Oral History Program Evelyn Hoogland Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 18 July 2017 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Evelyn Hoogland Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 18 July 2017 Copyright © 2018 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The World War II "All Out for Uncle Sam" oral history project contains interviews from veterans of the war, wives of soldiers, as well as individuals who were present during the war years. The interviews became the compelling background stories for the "All Out for Uncle Sam" exhibit. The project received funding from Utah Division of State History, Utah Humanities Council and Weber County RAMP. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Hoogland, Evelyn, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 18 July 2017, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Jake Hoogland Military Picture circa 1940s Jake on leave visiting Ogden circa 1940s Jake and Evelyn Hoogland Wedding Day 23 March 1945 Jake and Evelyn Hoogland Wedding Day 23 March 1945 Evelyn and Jake Hoogland January 1945 Evelyn Hoogland 18 July 2017 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Evelyn Hoogland, conducted on July 18, 2017 in her home in South Ogden, Utah, by Lorrie Rands. Evelyn discusses her life and her memories involving World War II. Michael Baliff, the video technician, is also present during this interview. LR: It is July 18, 2017, we are in the home of Evelyn Hoogland in South Ogden, Utah and we are talking with her about her life story and her memories specifically of World War II, for the World War II and Northern Utah Project at Weber State University. I am Lorrie Rands conducting the interview. Michael Baliff is here, as well as Deborah Francis. Alright, again, thank you. I appreciate you for your time. Let’s start with when and where you were born. EH: I was born here in Ogden, Utah in 1924. It was on Wall Avenue and at that time, Wall Avenue stopped at 33rd street. There was a whole little Dutch community there. We all went to the same church and we all felt pretty protected. LR: What day in 1924 were you born? EH: October 7th. LR: You mentioned that your parents immigrated here from? EH: Holland. LR: What were your parents’ names? EH: My mother’s maiden name was Marie Timmers. She was only seventeen when she came here. LR: Okay, and your father? EH: My father was only nine months old when his mother brought him and two other young children to Ogden. They were all from Amsterdam, Holland. 2 LR: And his name? EH: George Van Leeuwen. It’s a very difficult name to spell. I used to have to spell it all the time to teachers and whoever, and then to pronounce it, they had a hard time. They’d call you Leeuwan and whatever. LR: Did your parents meet here in Utah? EH: Yes, my mother and her sister came here. Their aunt had met some LDS people in Britain; then they came over to Holland and talked about the Mormon Church. They all immigrated here. My mother didn’t want to come here. She had a boyfriend, a typical seventeen-year-old. She wanted to stay there, but my grandmother told my mother, “You have to go with your sister because you’re smarter than she is. You can help her get here.” So my mother came very reluctantly. She got here and started working at a laundry. There were big laundries here. They’d launder shirts for the wealthy people and everything. She started working at this laundry and met my aunt, my father’s sister. She said, “Come home with me to my house and meet my mother.” They had a big house, which my grandfather built. They came to grandmother’s house, grandmother Van Leeuwen. My father was probably about nineteen then, or maybe a little older. He saw my mother and he said, “That’s the girl I’m going to marry,” and he actually did. They went together for a little while and then she thought, he’s a very nice boy; so she married him. That’s how their life together started. LR: How many siblings do you have? EH: I had six. One died at nineteen from an appendectomy. They didn’t have penicillin. They said it could have saved him from that infection. I had a sister 3 who was fifteen years older than I was. My brother George ended up being the head of Hill Field. My brother Claude Van Leeuwen, but everyone called him Dutch because he hated the name Claude. Everybody loved Dutch. He had the most wonderful personality. He could tell you a joke and in two minutes you would just think he was the greatest guy. Then, there was me. I had a little brother who was eight years younger than I was. He just died last year. So, I’m the only one of that Van Leeuwen family alive. He worked for many years. They started the sewer plant. My brother George was very innovative. He was on all kinds of boards in Ogden, and they wanted him to run for commissioner. He said, “No, I’ve had enough of politics.” He was one of the instigators of turning Washington Terrace into a city. That was built for emergency housing for people who worked at Hill Field or the Arsenal or the Navy base. They were just constructed cheaply. So after World War II, he had gone into the service. He was counter intelligence and he was one of the first nine people who landed in Korea after the Japanese got out of Korea. He worked all the way through that. He came home and he said, “I saw women out in fields burying a child and go right back to work again.” He could tell you the stories that would just really knock you. He came back to the states and they lived up at Washington Terrace when he got discharged. People had to get out because it wasn’t up to date, and he thought, “I’ve got to try to figure out how to do this.” So, he and two or three other people from Ogden, a banker and a layer or whatever, went back to Washington and they said, “We would like to turn Washington Terrace into an updated place, but 4 we need money.” So