Oral History Program Elaine D’Agnillo Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 29 April 2019 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Elaine D’Agnillo Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 29 April 2019 Copyright © 2022 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 Beyond Suffrage Project was initiated to examine the impact women have had on northern Utah. Weber State University explored and documented women past and present who have influenced the history of the community, the development of education, and are bringing the area forward for the next generation. The project looked at how the 19th Amendment gave women a voice and representation, and was the catalyst for the way women became involved in the progress of the local area. The project examines the 50 years (1870-1920) before the amendment, the decades to follow and how women are making history today. ____________________________________ 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: D’Agnillo, Elaine, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 29 April 2019, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Elaine D’Agnillo 29 April 2019 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Elaine D’Agnillo, conducted on April 29, 2019, in her home in Pleasant View, Utah, by Lorrie Rands. Elaine discusses her life, her memories, and the impact of the 19th Amendment. Erika Sisneros-Wood, the video technician, is also present during this interview. LR: Today is April 29, 2019. We are in the home of Elaine D’Agnillo. Is that Italian? ED: It is. LR: My family is Italian, so I can appreciate that. We are in Pleasant View, and it’s about 10:30 in the morning. My name is Lorrie Rands and Erika Sisneros-Wood is with me as well. Okay, thank you Elaine for your time and your willingness to do this. I really do appreciate it. Let’s start with when and where you were born. ED: I was born here in Ogden, Utah, on March 9, 1944. LR: Do you know which hospital? ED: The old Dee Hospital. LR: Okay, the one on 24th. ED: The one that was on 24th and Harrison, yes. LR: Okay, so you were born right there towards the end of World War II, how many siblings do you have? ED: I had five sisters and one brother. 2 LR: Okay, that poor man. ED: Well, he was next to the last, so it wasn’t all that bad for him. We were all very spread apart, big age differences, like twenty years from the oldest to the youngest. LR: Where do you fall? ED: I am number three. LR: Okay, and where did you grow up in Ogden? ED: Out on what was Wilson Lane, west Weber border. It was out in the country. LR: I have no idea where that is. ED: Rural Weber County. LR: Okay, did you grow up on a farm? ED: No, it was a farming area, but there was some property, maybe I’d say a half acre, that our house was on. The houses were not close together. We had one close neighbor. Other than that, it was old rural Weber County. LR: What did your father do? ED: My father was a locomotive engineer for Southern Pacific Railroad. LR: So he was gone a lot? ED: Yes, his run was from here to Carlin, Nevada. Yeah, there were no set hours. It was just when he got the phone call, he left. Sometimes we celebrated 3 Christmas the day before or the day after. Holidays were not traditional in that sense. LR: What did your mother do? ED: She was a housewife. LR: Where did you go to elementary school? ED: Wilson Elementary School. That would be the old highway and 21st Street, the west end of 21st Street. There’s a little part of it that’s still standing there, but the building itself is gone. LR: How far away from the school did you live? ED: Oh my gosh, it was probably five miles give or take. We took the bus. It was probably a block and a half from our house to where we caught the bus. It was on a rural country road. No sidewalks. LR: What are some of your greatest memories of growing up and going to elementary school? ED: Utah is my punishment, it’s not my reward. LR: Okay, now I’m curious, if you are willing to share it. ED: Well, my father was born in New Jersey. He went to school in Philadelphia. My mother was from Franklin, Idaho and she was going to the University of Utah and living at the Lion House in Salt Lake. My father was stationed at Fort Douglas and they met there. They married and then they moved back to New Jersey. My 4 two older sisters were both born in New Jersey and they moved back to Utah just prior to my birth. I’m not a desert person. I love the green and please give me the humidity where you don’t look like you’ve been freeze dried when you’re fifty. In fact, when we moved back here from Pittsburgh, IHC had an ad on the radio, and I was driving to work in Salt Lake, talking about diversity and it said, “I live in the mountains where it’s lush and green. My brother