Oral History Program Haven J. Barlow Interviewed by Ruby Licona and Rebecca Ory-Hernandez 16 August 2011 23 August 2011 6 September 2011 5 December 2011 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Haven J. Barlow Interviewed by Ruby Licona and Rebecca Ory-Hernandez 16 August 2011 23 August 2011 6 September 2011 5 December 2011 Copyright © 2021 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 Weber and Davis County Communities Oral History Collection includes interviews of citizens from several different walks of life. These interviews were conducted by Stewart Library personnel, Weber State faculty and students, and other members of the community. The histories cover various topics and chronicle the personal everyday life experiences and other recollections regarding the history of the Weber and Davis County areas. ____________________________________ 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: Barlow, Haven J, an oral history by Ruby Licona and Rebecca Ory-Hernandez, 16 August, 23 August, 6 September, 5 December 2011, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Haven J. and Bonnie Rae Barlow 1944 The Barlow Home 1957 Haven J. Barlow 1992 Haven J. and Bonnie Rae Barlow 1994 The Barlow Family 2004 Haven J. Barlow 2010 Haven J. Barlow 2011 President F. Ann Millner & Haven J. Barlow 2012 President F. Ann Millner & Haven J. Barlow 2012 at Haven J.’s 90th Birthday Party. 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Haven J. Barlow (born 1922). Senator Barlow served forty-two years in the Utah State Legislature as a senator and representative, during which time he was a key sponsor of the bill that granted university status to Weber State. The interviews were conducted on August 16, August 23, September 6, and December 5, 2011 by Ruby Licona in order to gather Senator Barlow’s personal history and recollections of his life and public service. Rebecca Ory-Hernandez was also present. RL: Today is August 16, 2011, and we are conducting an interview with Haven J. Barlow, who has been very active in events that have taken place at Weber State over the course of several decades. We would like to capture his story for our Weber State University Archives and we would also like to have the information because we are interested in collecting the history of people who are involved with Weber State and with Weber and Davis counties—the development of northern Utah which tends to be overlooked. So, I am Ruby Licona and also present is Rebecca Ory-Hernandez who works for the Weber State Development Office. To get started, let’s assume that someone encountering this record might not have any idea of your background; please start out by telling a little about your early days: where you were born, things you remember about growing up here, where you got your education, and how your life came to follow the path that it has. 2 HB: First of all, I was born in 1922, which means that I’m eighty-nine years old and at this point I’m closer to ninety. It’s on this same date that they celebrate the statehood of Utah, but that doesn’t mean I was around when Utah became a state; they became a state in 1896 and I was born in 1922, so I’m not that old. But anyway, it means I don’t have to worry about my birthday because I remember what day Utah became a state, which was January fourth. So, I was born in a house in Clearfield in 1922. Clearfield, at that time, was a very small community of maybe 200 people. We were primarily of one religious faith—LDS—and we had one ward, so it gives you an idea that the town was about the size of what one ward is today. RL: The size of one of the small neighborhoods in Clearfield. HB: You have to keep in mind that at that time, Syracuse was even smaller than Clearfield. Sunset was just a blip in the road. Clinton and West Point both had a ward. Layton was larger; it had two wards, one ward on the west side and one on the east, and Kaysville had one ward. That’s just to give you an idea of how small that whole area was. I don’t think the whole of Davis County was more than a couple of thousand people. Now we’re almost at two hundred thousand. Anyway, I was born at home; my mother was attended by a midwife. The family has a little history—the title of it is, “I’m lucky to be alive,” and I’ll tell you why. When I was nine months old, my mother’s friend—her name was Mrs. Walter Steed—came down in the morning to pick her up, along with her sister who came from Centerfield, near Gunnison, to pick up me and my brother, who was twenty months of age, and with her was her nine-year-old and her thirty- 3 month-old baby. So, in the car there were two adult women, an eleven-year-old girl, two nine-year-olds, a twenty-month-old boy and a thirty-month-old boy. They were crossing a railroad track—this was fall time, it was October 25, 1922—and they were following a wagonload of sugar beets drawn by horses. When the wagon approached the crossing, the wagon did not cross but turned left and followed the road over to what they called a conveyor van where they unloaded the beets into a railroad car in order to ship the sugar beets to the factory. Well, they were driving slowly and there was a building on the right-hand side so they couldn’t see the train and they must have been talking because they didn’t hear the train either. When the wagon turned left, they didn’t see or hear the train and they just went right across. The train hit them on the passenger side. I was sitting in the lap of my mother and the train hit her and she held me in her arms while she flew through the air 150 feet. I rolled twenty-five feet. Of course, she was killed instantly. They thought I was killed, too. Mrs. Steed was also hit and went about as far. I have pictures of the wreck and we can take a look at them. Anyway, the two mothers were killed—my mother and her sister. The nine-month- old Steed boy was killed. I survived, my brother of twenty months survived, and Harold Steed survived. My aunt and uncle came to live with my dad and take care of us for a year, after which my dad remarried a convert to the LDS church from Denmark. She spoke very broken English. My father’s cousin had gone on a mission to Denmark and had known this particular gal when he was over there. He married a Danish gal and Frieda, my earthly mother, was one of her friends. I don’t call 4 her my stepmother; she’s the only mother I know and so I call her my earthly mother. She took good care of us. We grew up on a farm; my father worked at a bank and we had a Japanese family at home that took care of the farm. I got to know the Japanese family very well. They had their own separate bath house and would put a fire underneath the bathtub. They also had rice they rolled into balls to eat but you couldn’t buy the rice in the store to do it; they had rice that they bought from Japan that came in kegs. It was wonderful rice. I felt like I was half Japanese almost. I came to really understand them and their lifestyle. RL: Did you learn some of the language? HB: I never did, although my son went on a mission over there and he still knows the language pretty well. RL: Were there other children besides you and the brother that survived the train crash? HB: Yes, Harold Steed survived. I had one sister born after the crash, Wanda Barlow Barton. She’s still alive. She’s eighty-five. So anyway, I remember that the only way we got around was horses. We lived in an area where each farm was between thirty, forty, and fifty acres, that’s enough land that you can support a family on it. The Freeport Center is there now; before that, it was a supply depot. It’s probably the most fertile piece of property in all of the state of Utah, well-drained and everything. In 1940, just before Pearl Harbor, I think they sensed they were going to have trouble with the Japanese. They wanted an inland 5 supply depot so they bought the ground. Not long after that, we went to war. So we had to move out, but that’s where I was raised. My friend Dean Criddle and I rode our horses to first grade. I have never known anybody who could claim that. We’d tie the horses up when we got to school and at 3:30 we’d get back on and ride home. We didn’t have saddles because we were too small to carry one. We had to climb the fence in order to bridle the horse. I remember the greatest thrill in my life was when I was in the second grade and my dad bought me a bike. I didn’t have to ride the horse everywhere—I didn’t have to go and catch the horse, I didn’t have to get the bridle on, I didn’t have to climb the fence to get on the horse. What a thrill—I could just jump on that bike and go any time I wanted. I remember my first bicycle as the most thrilling moment of my life up to that point. Our school was about a half-mile away, so we rode the horse, or later, when I had my bike, I rode the bike. RL: What did you do in the winter? HB: When the weather was real bad, we walked. It was only a half a mile. I remember to this day most of my teachers. My first grade teacher, Ms. Barsey; Ms. Brown, my second grade teacher; my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Acker; Mrs. Davis, my fifth grade teacher; Mr. Orgyle was the seventh grade teacher. I can’t think of two, but that’s not bad. RL: That’s fantastic to have that kind of memory. HB: I was very athletic. I loved to play baseball and football. At that time, we didn’t have a football field but we played on the baseball diamond. I broke my arm 6 playing football at school. My grandfather had a store in Clearfield called Jesse H. Barlow and Sons’ General Merchandise. It sold everything. It sold coal; it sold wheat and grain; it sold shoes and cloth. RL: A mercantile. HB: Just everything…bananas, potato chips by the pound, meat and so forth. My uncle also had a business of selling ice to the people in West Point and Clinton. Everybody kept what they called “ice boxes.” You had to put a block of ice in it and it would last…you made two deliveries a week so it would last three days or so. You had a pan underneath it and you had to change that every day or so, otherwise it would overflow and get water on the floor. But that was how you kept the food cool. At that time, a fellow called R.C. Willey was operating out of his garage. He was selling refrigerators and he would go to a wife—he’d never talk to her while her husband was around, he’d wait until the husband was out in the field— and he’d go to her and say, “You know, I just think the world of you as a family, and I’ll let you have this refrigerator for two months free, no charge, then I’ll come and pick it up. You won’t have to buy those ice blocks and this will keep your food colder and be much more convenient.” After two months he’d come to pick it up, and I swear that if the wife had to make a choice between keeping her husband and keeping the refrigerator, in most cases she’d keep her refrigerator. So, R.C. Willey—remember, this was during the Depression, nobody had any money, so he’d take anything: hay, straw, a cow, anything you’d give him, and 7 he’d work it out. So, we knew very well that when we were told by people not to bring any ice for a couple months that we’d lost a customer. Well, I know I’ve transferred just a bit but that’s part of my boyhood. But back to school—we didn’t have a junior high at that time. We had eight grades and then Davis High. The north end of the county didn’t have a junior high, but the south end did. The people from the north end of the county, which meant everything north of Kaysville, went to Davis High for four years. The people south of Farmington went to high school for three years and they rode the Bamberger. You don’t remember but we had a Bamberger train between Ogden and Salt Lake in my time. Some called it the Galloping Goose, but it was a means of transportation. It would be great if we had that same train today; it’s too bad we didn’t foresee the day we’d need it. But anyway. The south end of the county had a train that would bring the kids up here. The junior high down there was seventh, eighth, and ninth, so the grade school was six years. Ours was eight. I was glad to get out of grade school. Eight years is a long time to be in one building. But we had good teachers and I was on the baseball team. At that time, we didn’t have an indoor basketball court so we didn’t play basketball as a sport, but we did play Layton and Syracuse in football and baseball. Syracuse was the toughest to beat in baseball; they had the Hess brothers on the team and very seldom did anyone beat them. The Davis High School bus picked us up in front of our house. My mother always insisted that I have a bowl of oatmeal before I left to go to school. I never left without a breakfast. I remember that I was in the band; I played the French 8 horn, which is a very difficult instrument to play. During my junior and senior year, I was on the baseball team and the football team. I was tag back and I have a picture. I didn’t have much of a helmet. RL: It was the old leather helmet, wasn’t it? HB: I have a good reason why I sometimes act a little funny: I had the old leather helmet while I was playing football. Anyway, high school was a great experience because for three years I was able to go to school with people from all over Davis County. There was just one high school for the entire county. There are so many high schools now that you only get to know a group of friends from within a small area. When I was a junior, I was playing basketball and when somebody threw me the ball, I caught it and got hit by two or three other guys. I fell and shattered my left ankle. It was terrible. I didn’t know this, but the doctor told my father that I would never play competitive sports again. So I was in the hospital and I remember it as a great time because I got to eat anything I wanted. You know what I had practically every day? I had steak. Anyway, my ankle was the size of a football. It was shattered so badly that the doctor said to my father, “The only way I can explain