they gave him a grant. My brother was very foresighted. He just knew how to put things together. So, they got this money and then all those people who lived in those places had to move. They actually moved the buildings around, turned them around and updated them. You’d have to get out of your place and move to one of the other empty places that they hadn’t fixed up yet and then when it was fixed up you could move back. George said, “I want to be one of the first ones to be moved because I want to see how this is going to be done.” So his was one of the first ones to be moved, and he still lived there until he died. In fact, his grandson, Scott’s son, lives in one of the houses at Washington Terrace. As you can see, it’s turned into a lovely little town, and they are incorporated. They’ve got their mayor and everything else. LR: Going back just a little bit, growing up in Ogden during the twenties, what are some of your memories of that? EH: Well, I remember going to Ogden High School when I was a junior. Sitting there and it was Pearl Harbor. I remember I was at the Egyptian theatre downtown on a Sunday seeing a movie, which we shouldn’t have done. Mormons didn’t believe in seeing movies, especially on Sunday. They came out on the stage and said, “Pearl Harbor has just been bombed by the Japanese. Everybody go home.” So, I went home, and my mother said, “Where were you? I needed you here. They’re going to bomb us.” She was scared to death. Nobody knew what was going to happen. So, I went to school that next day and then President Roosevelt said, “We’re going to be at war because we’ve got to get after these Japanese. They want to take over the United States.” We had a big ROTC at that time. A fellow 5 that was across from me was like a captain in the ROTC, and I thought, “That guy’s going to go first. They’ll draft those kids and get them busy.” And they did. So many of the young men that I went to school with were killed during World War II. Our student body president when I was a junior, and then when I was a senior, those guys were all killed during World War II. MB: The German’s had been at war with Europe since 1939. The Japanese had been at war in China since 1937. During that build up to Pearl Harbor, did the threat of war ever cross your mind? Was that a worry? EH: No, because we felt like it was so far away. Hitler was in power at that time. My brother, the big imitator, imitated Hitler saying, “Hail Hitler.” He acted like he had a mustache and everything. It seemed so far away. We didn’t feel like we were threatened at all. It was just interesting. We were naive young people and just didn’t pay that much attention. LR: Let’s talk a little bit about growing up during the Depression. With the war happening, it really brought the United States out of the Depression. So, what are some of your memories of the Depression? EH: Well, I can remember going to Pingree school, which isn’t there anymore on 30th and Pingree. It was an elementary school we all went to. My father had been a carpenter and he built homes all over Ogden. He was very good. Then, the Depression came and they couldn’t afford to build. He worked for Anderson Lumber Company, which isn’t there anymore. They had supplied the materials and he had built a house for somebody and when it was all through then whoever bought it would pay Anderson Lumber. It was like a mortgage. So he did that, 6 and then he was doing pretty well. But, things slacked off and I can remember being pretty poor. At that time, welfare had just started. We didn’t have anything like that. They had canned meat. If you could prove were destitute, then you could get some of this product that the government had. We still do that. They give out cheese. I don’t know if you can remember when they gave cheese to everybody. I ran that program for the seniors. I ended up being in charge of all those things. But anyway, we got some food. They’d have investigators come to your house. My mother baked bread. She was taught that when she came here. An investigator came and they said, “That family doesn’t need it. That woman baked bread and it smelled so wonderful, and she gave me a piece of bread.” My mother said we had holes in the linoleum. They didn’t have the covering for floors at that time. There were big holes. It was called congoleum. You would roll it all out and you’d have a new finished floor. Pretty soon it would wear out and they’d have to roll it up again and get something else. We couldn’t afford shoes for me. They would have a rubber thing that you could glue on your shoe because you’d get a hole in your shoe. So they glued this stuff on and sometimes it would come loose and you’d go flat, and with this loose thing hanging on your shoe. That would be so embarrassing. You went to Ogden High School and tried to dress decently. By that time my mother had started working. They had just opened the city and county building downtown. She said, “I’m going to see if I can go to work there.” She ended up cleaning this brand new building. She was a janitor. She spent four or five years there. I remember coming from Ogden High School and going to see her cleaning. She’d 7 be washing blinds and windows. In the judges’ rooms, she’d polish all the wood and whatever. Pretty soon, the war started and then they had all these women go to work. Their kids would get in trouble. They’d steal or whatever because mom wasn’t there. She was at work at Hill Field or second street or whatever. So, they’d pick up these kids, girls included, and put them up in the jail. They didn’t have a detention. They just put them over in a little section. One of the people who took care of the big jail got a girl pregnant. They called my mother and they said, “We’ve seen you working here, Mrs. Van Leeuwen, and we’re going to start a Juvenile Detention for the kids up on the ninth and tenth floors, and