Garside, Don OH12_022
Don Garside, August 8, 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 Don Garside. The interview was conducted on August 8, 2013, by Melissa Johnson, in Stewart Library. Garside discusses his experience with 25th street. Don�s sister Anne Metcalf is also present for the interview. ; 34p.; 29cm.; 2 bound transcripts; 4 file folders. 1 videodisc: digital; 4 3/4 in. ; Oral History Program Don Garside Interviewed by Melissa Johnson 8 August 2013 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Don Garside Interviewed by Melissa Johnson 8 August 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: Garside, Don, an oral history by Melissa Johnson, 8 August 2013, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Don Garside August 8, 2013 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Don Garside. The interview was conducted on August 8, 2013, by Melissa Johnson, in Stewart Library. Garside discusses his experience with 25th street. Don's sister Anne Metcalf is also present for the interview. MJ: Today is August 8, 2013. We're interviewing Don Garside as part of the Business at the Crossroads 25th Street Project. We are here in the Stewart Library, my name is Melissa Johnson and I'll be doing the interview. Recording the interview is Sarah Langsdon, and also present is Don's sister, Anne Metcalf. So start us off, Don, with where and when you were born. DG: I was born uh May 4, 1934, in Riverton, Utah, on the kitchen table. MJ: Wow, on the kitchen table. DG: On the kitchen table. We moved to Ogden in the late 1930's, probably 1938 or 1939. We had stops in Provo and Salt Lake along the way because we got here in time for my brother to start elementary school, which he would have started in 1938. MJ: Why don't you tell us a little bit about your family as well? DG: I had an older brother, and my sister, and a half-sister. My current family or back then? MJ: As much as you would like to share. DG: I have two children, eight grandchildren, and ten great-grandchildren. If you add in the step ones that's another fifteen. MJ: Quite the clan 1 DG: Yes, it's quite a clan, quite a clan. We make a lot of noise. MJ: I bet, but that means you're having fun, right? DG: Yeah, yeah. MJ: Well, good. What were your parent's names? DG: My dad was Arlyn Myers Garside and my mother was Ruth Alice Lloyd Garside. MJ: Great, now you got here to Ogden in about 1938. How old would you have been then? What grade were you in? DG: I wasn't in school yet. MJ: Oh, that's right. You said your older brother started. DG: Yeah, I would've been about four years old. MJ: About four years old? DG: Yes. MJ: So what do you remember about Ogden when you were a child? DG: I remember the first place we lived was on Monroe Boulevard between 27th and 28th and then we moved into a duplex on the corner of Monroe and 27th street on the northwest corner—we had the west duplex. Then from there we moved to 25th street, and I was there until I was 19. MJ: So what kinds of things did you do for fun when you were growing up? DG: Well, the war was on, so of course, one of the things we did was play war games. We had several places we could play; the Sacred Heart Academy had a lot of open places. Over on 24th street was one of the Browning mansions and they had quite a yard there and they didn't seem to care too much that we played 2 in there. Then, in the middle of the block there was a construction company. There were a lot of their old trucks. We would go in there and we would make forts, dig trenches, and then cover them all with boards and cardboard and dirt on top of that. Just play war games and usually used war guns. We made them out of wood and shaped them like a pistol, but they had a long barrel. Then we would cut up inner tubes in strips and tie a knot in them. Then on the handle we would put a clothespin and the end of the barrel was notched so you would load it from the barrel to the back but usually you had to do it between your legs so a lot of times there were accidents. One of the rules of the game was no shooting above the neck. Also on the block there was a fellow who had a lot of junk cars. We talked to him and he let us take the liners out of the headlights because at the time all of the headlights were usually on fenders, and we made those into helmets. Then, of course, our wagons, the good old Red Rider was the Jeep and my friend and I would usually end up being the motor. My brother was usually the driver, the commander. We made our own games. We were from that era where if you wanted to be entertained you did it yourself. We played ball in the back alley, we played different tag games, and just anything that amused ourselves. We would create ball teams and challenge another neighborhood to a game. AM: Pineview Reservoir DG: Oh yeah. There was a neighbor who lived by us that every day went to Pineview, and if we had our parent's permission we could go with him. We would go up there and we would play on the beach and he would swim across the reservoir 3 and then swim back—I always thought he was an old man—but then he would bring us home. So that was a lot of fun. About every place we wanted to go around town we either walked or rode our bike. One of the challenges was to ride your bike up 25th Street to about Pierce and then come back down. At that time there was a light on 25th and Harrison, so the game was: we started out, but you couldn't