okay, I was born in Seattle, Washington in 1931, so I'm ancient as it were. I moved to Ogden when I was three or four years old and have been here ever since. So, I know the Ogden vicinity very well, plus the fact that when I was younger I used to deliver cleaning clothes for my uncle who owned a cleaning establishment and also worked for a flower shop doing deliveries. So, I got to learn the Ogden area quite well as far as streets and so forth. I've been here a long time. LR: When you came here when you were three or four, where was your first residence? SI: On 23rd and Grant Avenue. I went to grammar school at Grant School, which was on 23rd and Grant Avenue, so I was only half a block away from my grammar school. I grew up in the neighborhood and went to Central Junior High which is, I think, Lewis High school on 25th Street and Monroe. I graduated from 1 Ogden High School and went to Weber State when it was a junior college. So, I've been here a long time. LR: When you lived on 23rd Street, you were there until a teenager? SI: Probably, I would have to guess the 1930's and then moved to 23rd and Lincoln on the corner and was there for 10 or 15 years. Then, we lived at 127 Doxie, which is in between 27th and 28th on Wall Avenue. So, like I said, I've been in Ogden all of my life. LR: So, before the 1940's, what would you do for fun? Could you go down to 25th Street? SI: Well, that's where we hung out. Electric Alley, which is the back side of 25th Street between Wall Avenue and Grant Avenue, is where our playground was, in the back alleys. We grew up there. We had a Japanese School on Lincoln between 24th and 25th, so our activities were primarily from 24th Street to 25th Street between Grant Avenue and Wall Avenue. That area is very, very nostalgic to me because I grew up there. Where the Summit Hotel is now, that used to be our playground in the back alleys. The electric company, Yesco, it's Young Electric Sign Company, used to have their company on 24th and Lincoln Avenue. We used to climb over their fence and get the little tubes and break those and use them as spit ball deals. It's a funny thing because all of those electric signs always had the mercury in it, so I've ingested a lot of mercury through the ages, but I've never had any problem, health wise. I'm totally amazed that we survived those kinds of things when we were kids. 2 LR So your parents were okay with your hanging out on 25th Street? SI: Yes, because, like I told you before, there were really no aspects of being in danger there. Not our parents or us as young kids, ever feared getting mugged or kidnapped or anything like that. We just hung out there and watched. During the war we watched soldiers getting rolled and we saw drunkards getting rolled and it was all part of the activity of 25th Street back in the 40's and 50's, but that's where we grew up. Like I was telling you before, all the brothels in Ogden were on 24th Street and Grant Avenue, so we saw the seamy side of life. We, even as kids, used to climb up on roofs and peek in windows and look at the brothel place. We never did get to see anything, but always those kind of mischievous things are what we did as kids growing up on electric alley. Right now, electric alley has been fixed up so there's a lot of eateries and even the back side of 25th Street they have outside eateries. It's pretty nice now. Back in our days it was vacant lots and nothing but gravel and broken glasses, but we survived. LR: Is it strange to learn that those who didn't grow up on 25th Street found it a terrible, scary place? SI: Probably primarily the Caucasian race, they hardly ever came down 25th Street because during the wars years it was pretty notorious. Between the beer joints and the brothels, there weren't very many other activities. Union Station was a going railroad station back in those days. The military were transported through Ogden and the military always got a weekend pass or a pass to get off on 25th Street and visit the beer joints. I'll leave out the other one, I'm sure that happened too. Like I say, all the activities during the war was very, very open as far as 3 drinking and all that kind of stuff, so we saw all of that through the ages of growing up. LR: Speaking of the war, you mentioned this last time, but what are your memories of December 7, 1941? SI: Well, like I mentioned, I was raised by grandma and grandpa. My grandfather happened to be one of the more, I won't say important, but outstanding Japanese people in the Japanese community. On December 7, 1941, 11:30 at night, the police came and took him into custody and took him to Weber County Jail and he stayed there for a week and then he was shipped out to Mississippi to an internment camp and stayed there for a year and a half. He came back a year and a half after that. The war probably shortened his life by a couple years. He passed away when he was 75. I was ten years old at the time in 1941, so it was an impression that was very ingrained in my mind as far as a youngster was concerned. It was one of those things that, during the war at least when it broke out, the hysteria was very prominent and that's why all the Japanese descent people in California on