Haven’s ankle is to take an egg and drop it—that is Haven’s ankle. What can you do? That’s why he’ll always have a limp.” My friend Dean Criddle had a brother who was two years older than Dean and he was a priest. They came and gave me a blessing. Of course, they didn’t know what the doctor knew—I didn’t know what the doctor knew. They had complete faith that whatever they said was the will of the Lord and I had 9 complete faith that whatever they said was going to be true. Sometimes it can be good not to know the truth because it might weaken your faith. In the blessing, they made a promise that my leg would be healed and I would not have any permanent after-effects. So, the doctor, on one hand, tells my father there’s no way it will completely heal; and on the other hand, I have a blessing that says it will. My father didn’t tell me what the doctor had said and if he had told me, I’m not sure I would have had the faith. I don’t know. But when the swelling went down the doctor was amazed. He said he’d never seen it happen before. It was like somebody had picked up every little piece of that broken egg and as that swelling went down, all those pieces came together. He didn’t have to do anything. That was the next miracle after surviving that train accident. The next year I was well enough that I played football. I tried out for the basketball team; I didn’t make the cut. The final team was twelve players, I think, and I was in the final fourteen in tryouts. It only bothered me a little bit, but I did tell the coach he’d made a mistake. Later, he thought maybe he had, too, because I went to play for the Clearfield ward and we challenged the Davis High team and we beat them badly. You know who the high scorer was? RL: Mr. Didn’t-make-the-final-cut. HB: I’m very competitive and always will be. So that’s my high school years. Oh, in high school I got to know a gal by the name of Gene Holbrook. The last two years I went with her steady. We took each other for granted. She lived in Bountiful. In those days, the girls always got better the further you had to go to 10 pick them up; the guys from Bountiful would come to Layton and Clearfield and vice versa. You know how it is—you don’t pay any attention to the girl next door. Anyway, that summer I got to know this redhead gal—I was a tennis player and Clearfield didn’t have a tennis court at that time; the only tennis courts were over at Davis High and Layton. So, went over to play and this redhead gal was playing with Tony Barnes from Kaysville. I’d seen this gal and I’d heard of her, though I don’t think I’d ever talked to her. I got to know her and we went up to the drug store in Layton that had the best malts—if you ever went to Layton, you wanted to get a malt there, it was ten cents and it was so big that it was all you could eat. I got to know her and that summer I started taking her out; I went to Utah State that fall, but that was the beginning of my courtship with my wife. Her name is Bonnie Rae Ellison. I found out afterward that she had known about me for some time and her girlfriends said she had a crush on me, but I didn’t know it. RL: So she chased you until you caught her? HB: She didn’t know I was coming over to play tennis that day. But it turned out to be wonderful relationship. I graduated in the Class of 1940. The war was on, but when you’re a junior and senior in high school, you don’t realize all the terrible things that are going on. We knew England was surviving just by the skin of its teeth, but it just didn’t dawn on you. I probably would have gone to Weber State, although my father, my mother, and my brother went to the University of Utah. I might have gone there, but I got a scholarship from Utah State—what they call 11 an ACT scholarship because I wanted to be a veterinarian. It paid for my tuition and for my books. RL: Did it cover your room and board? HB: No, it didn’t, but it did cover tuition and books. Now, that sounds like a pretty good sum; how much do you think it was? RL: A couple of hundred dollars? HB: One hundred. One hundred dollars took care of tuition. This is when they had quarters, not semesters, and it took care of three quarters and all my books. Isn’t that something? Anyway, while I was up there, I joined Phi Kappa Alpha, for which I was appreciative. My grandkids have gone to college and none of them joined a fraternity, my kids did, but not my grandkids. When you go to college you’re all by yourself, maybe one or two from your own school, but if you join a fraternity you have a group of friends. At that time, I don’t think more than ten or fifteen percent of the high school graduates finished college, so if you got your degree in a university, chances were you’d get a job because that would indicate that you had the initiative and so forth. That’s changed a lot now. So anyway, I got the job being the house manager, even without experience, and I was putting out the football program and had the opportunity to get to know some really good businessmen. One in particular was Fred Champ, who was head of the board—he was one of the main bankers in all of the state of Utah. When I started going into business, I got to represent his company down in this area because of that job of putting out the football program. Who would have known? 12 RL: It was an early state of networking. HB: That’s right. So, I got my degree in business administration and my minor in accounting—I love accounting. If I were to do it over again, I would have gotten my degree in accounting. RL: That was a little off from your plans of veterinary medicine. HB: Oh yes. I found out that I had a hard time in some of those science courses and I didn’t do nearly as well in those as I did in the business courses. I realized that even though I love animals and I’ve always been around animals, my instinct was more business than veterinary. So I changed, and I’m glad I did…even though I still envy a veterinary friend his job—I’ve got a veterinarian friend I play golf with. Anyway, I was getting to the age now where I had to start making some plans. I took the ROTC program—every student had to take two years of ROTC. Many of my friends went on to get their commission in the Coast Guard. The ROTC program at Utah State was under the Coast Guard. Many of my friends became officers in the Coast Guard and didn’t see any action; they were put on some island or an outpost and stayed there the rest of their career. A program came along that enabled us to become pilots. Of course, I loved the idea of being a pilot; I became part of what they called the V-7 program—I would take some college courses and also take courses in meteorology and learning to fly the plane. I went out to the airport and got my license. In my junior year, I was just about ready to be shipped to Texas for flight school and evidently they had plenty of pilots but they had a shortage of disbursing and supply officers. They would let us change, if we wanted to, from being pilots to being supply and disbursement 13 officers because they had more than their quota. All the kids, you know, they wanted to be pilots. RL: They wanted the glamorous life. HB: Yeah, who wanted to be a supply and disbursement officer when you could be a pilot? But you know, the better part of my judgment told me this, I’ll never forget it: “When the war’s over with, the chances of getting a job as a pilot won’t be very good—there’ll be hundreds of pilots, but here, I’m a business major and if I’m a disbursing and supply officer, this is part of my training.” So I entered the program and it meant that I could stay in college two more semesters. I ended up in the Harvard School of Business and got my commission as a supply and disbursement officer. In 1944, I reported aboard a destroyer and served in the North Atlantic. There were still a lot of German submarines at that time; our job was to get them over to Iceland and then the British Navy would escort them from there. So the convoy would head for Newfoundland, which was halfway between us and Iceland. I was there for about a year and I was on an old destroyer—built in 1922. When it was built, it was using coal and had four stackers. They changed it to use diesel fuel. RL: What was the name of it? HB: It was the J. Fred Talbott DD-156. They decided to change the category and not make it a fighting ship. They took the guns off and made it a target ship, but now what do they do with me? They don’t need a supply and disbursement officer on a supply ship. They sent me off to a cargo ship in San Francisco: the USS Fentress AK-108. When I got orders that my old destroyer would be in port in 14 Fort Lauderdale, I called up my girlfriend—the redhead gal I told you about. She had a ring by then and she only had a quarter left before graduating from the University of Utah. I said, “You know, I’m going to be here for six weeks, I don’t know how you feel about it, but if you want to marry me, you can fly back here—if you can get here—and we’ll get married.” I figured I’d be shipped out after being on shore those six weeks. So she hurried and made her dress that night and flew back there. The officers and captain were there at the nicest hotel in Miami. The owner lived in the penthouse in the very top, her son had been killed—he was a pilot in the Air Force—so she was very sympathetic when she found out that a Naval officer was going to be married in one of the rooms in the hotel. She said we could go up there and she was like a mother to Bonnie Rae. After we were married there, I got orders to board a ship in San Francisco, that meant we could go right across the country and stop here in Utah for a while. While I was there, they were having graduation exercises at Utah State. Because I had this extra amount of schooling, I had enough credit to graduate, even though I left when I was a junior, I graduated in the Class of 1944. You know how many men were in that class? Just a handful. The rest were women. If you were to read the list of the class you’d find not very many men at all. Anyway, I spent the rest of the time in the South Pacific—in the Philippines and Japan. I got home in ‘46. I got my Philippine Liberation Medal because they were still fighting in the Philippines, but my ship never actually got closely involved. The scariest part was up in the North Atlantic. You know, a destroyer is not very wide, it’s probably not any wider than this patio here— 15 RL: Maybe twelve or fifteen feet? HB: Yeah, and then it’s about as long as from here to my fence. So it’s a long, narrow ship. It’s fast, but it’s like riding a rollercoaster for twenty-four hours a day. RL: You have to have good sea legs HB: Oh yeah. And we got in this terrible storm. The captain was a graduate from Annapolis and he got a Navy Cross because he sank a German submarine. Just before I went on board the 156, he’d lost his ship by ramming a German submarine tender—a submarine tender is a submarine that supplies ammunition and food to other submarines in the area. So the captain was well-qualified and we got a storm with waves about as high as that tree. With this little ship, you had to head right into the waves and go right up to the top. When we’d get to the very top and start going down, the propeller came out of the water and we had no control—you just hope and pray that you have the momentum to start going down and get the propeller back in the water so you can steer again. We went through that time and time again. A terrible storm. And it was cold—if we fell overboard we’d last maybe twenty minutes. We had to wear our full clothing on us twenty-four hours a day. So that was the scariest part of my life. We lost some smaller ships in that storm. But anyway, we were married and we spent about two months in California while the ship was being put into commission. By that time, my wife was pregnant and she stayed there while I was serving overseas. We had a baby daughter, her name is Jesselie; she’s now married to Scott Anderson, the CEO of Zions Bank. Since she was born in California, she says she’s a native 16 Californian, which she takes great pride in. So, when I got home after my service, I saw my baby girl for the first time when she was about a year old. That was quite an experience On the destroyer, one of my jobs was to be the paymaster, not just for the crew, but I was paymaster for a lot of the smaller ships, too. They would come and pick me up and I’d come on board—remember, I’m just a young kid, twenty-one years old and I have a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of cash with me at all times in this big safe. The responsibility that they bestow on people! But they also said this, “Have you ever been to Portsmouth, Maine?” I said, “What’s there?” They said, “The Navy prison.” “Why are you telling me that?” “Well, if you go there and yell ‘Pay,’ every other person will come and look out.” What they were saying, in other words, is that you’d better take care of yourself, because if you don’t, you don’t know where you’re going to end up. [Laughter] But I’ll tell you, it was an exciting job. We went to Iceland—our ship and three or four others were escorting ships over to Europe. We were in the lead going across the ocean most of the time, but when you get close to the shore, you have to stay back and protect the convoy from the rear. Once you get into the channel, the submarines are back there. So, my big problem is that I’m the paymaster but the guys can’t leave to go on shore duty until they have money. They won’t take U.S. money in Iceland; you have to go aboard, take U.S. money, go to the bank there, and give them U.S. money or a check in order to get what they call the krona—that’s their money. Then you have to get back to each of the ships. But all these guys are in uniform and they can only go for so many hours. 