hit your brake—and of course it was all the single speed bikes—so hopefully we would hit 25th and Harrison on a green light. One time we were coming down and one of the guy's the chain broke on his bike so he didn't have any brake, and you figure we were past Harrison so we had come down about a half mile and we still had about a half mile to go to my house. Didn't know what he was going to do so finally he just went up on the sidewalk and went into some bushes. It was better than hitting a tree. MJ: A little bit of a softer land. DG: Yeah, and a lot of times we were over at the Sacred Heart Academy. They had a half block and the west portion of it had fruit trees and there was a canal that divided it. They had apples, plums and all of that, and the other side was fairly open. The grass would get up, well for us it was about to our waists. We would play games in there, but we would have to be out of there by 7:00 p.m. because that's when the nuns went to bed. They would yell at us from the fourth floor, and if that didn't do any good the caretaker came out with his double barrel shotgun. The whole area was surrounded by a hedge—and they were basically piracantha bushes if you know what a piracantha is. We made areas in the hedge that made 4 somewhat of a tunnel. He came out one time and—we found out later on that he had a load of rock salt in shotgun shells—and this one friend of mine couldn't find the opening so he made one. He was a mess when he got out on the other side. We did a lot of things that people would think were nuts, but we had a good time. We enjoyed ourselves On Saturdays we would usually go to the movies. We would go down to the Paramount Theater that was on Kiesel between 24th and 25th. For a dime we could see two full double features, the news, and probably about ten or so cartoons. Then they would have a program in between where they would have a contest for a bike or something like that. If we liked the movie we would stay and sit through it again. Didn't make the parents too happy because we were late getting home, but it was a good way to spend the day. We always went to the Paramount because it was cheaper. The Egyptian and the Orpheum charged a ridiculous price of about twenty cents, so we went to the Paramount. One time we had a basketball team and we were challenged by a team at the Industrial School on 200 North Washington. We were in junior high school so we biked from our house all the way out there, played a basketball game, then hiked all the way back. So we did a lot of walking and biking. It was just natural for us, not like it is anymore. MJ: You mentioned before that your father owned an ice cream shop. DG: Yeah. MJ: That was at the house on 25th? 5 DG: No, that was over on 26th and Monroe on the southwest corner. There was a grocery store there—well it's still there, but on the east portion of it we had an ice cream store and it was called Collins. His partner's last name was Cole and dad went by Lyn so it was Collins Ice Cream. He made all the ice cream for the store and of course we had the local people in the neighborhood as most of our customers. We were also only a block away from Central Junior High so we had a lot of those students coming over. In the winter, Mom would make a big pot of chili and then we would have to get it over to the store. Then she would make sandwiches, tuna fish sandwiches, and ham and cheese sandwiches and we sell them. Didn't have to worry to much about the health department at that time. She was pretty good at it. So we sold those things and between the four adults they pretty well ran the store. We would open at noon and then we would close usually about 9:00 at night or so. As we grew older, one time dad let me build a guy a banana split and I thought I did a good job, but one of our chores we didn't particularly care for was when people would come in and stick their gum underneath the counter, and our job was to clean it off. So we would spend a day underneath the counter getting all those people's gum off from underneath the counter. It wasn't too bad. Dad would give me the yard stick and I could get underneath the coolers we had to keep the ice cream frozen. They were off the ground a couple of inches so I could get the yardstick in and any money I could get I could keep. MJ: That was your payment for the day. 6 DG: It was. There was a gas station across the street and kitty-corner. A lot of their customers would come over when they were getting their car serviced and have a sandwich, or have a sundae or a malt. One of the great things was when dad made ice cream. He would put it in the cardboard containers and there was always some left so we got the leftovers. He made all the different flavors, it was interesting to watch him make it. MJ: About how long did he run the ice cream shop? DG: He had a full-time job at the same time. He was a milkman at the time and his partner worked for one of the bread companies so we got a lot of the stuff from them. I would say we had the store about five or six years and they sold it. I think it was about the time he decided he was going to be a police officer because during the war he worked at Hill. Before that he delivered milk and then after the war he started to deliver milk again. One morning he was driving to work, of course he had to be to work at 3:00 in the morning. He was driving the car and he had his milkman's hat down and