lives out on the desert where it’s so flat and barren and you can watch your dog run away for three days.” I thought, “That is so true here because we can see planes land at the SLC airport from our house. I like the trees, I like the green, east of the Mississippi works really well, north or south. Elementary school was a good experience. There’s a good group of us that try and get together at least once a year. One of the fellows, he and I shared the same birthdate and we still keep in touch, either text or a phone call on our birthday. In fact, Jerry and Vickie Moyes are very good friends. We didn’t go to the same elementary, but we went to Wahlquist Junior High and that’s where we became friends, and we were very close friends all through school and after. We still keep in touch and see them. And they are part of that group. I had no problems with school. I enjoyed school, elementary, junior high, and high school. It was a good experience and like I said, I still have good memories and relationships with quite a number of them that we went to school with. LR: You mentioned your junior high, what school was that again? 5 ED: Wahlquist. LR: Wahlquist, is that around still? ED: They tore it down a year ago. Oh, it was there forever. They built the new one, it’s right on the Farr West, Plain City boundary. I’m not sure if they still call it Wahlquist. I think that they do. LR: Did you live in the same place all through your growing up? ED: When I was in high school, my parents built a new home in North Ogden so then we moved to North Ogden. LR: Okay, so where did you end up going to high school then? ED: Weber High. The boundaries were all still the same so that didn’t impact anything. It was a good school experience. I had some incredibly good teachers. One chemistry teacher, Hal Goringe, he was too bright to teach in high school. He was so incredibly smart. It was interesting and one of the fellows in the chemistry class, we had gone to school from elementary on, and he had been out in first grade a good part of the year with rheumatic fever. His grandmother tutored him while he was out. It was like she really brought out the high I.Q. level that he had. He was just a very, very intelligent guy. He got me through chemistry. School was good, I enjoyed it. LR: As a young girl, what women did you look up to? ED: You know what? This is not good. Women are their own worst enemies. LR: Yeah, I agree with that. 6 ED: I had better experiences with male teachers in school, and I’ve always had a respect for men. There are a few women now and then, but there was not any woman that stood out. LR: Not like a grandmother? ED: My father was an only child. His mother died when he was five, and his step-mother was quite a tyrant. It was as bad to be early coming home as it was late. He stood outside the door and waited until it was exactly the time before he’d go in. It was very interesting. My grandfather Mckeen died before I was born, so I did not know him, and she died when I was in junior high but it was never a close relationship. My mother and I, no way. I used to tell her, “I am a McKeen, one-hundred percent. I am my father’s daughter.” My mother could intimidate people, she would read the dictionary so that she could pick out a word and correct you on the word. It was very intimidating to most and to the children. I’m the black sheep. LR: Okay. I find that term “black sheep” interesting, because I look around and we might have different ideas of what black sheep means because I’m just seeing what you surround yourself with. I don’t see that. ED: This happens in a lot of families. There are three of us that are very close and the other two are just way out there on the fringes. With the three of us, a lot of it, eighty percent of it goes back to my mother, how she treated children. I was just never—I’m not intimidated by people. I’ve been very lucky with that fact. 7 LR: Do you think that’s something that you might have learned from your mother, to not be intimidated by people? ED: I wouldn’t give her credit for that. It was just what I saw and disliked about her. In fact, I told my daughter one time, “If I ever do anything like your grandmother, kick me in the butt.” LR: I know we talked a little bit on the phone about some of the individuals that you grew up around, one of them being Olene Walker. What are some of your memories of growing up close to her family? ED: Like I said, her younger sister, Karen, and I did 4-H together. Nina, her mother, was the leader for the two of us. Her father, T.O. Smith, was just a very gentle man. Her brothers, I just knew them, and the real tragedy was when her two brothers were killed in the plane crash with their wives. They were hard workers, they had a farm, and they were both educators. Nina was a