the west coast were sent to internment camps because of that. The hysteria was so prominent. LR: You've mentioned that it had an impact on you as a 10 year old. How did that affect the rest of your childhood? SI: Well, I guess it made me introverted or reserved simply because you didn't want to be outgoing when you were of Japanese descent during the war years. I can remember grandma and grandpa always saying, "Don't speak Japanese in the presence of Caucasians because they'll think you're talking about them." We 4 primarily lost the capability of conversing in Japanese. That's why right now I can still understand a little bit, I can speak a little bit, but very limited. Whereas, Chinese, Spanish, they all speak their mother tongue in their families so they're very fluent and they understand it very well, they can read it. Whereas the Japanese people pretty much lost it because of the war. I dare say the second third and fourth generation as far as the Japanese language itself, cannot speak it, cannot read it. We lost the ability to converse in Japanese simply because we were told not to use it. That's the way it was during the war time. LR: When the war was over and things were kind of settling down a little, you just didn't start speaking it again? SI: No, because by then my grandparents were very elderly, they were close to, I think 70's, so they were on their last leg if you will as far as their life was concerned, so our conversations were very limited and we spoke primarily English because we grew up that way with school and all of that. We ran around with nothing but English speaking kids and same nationality as me. You probably had 10 guys that you grew up with that were Japanese decent, but we all spoke English all the time. We never used Japanese words other than maybe a slang or a swear word or something like that. Other than that, we never used it. We never had the occasion to use it, so we primarily grew up using English. We even went to Japanese school when we were teenagers, the more simple reading and writing of the Japanese alphabet if you will, until the war broke out. After the war broke out, that was done away with simply because of the hysteria as far as Japanese people were concerned. 5 I'll tell you a little bit more about 25th Street. There was a Buddhist church on Lincoln Avenue between 24th and 25th. There was a dry goods store on the same block. There was a Chinese gambling casino on the same block and people say it was an opium den also, but I was never privy to that. I would imagine there was some of that going on because in those days it was pretty loose as far as gambling and stuff was concerned. The Lincoln Avenue between 24th and 25th had probably half a dozen Japanese residents and companies or stores, if you will. On the west side of Lincoln there was a Pacific Fruit, which was a produce company that primarily was run by Japanese people too. It was all very Japanese community oriented in that two block area. LR: So, the area between Lincoln and Grant and 23rd to 25th? SI: No, 24th to 25th. LR: Okay, so you mentioned last time that it was what you guys called Japanese town or J-town. Is it just that block then that was considered that? SI: Yes. It was just that one square block that was considered J-town because most of the stores were in that square block. There were establishments on Kiesel and Wall Avenue and over on 26th Street there were families living there too, but as far as the town activity itself, it was right in that one block area. LR: Speaking of the businesses, during the war and then afterward, was it hard for the Japanese to continue working? Were the businesses still able to function? SI: Yes, but to a lesser degree because it was affected during, I would dare say, probably a five to ten year spam. After that things went pretty much back to 6 normal. By then, the ones that weren't making an income probably closed up before that. The ones that were doing okay continued on. Like I told you, on Grant Avenue there was Utah Noodle and Bamboo Noodle right next to each other, which did very well during that time period. The reason I know is because my wife's brother owned Utah Noodle. They moved up to Washington in the 1970's and they kept going until just last November. There was one document in there that you probably need to read because Raymond Uno was the one who wrote it and he's a retired judge. He's very well-known in the community as far as the aspects of people that judge things. Anyway, he wrote that and he mentioned there were primarily three J-town or Japanese communities in Utah. One was in Price City in Carbon County, one was in Salt Lake and the other was in Ogden. The only reason we had one in Ogden was because primarily the Union Depot because the Japanese, the first generation Japanese that came to Utah, most of the people, or guys, that came to the United States worked on the railroad, so consequently, the relationship between the Union Pacific Station and settling here in Ogden was very cohesive as far as being in existence as far as working for the railroad. That was one of the reasons the Japanese community was in Ogden and then Salt Lake it was simply because it was the largest city and the reason in Carbon County in Price was because of the coal mines. They worked in the coal mines. LR: Did your grandfather work on the railroad? SI: No. LR: He had another business? 