they’ll be kept there. You have to cook on the tenth floor. There’s a kitchen there by the adult jail. You can do that, and you’ll have to sleep there 24 hours and we’ll get somebody to get you off and you can go home for 24 hours.” I remember my mother doing this. She would cook for the kids and bring the food to them. She had this Dutch flare. She could make things taste so good out of nothing. There’s a famous Dutch dish called hutspot. They would put carrots and potatoes and a little stick of meat, my mother would say, “A stookie of meat,” and then mix it all up. It got to be a very famous dish. In Holland they already had used that; so my mother knew how to do that. I recall she was cooking and that smell came all through the city and county building. One of the commissioners came and said, “You’re feeding those kids too much. It’s costing too much.” She laughed and she said, “Let me show you how much this cost.” She would have to get the material to cook from one of the stores that the city commissioners had set up. She could charge the meat there or the groceries and then she could cook it for the kids. 8 That’s what she did for about 20 to 25 years. She ended up there. She didn’t have a retirement. I ended up with a nice retirement. It was actually state retirement. We were all hooked up to the plan. At that time, they didn’t have that. Two years later, after she retired, they put that together for all the employees. She retired at 65. She couldn’t go anymore; so she retired. She even cooked for the juveniles after they moved them out to the county near the county hospital. She’d go out there and bring the food out to the kids. A fellow from Morgan—they had Morgan and Weber counties tied together to take care of these juveniles; he said, “That was the best food Mrs. Van Leeuwen made for everyone. I enjoyed it as well as the kids.” That’s how she existed and that’s how I grew up, seeing her do that. LR: Going back again to high school, if I’m not mistaken, you worked on the school newspaper. Or am I thinking of someone else? EH: No. When I graduated from high school, I went to work for McKesson Robbins Wholesale Drug Company. It isn’t like it is now, where all the pharmacies are big companies. When I worked for them, we had little drug stores all over Ogden. Some of them had other sundry items, we called them, like cosmetics and fingernail polish. There was a number of them all over town. Cave Drug on 25th Street, you could get a prescription there or you could buy all kinds of cosmetics and sundry items. Leanhart drugstore on 28th. They were all wealthy pharmacists as well as selling all this stuff. So, I went to work there and they would call me and place an order. At first, I was an order picker up. I’d fill the orders, and they sent them all over into Wyoming and Idaho. I would call all of these different 9 stores and say, “Our trucks going out, do you need anything today?” They had a sales car that would go around and pick up orders. These were last minute things. So, I would call these people and say, “You know we’re going out, do you need anything more before the truck leaves?” It was a big business, it really was. My boss didn’t think I was old enough to know how to do that, but I ended up typing their orders because I had learned to type in high school. So, I said, “Give me a typewriter.” It was hard for the order pickers to read your writing if you didn’t write carefully, so I would type this out. My boss thought that was just wonderful. I was doing that job and my girlfriend, I got her a job there but she wasn’t good at it, she said, “Let’s go over and have lunch at the Depot.” They had a big restaurant for all the soldiers that got off the trains. We’d go over there for lunch and then come back. By that time I was earning a little money and I had never been out of Utah. So I said to my mother, “What do you think if my girlfriend and I took our vacation and went to Los Angeles?” She said, “Well, I was seventeen when I came here. I trust you. You know what to do.” Here we are in the middle of the war. So we got on a train. You just bought a ticket and you were in the coach. All these sailors and soldiers that were being transported had seats. We were young and good looking and we met some guys. You’d go to L.A. and have a couple of dates and then I thought, “I’m too young to do this. I got to go home and mind my own business.” So, we went back here to Ogden. Then the next year, I said, “Let’s go to San Francisco. I’ve never been there.” So we went San Francisco. They had military police and shore patrol. They called them M.P’s and S.P’s. They would patrol the trains and make sure that the boys were okay and 10 that they weren’t misbehaving. So, my girlfriend and I went to San Francisco and I thought, “I can’t earn enough money here.” I started working for McKesson down there. I thought, “I don’t earn enough money to get an apartment here.” So I said to my girlfriend, “Let’s go back home again.” So we were on the train and this military policeman kept patrolling up and down and up and down with the Shore patrol. This girl I was with had a beautiful voice so she’d start singing. It took 24 hours to get from San Francisco to Ogden on the train. Pretty soon all the guys would be around singing the songs with her that were popular, and here came this military patrol asking, “Is everything okay?” We said, “Oh yeah, we’re having a great time.” He came back and forth and then he said to me, “What is your name?” I told him, “Evelyn Van Leeuwen,” and he said, “I’m Dutch Hoogland.” We got talking and by the time we got off in Ogden, he wanted a date with me. We got our luggage and got to the car and he followed out. These fellows would be sent here and they’d sleep here for twenty-four hours or thirty-six hours and then they’d get on the train and go back to San Francisco. My sister was