17 They’re all waiting for the paymaster to get back so they can get their money and can go to shore. Well, if you’re the last ship in and not the first, you can see you’re under a lot of pressure. When you leave, you’re just the reverse; you want to be one of the ships that goes out ahead of the convoy. When you’re coming in towards the shore, you want to step back and protect the rear to make sure no separators are sneaking up on the rear, but when you go out you have to be ahead. Well, my ship had to be one of the first to go out, so what happens is that I have to have everybody come in and turn in their kronor because I had instructions: Don’t you dare bring kronor back to the United States. They did not want kronor in the United States. I had to pick up those kronor, take them in, and get them changed back into U.S. money. Well, I couldn’t make it. So I went to one of the officers of another ship—a bigger ship that didn’t have to go out until the latter part. I talked to the paymaster and gave him probably thirty or forty thousand dollars and said, “You take these kronor in and get me money and when we stop in Newfoundland on the way back, I’ll come over and pick up the money.” “Okay.” Well, evidently the guy went on a binge and was drunk two or three days. When you’re at sea you cannot communicate back and forth between ships; it’s all silent. He was supposed to notify me—you don’t go on silent until three or four miles out of the bay—and he was supposed to wire me to tell me he’d gotten the money. Well, I never heard anything from him. For those three days, I imagined the worst. RL: You thought you were going to go to Portsmouth, Maine. 18 HB: I was sure that was my next stop. I said, “Boy, my family will never forgive me. I have fouled up on this job.” I talked to the captain about it and said, “Is there no way we can break silence?” “No, no way to do that.” So, in three days we got over there and luckily he had my money. But you know, there was no receipt, nothing in writing. I was just a young kid. RL: Did you learn some lessons that you did not repeat later in your business life? HB: I’m much more cautious. RL: When you were commissioned into the Navy, what rank did you get? HB: An ensign. I went in as an ensign. I finally got to the very high grade of a lieutenant junior grade. [Laughter] Not very high. I was a year late getting my commission because I was in the training period. If I’d stayed and become a pilot, I probably would have ended up as a lieutenant. President Bush was a pilot, he and I are about the same age and I probably would have flown with him. One part of me says it would have been great to have been a part of those big battles in the Pacific with the Naval Air Force; the other part says, “You did the right thing.” And I think maybe I did. I settled for the old, tedious job. Do you know what a supply and disbursement officer is? You’re in charge of all the food onboard; you have to buy the food and prepare the menu and keep track of the cellar. Remember, for the crew, the only thing they have that they can look forward to is the food. If you give them lousy meals, you’re going to get attitudes. RL: The experience you gained in the fraternity house must have helped. 19 HB: Oh yes, it helped. We were not authorized to have an ice cream machine but I wrangled one illegally. RL: Trading things you shouldn’t have traded? HB: [Laughter] But you know, it was a neat experience. The second ship I was on was a provisions ship. Those guys had been without oranges, apples, and other things for almost a year. When they came into port there were all these ships sending their boats over to get their share of their fresh provisions. It was too bad I couldn’t give them all I wanted to, but at least they got a case of something fresh. One thing about being in the Navy is that if you’re going to die, you’re going to die asleep in white sheets. Not in a muddy foxhole, but with the finest there is. Of course, onboard a ship, the officers live differently from the men. We have to buy our own food and pay an allowance for it. You might get by with the men but if you give the officers lousy food…boy, you are really in trouble. Oh, you know, I’ll tell you a good experience. The charter that I was on had a captain named Captain Valerie; he’s the one I told you about who was a Navy hero because he sank the German submarine tender. One day, he called me in and he said, “Pay—” that was my nickname because I was paymaster. Incidentally, I was also the encoding officer and sometime around twelve o’clock at night I had to wake the captain because I’d just gotten a message; so I also had to do the dirty work of waking the captain. Anyway, he said, “Pay, I have to know the combination of the safe.” I said, “Captain, I can’t give you the combination of the safe. The instructions are very plain that I am the only one.” They went to a lot of 20 trouble to put this safe on board and keep it safe because it held a lot of money— it was welded and so forth. He said, “The reason I’ve got to have the combination is because if something happens to you, I’ve got to be able to get in.” I said, “If something happens to me, then don’t worry about the money; you can wait until you get to port. If the ship goes down, the combination doesn’t matter. In any case, I cannot give the combination to you.” Well, when you’re out in the middle of the Atlantic, remember there’s two gods: there’s the real God and there’s the captain of your ship and nobody disputes the captain of the ship—I don’t care whether he’s wrong or whether he’s right. He says, “Pay, I ordered you to give me the combination. I don’t even want to know what it is. I want you to put it in an envelope and seal the envelope with the ship’s seal, then we’ll put it in the safe in my quarters.” I said, “Captain, that combination in your little safe that I could break with an ax would give somebody access to all of the money that I have.” He said, “That’s not going to happen.” I said, “You do not understand what I’m saying, the combination to my safe—which the Navy had gone to all the trouble to make sure can’t be broken—can’t be in your safe which could be broken.” Well, I had to do some quick thinking and so I said, “Captain, I’m not supposed to do this, but here…” I wrote down numbers, we put it in the envelope and he put it in the safe. What he doesn’t know is that I put down fictitious numbers. The only thing I was afraid of was that he might say, “Let’s try it.” I don’t know to this day what he had in mind. I don’t think he would have had me purposely thrown overboard, but keep in mind, that was a lot of money. It was a hundred thousand dollars in those days, which is worth much more today. 21 But you know, when we got to Boston, I went to the supply department there and kind of related a little of what had happened. The guy was stupefied. You know, when you’re a navy hero you don’t pay much attention to the regulations; it’s whatever you think is best. But this guy had always been in command of everything—he hadn’t had a supply and disbursement officer before. Maybe he didn’t like the idea of not having his hand on something. I don’t know. I just gave him those false numbers and it worked. But anyway, I mentioned this while I was in Boston and the next month in all of the publications of the U.S. Navy—it didn’t mention me personally but it mentioned this incident—it said a captain was demanding the safe combination of a supply officer and that under no condition should that happen; it was clear: “No, sir, this should never happen.” And it was all because of me. [Laughter] Why did it happen to me? All the ship captains in the world received this about how “it has been brought to our attention that a ship’s captain demanded the safe combination. ”I was a good supply officer. I was honest, I worked hard, my figures were accurate; I had been an accounting major at Utah State University and I loved accounting, so it was a wonderful job for me. Other paymasters were confused because they didn’t have a lot of experience and didn’t have any college training. I felt sorry for them, but my reports always were good. The only thing that upset them was that when we were closing things out at the end of the war, I wanted to save a one-dollar check. I wrote it out to myself and I never did cash it. They wrote me and said, “This check has never been cashed and it has to be, so please cash it.” I wanted to keep it so I could have a copy of a 22 government check with my signature on it; I wasn’t able to do it. I don’t know why it was such a big issue. RL: In your own business, you know if people don’t cash checks, it comes up. HB: I know. When they close out the account, they want it closed out; they don’t want any outstanding checks. RL: How much interest would that dollar have earned? HB: [Laughter] I don’t know, but it came out alright. RL: Before we go to the next segment, I want to you to repeat the story you told me earlier. When I asked you to fill out your name on the forms, you insisted that your name had to be a certain way and you told us a little story about that. Would you repeat it for us? HB: About the Haven J. I’d always gone by Haven Barlow but in 1948, two Haven Barlows came to Layton. One was I. Haven Barlow. He was five or six years older than I was and he’d come from California. He was distantly related; if you go back far enough, we had a common great-grandfather. Israel Barlow was his great-grandfather and Israel Barlow was my great-great-grandfather. He was a great guy; I loved the man. The problem was that in those days, they didn’t have mail delivery to your home. All you had to do was send a letter addressed to “Haven Barlow at Layton, Utah,” and I got the mail. So every week, all these letters came for Haven Barlow and we’d get together and decide “This is mine” and “This is yours.” Then we decided, “From now on, let everyone know they need to use your full name.” But he didn’t like to use the name Israel, so he went by I. Haven Barlow and from then on, I always used Haven J. It took people 23 years to overcome that habit. They would still call him Haven and call me Haven. In my own family, I would hear, “Haven told me the other day that so-and-so did this.” I would look at them and say, “I did not do that.” “We mean I. Haven.” “Then why don’t you say I. Haven? You’re my own family and you’re not even helping me get these names correct.” But before they died, I think they got it. It took a long time. But it was a good experience because I. Haven was a good guy; he was our stake president and I served in the High Council under him. I don’t know anyone more humble and spiritual and worthy as I. Haven Barlow. I hope I can be half as good as he was. RL: When you get to the Pearly Gates you’re going to have to tell St. Peter that you are Haven J. HB: Yeah. There’s also a problem with names because about the time I was born, there was a Haven Barlow in the Davis High School graduating class. I think in heaven we’re going to have a lot of Havens. The name comes from my great-great- grandmother, Elizabeth Haven. Her family came from New Haven, Connecticut, and established a community. One of the professors talked about her at BYU just a month ago. She was quite a gal. She graduated from college, which, in those days— RL: It was unheard of. HB: Yes, it was. And she was a school teacher. She taught many of the children of the leaders of the church. That’s where she met my great-great-grandfather. They married late in life. When they get to be about thirty, the family starts to 24 worry, “Well, why don’t they get married?” I don’t know why they’d wait that late. I think Israel Barlow was about thirty-two and Elizabeth Haven was thirty-one. RL: How was the transition between military life and living on shore and establishing your life with your family? HB: The event of leaving the Navy was quite something. It was an entirely different life. I came home not knowing what to do. I didn’t have a job in mind. I didn’t have any money to speak of—I had a total of $800 when I got home. RL: Is that from your Navy pay? HB: Yes. I didn’t have a place to live and I had a wife and a daughter. She was staying at her parents’ place and she lived in the smallest bedroom in the house. The other bedrooms were occupied by her two sisters and her mother and her father. They insisted that I stay there with them until I could find a place. I stayed there for maybe a month. At that time, my father was an officer of the Clearfield State Bank. My father and one other man ran the bank; it was very small. They both had sons coming home from the service and both said, “Let’s try to get them to come into the bank and eventually take over our positions.” So my dad asked me if I’d like to work in the bank and I said, “Sure, I don’t have anything to do.” I was offered a salary of $150 a month, which was more than enough to live on; I was able to get into a place up in Sahara Village—it’s a mobile home park. If you go up Hill Field Road you get to Highway 191; on the right-hand side are a lot of mobile homes. That was all covered with chicken coups—I call them chicken coups because they were built the same as chicken coups—concrete floor, concrete baths, and absolutely bare. But housing was so hard to get and we in 25 the service had first priority over anybody else. We stayed there for maybe six months because we had our name in at Verdland Park, which is right here where Layton High School is. It was covered with 399 housing units which were better than up in Sahara Village; you had wooden floors but you still had concrete slabs. All of our friends in the Navy lived there; it was great. We stayed there for about a year. In the meantime, I stayed at the Clearfield State Bank for about a month and then I decided to leave. I decided to leave because of my brother-in-law, Roy Simmons. He was working in the First National Bank and he told me, “Why don’t you get a real estate license so you can supplement your income? You can work on it when you get through at the bank and on Saturday.” I became a salesman under his license. One Saturday afternoon, I sold three houses and I