some guy went speeding past him and slowed down. I guess that's when he figured he should become a police officer. MJ: He was kind of giving the impression he was a police officer? DG: Yeah, I guess so. There were times I went with him on the milk route. He would do part and then pick me up. His route was usually up around Marilyn Drive, 27th and 28th area. Dad had big hands and of course all the milk was in glass, quart bottles. He could carry four bottles of milk in each hand; I could carry two. So I was carrying two and just running up to this house, running up the steps and 7 I tripped. I broke the bottles of milk. He asked me if I wanted to try it again so it was interesting to get out and go around and watch him do his job. MJ: So when he became a police officer you said he started as just a beat cop? DG: Yeah, he was a patrolman. He walked a beat—of course the whole city was patrolled, but most of it was patrolled by car. The downtown area walking beats, and of course the only beat he liked was 25th Street because there was always something going on. He said he would get into those outline areas and it was boring. He said on top of the city county building they had lights and antennas so they had to look there, and if a red light went on they either had to go back to the station or call in to see what was going on. He was always praying that the red light would come on because there wasn't much else going on. But he enjoyed 25th street a lot. Of course they all did, they were all trying to get that beat because it was exciting; there was something to do. MJ: So how long did he have that beat for? DG: I think he was only a patrolman for about three or four years I think was about all. Then he was selected to be on the youth bureau. Back then there was still a drug problem, in the late 1940's and 1950's, and he had a display case that was about that size [indicates with hands] and inside of it he had one of every type of dope pill that was known at that time. He also had a spoon in there where somebody had cooked something. He would go to different functions at churches and talk to kids about all this dope and what it can do to you and show them what it's like. Then of course, well marijuana was starting to go about that time so he figured he would grow a marijuana plant. We had it at the house and it didn't look very 8 good. He would water it and everything, but he finally decided it was ready to die so he took it down to his office down in the city county building. His office faced Washington Boulevard and he put it in the window and that thing flourished. My mom said it was the environment that did it. You could drive down the boulevard and you could pick out his window because it was the one that had the marijuana plant growing. Then he would pick leaves and show what it looked like. It was interesting one time they got a call that a guy was going to kill his son, so they got the address and he and his partner went to see what the problem was. They lived in a house with an apartment above it. They went up the stairs to the apartment, knocked on the door, and announced who they were. The guy told them to go away because he was going to kill him. So Dad opened the door and the guy was standing there with a 22 rifle pointed at his son and then he turned and pointed it at Dad. He told him, "Don't come any closer or I'll shoot you." Dad said, "No you won't." He said, "Yes I will." He was just talking to the guy and slowly inching his way in and the guy says, "What makes you think I won't?" Dad said, "If you shoot me my partner will shoot you." He said the guy had a funny look on his face, but kept walking towards him. Finally, he got close enough where he pushed the barrel to the side and grabbed the gun and took it away from him. He turned around to hand it to his partner who wasn't there—he had decided to try the back way to get behind the guy, but he didn't tell Dad that. He said his knees got quite weak there for a while. MJ: Close shave. DG: Yeah, quite a close shave. 9 MJ: So when did he take over the anti-vice squad? AM: Well, he sort of just moved into it. DG: Yeah, he was doing such a good job with talking to the kids about narcotics, you know, and things like that, and they solved a few burglaries that were committed by juveniles. They decided that they needed an anti-vice squad on the police department so he was selected to go on that. To me, he had a sort of sixth sense about things and was very perceptive about what was going on. So he got on it and he enjoyed it, he had a lot of experiences. He was not only working on anti-vice, but he was also handling a few murder cases, so he was written up in about three nationwide detective magazines on some of the cases that he had solved. Of course his big concern was good ol' 25th street because it was rather notorious. It was pretty active during the war because we had all the troop trains coming through with all the soldiers on there who were looking for activity. After the war the troop trains were still coming through, but not as often, so they were trying to cut down all the vices that were going on on 25th Street. There was all kinds of gambling going on, like slot machines. They even raided the Elk's Lodge at one time because they had slot machines in there. Bootlegging was a big problem because the state didn't like losing their tax money on the booze. The bootleggers usually brought