there to meet me, and I said, “This guy wants a date.” She said, “He’s cute. Why don’t you have him come down?” I said, “You know, he’s Dutch and I feel kind of sorry. He’s from Iowa and he’s so far away from home.” She said, “Invite him to come down later this afternoon. You can go to dinner.” He came. I told him where we were and he walked down Wall Avenue to our house. My mother just thought he was wonderful. He wanted to take me to a movie that night. He had coffee with my mother and he said, “I’ll bring her back after the movie.” The next time he 11 was in town he called me and he said, “You know, I‘d like to take you to lunch.” That got to be a habit. Soon we fell in love, and he said, “I’d like to marry you. You seem like a very nice person, but I’ve got to go back.” Then he sent me a telegram and he said, “They want me to ship out so I want you to come with me back to San Francisco before I have to go.” My mother said, “Not until you’re married. I’m not going to let you go off and be with him.” So we hurried up and got the wedding planned. My mother worked in the city county building and she got one of the commissioners to perform the marriage. He was a bishop in the Mormon Church and she said, “We need to get you a cake. You’re going to have a wedding cake.” So we went to all the neighbors and asked them if we could have some of their sugar or their shortening because it was rationed. All of the neighbors thought this was wonderful; so they all gave their food or these tickets that you could go to the store and get the butter or the sugar. There was a Dutch baker, Topper Bakery, and he said, “I’ll bake her a cake if you can get the stuff.” So he hurried up and made the cake and we were able to pick it up. My sister had a car, lucky enough to have enough gas to get around a little bit because that was rationed. We got the cake and brought it home. I couldn’t have my friends because they were all married to guys and they were off with the fellows, but I got a lot of their parents that I grew up with. We had a room full, and of course my sister. My brothers weren’t here. They were in the service, so they couldn’t be there when I got married. My brother had been on leave and somehow he met my husband and he said, “He’s a good guy, Evelyn. You’ll be okay with him.” I didn’t realize it at the time that my husband was the same age 12 as my brother George. George was nine years older than I was. When he’d walk in the trains, he was straight and he had this blonde hair. He looked like he was 20 to 25 years older. We got married, and I went back to San Francisco with him. He got me a little hotel room, which was hard to do at that time because everybody was going to the big cities to work. He was able to get me a room through the service. He said, “I’ll be right back. I’ll go report in to see when they’re going to ship me overseas again.” He came back laughing and he said, “They’re not going to ship me overseas. I have too many points. They’re going to release me.” They would give these kids money if they joined. They’d go to a class once a week to figure out if there was a storm or a disaster. My brother joined. If they would report in case of a disaster, they’d have to go and help. They drafted all these kids because they had been trained to do these kinds of things. My husband said that he was patrolling salt mines down in Louisiana. He said, “They just took all of use that were there and sent us to New Jersey, and they sent us overseas to fight the war.” First he went to North Africa. There are books written about that. He never talked much about it because he said so many of his buddies got killed there. Then they shipped them out of North Africa and they walked up a highway in Italy. He said, “I remember walking up that highway and there would be grapes. We’d go along and pick these grapes as we walked up.” They were at war with Germany at that time. Germany had taken over Italy too. He said that they had got up to one of the main towns. He got shot in the hand, shrapnel hit him. He almost lost his hand. I said, “How did you feel when you knew you were being 13 shot?” They were taking this mountain and he said, “I knew when I was starting up that mountain. I thought, ‘I’m going to get shot here.’” Sure enough, he did. So they got him back down and sent him to a hospital to repair his hand. He got gangrene in it and they were going to cut it off. He said, “It was a miracle that they came by and said, ‘That hand is okay now. We won’t have to take it off.’” He never could close his hand. He milked cows for a living, so they gave him a ten percent. You know when you’re wounded in service they give you some much? They figured that he was ten percent incapacitated. I think it was ten or twenty dollars a month. He thought that was wonderful. That was a lot of money at that time. He got discharged and we came back to Ogden. He said, “I like it here.” He was going to go back to Iowa and farm because that’s all he knew. We went back there and the people said, “Oh you are a good farmer. You worked hard with your dad.” His dad owned two or three farms. He sold them during the war and moved to Bellflower, California, like all the good Iowa people did. His father said, “You go back. There’s some farmers that will lease the land to you and you can work on it.” We went back and he said, “Do you like it here?” I said, “I hate it here. They don’t send their kids to college and they don’t fix their teeth.” They were farmers. It’s so different now. I didn’t realize that there was a big University of Iowa there. I just saw this north corner of Iowa where all these Dutch farmers had settled to farm. So I said, “I don’t’ like it here. I want to go to Utah.” He said, “I’m with you.” So we came back to Ogden. He said, “I don’t know really what to do.” He met another Dutch fellow and they struck up a good relationship. He