teacher and T.O. of course became a school superintendent. I don’t know, it was just being in the country—and my children experienced this because they grew up in what’s West Haven now, but it was Kanesville then—you just didn’t have close neighbors, so kids learned to play and entertain themselves. It was very different. You went to school and you associated with people when you are at school and that was it. In fact, there’s a gal, and she and I became very good friends, and she lived up the street. But until we went to elementary school, I didn’t know that she existed. This is the cluster of Utah that I grew up in. They were Catholic and we were not, and in a rural community, there was nothing else to connect you. So it was quite different than suburban. My first husband, when we were looking for a house and 8 had thought, “I’m going to go to the city.” It was such a shock and there was no way he was going to live in the city. It was out to the country, and I thought, “Are you kidding me?” LR: So as you were growing up, were you encouraged to pursue an education? To continue after high school? ED: No, it was just one of those things that you did. I married right out of high school and so I didn’t go to school until after my first husband died, then I went to Weber. But no, I went and I got a job and I worked, and that was what you did. LR: You said you married right out of high school. What year did you graduate from high school? ED: 1962. LR: Okay, what are some of your memories about that year? ED: Nothing really. I mean, that’s been so long. LR: I know. I might actually have my years wrong. I was thinking that was the year that Kennedy was assassinated. ED: No. LR: That was 1963 then. ED: Yeah. Well, we bought our house in 1962 and moved and so that was interesting. Before we bought our house, we lived in an apartment up on 21st Street, just above Adams. I still drive by it every now and then. That was another thing that shocked me, we didn’t have a phone in the apartment. It had a bathtub 9 that, I mean, it was the greatest bathtub, and it was before the tubs that you see now that everybody wants. But anyway, there was a kitchen, a living room, and a bathroom, and a murphy bed in the living room that folded down. I periodically will drive by 21st street and just think. The apartment building, there were four apartments in it and they all faced the street. There were two apartments that were up a few steps, maybe ten steps, and the two below, they were a semi-basement, a half and half. It’s interesting, but then like I said, we bought our house and moved out. We really had the two children, and I didn’t go to work until Jody went to kindergarten and she was the oldest. LR: What was your husband’s name? ED: Kent Vanderwood. LR: So you were married in 1962, was he from Ogden as well? ED: He was from North Ogden. LR: How did you meet him? ED: High school, he was two years older. A fellow that was a friend that lived west of us when we lived out in Wilson, they were good friends and we were friends. I met him through that but also through high school. LR: Okay, so you said that you didn’t start working until your oldest was in kindergarten or your youngest? ED: The oldest. LR: Okay, why did you start? What was your first job? 10 ED: My first job was for Empire Paper Company, which doesn’t exist anymore. Well, I take that back. My first job was at the IRS—how could I forget that? I worked there long enough to accrue three days of leave to go find another job. It was so terrible. They had quotas that you had to fill, and it was key punch. You were doing key punch with the tax returns, and you could get your quota done by half-day. So then everybody, especially with some of the interesting tax returns, we would pass them around and read them. It’s interesting what you remember. They were grouped together, a lot of them from California where they had the fires, with huge itemized deductions because of the fires. There was one that we almost wore it out passing it around in the group. I’m not kidding, it was this thick [indicating a size with fingers]. LR: Wow. ED: But he had listed everything that had been destroyed in the house. Where he ever got the information, even to the plants in the yard, amazing. Then the morbid ones, which were suicides, would come through in groups, and you know, the death certificates. That was the only thing that kept you sane was reading the tax returns. I have no sympathy for anybody who works for the IRS. If you weren’t smart enough to go find something else, you deserved to be there. LR: Yeah, so you were there, it doesn’t sound like for very long. ED: I think it was like four months that I was there and then I worked for Empire Paper. LR: Okay, and what did you do at Empire Paper? 