made a commission—at that time, I was making $150 on each house—and on that Saturday when I sold three houses, I said, “That’s the same as working at the bank for three months. Why am I at the bank?” So I explained to the bank that I was maybe going to give up security—I mean, when you’re working at the bank you know you’re going to get your salary every month, and my wife sure liked that—she was not happy about me giving that up. But when I got those three sales, she thought again. She was worried I might not sell any houses and be able to take care of her and the baby—by that time, Heidi had come along. Of those three houses, two of them closed and one did not. I learned a lesson. That is, when I sold a house, don’t count on it. I learned to say, “It’s in the pipeline.” Don’t even think about it because you’ll probably lose at least one out 26 of two for some reason. You know how people are, they change their mind. So, from that time on, I never did count a commission the same as money in my pocket. Now, had I only sold one house that day, I might not have left the bank. It changed my life completely. I was an absolutely free person—I could go to work when I wanted, I could leave when I wanted. When you work in a bank, you have to work banking hours. One thing that really bothered me was that you have to balance out at the bank—it doesn’t matter if it’s a penny. Before I left the bank— and this had something to do with leaving—I worked an extra hour or two after work trying to balance out. It wasn’t a big amount; I think it was under a dollar. At the end, my dad helped me and we finally balanced out. I said, “You know, this is not as good a job as I thought it was. That’s so much detail. I mean, who’s going to care if you’re ten cents out? If you’re long, take it out and put it in a pot. If you’re short, take it out of the pot.” “Oh no, you can’t do it that way in a bank.” RL: It sounds like a one-dollar check that needed to be cashed. HB: So we stayed there at Verdland Park for about a year. We had two girls. I was working with Roy Simmons as a broker and Roy came along one day and said, “Haven, there’s this nice house for sale over on Elm Street. It’s unique; it has architecture you don’t see every place. Richard Knowlton is the contractor. He bid on a bridge up in Idaho and his costs are more than he thought, so his bonding company is requiring that he sell some of his property in order to pay his bills. He decided he was going to sell his thirty-acre farm. His bonding company said, ‘Richard, you can’t always pick up a farm with a farmhouse on it, so why don’t you keep that and sell this house. You can build another house, later.’” At 27 that time, you were buying in a typical area for $5,000 a house. As you are driving home to Ogden and you get on Gentile on the left there are some houses. Those are the typical $5,000 homes. But they wanted $15,000. I thought, “There’s no way.” I could get a GI loan, but I didn’t want payments that high. I would have payments three times the average of these small homes that were built during the war. Roy said, “Let’s offer them $10,000 cash.” I said, “Let’s do that.” I knew I could get a GI loan at four percent. At that time, the real estate commission was about five percent and Roy said, “We’ll forget about it.” So I actually bought the house for about $9,500. Oh, excuse me; the commission was $700, so my net costs were $9,300. I was so thrilled. I went to the bank and got a GI loan for $8,000. Remember, I only had $800 dollars when I came here and I had only increased it with one month’s work at the bank. My dad came to me and he said, “Haven, when you were in college, you never asked for a car; your brother asked for a car and I gave him a car. You went through college without asking.” I’d needed a car badly because I went to Utah State, but I never asked. So my dad said, “I gave him $300, so here’s $300 for you. I have always felt that whenever my children buy a home, I want to help them out. So here’s $1,000 that I want to give to you on your home.” That meant that I paid $1,300 on that $9,300 balance. The payments were forty dollars a month. Keep in mind, I was making $150 with a house payment of forty dollars—that ratio is real good if you compare it to what it is today. These days, with taxes and insurance, people are sometimes paying around thirty or thirty-five percent, which is pretty high. 28 So that got me this house, and we loved it. We had trouble with a contractor; he never finished their house. There was a lot of trim that had never been put on. The house had water in the basement, so I had to go and rip out the old floor and finish the basement. The lot wasn’t very big—see that post? That was the end of the lot; this wasn’t part of it, this is all new. We moved the shed and had a basketball net on it; we had a lot of kids over here playing basketball all the time. The pasture out there was not ours but we always played ball there. Later on, I was able to buy land out there from E.M. Whitesides who lived in the corner house over there. After he passed away, his estate let me buy more of the land, so I have about four and half acres. I’m here all by myself; I don’t have neighbors that are too close and it’s heaven to me. I had a few kids over here the other day; I have swings and they love those. They were swinging and I said, “Do your folks know where you are?” “Oh yes, I told them we were going over to the park.” So this is the park to the neighbors. Well, when I decided to quit my job at the Clearfield State Bank, I was a salesman with Roy. I had a tiny office down on the corner of Gentile Street and Main Street. It was so tiny that I could only have one person in the office at a time. I had a desk and two chairs. If anybody else wanted to see me, they could wait outside on the sidewalk or in the furniture store—the office was adjacent to a furniture store and so I would invite them to come in and sit down in the furniture store. I remember there was a deli next door to that building that sold ice cream. At that time, if you went in and bought a malt, it was ten cents and you had to pay 29 a penny tax. So I would always buy just a half of a malt, which was five cents, to avoid paying the penny tax. RL: Did you buy one half or two different halves? HB: I don’t think I could have gotten away with two halves. But they were such big malts that half was enough. But anyway, you can see I was watching every penny. I was a salesman trying to sell homes, but if you don’t have any homes to sell, you don’t make any money. I decided to concentrate on two subdivisions over in Clearfield. I had been born there and the Barlow name was known. After the war, Layton might have been two thousand people; Clearfield might have been a thousand. Now, Clearfield has twenty or so thousand and Layton has close to sixty. So that gives you a perspective. Anyway, I remember going over there and knocking on every door in the subdivision, “I’m Haven Barlow. I’ve just started in real estate and I have customers—” and I did, “—that are looking for a home. I just wondered if you’d be interested in selling or if you know anyone who’d be interested in selling.” I went all around those subdivisions and you’d be surprised at the leads that I got. This was before the mobile listings, and I was able to have all of these leads on my list—probably three to five houses that I was trying to sell. Remember, the average house is $5,000 and your commission is five or six percent. If I could sell one house a month, that would be $250 where I’d only been making $150 at the bank. I sold at least one house a month. While I was working real estate for Roy, he was working at the bank and doing real estate on the side. When he became the bank commissioner, I set up 30 my own business, which was in about 1950. I went out to North Layton. Do you know where Home Depot is? Come just south of there and that’s my office building. Right across the street was a building that was owned by Dell Adams— his daughter had a fast food restaurant—but this building was vacant and not much better than a chicken coup. I decided I wanted to rent the building—here I was in business on my own but with two tiny offices. So I rented over there and I hired a secretary and a couple of salesmen. That was the beginning of Barlow Realty and Insurance. I got my license to sell fire, casualty, and life insurance. I never did go into life insurance, but I did have a license. I sold insurance to businesses and to homes. Then I decided I wanted a better building. The building where we are now…I remember we paid an exorbitant price—around $6,000 for the land. Keep in mind, that’s the price of a house in those days. But it was commercial and we put the building on it. I got a loan to do it and we built onto it two times later. I never regretted leaving the bank. There were months when I didn’t make a sale, but I worked hard. My wife was a great gal. I know she didn’t like me turning down a paying job. Her father had a check every month and her husband had no guarantee of what he was going to make. It was hard on her. But I thought that if things got really bad, then I could probably ask my dad for a little help. I never had to. But the real estate business goes through periods of ups and downs, just like it does today. Right now, there are more houses available to buy than there are buyers; it’s hard to make a sale. Well, I knew that that would happen so I decided to diversify; I decided to become a contractor and get my 31 license as a certified appraiser. I was also selling insurance. So if something happened to the economy in the real estate business, I could take advantage of my insurance—although insurance takes two or three years before you can start taking money out of it. But I was building up my customers so I could sell both real estate and insurance. It took a while. I was from the area; I was fairly respected; and I’d married an Ellison, which was a family that had a good name and reputation here in Layton. I did a number of appraisals for the State of Utah and for farmers. When the highway went through Morgan, for instance, for about three miles all the farms had to have an appraiser and they got me. I’d go out and appraise the farms and then I’d get on the witness stand and they’d try to tear me apart because I felt the state didn’t offer them the fair price. I got $100 a day to do that—just to be on the witness stand! I thought it was great. It was nearly enough to live on for a month. The state knew I was a good appraiser; I handled myself well. I was a college graduate and I was on a debating team in high school. A lot of people would be afraid on the witness stand, but I wasn’t. You have to be forceful— being on the witness stand is not about what you say, it’s your body language. That’s the only way you can defend people; you can say the most beautiful words in the world, but if you don’t say it like you feel it deep down inside of you, then they’ll know it. After that, I got my construction license and I decided to build some houses. I didn’t know anything about building houses but you don’t have to know 32 anything about it in order to do it. You just have to go out, get a set of plans, get a good contractor and let them bid on various parts. Get a sub-contractor to put in a foundation and another to put up the walls. Then get a contractor to put the roof on. Get a contractor for the plumbing and another for the painting. That’s what you need to do in order to build a house and that’s what I did. And you know how much I made off of those houses? Five hundred dollars a month. But let me tell you: my first project was these homes that are…when you leave here, go west and then turn on Gentile Street. Along there are some small homes that I built. Let me tell you what happened on one. It was the third house from the end and I was coming home from work and dropped by to see how it was coming. Before the war, there was only one contractor who laid brick and mortar around here; his name was Pearl Shan. After the war, he was under a lot of pressure with all the housing developments. Pearl had built my first two houses for me, but in this project, I had to get somebody else. At that time, brick was hard to get and Interstate Brick had more customers than they could provide for. I couldn’t get the brick that I needed for one house, but there was a place called Harris Brick Company over in Harrisville. Their bricks were good except that when you take the bricks and put them in the kiln, his kiln did not have a roof on it. It should have had a roof. He was still able to bake the bricks, but on the top they were a little round. So you have to have a bricklayer who really knows his business because you have to make sure that the mortar is straight and even if the bricks were rounded. Well, I went to the house that night after work and looked at the wall and it was like this—wavy. I had a tough decision to make. I said to myself, 33 “For the rest of my life, I’ll be driving by that house on the way home and I’ll look at it and I’ll know it was a terrible job. Word might get around that people shouldn’t buy anything by Haven Barlow because of the bad quality.” I told the brick layers that the whole wall had to be torn down. We finally got it worked out and it’s a beautiful house. The bricks are still rounded but the walls are straight. I didn’t make any money—in fact, I lost money on that house. So I had to build two houses just to break even. RL: But you kept your integrity and all these decades later, you have a great reputation. HB: I hope so. I don’t know of anybody who’s my enemy. Did I tell you the story of how I broke my right hand? RL: No. HB: I told you my uncle had an ice business and I helped him. I was being paid around five cents an hour. That was good pay. For three hours I’d make fifteen cents and that would buy you a ticket to a movie house and you’d have a nickel left over to buy an ice cream cone. Well, my uncle had