said, “I know this fellow who owns an orchard. We can pick peaches for him and 14 he’ll pay us so much money.” Kellerstrauss was this guy’s name. They had the Kellerstrauss gas station. So, my husband started working with him. He said, “This isn’t really enough money to live on.” Somehow he got in touch with someone and he started driving a truck. He’d deliver stuff all over Ogden and up into Logan. He’d load up at their loading place up on Wall Avenue and 12th Street. They’d bring in all this stuff and then they’d load it up and distribute it. He said, “I’m going to drive a truck.” He did that the rest of his life. He retired at almost 65. He said, “I’ve done this long enough.” He had made good money by that time. Meanwhile, I had started working with the senior programs. I developed the Meals on Wheels and built a big kitchen out in Ogden. That’s still functioning well. In fact, my grandson is running it. He’s a chef. I got the commissioners to let me hire him. The personnel director said, “Evelyn, you can’t hire him. That’s nepotism. That’s your nephew.” One of the commissioners knew Mike, my nephew, and said, “Evelyn, we’ll give you permission. I’m going to sign it. You hire him and have him come to work for you.” So, he came. He was working for some catering company out on Hill Field supplying food to the troops and civilians who worked out there. I called Mike and I said, “I’ve got a good job for you. If you’ll come here and cook for me, we’ll have good compensation. The salary isn’t good, but the benefits are very good.” He came out and said, “Okay, I’ll do this.” So he came to work for me. Pretty soon he knew more about running a kitchen because he had worked for hotels and chefs. He said, “I can fix up this kitchen the way it should.” He was a kitchen manager. Pretty soon I thought, I’ve 15 been in this business so long. I married Deborah’s grandfather. He had met me doing this. We’d established senior centers all over the place. I met him when they were working on the South Ogden Senior Center to send out meals. He used to come out and see me and say, “Boy, you run a big operation.” We got really connected. I asked him to serve on my board. You had to have board members to advise you on what to do. You’d tell them what you’d want to do and then they would approve. Pretty soon Glen was on this board, representing South Ogden. He would come out and see me. We received commodities from the government to run all these programs. We got all this cheese. They had stored all this cheese in caves all over the country. Ronald Raegan was the president and he said, “We’ve got to get rid of this stuff. They want to dump it in the ocean.” The dairy farmers were making money selling this stuff to these cheese factories. He said, “They want to dump all this cheese that’s been stored in the ocean, but I don’t want that. I want to give it away.” We had tons of cheese out in the storage area. They’d bring in crates and crates of this cheese. I thought, “Oh my gosh, what are we going to do?” So we started giving it away. Glen said, “I’ll help you.” We got volunteers to distribute the cheese to different senior centers. If people were unable to come get them, we’d take it to their houses. It was the beginning of Meals on Wheels actually. Everybody was helping to give out cheese. There were no guidelines because they wanted to get rid of it. Pretty soon they said, “We can’t do it this way. We have to prove that these people need this cheese.” You had to say to people, “Are you poor?” You couldn’t ask how much money they made. We had people coming to the Golden 16 Hour Center who owned mortuaries in Ogden. These people would come and get the cheese because you weren’t allowed to ask them or document that they were that poor. Everybody got cheese. It was just crazy. They would take it to people’s houses. One lady called me, “Glen Gileman is storing cheese and he’s not doing it legally.” Some woman in their neighborhood had seen that so I called Glen and talked to his wife. I said, “I’m sorry but I have to talk to your husband. May I talk to him?” She said, “Sure.” So she got him, and I said, “Glen, they say you’re storing this cheese illegally.” He said, “I was taking it to the people that couldn’t come and get it. They can come and look at it.” I said, “I believe you. Just write the people’s names and have them sign it that they’ve gotten the cheese.” You had to document who you gave it to. It was the biggest mess. I don’t know how many thousands of hours we spent doing this, to document that we had only gave cheese to the people who were low income. I even had federal people come and go over your books to see who you gave it to and whatever. It was a huge project. I’m sure glad we don’t have to do anything like that anymore. Pretty soon we decided that it would be good to do Meals on Wheels and take the food to people’s homes when you found out that they couldn’t go to a center to eat locally. We set up the Meals on Wheels program and I raised money because I thought, “We need trucks.” I didn’t have enough federal or state money or county money to get all these trucks we needed to distribute meals. I set up this fund and I called it, “The U.S.O for the Meals on Wheels.” I got one of the fellows that I knew who played in the orchestra. He was an attorney. He ended up being the county attorney. They all said, “We’ll play for free.” I asked 17 the gal who ran the Union Depot if I could use that for a dance and food. We said, “We’ll sell you a meal for so much and then you can dance.” I made $7,000. One of the commissioners said, “I tried to come and see what you were doing but I couldn’t find a parking place. Everything around Union Depot was loaded.” We made enough money to buy at least one truck to start delivering Meals on Wheels. By the time I ended up, they had seven or eight trucks and plenty of funds to