7 SI: Yes. Like I said, he was sort of a semi-important person in the Japanese community. He never had to do manual labor, he was always a higher up guy that did bookwork and stuff. LR: Did he have his own business? SI: They had what they called the Intermountain Japanese Association which was an association that developed Japanese American relationships within the Northern Utah area. He was very prominent as far as the Japanese community from Corrine in the north to Salt Lake in the south. In the organizations or Buddhist church and community things going on, he had his fingers in all of those areas. He was very well-known and established as far as importance in the Japanese community. That's one of the reasons he was interned immediately when the war broke out. LR: So, I'm kind of going backwards a little and I apologize. You mentioned that there was only about a dozen from Ogden that were interned and they were all important in the community. SI: Important in the Japanese community. Primarily guys like, I can name two or three of them, there was Mr. Sakurada who was a prominent market established entrepreneur. There was Dr. Yoshitaka, who was a dentist. There was Kobayashi, who owned the Utah hand laundry. Those kinds of people were the ones that were taken, that owned their own establishment, that were highly thought of in the upper echelon as far as the Japanese community was concerned. They were the ones that were picked up right from the very beginning and taken. 8 LR: The ones that owned their own businesses, did their business suffer? SI: Yes. Like I said, probably the first five years was the worst. After that they probably slowly came back. At least in the Ogden area, there really wasn't all that much prejudice. There were a handful that thought of you as the enemy, if you will, and called you all kinds of names and stuff, but that was minimal in the Ogden area. On the west coast it was predominant. I've heard those stories like there's a senator from Hawaii, Daniel Inoway, who's passed on now, but he was in the army in the 442 and he lost one of his arms. When he got discharged in California, he went to a barbershop to get a haircut and they wouldn't cut his hair because he was of Japanese descent. He even had on his uniform, that's how bad it was back in those days. It's something that we lived with and grew up with, but we got over it so to speak. It's still in the back of our minds or in our memory, but we got over it. I'm 82 now, and I can still remember certain instances. In Ogden there were two areas that we were not allowed to go to because we were Japanese people. One was KLO, which was above the Orpheum Theater. We couldn't go to that theater to see a movie because they feared we would do something to KLO, which was a radio station. Those things didn't last very long, it only lasted probably a year or a year and a half. After that they lifted. There were certain areas that Japanese race people could not go. In California it was even twice as bad, so here in Ogden or here in Utah, it wasn't all that bad. LR: This obviously shaped your childhood and as you grew in your teenage years. You talked about your uncle who owned a cleaning establishment and that you would deliver clothes. 9 SI: Was there any prejudice when I delivered? Let's see, that would have been, I graduated in 1949, so it would have been 1948, 1949 and I went into the service in 1951, so between 1948 and 1950 is when I used to deliver clothes for my uncles. I never had any problem because I was a typical teenager. LR: You were just doing your thing. SI: Yes. Most of the Caucasian people never entered their mind as far as a kid delivering clothes that they would be prejudice against. One thing I will say for my uncle. He did a very good job of cleaning clothes, so we had a lot of real good customers, so I never had, at least to my knowledge, I can't remember ever being discriminated against while I was working there. LR: Kind of a lighter question, when you were in your teenage years, would you still do the same things for fun? Would you still be on 25th Street or were you kind of expanding out into the community? SI: No, that was our area, that's all. We only grew up between school and that one block area, that's primarily where we hung out and played. It's really funny because as kids, we used to make swords and have swordfights and we used to make little rubber guns and use inner tubes, because in those days, inner tubes were in tires, so we used to make those and have rubber gun fights. I told you about Young Electric Sign Company and the blowers, we used to do that. So, we played marbles, we played tag, Annie eye over the roofs. Kids nowadays don't know how to play compared to what we used to do when we were young. I see kids now just for, I don't know why, they'll go and pick a flower off of somebody's bush and throw it in the gutter or sidewalk. Why do you want to do that? If you 10 pick it, why don't you take it home? I just can't fathom why kids do that