a T-Model Ford and every time it stopped, the engine stopped. My job was to go out and crank it every time it stopped at the house. Well, on a T-Model Ford, you don’t crank it by going around, you have to pull it up and pull it up real fast, then go around. I didn’t come up fast enough and the lever swung around and broke my wrist. So that was the first broken bone I had. The second was when I was playing football. I was eight when I broke my hand. I was probably about twelve when I broke my leg playing football. The third was when I was playing 34 basketball. The fourth was when a cow kicked me when I was in the Legislature. I pulled this calf over along underneath this cow to get him to milk from the mother. When a calf is born, it’s got to have its mother’s milk…I don’t remember what it’s called, but if the calf doesn’t get enough mother’s milk, it will die. You can give it all the normal milk in the world and it will still die. The mother’s milk has to be in the intestine before any food is ever taken. RL: I don’t know about cows, but in humans it’s called colostrum. HB: That’s it: colostrum. And, you know, when I was down helping the calf, that dog-gone cow just fell on me. That’s how I broke my leg. RL: You talked about being a student body officer in high school and some of your public involvement at Utah State. HB: I was the secretary of the senior class of 1940 at Davis High. I’m very proud of being a graduate of Davis High. At that time, Davis High was the only high school in Davis County. After I graduated from high school, I went to Utah State; I had a great time there. I became the editor of The Buzzer in my junior year and I was on the student council. I guess I had a little political bud in me all along. I enjoyed that kind of activity. I built that up so that we had one of the largest agencies in Utah. RL: When you talked about your insurance agency, did you have particular companies that you worked with? HB: Yes, we represented several companies. Our main company was Travelers. It’s still a favorite of mine. I always tell people, “If you’ve got Travelers insurance, you 35 can sleep well at night. They’re a great company.” I had a number of other companies; some have gone now and some have merged. Here we are now in 2011, and my son has taken over the real estate business. About eight years ago, when I got into my eighties, I said, “Why have the responsibility of this insurance business? I’m going to get rid of some of my duties and not be CEO.” Val Stratford was my main salesman and I let him buy twenty-five percent of my company. About seven or eight years ago, Zions Bank decided that they wanted to expand their insurance business. They were strictly in the business of selling fire insurance on houses. I talked to Val and I said, “It’s your decision. Even though you only own twenty-five percent, if you want to stay on, that’s fine.” He was sort of managing the company under me. He said, “I think we ought to sell and we’ll continue under the Zions name.” We did that. It only went on for a few years until Zions Bank decided they shouldn’t be in the insurance business. They sold everything to another agency. So that’s what happened to the insurance business. Looking back, I think it was a good decision. My business was a great source of satisfaction for me. I started from scratch and built it into a great business. My son still sort of runs the real estate, but he’s primarily in the development side of the company. I manage my apartments—the Skyline View Apartments. We have 111 units. It’s low-income housing, so we’re limited as to how much we can make but it’s still a good business. That’s my responsibility right now. We have other investments that Duncan and I work together on. So that’s where we are right now. 36 I should mention, too…we haven’t talked much about my involvement in the Church. Did I mention that I was a bishop? RL: I don’t think so. HB: I was on the High Council in two stakes—longer than anybody in the history of Layton, I think. I was on the High Council for twenty-one years. Robert Bitner was the stake president, Wayne Winegar was a counselor, and Dave Adams was another counselor. At the end of a meeting one evening, they said, “Oh, Haven, come on in; we need to talk to you about something.” I went in and there’s my wife, Bonnie Rae. I said, “Bonnie Rae, why are you here?” She said, “I don’t know, they just called me and asked me to be here.” The stake president said, “We want to read a letter to you.” So they read a letter to me from the president of the church that appointed me to be a bishop. Bonnie Rae was shocked; she did not want me to be a bishop. The first thing she said was, “Haven doesn’t need enemies when he has friends like you.” RL: But she did support you. HB: Oh yes. Absolutely. She was a great support. So I served for about five years and really enjoyed it. Bonnie Rae was a great supporter. She was a former president of the Relief Society anyway. She was very independent—she is very independent. And she does not like to be surprised by anything. One thing about her was that you always knew where she stood. If she thought of something, she’d tell you. Did I tell you what happened when Haven married Amy? RL: I don’t think so. 37 HB: My son lost his wife while he was doing his medical internship; Chris passed away while they were back in Rochester. It was a shock. My wife went back there and stayed with him for a while—so did his mother-in-law—in order to help with the four kids. They eventually got a nanny from Utah. Three years after that, he finished his medical degree there at Rochester and they encouraged him to go into plastic surgery. The University of Utah accepted him into their program. On his way west with his family, he stopped in Washington D.C. My son Stewart was in medical school at Georgetown. Well, Marie Barlow was the wife of my son who was in school at Georgetown, and she and my son offered to show the kids around Washington D.C. Marie asked her Relief Society companion if she would help her with the kids. That’s how Amy got involved. Afterwards, Amy said, “Marie, I think you only asked me because you wanted me to get involved with Haven. With the four kids he has and the three kids I have, there’s no way that we’re going to get together.” I don’t know what happened, but Haven was there and got to know Amy. Later on, they corresponded. There was about a six-month period in which he was waiting to get into the plastic surgery program at the University of Utah. The university sent him up to Boise to do some work for those six months and he stayed there with the kids and his mother-in-law, who was helping with the kids. Amy came west and stopped to see Bonnie Rae. The first thing Bonnie Rae said to her was, “Amy, you don’t want to get involved with Haven and those four kids, do you?” I was so surprised to think that here I wanted him to get a wife, but now his mother is discouraging this girl from even looking at him. But 38 that’s Bonnie Rae, she wanted her to know, “Do you know what you’re getting into?” Amy decided to go up to Boise for a week to be close to Haven and the kids and decide if she was sure she wanted to be involved. I admire her for that. I think if every prospective bride would live for a week with her in-laws that might open their eyes. Anyway, after she stayed up there for a week, they became really attached and, of course, eventually got married. They ended up having four kids after they were married, so the family ended up with eleven children. Amy, at the first, had said, “I don’t want to get involved with those four children while I already have three; that’ll be too much to handle.” [Laughter] She ended up with eleven wonderful children. Great kids. I love them all very much. ROH: Tell us a little about Bonnie Rae. HB: Bonnie Rae was sort of a high-spirited gal. When she was young, she had her own horse and rode. The kids were all girls except for one older brother but he left home early. She was raised with four sisters: Oma, Tibby, Carol, and Kate. They lived down where Duncan lives now. Duncan took over that house and made it into a nice home. In a way, she was a challenge to her parents, I think. RL: Was she the tomboy of the family? HB: Yes, she was a tomboy and she was the only one who would work out on the farm with her father. She would rake hay and she had freckles; the sun was the worst thing for her, she had to stay covered all the time or else those freckles would really stand out. She had auburn hair. She went to the University of Utah while I was going to Utah State. She loved to decorate—you can see this home 39 here, it’s her home, I just occupy it. I call it her home because she planned it; all of it was her idea. We also have a place down in St. George that she decorated very nicely. She was involved in the Assistance League, which is a group of women down in Salt Lake City that helps kids and helps in other areas, as well. Did I tell you about our daughter Rachel? Rachel had some challenges when she was a young girl and so Bonnie Rae would take her down to the Children’s Center. This was before Rachel was ready to go to kindergarten; she was very young. For four years Bonnie Rae would drive to Salt Lake every day to take Rachel to the Children’s Center for schooling. Thanks to the Children’s Center, we were able to get her prepared for life and she’s done very well. So we’ve been great supporters of the Children’s Center. Rachel now works for the school district; she’s a secretary. She’s a very pleasant girl and always calls me. When I went to Bear Lake over Labor Day, she and her husband Curtis took care of the dog. That’s their assignment: when I’m gone, they come and stay at the house so the dog won’t be lonesome. It’s great. RL: What other kind of things was Bonnie Rae involved in? HB: Bonnie Rae would take off to go to Mexico for ten days at least every other year. She would jump in the car and head for Mexico—when she was a senior in high school, she went down to Mexico and lived with a family for a summer, they kind of adopted her. So she’d go down and see them every year or every other year. Not many husbands would let their wife take off in a car by herself to a foreign country, but let me tell you, she went to a rural area and she just loved it. She would go to the park and start to crochet—she loved to crochet—and women 40 would come around to see what she was doing. Pretty soon she’d have friends there. She wouldn’t stay at the best hotel; she’d always stay at a hotel where Mexicans were. She loved Mexican people. So anyway, she did that for a number of years. She was a great wife. When I was in the Legislature, they didn’t have cell phones and email like they have now. The telephone was the only way to get in touch with people, and they would call this house for all kinds of things. Bonnie Rae was so pleasant with all of them. She was great. RL: Going back to what you said about her being surprised about you being called as a bishop and voicing her concerns: what did she do when you announced an interest in going into politics? HB: She said, “Haven, I told my parents I would never marry a man who was involved in cattle or politics.” Her father had raised cattle and he loved politics; he never got involved personally, but he was politically involved with everything. He really enjoyed talking to me when I was involved in politics. But when she married me, she didn’t realize that I had raised cattle all my life. When I came home from the war, we had a pasture by the house and I realized they weren’t using the pasture. So I asked Mr. Ellison, “Is it okay if I buy four head of steer?” The first thing I did was buy those four head and put them in the pasture. So Bonnie Rae ended up with a person who was exactly what she did not want. I’ve been raising cattle ever since. Right now, I have a herd of over 150 head of cattle. When I decided I wanted to get involved in public service…Well, let me tell you how I got into politics. My dad was on the school board in Clearfield. He 41 served there for two terms, which I think was about ten years all together. Then it was time for Layton to have their turn—the district involved Clearfield and Layton, they’d have somebody from Clearfield for a couple terms, then someone from Layton; it was kind of a gentleman’s agreement. RL: Was it a county school board? HB: The Davis County School Board. I think it had five members so there were five districts in the county. That sort of got my interest and I decided I wanted to run for the school board. My opponent sent out fliers saying, “Jesse D. Barlow just wants to continue his influence on the school board by having his son Haven Barlow run from Layton. Haven is really from Clearfield and he was raised there but I am from Layton so I should be the one to be elected.” Well, what happened is I lost by nine votes. A young return serviceman against a long-time farmer in Layton. RL: What year was this? HB: That was around 1950. It turned out that that was the best thing that ever happened to me. Sometimes when you’re disappointed, you don’t realize that something good will probably come of it. But if I had been elected to the school board, I would never have been in the Legislature. I would have been like my dad: serve two terms and then be done. RL: So it’s the old saying that the Lord closes a door and leaves a window open. HB: That’s right. So, in 1952, it was time to elect a state senator from Davis County and one representative. I noticed in the paper that three people had filed for the representative position but nobody for the senate. I’d heard rumors that the son 42 of the former mayor, Rendell Mabey, who lived in Bountiful, was going to run for the senate. I decided, “Well, I’m going to run for the senate.” I had to get an article in the Weekly Reflex that covered the whole county and got good exposure: “Haven Barlow Return Veteran Running for State Senate.” Great article. Well one day I got a call from