it in from out of state. I remember he said that one time he was a patrolman on 25th Street and he went up one of the back stairways because he knew there was some gaming going on up there. He was in uniform, so he turned his hat around so the badge wouldn't shine and he watched them through the window. He knew a lot of the guys that were in there. He watched 10 them for a while and when he ran into them on the street a few days later he asked them how it hurt to lose that amount of money? Of course, one of the big problems was prostitution because it was more than just Rosie. It was up and down on both sides of the streets; the gals would be calling from the windows. They would organize raids for the gaming and prostitution. He said they would figure out where the gaming was and a lot of times they were in the basements of the buildings. They would go into the building next door in the basement and drill holes through the wall and watch the people there at the gaming tables. They had crap, roulette, and all of those. They would watch them and take notes, who was there that they knew. Then they would go back and plan a raid and as a courtesy they invited the sheriff's department to sit in on the planning. So they would have the planning of the timing, who all was going to be there and what they were going to do. Then they would pull the raid and the tables were gone and nobody was in there. This went on several times so they finally uninvited the sheriff's department and lo and behold they were successful. So they made a lot of arrests. The big problem, of course, was the noted Rosie from the Rose Rooms. He arrested her several times. They would take her in and have her booked, then they would have to turn her over to the sheriff because the jail was his. Dad said the next day he would be driving to work and Rosie's out sitting in the city park doing business. He would go find out why and the sheriff made her a trustee. Trustees could come and go and do different things. He said it just really got to him, that he had a tough time figuring out what he was going to do to circumvent that. He had 11 become pretty well known and he got to know quite a few of the federal officers out of the Salt Lake office. He was inviting them on raids, because they were also breaking federal laws. When the feds got involved the sheriff was a little more reluctant about letting people become trustees. MJ: He was a little bit more careful. DG: Uh huh. One time he was approached by the feds to become an agent, and he had a lot of backing to do that. When application time came and he filled it out they saw he didn't graduate from high school so they wouldn't take him on. He was quite disappointed because he felt he would've been a good agent. He was a good police officer, very intuitive about what was right and what was wrong. He got a phone call and offers that if he would stay out of certain parts of town he would be financially paid off. He just told them, "How the hell cheap do you think I am?" So then they doubled the offer and even when they offered thousands of dollars. Back in the 1950's that was quite a bit of money. So I said, "Why didn't you do it?" He said, "Because I knew that if I agreed to it, there would only be one pay off, but there would be somebody there watching and that would be the end of it. The money's not worth losing your job and losing what prestige you have in the community." He just knew it would be wrong. MJ: Did you ever go down on 25th Street with him? DG: Oh yeah, we went down there. One time we went down there, we were in his unmarked car. We went down and pulled into one the parking stalls and we were just sitting there. I think it was on a Sunday because there wasn't much foot 12 traffic on 25th Street, which was very rare. There were a couple of guys on the street who were conversing and he said, "Watch them." So we sat there and we watched them. Pretty soon the one guy nodded and they went into the doorway to one of the upstairs hotels. He said, "What are they doing?" I said I figured the guy was a bootlegger. He says, "Yeah, he's a bootlegger. He's making a sale." They came out and left and we pulled out. He says, "What was the number on the parking meter?" I said, "I don't know." "Well how can you prove you were there?" You had to remember those things, so it was a lesson. But we didn't go down with him too often. He had a lot of working nights, when all of the activity was going on, so we didn't really get to do too much with him in that regard. MJ: Looking at his notebooks that we have the copies of, he seemed meticulous on his stakeouts. DG: Yes. MJ: Noted everything. DG: They said you had to. You had to prove you were there and you always had to be thinking what are they going to do to mess you up? One time he said they had picked up a guy for bootlegging, and of course he had to be at the trial because he was the arresting officer. The defense attorney was giving him a bad time and he reached over to the table where they had the evidence and they pulled up this liquor bottle. He says, "What's this?" "That's the liquor I took from the guy." He says, "It's not full." Dad said, "That's the way I got it." He said, "There's a line on 13 this bottle, what does that represent?" "That's how much alcohol was in the bottle when I confiscated it." The guy says, "That's interesting because your line's up here, but the booze is down