run the program. I said, “This meal cost $5 to prepare, but pay what you feel you can afford for this.” We would suggest at least $3. So people would come, and if they could afford it, they’d put the $3 in. Otherwise they got a meal. We were doing that at the Golden Hour Center and every Senior Center. That’s how we established Meals on Wheels at each center. They’re still going strong. They don’t do so much down at South Ogden. This man across the street, he’s a widower and not in good health, and every day at eleven o’clock I see him get in his van and go down to the South Ogden Senior Center for a meal. They used to have a real good program there. That’s where Deborah’s grandfather help put that thing together. They used to have wonderful classes there. They’d have teachers come and teach painting and macramé and toe painting. In fact, after I retired, I took a toe painting class there. Do you know what toe painting is? I got a jewelry cabinet in my back bedroom, and I took a door at a time down to this teacher who taught toe painting there. A lot of furniture you buy has toe painting on it. I can remember going down there to meet my husband when he’d come in off the train. Here all these kids would come off the train and go up 25th Street trying to find something to eat that was more decent than on the train. Some of 18 them had to stay overnight, and during World War II that was just a busy place. Drug stores and anything on the corner made a lot of money. They’d sell candy and all kinds of stuff there, besides prescriptions. 25th Street was just a very busy place. When the trains came in, everybody would like to come and see the kids on the trains, the soldiers. They had the Red Cross there and they’d give out donuts and coffee to the soldiers and the sailors. LR: Do you remember that? The canteen they had there? EH: Yes, I sure can. LR: Did you ever volunteer? EH: No, I didn’t. I was too young in the first place and trying to make a living myself. So, I wasn’t able to. There were wealthy people here in Ogden. Women who donated their time to give the soldiers stuff. LR: I know about the canteen. That is my pet project. What year did you get married? EH: In 1945. I was only 20 or 21 years old. LR: What year did you graduate from high school? EH: 1942. LR: When you were traveling to Los Angeles and San Francisco, were you still in high school? EH: No, I just graduated. The first year after I graduated, I was working. That’s the first time I took a trip to L.A. I was probably 20 years old. The next year, we went to San Francisco and I probably didn’t turn 21 until October. LR: So, what was the actual date of your wedding? EH: It was March 23, 1945. 19 LR: You talked a little bit about rationing during the War. Were there any other things that you did, like help with bond drives or scrap metal drives? Do you remember anything like that? EH: I remember my brother took my mother’s pots and pans down and she said, “You can’t sell those. I’ve got to cook with that.” That’s how poor we were. We were looking everywhere to try to find enough money to live on. It was not a fun time to grow up. LR: So do you think the war actually provide a little bit more for your family? EH: Yes. I think everybody started to go to work, those who weren’t drafted. I never went out to Hill Field or 2nd Street. It seemed like I was just too young to do that. My girlfriend that grew up with me down on Wall Avenue, we went to work at McKesson. We felt we were doing a good thing, ordering things for these pharmacies like medicine. I just felt that I was doing a more important job than trying to go to Hill Field and sit and type. A lot of my family, the women, would go and sit and type orders or whatever they did there. I looked there and I thought, “That’s not really what I want to do.” LR: You mentioned that two of your brothers were drafted or enlisted. EH: George and Claude (Dutch). LR: Do you recall what that was like within your family, to know that your two brothers were gone? I’m assuming they both went overseas? EH: Yes. My brother George first went to Montana and they trained him there. They saw he was a smart guy. So, they put him in the C.I.A. or something. That’s when he was dropped over into Korea. When he came back, he said, “You know, 20 the Japanese had upset that.” They didn’t have monetary value. He said, “There were nine of us that had to set up the monetary value, how to earn the money and distribute it.” It was very complicated. I look back on that and I think, “Did I really understand what he was talking about?” He said that they set up the monetary system in Korea. When he came back after things were all settled he said, “There’s going to be a war in Korea in the next five years.” He could see the unrest. That’s when North Korea and South Korea fought. Isn’t that crazy that he could see that coming? They wanted him back in Washington, but his wife didn’t want to go. She was an alcoholic. She said, “I don’t want to go there, I’m too afraid.” LR: What about Dutch? EH: They sent him to North Africa. They had to protect a passage over the mountain. My husband said, “Dutch said he was in combat, but he was not in combat like I was or George.” It was important during World War II to safeguard what that was. I didn’t understand what he talked about. My brother and my husband seemed to know what was going on. They’d give them awards for being in the war. He said, “I wanted one of those.” My brother George said, “He wasn’t in that. He doesn’t deserve that.” MB: When you traveled from Ogden to L.A. and San Francisco, was that the first time you had been out of the state? EH: Yes. MB: What was that like, seeing the difference between Ogden and a city like Los Angeles or San Francisco? 