11 ED: It was secretarial. LR: Was there ever an opportunity to do anything different besides secretary work there? ED: It was a very small company, there was a sales crew of three guys, and the owner Willard Pingree, and there was one other gal that worked in the office with me. We just answered the phones and did what used to be secretarial work. It has changed dramatically since then, and I had an opportunity to leave there and go to work for a CPA, Larry Patane. I did that and met some very interesting people working for him. I’m trying to think, his father-in-law, who was the architect in Ogden that did Ogden High School, I’m missing his name now. LR: Les Hodgson. ED: Yes, Hodgson was his father-in-law and Larry was from the Bronx in New York. It was just interesting, and like I said, some very interesting clients. LR: What did you do for him? ED: Just secretarial work. LR: As you were in the workforce, did you ever experience any resistance or prejudice because you were a woman? ED: You’ve got to be kidding me. No. That was the real world back then. No, I loved working. Women, you set the tone for the work environment. I preferred working with men and my final job was at Sinclair Oil, and I worked there for twenty-five years. I worked for Earl Holdings, number two man Executive Vice President of 12 Operations, Kevin Brown. He was in charge of the three refineries, the pipelines, the trucking, and environmental. Eighty-five percent of the people that I worked with were men. Forget the women, they were, no. LR: So you preferred working with men. ED: Oh absolutely, men, you knew where you stood. “This is what your job is, this is what I want from you, this what I’m going to do,” and it worked wonderfully. Even the pipe liners and the refiners, they could be some pretty rough guys, never ever were they not polite. Never had a problem. In fact, there are a number of them that I still keep in touch with. The Holdings were incredibly great people and Sinclair was a great company to work for. LR: Going back to the CPA that you worked for, Larry Patane, you mentioned that you saw a lot of clients come through there. Is there anyone that just stands out that you are willing to talk about? ED: Should I? LR: Please. If you don’t like it, we will just take it out. ED: Dean Perkins. Dean was a great guy, but Larry was always so nervous when he and his wife Janet were coming up to the office, because you never knew what was going to come out of Janet’s mouth. It was usually shock therapy. There was another fellow, Gary Willey, who was quite prominent with some things here in Ogden. Gary had gotten into problems with reporting/paying his taxes and Larry had done a lot of work for him on that. Gary owed him a lot of money, and when I say a lot of money, back then it was a couple of thousand dollars. Gary 13 would come in and he would have a $50 bill all folded up in this tiny cube and he’d throw it on Larry’s desk, saying, “Here’s some of what I owe you.” John Eccles. That was an interesting couple. LR: You mean John and Vera? ED: Yes. LR: Okay. I processed their collection, so I understand a little bit about what you mean. ED: It was just, Larry had done the books for Camera Land, John’s business, for a long time, and Vera worked for him. One day, they came in—and Larry was just an interesting guy. He had the best wardrobe in Ogden that Fred M. Nye’s could sale, I mean, he was an incredible dresser. But anyway, they were in his office, and when they left Larry came out and he said, “Vera’s pregnant!” and nobody knew that they were married. In fact, he knew that John was still married to Shirley. He said that they had said, “Well, C. Sumpter Logan,” who used to be the pastor at the Episcopal Church here, he was in Reno at that time and they had gone to Reno. He had married them in Reno, but John’s divorce was not final. It was just interesting. LR: You were associated with a lot of interesting people throughout Ogden, and that was just working for Larry Patane? ED: Yes. And I worked at Browning Arms, and that was an interesting group there. LR: What did you do at Browning Arms? 14 ED: I worked for Dick Beckstead, who was over the accounting, and Gordon Barney who was a funny, funny guy. He was another one who you just never knew what was going to get his attention. There was an open area that had quite a few desks in it, and there was this one gal that worked in the office, and he came in one day looking for her, and somebody said, “No, she’s home in bed with the flu.” He said, “She’s home in bed with who?” and he was very serious. But just some very neat people and the very difference in the two Browning sons, yeah. LR: Matt and Mariner? ED: No. I’m trying to think of the one that lived up in the northwest. What was his name? LR: I can only think of Val, Matt, and