here." So the attorney was going on about how evidence keeps disappearing from the evidence room and all this. We got these upstanding police officers who would never do anything like that. Dad says, "Can I see the bottle?" He says yes and gives the bottle to Dad, who turned it upside down and he lines matched. So he had to plan ahead for everything because they were after you. Then there were two fractions on the police department and they were going after each other all the time because there were a lot of them that didn't want Ogden cleaned up. Dad had a lot of guys on the police department that he also had to watch. So it was pretty tough and you didn't dare make a mistake. MJ: You mentioned before that reputation and prestige that he had in the community, and you mentioned before that people on 25th Street really respected him. DG: They did. He would do his job, but he was fair about it. Once he helped the feds with a guy and they arrested him—his brother owned a bar on 25th street. He ended up in federal prison, but he held nothing against dad. He even wrote him a letter while he was in prison, and when he got out he met up with him. Of course, not all of them were that way. There was one time my friends and I were going to go to Yellowstone for a week and Dad was going to give me some money. I came the morning I was leaving—it was a Sunday morning. I said, "Have you got that money you were 14 going to give me?" He had forgotten about it so he wrote me a check. I said, "How am I going to cash a check on Sunday morning?" He said, "Go down to the club." So my friends and I went down on 25th Street and went into the club. Handed the guy the check and he looked at it and said sure. So he cashed it and he says, my friends were with me and he says, "Do you guys like candy?" We said, "Sure who doesn't?" So he got a brown paper bag filled with candy bars and stuff and handed it to us; said, "Tell your dad hello." Dad had raided him before and closed him down for violations, but there was no animosity. He was doing his job and they got caught. He had a reputation for being honest and fair, but he wasn't totally by the book. There was one fellow who he knew down there. He was a barber and he always went and talked to him. They ran into each other on the street and the barber had a nice new leather jacket. Dad asked him, "Where'd you get the coat?" He says. "Oh I bought it from so and so." "Well I tell you what, don't wear it into this store," and he gave him the name. There had been a robbery there a few nights before, but he had bought it from somebody. Dad couldn't do anything to him because he innocently bought the coat. But he appreciated the warning MJ: I'm just looking over here on my notes to make sure we are covering everything. You had mentioned Rose Davie. What else do you remember about her? DG: Rose was quite a character. She was always trying to get Dad to come upstairs, but he never would. The only time he went up into the Rose Rooms was when she had been taken to jail, then he went up there. One thing that Rose used to do, she would have to replace her linen supply periodically and my mother 15 worked at J.C. Penney's. Rose always asked for her even though mom didn't work in that department. She was on the same floor so Rose would get her to help her out. I think mom got a slight commission on that stuff so it was pretty good. Rose and Dad had their differences, but she had no hard feelings towards him. AM: But Bill did, didn't he? DG: Yeah, Bill did. Bill tried to disparage my father a few times, but he was never successful. He couldn't get any hard facts about him. They even called our house and my mother answered the phone. There was a gal on the phone telling her that Dad was having an affair with all these young girls downtown, and trying to cause problems. I know another time the guy called home and Mom answered the phone and the guy started telling her what he thought of her, you know, not very polite. So the guy finally got off the phone and Mom called the police station and had Dad call home. She told him, so he went down on 25th Street and he said the idiot was still sitting in the phone booth because he knew who it was. But Dad was pretty good. He weighed 225 pounds, was a pretty good sized guy and was quite athletic. When he started out at the police department he had what they called a sap, which had leather with buckshot in the end. It was braided leather and it would spring. It had a strap on it that you'd hook on your thumb and wing it around, because if you put it around your wrist and they grabbed it then they've got you. So you put it on your thumb and just let it go and it hurt. I tried it a few times on my hand. But then they came out with a yawara stick. It fit in his fist and just a little bit above the hand, and it was grooved inside. There were two 16 little spikes but they didn't protrude past the wood. There was a booklet that came with it. If you hit somebody in the shoulder with it would either break the collarbone or numb the arm so that you could turn it and hit them in the chest. It was a handy tool and he always carried it in the inside pocket. One night they were on 25th Street. He said the most horrible thing is to try to arrest a woman because everyone comes to her aid. So they arrested this lady, and they got her out of the bar and out on the sidewalk and some guys decided that they were going to