Rendell Mabey. I knew him and he said, “I see you’re running for the senate.” “Yeah, I noticed there’s three other people running for the House, but nobody running for the senate.” He said, “Well, Haven, I’m planning on running for the senate.” I said, “You are?” He said, “I’d sure hate to have to run against you. Haven, if you want to run for the House, I will give you the five dollars that you paid when you filed for the senate. If you run for the House, I’ll help you down here at the south end of the county.” Keep in mind that for twenty years Republicans didn’t have a state senator and they didn’t have a representative in the house, so it was a difficult time for a Republican to get elected. Roosevelt had been in during the Depression and the war and most of the population were in their twenties and thirties and didn’t know of anybody else but a democratic president. Anyway, this is one of the best decisions of my life: I said to myself, “Okay, even though I’m young and a return veteran, Rendell Mabey lives in Bountiful. He’s the son of a former governor. I’m from the north end and he’s from the south, I don’t think I can beat him.” I looked at it pretty closely. So I took him for his word and I filed for the House. They ran a second article about me, so I got all this second exposure for free. It was great publicity. So Rendell didn’t have any opposition for the senate, but now there were four competing for the House of 43 Representatives. Because of the publicity I got and the help from Rendell Mabey, it got people talking about me. RL: It was a good will for you. HB: It was. First, we had to go to the county convention to eliminate those four down to two. They had a primary to select the two top men and I was one that was selected. So I won the nomination for the Republican Party in the House of Representatives. I think I made the right choice. I think if I’d tried to run against Rendell, I’d have been defeated. So anyway, I was in the House of Representatives. I enjoyed it. It so happened that the Speaker—his name was Davis, he was a good friend of mine before I was elected—he appointed me to the appropriations committee. I don’t think it ever happened that the new, young representative goes on the appropriations committee. At that time, there was about eight or nine members from the House of Representatives and about four or five from the senate. They determine the appropriations for the whole state of Utah, which is not how they do it now. But I was on the Committee and I was chairman of the sub-committee in my first term. It was a blessing in disguise because J. Bracken Lee was the governor and he sort of liked me because I was the youngest member. I was thirty and there’s been people elected to the House younger than that since then, but at that time, I was the youngest representative. So, J. Bracken Lee knew I was in the insurance business because he was in the insurance business before he was governor. I had a good relationship with J. Bracken Lee, and it happened that I had a real challenge when I was in the House of Representatives that first year. 44 The Arts Council, which we had had since Statehood—actually, we’d had it even when we were a territory; I think we were one of the first states that ever had an Arts Council. J. Bracken Lee said he wasn’t going to continue funding the Arts Council, he said it had to be funded by private donors: “We don’t have enough money for school teachers, so why should we be funding the Art’s Council?” Well it so happens that part of the money that went to the Arts Council went to the Utah Symphony. Maurice Abravanel was the conductor of the symphony and he came to talk to me. His English was not very good but he told me that he didn’t think the symphony could survive if they did not have this help from the Arts Council. In those days, the Legislature did not have their own staff. They were a poor third branch of government. They had to accept the governor’s revenue estimate and take his budget; if they thought that more money ought to be spent for something, then they had to take it from someplace else. So I had to take money from several areas in order to fund it. In my first term, I got the money for the Arts Council to go through the Legislature, but the governor has what is called a line-item veto, which means he can veto any line item in the appropriations bill. I just crossed my fingers because he’d said, “No, we’re not going to fund the Arts Council,” and here’s this newbie doing just the opposite. I was afraid he was going to line-item it. And you know what? He let that appropriations bill go through with that item. I said to myself, “Maybe because I was one of his favorites he did me a favor.” I enjoyed serving for two terms—four years. And Rendell Mabey, at the end of his first term as senator, decided that he wanted to run for governor. He 45 talked to me and said, “I’m going to run for governor and I want you to run for senator.” It was natural anyways because I was the representative. But he said, “Before I do that, I’m going to go around and see every delegate in the state of Utah to make sure that I can get through the convention and at least make it to the primary. If I can get to the primary, then I’ll be alright.” Running against him was George Dewey Clyde and J. Bracken Lee. So he checked around and he decided to run. So now three are running for the governorship and it meant I could run for senator. I had tough opposition in the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, but I made it through. J. Bracken Lee would go around to the delegates and tell them, “I’m committed to Rendell Mabey. Do me a favor…all I need is a few votes. Rendell has more than enough; he can make it through, just give me your vote because I want to try to make it to the primary.” And by golly, when the votes were counted, Rendell Mabey was third; J. Bracken Lee and George Dewey Clyde were the two at the top. Rendell lost his seat as a senator and lost in the primary for governor. That was a sad day. But it goes to show, as I tell the people I know who are going to run for office, “Even if you think you’re going to make it, don’t you ever tell anybody. You let them know you’re scared and that you need every vote. If you don’t, people will think you’re alright and that since the other fellow is a good guy they’ll give their vote to him.” RL: Like the advice, “Don’t rest on your laurels.” HB: That’s a good way of putting it. So I started in the senate then. While I was in the House, I had thought, “Oh, those guys in the senate, they are so much wiser than 46 we are…” It was kind of a hero worship that I had for the senators. I’d known many of them for some time and now I was in that group. You know, the House was sixty members and the senate was twenty-eight and it makes a big difference if you’re one of twenty-eight versus one of sixty. I was able to be more effective in the senate than I was in the House. If you wanted to pass a bill, all you had to do was talk to four or five of your fellow senators individually and say, “I’m introducing this bill and this is why I’m doing it.” Get them to understand it and to know that you feel passionate about it, so when the bill comes up for vote, you’ve got a good group on your side. Whereas if you’re in the House, you’ve got to talk to maybe twenty representatives. I served under a lot of great senators and really had a great experience. RL: Tell us about an early piece of legislation that you got passed through. HB: When I was a representative, I passed the first anti-litter bill in the state of Utah. It said you could not litter on Utah highways. It used to be that people would throw their whiskey bottles and papers out the window; you’d drive along and the highway was like a garbage collector. When I was in the House, I passed that bill in my first term. I had one or two others, so when I came up for re-election, I had something that I’d done and could show people. Another thing that helped me to be elected was when I was in the House of Representatives, we had a telephone system that made it long distance if you were in Clearfield and wanted to call Layton. The telephone company really fought when I tried to change that. I expected it was a cash cow for them. So we had public hearings in Kaysville and Bountiful. All kinds of people came out and agreed with me: “We don’t like this 47 idea of paying long distance.” I said, “It’s a healthy thing for people to be able to just get on the phone and talk. They won’t do that as much if they have to pay long distance, you have to make the conversation short and you can’t enjoy it.” I think that helped me get re-elected. The phone change and the anti-litter bill. RL: The anti-litter bill was cutting edge legislation in that time. The federal government got involved and more states followed with similar legislature. Now you see signs all over with fines for littering. HB: Yes, you do. So anyway, that was my first bill. RL: When you got into the senate, what were some of your bills? HB: I would handle an average of about ten bills. I figured that if you had any more than that, you couldn’t give them the proper help. You had to know where they were at all times—some might be on the floor waiting for a vote, some might be already passed and gone over to the other House, and so forth. Well, let me tell you about the bill for Weber. Weber wanted to be a university and I was a key sponsor of the bill to do that. RL: That was in 1989? HB: Yes, and I’ll tell you, you don’t realize the people who opposed that. Here, I was a graduate of Utah State University, and Utah State and the University of Utah fought that bill. It was a tough fight. People said, “Hey, you’re a graduate of Utah State, why did you introduce this bill?” I said, “I think Weber deserves to be a university.” Well, Dixie Leavitt down in Cedar City wanted that institution to be a university. He said, “How about adding that to your bill?” I said, “Dixie, I’m going to vote for your bill, but let me tell you, I think that Weber deserves to be a 48 university ahead of your school. If my bill goes through first, that will help your school. But if you tag your bill on with my bill, my bill could very well be defeated, not because they wouldn’t vote for Weber, but because they might not vote for your smaller school. I’ll help you get it through, but we’ve got a better case at Weber than you have. Is that okay?” When I was president of the senate, Dixie was my assistant majority leader. Well, we got that bill through but it was tough. It barely carried the senate. It was very close. After it passed the House, Dixie put his bill through and it was much closer than Weber. We had more votes than he did, but the fact that my bill went through helped make it possible for his bill to go through. His school got university status at the same time as Weber. RL: Your mother had been on the faculty at Weber State in 1920 and you grew up in Davis County, but you were a Utah State graduate, so what was it that made you want to support Weber State? HB: I love Weber State. I love the way they teach the kids. I’ve talked to many students and there’s something special about that school. Besides, I represent people and I think far more of those people go to Weber than to any other school. We’ve developed a kind of love affair, really. I’m a graduate of Utah State but I feel so warm towards Weber State. They’ve been good to me. Let me tell you how they got the Davis campus. To me, that was a miracle that they were able to get that one hundred acres in the heart of Layton. I was on a committee with Jean Madsen, Lloyd Carr, and two or three others; it was a side committee. We wanted an institution here in Davis County; we were sick and tired of going to Weber in Ogden or going to Logan or to Salt Lake. We wanted 49 an institution in our county; we were passionate about it. The first thing we had to do was find a site. Our site committee decided on one hundred acres here in Layton. We got options on the land: there were three owners, but one had already verbally committed to sell his property. He went ahead and signed the agreement but he put a line in there that said, “This is null and void in case the state of Utah buys our property during the year.” I don’t remember what year it was, but there wasn’t much money available to be buying the land and building the buildings and so forth. We had to get a million dollars for this owner. It was one hundred acres and we were paying thirty-five thousand dollars an acre, so that total price was three and a half million dollars, but we needed a million dollars to start. We went through the process of trying to get a million dollars from the appropriations committee on facilities and we just couldn’t do it; we didn’t have enough support. People asked why we wanted another campus. They said, “We don’t have enough money to take care of the campuses we have.” Oh…it was 1994. It was the year that I was leaving the senate after forty-two years. The leadership of both houses really liked me but they knew I was passionate about this million dollars. I wanted to get this before I left the senate. What happened was that the appropriations bill passed three days before the session adjourned, but in the appropriations bill, they put in an estimate of so much money that they might have to fund bills that are in the process of going through. It assumed that all the bills would go through and require money—not all bills are money bills, but some are. So they put in this appropriations bill that passed, so much money for the bills that were going to go through. At the end of 50 the third day, there was about ten or fifteen minutes before they adjourned and they passed what they call a cleanup bill, it’s a lot of minor items. Well, the leadership found out that there was just barely over a million dollars that they had set aside in the appropriations bill three days before to pay for the money bills in hopes that they’d go through. So they had this million dollars that was not committed and they’d told me that the only way they could give me any money for the campus up here in Layton was if there was enough money left over. I don’t recall that ever happening before. In the past, that money just reverted back as surplus. Well, that bill hit the house about ten or fifteen minutes before they adjourned, and here was a million dollars for this campus. Why somebody didn’t get up and say, “Just a minute, you’re starting a university and if you appropriate this million dollars, you’re bound to have to pay two and a half million dollars for the rest of it.” That was never brought out. This was the cleanup bill—they don’t even read it. They just put it before them, “This is the cleanup bill, all those in favor say aye.” That’s how we got the institution here in Layton. RL: So they passed the bill and Weber cleaned up. HB: So we got the million dollars to buy the land. That meant that the state was bound: before they could do anything, they had to appropriate the two and a half million dollars for next year. I regard that as a miracle. I have never known of any million-dollar appropriations in a cleanup bill. To my dying day, I’ll never know how we got that to go through. Had we not gotten that, we would have lost that site and I don’t know if we could have ever gotten the enthusiasm for another. 