21 EH: We were used to small towns. We got on a train here and when we went to L.A. you got off at Union Depot in L.A. It’s where the trains from San Diego and across the country go. It was just huge. I remember getting off the train there and walking up the street. There was a Mexican canteen where they sold tacos. That’s the first time I ever saw a taco because we didn’t have them there. There weren’t Hispanic people in Ogden. They were all Dutchmen or Germans. I thought that was a really big deal. My good neighbor, my friends mother, said, “When you go there, stay at this Roosevelt Hotel. It’s a good hotel and it’s cheap and it’s clean and it’s safe.” So, we went about a block away to this Roosevelt Hotel and we got a room and stayed there. This was our vacation. There was a red train that you could catch out of that Depot in L.A. and it would take you down to Long Beach. I had never seen the ocean. I thought, “Boy, this is neat.” My friend and I got on this little train, the red car, and went down to Long Beach. It took you there and you got out and there was the ocean. I loved to swim; so, we would go swimming and just have a great time. It’s been so many years that I can’t remember now how we managed. We had a good vacation and came back home. The next year was when I wanted to go to San Francisco. I said to my mother, “How did you allow me to do what I did? I wouldn’t let my children do that.” She said, “I prayed a lot that you would be safe. You had to learn someday to face society.” My daughter says, “I couldn’t even sleep at the neighbor’s house. You wouldn’t let me. How did you dare do that?” So, that was my introduction. 22 MB: It sounds like you were doing a lot of work during this time. Was there anything that you did for fun or to relax? EH: There was a swimming pool in back of the old Washington school on 33rd and Washington. We would go swimming there. It was free. The city did that. It was before they found out about polio. They wouldn’t sanitize the water. It would come directly out of Pineview Reservoir. It would have these bugs in it. They’d say, “Hell Divers.” They’d get on you and sting you. They would have boys in the morning and girls from two to six. There was mixed adult swimming after that. Later on, we were in college up on 25th, and they had a swimming pool. For thirty-five cents you could go swimming there. That was nice clean water. Oh, it was wonderful. You could go into a locker and change your clothes. We’d walk from Wall Avenue up to 25th, up the hill on Adams and go swimming. That was a real big deal for us. If you could get the ten cents, you could go to a movie. They had the Lyceum Theater down on 25th Street. That was a cheap theater. It wasn’t very nice. Then they had the Egyptian Theater up on Washington. My dad helped build that way back. They built the Union Depot the year I was born, 1924. It burned down. LR: Yes, they had remodeled it. EH: They rebuilt it in 1924. That was the year that I was born. We used to go to the Egyptian Theater and then there was the Orpheum Theater. The Glassman’s who owned the newspaper, they owned the Orpheum Theater and the Egyptian Theater and the Paramount Theater on Kiesel. That was our entertainment. We didn’t have television. You had to go a movie. It was wonderful because the older 23 that got, the bigger the screen got. Now, we can see those with all the sound and everything. It’s just wonderful. They had little speakers. I look back on that. It didn’t take much to entertain us. We’d just think that was wonderful. LR: You grew up in Ogden before the war. It wasn’t quite as diverse as during the war. How did that change when you had that huge influx of people coming from all over the country? EH: I think it was very hard. We were used to having the elite, the Eccles and the Brownings. My mother would go to work for them for a dollar a day cleaning house or doing laundry and ironing. I remember she worked for a judge and his home was out on the corner of 12th and Washington. She would work all day for a dollar. She said that these two old maids that lived with them would go around and test to see if she had dusted the top of the doors. That’s how my mother made a living for us, for a dollar a day. I remember her knees would just be fiery red where she’d crawl and scrub the floor, because she couldn’t mop in those places. That was not a fun time. Then my brother got a job at Grant’s Store. It was like a five and dime store. We don’t even have those anymore. There was Kresse’s and Wellworth’s and Grant’s. My brother quit school. He was going to Weber for one quarter and he quit school to help build Pineview Dam. That was during the end of the Depression. He was on the WPA. He was nineteen years old, and he wasn’t a very big man. He would carry my dad’s tool box and go up and help build Pineview Dam. That’s the way we grew up. I remember sitting in class with Claire Eccles and thinking, “She must have money. She’s got beautiful clothes. Her hair is cut just so.” She was a very good looking woman. She was 24 known in Ogden as a wildcat. My niece just lives two doors down from an Eccles. Claire was his older sister. We were watching the Thunderbirds down on Adams. He came there and I said, “I remember your sister, Claire Eccles.” His wife said, “She was a wild one, wasn’t she?” I said, “Yes, she’s very pretty.” I didn’t want to say anything bad. She ended up marrying a boy from Ogden who was a test pilot in World War II. He got killed. He was testing a plane and it wasn’t a good plane; so, he got killed. She got so much money from that as the widow. Then she married a doctor here in Ogden and they had a son. This little Dutch lady that lived next door to me, she used to go iron for them. She said, “That Claire Eccles is a wild lady. She’d have boyfriends come while her husband was working.” Everybody in Ogden knew that she was just really a character, but she was just so beautiful. LR: I’m going to ask the final question. How do you think you’re experiences