protect her. They came after Dad, and Dad turned around to talk to them and the one guy hit him in the face. So he stooped over, didn't fall down, but as he went down he reached in and brought that out. He was going to hit the guy in the shoulder to numb it but as he came down the guy moved and he hit him in the face. He said the guy hit the sidewalk and bounced. Dad didn't have any trouble after that. They figured if he could hit a guy and make him bounce he must be pretty tough, so he put it back in his pocket and nobody ever saw it. MJ: What was it called again? DG: I think it was called the yawara stick. It wasn't very big. I know I played around with it when it was at home, but that wood was hard. You could hit a guy on the top of the head and it would knock him out. It was a defensive tool that they had come up with. MJ: What else do you remember about 25th Street? Like your interactions down on 25th Street? 17 DG: I didn't go down there very much. Now, I had friends in high school that lived down there. A lot of the Asian classmates lived between 26th and 24th in that part of town. The only time we would go there would be to watch the drunks and see who was going to fight who. We pretty well stayed away from 25th Street because every other building was a bar and there wasn't really much going on. There were some stores up towards the eastern end and that was about it. It was wall to wall bars. Of course, the only thing they could sell was beer and mixer. If you wanted a mix drink you had to bring your own bottles, so they would brown bag the bottle then they would buy a mixer. That's when the bootlegging was happening. People didn't want to go to the liquor store even though it was right there on 25th Street, so they would do bootlegging. I didn't go down there. AM: We used to go watch. DG: Yeah, we used to go watch a lot and that was about it. Especially during deer hunting season because that's when it was really active down there. We were watching one night, there was a steady stream of people going up and down the street and a couple came out of this bar and they stopped. The one gal says, "You S-O-B, you're supposed to be deer hunting." He says, "You're supposed to be tending the kids." So it escalated from there, but things like that were going on. It was interesting to watch, and how some of those people ever made it home I have no idea because they had trouble putting one foot in front of the other. AM: If Dad knew we were down there he wouldn't have been happy. DG: He didn't seem to bother when we went down there. AM: Well I mean we'd just go down and drive around the back alley. 18 DG: Oh yeah check out electric alley. AM: Yeah, look at all the girls and not really know what they were doing cause we were sixteen. MJ: You mentioned when we first met, the segregation on 25th Street. One side was— DG: Yeah, the south side from Wall to Lincoln was for the blacks. The whites would go over there, but the blacks wouldn't come on the other side of the street. I know that the Porters and Waiters Club was on the south side, run by Annabelle Weekly. It catered to the blacks who worked on the railroad, the porters and the waiters. They could go there and stay because none of them could go in any of the hotels in town. So that was about the only place they could stay as a visitor. She ran a pretty good operation over there. She didn't fuss or cause too much trouble, she was actually an asset to the community. That was about the basic on 25th Street as far as segregation. Of course, I think every American community was segregated because I didn't see any blacks in school until I went to junior high. I went to Madison and there weren't that many downtown, but when I went to Central they came from all over and we had a few blacks there, and of course, Ogden High was the only high school, so we had them there too. Our historian in our senior class was a black fellow, quite studious, and a pretty good athlete. I had never really thought about racial things too much until one night there were a group of us who went to a burger place. We went in there and sat at the booth. We had frequented the place quite often. It was usually on a Sunday instead of going to class we would 19 go get something to eat. I knew the owner and he called me over to the counter. I went over there and he said, "I'll wait on him this time, but don't bring him in again." That's when I first realized that there was something going on. I made excuses about how the owner had a punchboard he wanted me to play or something. I don't think he believed me, but that's about the only time I noticed it that much. MJ: So it wasn't just 25th Street that was segregated? DG: Oh no. There would be black entertainers that came to entertain and they couldn't stay in any hotel, not even in Salt Lake. Annabelle would take care of them. The whole state was about that way. It wasn't blatant. I think they in essence knew how things were. AM: Well, there weren't very many DG: No, there weren't too many, but yeah, I think of the ones we had in school not too many finished high school. I didn't think anything about it. MJ: So what do you remember about some of the other downtown areas? Some of the other businesses and people down there? DG: Ogden was a fun town to go down to. Back in those days there were six movie theatres in town and uh now were down to one, two now? Yeah, two. Of course, most of us went