51 When you look at that hundred acres, you have to be grateful nobody read the bill. RL: It’s paid off, hasn’t it? HB: Oh yes, and now we’re going to get the second building. ROH: Who did you work with on campus? HB: I worked with the president very closely. I also worked with Richard Myers, he was head of the Board of Trustees. The three of us worked very closely. Another thing that I got very passionate about was Antelope State Park. My friend, Wayne Winegar, was president of the Davis County Commission, along with Doc Reese and Glen Flint. We’d tried for years to get the Legislature to appropriate funds for a road across the causeway, but it was too expensive: fifteen million dollars. The Legislature would not buy it. Remember, fifteen million dollars back then was at least thirty million dollars now. It’s not small change. So, Wayne Winegar was talking to Dale Smedley one day and he said, “What can we do to get this road over there?” Dale Smedley was a contractor and a good friend of mine, and he said, “Wayne, just start digging.” Wayne said, “What do you mean?” RL: You talked about some of your victories, were there disappointments? HB: The biggest disappointment I had was that I wanted to buy The Deseret Land and Livestock property. There’s a two hundred thousand dollar ranch that was available up in Rich County. I was interested in the state buying it because it would provide considerable recreational land for camping and so forth. About a third of it was forest; the other two-thirds were ranch land. I was able to convince 52 the ranchers up there in Rich County that we weren’t taking away their ranches, but that I was interested primarily in the forest land. So when the bill passed the senate, the Farm Bureau started putting out advertising on the radio that this would be a terrible thing and urged the House to defeat it. It lost by two votes. That was my greatest heartbreak in my legislative experience. I enjoyed working under six governors. I worked under J. Bracken Lee, then George Dewey Clyde, then Cal Rampton for twelve years; under his administration I was president of the senate. After those twelve years, there was Governor Matheson for eight years. So we had twenty years under democratic administration. Then there was Norm Bangerter, he lost his wife recently. All six of those men were great governors. People ask me, “Which do you think was the best governor?” My answer is, “Of all the governors, Mike Leavitt is the best golfer.” To me, none of them were superior to any of the others. They all made significant contributions. In 1967, I became president of the senate. That was a very interesting experience. People don’t understand how those offices are elected. It’s an entirely different experience. This is when the members of the senate have what they call a caucus after the normal election to see what party controls the senate. In 1965, Cal Rampton was elected and as a result, both houses of the Legislature were controlled by the democrats. But during that two-year period, there were a lot of tax increases. Looking back, I have to say that some of those taxes really were necessary and Cal Rampton had the courage to ask the Legislature to pass some of these tax increases. It needed to be done, the 53 schools needed it and so forth, but of course, the people didn’t like it very well. Two years later, we had a landslide movement towards the Republicans. In 1965, we had around fifteen Democrats in the senate and thirteen Republican. Two years later we had twenty-three Republican senators and only five Democratic senators. The same happened in the House. It was overwhelmingly Republican and it was during that period that I was elected president of the senate. Cal and I worked very closely During my second term, the House leadership was Democratic. I was one of sixteen legislative leaders who were given a special award by Hubert Humphrey, who was vice president of the United States. I think the reason I was given the award was because during my second term, the Democrats controlled the house, the Republicans controlled the senate, and the governor was Democrat. We were able to work well together; we didn’t become personal in our disagreements. We did have disagreements but it was on a level that was tolerable. I think more or less it was a message saying, “Here’s a good example of how a government can run when one section is controlled by one party and one by the other party.” I was one of sixteen legislative leaders throughout the country that was given that award. I appreciated it very much. RL: It’s an example that if you have commitment and integrity in service, it doesn’t really matter what party you are; it’s about getting the job done for the people. HB: That’s right. I’ve always taken the position that even if the governor is from the opposite party, if he has a good idea, then embrace it. I think you’ll win more votes that way than if you try to find fault with everything the opposite party 54 brings up. In most cases, there are a lot of good points that the opposite party can bring up. The main thing is: work for the good of the state. Whatever is the best for the state, put that first and forget about politics. You’re in there doing whatever is best for the state of Utah, forget about everything else. RL: So your commitment was to service, rather than to a political party. HB: That’s right. RL: What initiated that first commitment to politics and public service? HB: I don’t know. I think most people would like to be involved in politics. It’s a way of getting involved in making things happen, being part of a movement instead of asking others to do it. I think we all have the feeling that we’d like to be involved in some way. Being in politics is a great experience. I enjoyed it tremendously and met many great people because of it. When I look back on my life, if I were to take the politics out of it, my life would be considerably less exciting. It’s been a great experience. I encourage people not to be afraid. Even if they might lose, I encourage them to try. My son, the other day, was elected by the delegate to fill an unexpired position in the state legislature. He’s a doctor. I said, “Stewart, you can’t afford to be in the legislature; you’re too busy.” Why would he do something like that? It’s something inside of him. We want to be involved in public service. It’s going to cost him financially but he’s willing to do it; I think he’s seen how interested I’ve been in politics and the satisfaction that I’ve gotten out of being involved in things that are going on and improving the state; like when I look back at the Weber campus and think, “Hey, I had a part in that.” Of course, my great love was education. I was co-chairman of the education committee. I just loved 55 working for the schools. I loved the school teachers and what they have done. There’s no more noble a profession than being a school teacher and affecting the lives of young people. I’ve fought for everything I could in order to get money for education. Being a teacher is something that is far more important than being in politics. You’re changing the lives of people. RL: It certainly sounds like Davis County has benefited from your involvement in business and politics. Certainly, Weber State owes you a debt of gratitude; you’ve made a big difference in the way Weber has developed. HB: I just happened to be in the right spot at the right time so that I could do something. I think if there was somebody else, they probably would have done the same thing. RL: You’re no longer in the Legislature or on the Appropriations Committee, yet you’ve stayed involved with Weber State. HB: It’s a great school. I have a picture in my office of my mother on the Weber State faculty. I see it every day. RL: You think she’s been guiding you over the years? HB: I think she’d be very proud. I set up a scholarship at Weber State under her name. With that scholarship, we’re able to help eight or nine students get through college every year. I make contributions to the Utah State Business School, but my main contribution every year is to Weber State. I give Weber more money every year than all of the others put together. ROH: Why is that? 56 HB: Because I love Weber State. I wouldn’t say that to the president of Utah State. Just today, Dave Anderson, who runs the botanical gardens that are under Utah State, came and said, “On the seventeenth of this month, we’re honoring Senator Bennett. The president of Utah State will be there and we want you to give a few remarks concerning the senator.” ROH: Which botanical gardens? HB: The ones here in Davis County. They have a wetlands building that they’re dedicating; I’m supposed to be there to give remarks. So I’m still involved in Utah State; it’s still my school, but I have a special relationship with Weber State University. RL: So there is a little part of you that bleeds purple. HB: Yes, there’s more than a part of me that bleeds purple. RL: Could you tell the story about building the road to nowhere. As I understand it, Utah didn’t even own Antelope Island at the time. HB: They didn’t even own a square inch. RL: Do you remember the year? HB: I think it was about 1965 or 1967. What a great story. The bravery and courage of two or three men—not me, I didn’t get involved until later. Wayne Winegar was chairman of the Board of Commissioners in Davis County and then Doug Smith and Glenn Flint were the other commissioners. Then there was a guy named Dale Smedley, who was a contractor. Well, Wayne had a passion, as did many of us in Davis County: we wanted to get out to Antelope Island. We wanted to make it into some kind of recreational spot. It was the only place in the area that had a 57 beach where it was deep enough to swim in the Great Salt Lake. But we didn’t own the island. RL: Who owned the island at the time? HB: It had two owners. The Bamberger family owned it first. While the Bamberger family owned it we were able to buy the first 2,000 acres on the north end, but now I’m getting ahead of myself. I want to explain how we got it, first. It wasn’t a question of trying to buy the land. The question was, “How do you get to it?” The state engineers told us it would probably cost $15 million to build a road to the island. The Legislature would never appropriate $15 million. And that was only the road, that didn’t include buying the island. Well, Wayne and his two commissioners and Dale Smedley were determined that something ought to be done. Wayne and Dale were talking one day and Wayne said, “Dale, do you have any idea how we could get out there to the island?” Dale made this remark: “Just start digging.” Wayne said, “What do you mean?” Dale said, “Get a couple of backhoes on either side, and dig up that muck and head toward the island.” That’s exactly what they did. They borrowed a backhoe from Hill Field, which was done quietly, and every city except one— Wayne would never tell me the city that didn’t cooperate—but every other city provided some kind of equipment to help. They started digging up this muck that was gooey and went down two or three feet and they put it in the center and just headed out toward the island. They went out five and a half miles and couldn’t go any further because the water was too deep. The governor said, “That road will never hold up in a storm.” That was George Dewey Clyde; he was an engineer. 