now. The kids I see now go and, even the grammar school kids, when they get off at 3:00pm, they dare cars to hit them. They cross the street and they slow down, they don't hurry up. I can't imagine why kids are like that anymore. It doesn't make any sense. They're daring you to hit them and I tell young kids, I say, "I hope your skin is tougher than that bumper." They look at me, "well, what do you have to say about it?" I'm thinking, "Well, you know, logic up here tells you that you shouldn't be doing that." That's the kind of stuff that we used to do back in the electric alley and we grew up that way. We made our own entertainment and got along— along with the mischievous stuff. LR: Of all the businesses on 25th Street that you didn't necessarily frequent, but you were able to be around, which ones were your favorite? Did you have a favorite that you just liked to hang out in front of? SI: Well, restaurant wise I've got to say Bamboo and Utah Noodle probably. I wasn't married to my wife at that time when I was a kid, but Bamboo Noodle used to have a bowl of noodles for 35 cents, so we could go in there and afford to have a bowl of noodles. We didn't have a lot of money in those days, but 35 cents wasn't much money either. Those were the kind of places that we often frequented. As we grew up, I can remember when I was in high school, we visited Salt Lake a lot because 1st south and West Temple was J-town in Salt Lake. There used to be three or four cafes in that area that we went to all the time too. When I was growing up, when I got to high school, there was one older guy that we hung out with. He was one year older than us, so he was the guy that had the car. There 11 was a half a dozen of us guys, he would furnish the car and we would pitch in our 25 or 50 cents to buy gas and we'd go to Salt Lake. That's the way we used to survive. In those days, gas was 20 cents or 25 cents a gallon. LR: Going back to the discrimination on the street. I asked last time about the blanket discrimination on the street. The south side was where the blacks were allowed and they weren't allowed on the north. You mentioned that you didn't really see a lot of that until later. SI: In Ogden, the race situation really wasn't that terrible. Like I mentioned, when I went into the service, I went to Texas to take my basic training and that was the first exposure to real prejudice because there were separate drinking fountains, separate lavatories, and all of that kind of stuff. In Ogden, the black community primarily stayed on the west side. They all lived on Lincoln and Wall Avenue. That was the area that blacks lived and the Japanese people were primarily around 25th Street and the Mexicans, there weren't that many in Ogden at that time, so those were the two major races in Ogden that existed. There were a few Chinese too, but they were also mixed in with the Japanese community because they are an Asian or Oriental race. In Ogden, I really didn't see that much racial prejudice, whether it was against the Japanese or against the colored because on 25th Street, there wasn't that much prejudice. It wasn't all that bad. Like I told you, the only time I ever saw it really predominant was in the south when I went into the service. LR: As you got older and graduated from high school, what did you decide to do career-wise? 12 SI: I didn't have the slightest idea of what I was going to do. In fact, I had no aspirations to go to college. The Korean War broke out and before we got drafted, I decided to join, so I joined the Air Force. I went in the Air Force for four years and came out and bummed around and worked half a dozen different jobs and I really had no secret desire to be a doctor or a lawyer a carpenter or anything like that. I just, you know, went with the flow, if you will, helped primarily with my uncle in his dry cleaning business. I even delved into a flower shop because of delivering and those kinds of things. I don't know if it's luck or, I happened to go take a test at the capital for this appraisal job and happened to pass it so I went for an interview with the state tax commission and they asked me a bunch of questions about appraising and so forth and I guess I did all right because they said, "When would you like to start?" I said, "How about tomorrow?" I started. That's history. I've been doing that ever since. LR: Your uncle's cleaning establishment, his dry cleaning business, do you remember what it was called? SI: Economy Cleaners on 24th Street between Grant and Kiesel on the north side of the street. LR: As time has gone on and you've had a chance to look at 25th Street the way it is now, do you like the way it's changed? SI: Yes, I really do. In fact, I'm rather surprised with the activity on 25th Street now. In fact, we go down to the sushi bar, Tona's, on 25th Street and by the way, it used to be Western Barbershop that Wat Misaka, the one that used to play for Weber College and also Utah University, that's where his mother had a 13 barbershop. In fact, I dare say there's my hair on the floor someplace in that building because I've had my hair cut there all the time. That café is where the barbershop used to be and we go down there quite often. To