during World War II affected and shaped the rest of your life? EH: First of all, I appreciate freedom. I think that is so important, when we realize that America is independent. I’m reading a book all about that right now, on how we are blessed with living in America. I know my mother said that she hated to leave Holland, but during World War II she was glad that she had her children here. If we would have been in Holland, we would have starved to death. I realized how important it is to live in America and have the kind of background that I have in growing up so I can appreciate what I’ve got now. I think that is my story of my life, when I look back on it. I think I am so fortunate that I have turned out the way I have. It’s not only monetary, the things you own. It’s your family. I realize that 25 more and more now because all my siblings are gone. I’ve been married twice and both of those men were soldiers during World War II. They’re gone. There aren’t many people my age still alive. I can’t go to a reunion because nobody’s there anymore. LR: Is there any other story you’d like to share? DF: I don’t think they understood. Your mother had to go to work because your father was injured on the job and he passed away. EH: He was paralyzed. We lived down on Wall Avenue. My dad had pains in his back. I can remember, just terrible. She took him to a clinic in Salt Lake, and they said, “Don’t let anybody operate on him.” There was a Dr. Bartlett here who was later known as a butcher because he would operate on anybody. He operated on my father thinking that he could relieve him of the pain. He said, “He had tumors kind of wrapped around his spine. I had to go in there and clean all that out.” He had opened him up from the top to the bottom. Doctors wouldn’t do that. When he sewed my father up again, my father couldn’t walk. He was paralyzed from his hips down. He couldn’t control his bladder. He couldn’t control his colon. He laid in bed and he had a urinal that he’d put there and he would pee. He couldn’t feel it. He said, “Evelyn, honey, I hate to ask you to do this, but will you empty this urinal.” I’d take it in the bathroom and dump it in the toilet and wash it out and bring it back to him. My mother would have to give him enemas to relieve him. The doctors said, “The best thing you can do is give him a little bit of wine each night to help with circulation.” My dad hated wine. I can remember my mother giving that to him. It was during prohibition. They had a heck of a time trying to 26 get wine. We had a cousin that lived across the street. He and this other guy could get whisky or wine. He’d drink this wine and see if that would help him. My mother couldn’t go out and work because she had to take care of him. He laid there for almost three years. Then he passed away. They took him to the hospital to see if they couldn’t help him with something, and he died there at the old Dee Hospital. That was hard. I was only in the seventh grade. From the fourth to seventh, he was paralyzed. It was not a happy youth for me at all. I look back and think, “God has blessed me.” I had two healthy husbands and I was able to raise a family who were very successful. They have had nice families themselves and they’re doing very well. That’s where I feel blessed. I don’t know where in the world we would ever be blessed like this. I’m happy to be living in Utah, in this area. We have been pretty well away from all the other stuff. There was always a 25th Street when I was growing up. My mother said, “Don’t you dare go down on 25th Street.” You know all the saloons and prostitutes were there. I laugh now because all the nice places to eat are on 25th Street. LR: Is there any other story that you’d like to share? DF: I just wanted to make sure you knew that part. I think your mom is a rock. She had to do that herself and work at time when women were just new to the workplace. You took care of your brother while she was at work. EH: Yes, I had a little brother. She worked at the canning factory. We had canning factories all over here where they would put up tomatoes. We would always be happy when the tomatoes came on because that would give our mothers a place to work. Mother was working on the sorter. They’d pull out all of the bad 27 tomatoes, and her hands got so much acid on them that she had big sores on her hands. It was like a fungus. I remember washing her hands and treating her when she had come home from lunch from the factory. My mother wasn’t the only one. There was a lady across the street who was widowed. She was lucky because her husband, before he died, had some houses that he had bought, and she was able to rent those houses. She was able to quit earlier than my mother. My brother bought a mangle from George A. Lowes. He worked there. It was a hardware store downtown. He brought home this mangle for her. I learned how to mangle. It’s an iron that’s hot on this plate. It’s a big plate and you sit at this mangle and you can push with your knee, and this lever lets this hot plate go down. You can feed a sheet or whatever you wanted ironed through this thing and it would come out all pressed. Down on 25th they have the Union Pacific laundry where they would wash everything. They had Pullman cars. A lot of people would ride across the country in Pullman cars where they could sleep. Some of them had little suites where they had their very own little bed. They had a table that they could have. They’d be able to eat there. You were very wealthy when you did that. Normally, when you went on a train, you sat in the coach and for 24 hours you sat up, got off in L.A. then you’d crash because you hadn’t been able to sleep for 24 hours. It’s like flying here, when you get jet lag. LR: Thank you so much for your time and for talking with us. I really appreciate it. It’s been a lot of fun. I’ve enjoyed every minute.