58 Dale and Wayne were ridiculed for building a road out of that muck to get to the island. And it didn’t go anywhere. They found out afterwards that there’s enough salt in that muck that the base was as good as if it was all gravel, but nobody knew about it at the time. They did this all in one winter; the road crew in Davis County wasn’t very busy during that time. Other than removing snow from the roads, Wayne told me that they mostly just sat around waiting for something to do. So Wayne put them to work out there with volunteers. When the road survived the winter without washing away, I got involved. I took the lead on working with the Legislature. I worked with Governor Cal Rampton to get $5 million to finish the other one and a half miles, including a bridge over the river, and we got to the island. Once we got there, we made arrangements with the Bamberger family to buy 2,000 acres and the road finally had a home. A few years later, the Bamberger family sold the island to the Anschutz Corporation, which is a company near Evanston, Wyoming. When we decided we wanted to buy the whole island, we had to negotiate with them; when we finally bought it, we paid about $5 million. That’s how we got the island. But the miracle was the fact that these men started on their own, building that road in the muck going out towards the island knowing that we had no land out there. That’s quite a story. RL: It is quite a story. The island is a treasure. HB: The island is so beautiful and it would never have happened if not for the courage of those four men. I was honored by the county last year and I took Wayne Winegar as my guest. After they bestowed the honor, I got up to say a 59 few words and what I said was about Wayne Winegar to let him know how much we appreciate Antelope Island. I said that whenever I look at Antelope Island, I can’t help but think of the people like Wayne Winegar and Dale Smedley. RL: And that was happening at about the time you started in the Legislature? HB: No, I started in the Legislature in ’53 and this happened fifteen or sixteen years later. RL: As you were talking, you mentioned a few of the governors you worked with. I understand you’ve served under more governors than anybody else. HB: I’ve served as a legislator under six governors. I started under J. Bracken Lee, then George Dewey Clyde, Cal Rampton, Scott Matheson, Norm Bangerter; I retired after two years under Mike Leavitt. They were all great governors— whether they were Democrat or Republican. I served under two governors who served a total of twenty years, that would be Scott Matheson, who served eight years, and Cal Rampton, who served twelve years; then I had another twenty-two years under Republican governors. RL: At that time, Utah was considered a Democratic state. HB: Under Scott Matheson and Cal Rampton, I would say that the Legislature was controlled by the Democratic Party, but most of the time the houses were controlled by the Republicans. In Davis County, at that time, thirty or forty percent were Democrat. Now, I think it’s more Republican. RL: What brought the change? HB: I think the National Democratic Party has gotten a little away from what has, traditionally, been the Democratic Party in Utah. The Democratic Party in Utah, 60 during my time, was a great party. It was a party that represented a lot of the people. I think, nationally, they became more liberal than the Democratic Party in Utah. That’s my opinion. Some of our finest legislators have been Democrats. I worked in the Legislature when the Democratic Party controlled the Senate and I was the assistant minority leader. I really had great years working in the Legislature and working with members of both parties. RL: And all of the service that you put in for the state and for Davis County has to have set a really great example for your children. HB: I hope so. RL: You mentioned in an earlier conversation that when you came home from the war you met your daughter for the first time. HB: My wife would send pictures, but she was about a year old when I got back. RL: What was her name? HB: Jesselie. RL: How long after you got back did you have your second child? HB: Two years. Heidi was born in 1947. Our third child was born in 1949; that was Haven Jr. He’s a plastic surgeon in Maryland now. Our fourth child is Duncan Barlow; he’s in business with me. Then there’s Stewart, who is a doctor and is now a representative in the Legislature, which I’m really pleased about. He’s now Representative Barlow, which I was back in 1953 to 1956. RL: So here we are sixty years later and he’s following in his father’s footsteps. HB: I’m very pleased. 61 RL: So you have two sons that are physicians and one that was in the business with you. Did your daughters have careers? HB: They both started out being school teachers. Jesselie was a teacher at Layton High and at Davis High. Heidi did the same. RL: Where did your children get their educations? HB: Jesselie and Heidi from the University of Utah. Haven, my oldest son, graduated from Utah State University. Duncan didn’t graduate but he went to Utah State University. Stewart graduated from the University of Utah. Rachel attended Weber. Rachel works for the Davis County School District in Clearfield. RL: And all of them grew up in the family home? That house was quite a purchase, wasn’t it? HB: That house was the old Knowlton house. I bought the old home in 1948 and that’s where we raised our family. In 1970, I built an addition onto it—a new kitchen and a new bedroom and a large living room. Only Rachel was still at home at that point. The old house had four bedrooms on the second floor and then we made two rooms up in the attic, so each kid had their own room, which is really nice. RL: Tell us a little about your grandchildren. HB: I have twenty-nine grandchildren. I don’t know the latest count on my great-grandchildren, but I think it’s about sixteen. RL: You mentioned you all get together in Sun Valley. HB: Every year we get together as a family. We’ve been doing it for seventeen years. We started getting together at the fiftieth wedding anniversary of my wife and I. 62 We were married on Thanksgiving Day, so we would get together on Thanksgiving. We tried to get together in Sun Valley or down in St. George. For three days we have dinner every night and tell stories and have a little program. All the cousins get to know each other, many of whom haven’t seen each other since last year. The family pays for dinner and lodging, so each family only has to get there on their own. If any had trouble financially, I’m sure their grandpa would help them. I want the whole family to know that rather than miss a get-together, I’ll help them and make sure they’re there. RL: That’s wonderful. You’ve also told us about your high school years and your time in the war and your years in the Legislature. It’s been a long, fulfilling life, hasn’t it? HB: It really has. This coming January will be my ninetieth birthday. Rumor has it that they’re going to have a birthday party for me. Can I tell you something? I never did have a birthday party until I was married. When I was a youngster, I never had a birthday party. After I was married, Bonnie Rae had my first birthday party. RL: Did your stepmother not come from a tradition of having birthday parties? HB: She came from Denmark and their customs would be different from ours. But evidently it didn’t bother me; I think if it did, I would have asked for one. When Bonnie Rae found out I’d never had a birthday party, she was surprised. She had one every year in her family. This birthday party for my ninetieth birthday will be the biggest party of all. Well, I’ve got to live another month still, you know. I’d better make sure I make it. 63 RL: It seems to me that as you’ve told us your stories, sometimes you met goals and sometimes you changed your plans— HB: Oh yes. I haven’t always been successful in all I wanted to do. But you know, that’s not the big thing. The big thing is that you always try to do something that’s worthwhile. Even when you’re not successful, that gives you the tools and stamina to maybe take on something you may not have wanted to try. Even if you fail, you’ve gained something. RL: I wasn’t thinking of that as a failure. I think if you started off on one path and recognized that you needed to change, that was a big success in itself. HB: Oh yes. The worst thing a person can do is nothing. If you’re at least doing something and you’re on the wrong path, you can make changes. RL: Do you feel like you’ve achieved all that you wanted to? HB: Not all. As I look back on my life, I’m very grateful that I have had the opportunity to do what I have done. I feel like I was in the right spot at the right time. If somebody else was in my place, they probably would have done the same thing. I think most people want to be in public office because they feel like they can do something if they are in office, otherwise they feel like they’re bystanders relying on somebody else. I appreciate my forty-two years in the Legislature because it gave me the opportunity to do things I would never have been able to do. RL: Certainly Weber State has benefited from that. HB: I’ve benefited, too, from my relationship here. It’s been a great relationship between me and this school. 64 RL: It sounds as though you reached the goals you wanted to reach and that you helped your children reach their goals and be successful. In looking to the future, for them, is there advice that you’d like to pass on to your children? HB: I would say just be a good husband or a good mother and help people that are in need. Be an example and get all the education you can. A lack of education keeps so many people from doing what they would like to do. Don’t be afraid of disappointment because there are disappointing things that happen—it’s part of life. Just be someone I’d be proud of—they know what that would be. RL: You’ve spoken of people in your past who helped instill the value of service in you. It seems that the professions your children have entered are service-oriented. HB: I’ve been very fortunate in the material things of this life. I’ve been fortunate to be able to help out other people, too. It’s been a great life. I’ve been involved in the Church all through my life and I hope my children and grandchildren will be active. RL: Since our last interview, the Davis Chamber of Commerce honored you. Will you tell us a little about that? HB: I was given their special award, which I appreciate very much. It was a real honor. I’ve been very supportive of what Davis County needs. I think we’ve done well. We now have a campus of higher education—the Weber State campus is up to about 3,500 students and we’re building a second building. I envision a day when we have ten or fifteen thousand students there. We also have the Applied Technology School in Kaysville, which I’ve been a part of. We have around 8,500 65 students there learning skills. Those are two of my most choice accomplishments. A lot of people were involved and I am happy that I was involved with them and a part of that group. RL: You mentioned earlier that you had a story about cows that you wanted to share. HB: The story about taking my cow through the house. When I was a youngster, I raised pigs and calves. I was a member of the Future Farmers of Utah when I was in high school. I think I was probably a freshman when I had a steer that I was feeding because I wanted it to win a ribbon at the North Salt Lake Stock Show. A number of us kids would take our animals down to be judged and we would get maybe ten cents per pound more than what we normally would if we just sold them. So one day I cleaned the steer up and got the halter on it and I was so proud of it. I decided that I would take the animal up the front steps and I opened the front door and took the animal right through the house. I got about half-way through when my mother saw it and screamed. She said, “Haven, get that animal out of this house!” I thought it was fun, but my mother didn’t. ROH: Why did you take the calf in the house? HB: It was so tame that I just figured I could take it right into the house without a problem. You know how kids are. Occasionally, I did some funny things and why I did, I don’t know. You’d have to understand, my mother was meticulous; she was Danish and she kept that house spotless. I guess, maybe, since I had just gotten through washing and cleaning that steer my reasoning was that the animal was just as clean as the house. Anyway, it turned out okay. 66 I had a great childhood. I grew up on a farm and you had to work hard. I always credit my dad with helping out financially in my life. He would never give us any money unless we earned it. We got twenty-five cents per week for doing work around the farm—cleaning chicken coups or cleaning eggs or milking cows. I also had paper route. Work was just part of my life. I remember when I was in the first grade, the school was about a half mile from where my dad worked and on more than one occasion I’d walk up there during my meal time. When my dad got through talking with customers, I’d ask him if I could have a nickel. On many occasions, my dad would say, “I’m sorry, son, I just don’t have a nickel on me.” Sometimes he would give me a nickel, but that was when I was really small. Other than that, nothing was handed to us. If we wanted something, then we had to do something. My father and mother instilled in me a work ethic. I don’t think I instilled it quite as much in my kids, but they’ve all turned out really well. I have not been disappointed in any of my grandkids, either. To my grandchildren: Remember that after I’m gone—the last words I said about you were that I’m not disappointed in any of you. I’ll be watching. RL: Well Haven, it’s been delightful spending this time talking with you and hearing your stories. HB: I’ve enjoyed both of you. This has been interesting. Thank you for doing what you’re doing for me. RL: You have created a legacy to be very proud of. There are a lot of citizens of Utah who have benefitted from your hard work. 67 HB: It’s because there have been a lot of people who have taught me and been a part of my life. Great teachers influenced me—I have great admiration for people who teach school because they influence people’s lives. I tell school teachers, “When it’s your time to go, you’ll probably have more friends than people in any other profession because of what you’ve done for the lives of children. They’ll remember you.” My athletic coaches had a great impact on me, too. They taught me to work with a team. That’s why I think sports are so important. When you go through life, you have to work as a team if you want to be successful. That’s one of the indirect benefits of sports. RL: We are more than grateful for the time you’ve taken to talk to us about your recollections of different aspects of your life. This will certainly be a part of Stewart Library’s collection, but it will also be available to many others throughout Utah and I think I am speaking on behalf of everyone when I say thank you for your service and your commitment. HB: That’s nice, but I’m the one who’s benefited the most. RL: Thank you.