Mariner. ED: It was Bruce that lived in the Northwest and John Val that was here. LR: Val, the father, and John Val were the two that were really involved with the business. ED: Right. Then it was Bruce, because he was not. In fact, only when they had a board meeting would you ever see him. His whole outlook on life was totally different than theirs. But yeah, that was a fun place to work. They had the mink farm then and the hunting dogs. The two guys that managed the dogs and mink would usually come into the office together and the greeting to them was always, “Here comes the head skunk and the head dog.” They were just fun, fun guys too. 15 LR: You say you had two children and both girls? ED: I had one of each. LR: That sounds fun that you have one of each. As you’re working and raising them, if you will, how did you balance your responsibilities between the workplace and home life? ED: You know, it really wasn’t that hard. They were very… my son died when he was thirteen, but living out in the country, you know, they got off the bus and then they came home. They had some chores, we had some animals and that, that they had to do. It wasn’t a problem. It was just everyday life. LR: You mentioned earlier that the one thing that you learned from your mother was to not be like her. How do you think you did then as your role as a mother with your children? ED: My daughter’s brother-in-law died last fall—she was with him at the hospital in Logan the last twenty-four hours of his life, he was comatose. She had called me afterwards, and I took it as a compliment. She said, “You know, one thing that you taught me was you owe your children two things, you owe them roots and wings.” We’ve never lived close since she’s married. I mean, she’s always been in Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, Arkansas, and back here. But we would most everyday, or every couple of days at least, just say, “Hi, how are you? Everything good?” Not long, just a check-in, and we’d see them about every three months. My husband was traveling a lot then, and spending a lot of time in South Carolina. In fact, we had an apartment in Columbia, South Carolina for 16 four years, so we would see them either back there or they would come out here about every three months. We weren’t the babysitters. The grandchildren looked forward to visits from us, we looked forward to visiting with them, we did special things. In fact, the youngest one is twenty-two and we still talk about those special things that we did. It was just a good relationship. LR: I absolutely love that, roots and wings. ED: You do fine if you give that to your children, and that’s what I’ve said. We didn’t live close, but yet we were very close. LR: That makes sense. In the beginning you mentioned that your first husband died. Like I said, if you don’t want to answer any question you just say so. ED: He had a brain injury. A good friend of his who he grew up with had married Dr. Cobabe’s daughter. This was before they had developed Powder Mountain. But anyway, this friend of his had some horses up there on the mountain and the property. My husband had rodeoed and was a calf roper, so we had always had horses and that. Well anyway, they were trying to get these horses rounded up and get them in the corral. They just couldn’t do it on foot, so he had called Kent and asked him if he would bring his horse up and help them, and so he did. There was one horse that they had trouble getting in the corral. He finally got it in, but they couldn’t catch it, so Kent roped it and as the rope went over the horses head, it jumped the pole fence. When it jumped the fence, it broke the pole in half and it came back and it hit my husband right in the forehead. He wound up with meningitis and was in a coma. This was four months after it had 17 happened, and I can remember driving him to the hospital that morning and by the time we had gotten in the car he was in a coma, driving past our cornfield and the corn was up about this high and I thought, “I wonder if he will ever be back to see his field of corn.” That was when they found out that the damage was in the front of the brain, which is the personality, but it had also caused a tear inside his forehead and the spinal fluid was draining out his nose. He had been to the doctor about two days before and he had this runny nose. But they just didn’t know it was the spinal fluid. That was where the meningitis came from. They operated and he could function, but he had seizures. He said it was interesting, he could tell when he was going to have a seizure because he could taste metal in his mouth from the fillings. It was just kind of a pre-warning. He only had a couple of grand mal seizures. But anyway, it was eight years from the time of the injury until he died. It was just a gradual downhill. He wound up committing suicide because he just could not deal, and it gave me a whole different perspective—there is suicide and there is suicide. You shouldn’t have to lose your dignity before you die. That was it, because his personality changed dramatically. LR: How long had you been married? ED: Oh my gosh, well, I was thirty-four when he died. We had married, it was right after I had turned eighteen, so about sixteen years. Yes, because Jodi got her driver’s license shortly after that. No she didn’t, that was after. Anyway. LR: So did your husband do any of the rodeo circuits? 