to the Paramount because it was the cheapest and none of the others had a double feature. Then we had a lot of nice specialty stores. There must have been five or six men's stores and there were a lot of women's stores. We had, there was Penney's, it was probably the biggest chain store. There was 20 Woolworth's and Grant's and all those others, but they weren't a department store. AM: You say Woolworth's and Grant's like she would know what that meant. DG: J.J. Newberry's. Those stores, they were there, but there were no big name stores. Well there was Sear's and C. C. Anderson's and that, but it mostly local people. All the men's stores were just local people and it was an interesting place to be. I remember at Christmas-time there would be a contest to see who could decorate their windows. It was a fun place, but what was strange about it was mostly everybody was shopping on the west side of Washington. I was talking to a guy when I was working at the post office and he said the difference in the rental fee for the west side of Washington from 25th to 23rd is almost double what it is on the east side of Washington from 26th to 23rd. Everybody's on the west side and what I thought was strange, you go to downtown Ogden and people always wanted to park on Washington, Kiesel, and Grant, but they didn't want to go below Grant and it was only a block. They didn't want to walk up the hill either, but the same people would go to Salt Lake and walk three or four blocks to a store, but they wouldn't in Ogden. If they couldn't park on the Boulevard or on those streets then they just thought it was horrible and ride around and ride around and ride around and wait for a parking place. That brings up another story. There was a group of us at a church function and it was getting a little boring. This one guy said he had a gun, so we made up our plan. We'd have three cars and the first car would come along Washington and the guys would get out (at that time there were a lot of the stores where the 21 store fronts were here, but you had to walk down to get to the door and there were display windows there) then another car would come by and we'd get in a fight on the street and then somebody gets shot and the third car would come by and get the body. So I was the body. We get out of the cars and we start fighting and the guy pulls out the gun and shoots and I fall on the sidewalk. So I'm lying there on the sidewalk and nobody comes, and nobody comes. Then the movie lets out there at the Egyptian theatre, were on right by the Egyptian. The movie lets out and I'm laying on the sidewalk counting pebbles in the concrete. People walking by and nobody came. So finally, I get up, walk between cars across the boulevard, and here comes the car. They decided to go around the block an extra time so we lost the whole thing, but it was mentioned in my yearbook a few times. AM: Did your dad know about that? DG: No, never told Dad about that. There were some things we didn't tell Dad. It was like Dad told us, "Don't ever do anything to embarrass me," and I said, "Like my brother climbing over the fence at the ballpark and getting caught." MJ: Well, was there anything else that we haven't talked about that you'd like to share? DG: Well, I think back in that time we had a lot more opportunities for employment, as far as kids for high school and junior high school. We had the canning factories there were three or four canning factories. Del Monte, out in West Ogden, I worked out there, and I worked at Blackington's on 7th street. For two summers I worked at the ice house. We iced box cars. The trains would come from 22 California and the cars that had ice bunkers on the ends to keep the fruit fresh. They would come into Ogden and then we'd have to re-ice because they'd come across the desert, so we'd have to replace it. We were handling three hundred pound blocks of ice we had an ice pick. It was that long [indicates with hands] and on one side was what they called the pusher. It came off the end to a point and under it was the puller, which curved. Then you would put it on the block of ice and you could pull it to you. It would flatten out and everybody had a file in their pocket because you would file it to keep it sharp. So we'd get a call that there was a train coming in. The ice docks went from under the viaduct to 28th Street and there were two of them, so we could work four rails at a time. One guy would walk down and open all the bunker tops and you could easily ice the one on this side. On the other side you had to put down a skid pad that made a bridge and acrossed to the other side. It got pretty hot out there in June, July, and August, but then all winter long they had been storing ice in a building that was about three stories high, but the only floor was on the bottom so all winter long their putting in these 300 pound blocks of ice and stacking them. They had a place called the Daily. They made ice all the time, but couldn't make enough to service the trains. We'd get a train come in with one hundred icers in it and the ice is lined up on the dock and we used it all up, so then you have to go to the store room. It's 100 degrees out on the dock, and then you go into this store room and it's 28 degrees. We had to ship all that ice out to the dock and when we'd get through with that and they'd say, "RV on three which 23 meant a Roseville train on track three, 100 