find a parking space on 25th Street in the evening time is pretty tough to do. We can park in the back where the hotel is because that had a lot of parking space. We go down to Karen's Café which is half a block further west on the south side of the street. Saturdays they have the farmer's markets and there are a lot of people down there milling around. I've got to say, Ogden, thanks to the mayor and so forth, the activities, there's a lot of activity going on in downtown Ogden, I'm surprised. It's progress. All of the old buildings that I know about primarily are all gone. The hotels replaced, the federal buildings are replaced, almost all of the buildings. You asked about Star Noodle, that closed up and it's vacant right now and it's for sale. Its progress I guess. LR: Hopefully for the better. Do you have any questions? MJ: I had a few that I jotted down. You mentioned that you were born in Seattle and then came to Ogden when you were three or four. How come your family relocated to Ogden? SI: Well, it wasn't, let me back up a little bit. When I was born, my family moved to San Francisco, California. Mom and Dad and my older brother and I lived there and when I was three or four, they shipped me to Ogden to live with my grandma and grandpa because Mom was very ill at the time and it so happened that I liked it better here than I did there, so they said, "Well, you can stay," hoping that I would come back eventually, but I never did I just stayed in Ogden. I grew up in 14 Ogden and later there was a younger brother that was born, so my knowledge of my two brothers were less than the guys I used to run around with because I never grew up with them. So, they were living in California when the war broke out which is why they were sent to an internment camp. Manzanar was the name of the camp they went to in California. When they got out they decided to go to Cleveland, so that's where they relocated after the internment. So, when they moved out there I had no reason to go back east, so I stayed here. That's the way it was. I just grew up as grandma and grandpa's kid. LR: You were, in essence, an only child with your grandparents? SI: Yes. Until my uncles and aunt came and they took over living and taking care of grandma and grandpa as far as their life was concerned. That's why I got an association with the cleaners, but after that, my aunt and uncle primarily raised me, which was after probably my sophomore or junior year in high school. When I went in the service and came back I was old enough that I pretty much went out on my own. MJ: So, how did your grandparents settle in Ogden? Why did they settle here? SI: I really don't know how they came about coming here. My grandma is the mother of my uncle, Tominaga, and my grandfather remarried my grandma. He was originally married to another lady. I never met her, I just knew about her. Grandma was always here as I remember and grandpa came from, I don't know where he came from, other than Japan. He came here and they got married. My grandpa was one of the, I don't know if you want to use the word "instigator," but he was one of the ones that took care of, the Japanese word is, "Bishakunin," 15 which means, "picture marriage." They used to fix up guys that lived in Ogden or the Utah area that never got married, fixed them up with a wife from Japan just through pictures. LR: Wow. SI: Yes, that used to go on back in the old days. That was primarily to get Japanese descent ladies from Japan into the United States because in those days there was a limited amount of foreigners that came into the United State, but if you could arrange a marriage, then that took place and they were able to come. The guys were always already American citizens because they were born in the United States. They were always older guys that went through their life primarily working for their parents and never interfaced into the American life and dating, etc. So, that's why those kinds of marriages were arranged for the Japanese. MJ: Would they go to Japan and marry them and bring them back or would they bring girls to the U.S.? SI: Some of them would go just to meet them to make sure that they wanted to marry them, but some of them just "cold turkey" came over. I don't know if that's the right term to use, but they came over and got married over here. MJ: You said your aunt and uncle came to Ogden as well. Were they the only other extended family that you had or did you have other aunts and uncles? SI: Well, through marriage, yeah, my aunt's sisters lived in Idaho and I got to know them, but as far as my uncle, my mother and uncle were brother and sister and they were the only two in the family. So, not really a lot of relatives. I know on my 16 father's side there are people in japan still existing. When I went to Japan I looked them up and visited with them, so that was a good experience. MJ: I wanted to talk a little bit about that Intermountain Japanese Association. Do you know how it started? SI: I can't tell you anything about it because all I remember is that he was the head of it and they paid him. I don't know how in the heck he got paid, to tell you the truth, but I'm sure it was the community donating or paying