icers. So then we would go back out to 100 degrees. AM: These are just kids. These are kids doing this? DG: Oh we were in high school; there were older people doing it too. AM: You were saying they were jobs. DG: They were jobs, it was a summer job because in the winter time all they did was put charcoal burners in the same bunker. But when you really would see the excitement was when a train would come in and they would ship wine in tank cars. They would come and you would see all these guys up on the dock looking at it, "There's a leaker." Pretty soon they'd disappear and guys would come out with gallon jugs and their thermos' and all. One guy was assigned to fill them up and the rest of them went into work. We had things like that. I worked at the Weber College for a year-round job. I was a custodian, and in school time we would start at 6:30 a.m. and work until 8:00 a.m. Then on Saturdays we would work from 6:30 a.m. until noon, and when I started we were getting a whole 50 cents an hour. After a while they raised it to 75, we got a 50 percent raise, which is pretty good. It was enough to keep us in spending money. It was interesting work. In the winter time you were assigned a specific area that you'd clean everyday. One time I had the offices that were in the old gym building and we'd clean the offices of the treasurer and the registrar and all that. Then another year, I had the gymnasium and the handball courts. I had to clean those and get all the black marks off the floor that people would put on. One year I had the ladies restroom. I had 18 toilets and 5 wash basins that I cleaned every 24 morning. The worst part about that job was the paper dispenser was in sheets, like out of a box. The gals put on the lipstick, blotted it and dropped it. The floor was always covered with paper, but it wasn't too bad. I would change the towels and all that, but you know an hour and half every morning wasn't too bad. Of course, I'd walk from home down to the college, and then walk back home, change clothes, and then walk from there to Ogden High until I met my girlfriend. I'd walk back with her until about Jackson, then run to school. There were a lot of things we could do and you had all the orchards. You could go pick all the fruit you wanted and just a lot of different things that we could do to occupy ourselves. Then the ice house was a very dangerous place to be. One guy had his ice pick and he was walking along the dock and he would spin it. He spun it, brought it back, and he put the puller in his leg; he went to the hospital. Sometimes, after they found a leaker there would be some hot-headed Hispanics who would get into a fight and use the ice picks as weapons. AM: The good ol' days. DG: Yeah, the good ol' days. I remember one guy, he was pushing on a piece of ice and he brought his ice pick back but the puller caught and it was pulled out of his hands. We watched it cartwheel about four tracks away and hoped there was nobody standing over there. AM: Those jobs couldn't exist today DG: No, they finally did it away. Now they're all refrigerated. We would work a lot of trains and you always took your lunch, but you never knew when you were going to eat. We'd start at 8:00 a.m., sometimes we would have lunch at 10:00 a.m., 25 and sometimes have lunch at 2:00 p.m. It depended on how the trains were coming, but it was interesting work. I know a lot of people who I went to school with worked at the canning factory, making the tin cans. I worked at Del Monte stacking cans and there were just a lot of different things to do. Made life interesting. MJ: Well good. Did you have any questions? I think we covered everything that I had on my notes we had from our first meeting so. DG: Okay. MJ: Do you have anything else? DG: I will give you an example of how things were back then. I was in high school and I was dating a girl who lived up on the 1400 block of Polk Street. We were going to go to the dance at the White City, it was on 25th Street. I walked from my house to her house, from her house to the White City and we danced at the dance. We went down to Keely's on Washington Boulevard, had something to eat, then we walked all the way back to her house. Then I had to walk all the way home. That was the norm. I think one of the things you talked about was segregation, things like that. I lived below Harrison so the rule was somebody who lived below Harrison couldn't date somebody who lived above Harrison. AM: A different kind of segregation. DG: Then you were frowned on. I got told about it a couple of times, "You're out of your boundary." MJ: Out of your place. AM: Out of your league. 26 DG: It was interesting. It was an interesting place to be. Like I say, in high school we had the whole city. We had millionaires and we had very, very poor people. There was one kid in Ogden High—we had 2,000 students at Ogden High because there were three classes. Everybody's wearing Oxford's except one kid, good ol' Charlie. He wore tennis shoes and he was the only one cause he was from a poor family. Everybody liked Charlie. Charlie was a little slow and we'd go up to him, "See that girl she really likes you. You oughta go over there and talk to her." He had buckteeth and blond hair. He'd say, "I can't." We would give him a bad time, but nobody ever teased him about his status or nothing like that because we were all the same. I could probably stay all day with this. 27