him a certain amount of money for whatever he did. I don't know how it started or why it started, or why they chose him to take care of it because I was only eight or ten years old at that time. I just know that there was such a thing. My grandpa, I got to give him all the credit in the world for raising me right. Like I told you before about kids and how they act, in my days when I was growing up, grandpa was good for this. He used to always give me one of these if I did something wrong, it was one of these little knuckles in the head. It wasn't very hard or anything, it was just a reminder that you need to shape up and do things right. It was a good learning experience, even while I was going to school. If I got stuck on some algebra problem or whatever, he would take me aside and he'd say, "Now, this is the way you do it," and he'd give me one of these and say, "Maybe that'll help you remember." He was very stern and I didn't dare go against his wishes or ever miss mind whatever he said. I can thank him from the bottom of my heart today because that's the way I was raised. My kids were raised pretty much the same way because I used to pull out the belts, if you will, and give them a spanking now and again when they 17 misbehaved. In today's age you couldn't do that. You would be mishandling children. It's a different culture from the time I grew up to now. I can see kids, like I said before, that's what they need a little bit, one of these or a little kick in the butt, if you will. Maybe that would straighten them out. That's why you get, when they get into their later teens and early twenties they get into this kind of stuff that is more serious like robberies, etc. MJ: The other thing I was kind of wondering, we talked about the hub that the Union depot was. It was that railroad hub and it brought in so much business during the war, but we know later on that declined, so how did that affect the Japanese businessmen who were down there? SI: As time went on, I dare say, probably in the seventies, most of your Japanese community establishments disappeared. There are a few that lingered on, like my wife's brother, he existed in business for 57 years, if you can believe it. Those were far and few between. For whatever reason they either quit the business or went into something that was a little bit more lucrative or more meaningful. All of those kinds of businesses that the Japanese community was in in those days were, not demeaning, but lower class, if you will, lower income, if you will, because that's all they could do at the time. That was normal for foreigners to get established, so that's what they did. Before I forget, the hotel Ben Lomond, did you know that was originally a different hotel named, "Bigelow?" MJ: Yes. SI: Okay, that's good. I didn't really realize that until we did this day or remembrance in 2007. I was doing some historical work and I found out it was Bigelow and I 18 thought, "Wow, that's strange." I always knew it as Ben Lomond Hotel. That's one fact I wanted to bring up to you guys because that was back in the thirties, maybe even twenties? MJ: It was about then. Archie Bigelow, who owned it, it was during the depression that he lost his fortune and sold it to the Eccles family. SI: It was interesting to me because I've never known it as anything else other than Ben Lomond. MJ: It's fun working in special collections the way that we do because we learn all these little tidbits. We go out and talk to people and get their stories. SI: Have you heard about the Egyptian Theater and the Peery family? Peery used to be quite a notorious guy in his days. MJ: I know, mostly as the mayor, the cowboy mayor. SI: I think he was an instigator of pioneer days way back when. MJ: The Buddhist Temple that was there on Lincoln, how long was that there for? SI: Growing up, as a kid, it was always there when I was small, but they relocated to North Street, I'm thinking it had to be in the fifties or sixties. That's where all the Japanese funerals were done and the Buddhist celebrations, whatever they had, the hana matsuri and that kind of stuff was all down there. MJ: We actually have a couple of pictures of a parade that was done by the Japanese Buddhist. I'm not sure when the photos were taken; I think they were from the fifties or sixties. 19 SI: I think I know what one you're talking about because I've got the same ones. I was looking for that, but I don't know where it is on my computer. The one with the little children in their Kimono's? MJ: Yes. SI: Yes, that one. I think it's probably the same picture. MJ: Did they often do parades like that? SI: Yes, because the hana matsuri I'm talking about is an annual thing that they celebrate in Japan primarily and it came over from Japan. They perpetuated the custom and so forth. They celebrate by doing the dances and stuff and it's always in their Kimono's and that kind of stuff. They used to do it all the time. MJ: It's hana matsuri? SI: Yes, "hana" means "flower" and "matsuri" is "celebration" so it's the flower celebration. MJ: Okay. SI: It's just like; I'm trying to think of the Japanese café over on 37th Street. I can't think of the name. Well, that's another story I guess because I can't remember what it is. SI: I'm very honored and pleased that you guys would take the time to do this because for me, as a Japanese, we just don't get this story out to the community because they are not aware that there was such a thing as J-town back in the day. The celebration that we put on in 2007, I chaired the thing and Raymond Uno, he was primarily the instigator of the whole thing and he did most of the 20 work, but he just used me as a centerpiece, I guess. The Japanese community, during probably ten years prior to the war and ten years after the war, it was predominant right there on 25th Street. So, if you're doing the 25th Street history, you've got to get that because we were very prominent during the late thirties and early forties. There were a lot of Japanese establishments and café and laundries and hotels and that kind of stuff. LR: You mentioned that when the railroad stopped going through that the businesses began to flounder away. Did that stop being J-town then? Or has it? SI: Actually, I would still have to say that it's there a little bit, but not as much. If you asked people of my age, they would immediately say, "Yes, J-town is gone, because there is really no Japanese establishment down there. There are two sushi bars down there, but they are both run by Chinese. I know the one very well. Tony is his name and his wife, Tina. The Tona restaurant, the name has been divided between the two. Tina is very, very presentable, as far as being the outgoing person at the restaurant, but this Tony guy, he took sushi making classes in San Francisco, so he does a very good job of emulating the Japanese custom and making sushi. There is a knack and in Japan, it isn't so much quantity as it is presentation. You've got to have a nice looking dish as far as the sushi is. It's got to be presentable to taste good. That's their theory. He's learned that very well in his presentations of sushi. There's a Chinese guy, two Mexicans and one white guy making the sushi for him. So, you can imagine, not one real Japanese there and the owner is Chinese, but he does a good job. In fact, he 21 always tells me, are you watching real closely, and I say, "Yeah I'm watching you guys." Not that I'm an expert. I just depend on my nationality to ride it a little bit. LR: Let me just ask you this final question. Is there anything else that you'd like to share about your time growing up on 25th Street or just the Japanese community as a whole that you'd like to share? SI: As probably an afterthought, but I am pleased that you would take the time to do this because the story of the Japanese community in Ogden really hasn't been exposed to the general public. Yes, the Japanese people know about it because we've lived it and grew up with it and so forth. Even the tape stuff that I've given you, please look at it and decide what you want to use and what you don't want to use. There is one document in there written by Raymond Uno, the one that I always tell is he's a judge and he's very good at writing stuff and that gives you a real good picture of the Japanese history from J-towns in the three communities I talked about and how it demised and where it went to. It's just a little snippet of the J-towns in Utah and it'll give you some very good history as far as what happened in Utah. My idea of the Japanese community growing up was, I was just a kid and went through all the regular stuff kids go through and never was very important or did anything important, but enjoyed my life to now and to have you guys take the time to do this, I appreciate it. LR: We appreciate your willingness to share. SI If you ever decide you want more input, I would like to get a couple or three guys that have gone through the Ogden growing up. Guys like Ray and Alice who actually went into an internment camp and maybe at some future date, we could 22 set an hour or two and you could pick their brain, if you would. I'd be glad to set something up like that if you're interested. MJ: Absolutely, we are. SI: Just give me a call and let me know and I could sure arrange that without any problem. Ray lives in Salt Lake and Alice lives here in Ogden. Maybe we three and maybe one or two more and you could fire questions like crazy. LR: I think we could definitely do something in the next little while, that would be fantastic. SI: It doesn't have to be immediate. A year down the line, six months down the line, just remind me who you are when you call. If you want something like that I would be more than happy to arrange that and we can go to the church, it has more room for three or four people. Or even at the college. The only trouble with going up to Weber is you'll never find a parking space. LR: Then when you find one you still have to walk a ways. SI: A mile or something. LR: And it's all uphill. SI: Hey, let me tell you about walking uphill, I used to live on Wall Avenue and went to Central which was on Monroe. We used to walk that sucker every day. I tell my kids that and they say, "Yeah, yeah, through five feet of snow." I'd say, "You got it." They never believed me. LR: That's the best part about telling your kids. Thank you so much, Mr. Ichida. We really appreciate it. 23