18 ED: Yes, he was a PRCA calf roper. LR: Would you go with him? ED: Yes, that was summer weekends. LR: Was he a professional or more the Rocky Mountain Circuit? ED: It’s PRCA now, it was just RCA (Rodeo Cowboys Association) at that point. He had a very low membership number. He was early. LR: One of the originals. ED: Yeah. So it was interesting LR: This is going to sound terrible, but was he any good? Or was it something that he did for fun? ED: It was more fun and the comradery, the people that he had known for years. He had worked for Rocky, well, it was Utah Power and Light then. So that was his recreation, I’ll say, and he was very good with horses. LR: Would it end up being a family thing, going to these? ED: Yes. In fact, my youngest sister at that time, she’s three years older than my daughter, she liked to go, and pick-up trucks had just one seat, so there were five of us in the truck. The roping can that he kept his ropes in, it was a five-gallon can with the pop top, well, that was over by the door, and that’s what she sat on. We enjoyed it. Like I said, previous lives. 19 LR: Let’s see, talking about previous lives. Do you have any memories of the Women’s Rights movements? I know you were still kind of a young woman in the 1960’s. ED: You know, that’s interesting, I really don’t. The Civil Rights, I remember that very, very well. Lyndon Johnson, when he became president, I really felt that he didn’t get credit for all that he did, as far as Civil Rights. It’s just interesting and maybe it’s just because of living here too, you know it’s a very small world in Utah. LR: Yes, yes it is. Is that what you mean, by living here, we are kind of isolated? ED: The thinking is rather isolated. I am Mormon, but so many of them—it’s a big world on the other side of these mountains and there’s a lot of good things that are occurring and a lot of good people are doing good things. They come from all different backgrounds and all different cultures and religion. After my husband died, I just got a bigger exposure to things. My dad’s family was still on the east coast, what there was of them, so I would spend time back there visiting them and it’s a different world. LR: You think it might have been different if you had been on the other side of the Mississippi during that time? ED: I do. I really do, and the exposure just to so many things. When we lived in Pittsburgh, the diversity there is so different. I miss Pittsburgh terribly. LR: When were you in Pittsburgh? 20 ED: We moved there in 1995. No, wait a minute. We came back in 1995, we moved there in 1993. LR: Okay, by this time you were married again? ED: Yes, I was single from the time my husband died until I remarried. I was single for ten years. LR: Okay, so when you went to Pittsburgh you were still single? ED: No, it was after John and I were married. He worked for Westinghouse. Western Zirconium here and Westinghouse Electric, which doesn’t exist anymore. Westinghouse, the nuclear division. So yes, he was transferred to Pittsburgh. LR: How did you meet John? ED: We went to school together. I’ve known him for years. We didn’t run around together but I knew who he was in high school. I thought he was a real brat because he had a brand new Ford Star Liner, and I thought, “What a spoiled brat.” I told him afterwards, “I didn’t realize how many rows of onions went into that, and tomatoes and all the rest of it. Farming.” LR: So he grew up on a farm? ED: He grew up on a farm in Riverdale. Riverdale Road divided their farm. Where Freeway Mazda was, that was part of their farm. Cutrubus’ bought that from his parents, and we still have the house where he grew up in, his daughter lives in it. LR: So after your first husband died, how did your mothering style change being a single parent? Or did it? 21 ED: You know, it really didn’t. Like I said, my son died just six weeks after his father did. So it was really just my daughter and I. No, it really didn’t. We did things together, that part of our life didn’t change. There were some real—you adjust and things are never the same as they were. She was mature enough and she was working. Staying busy is probably one of the best things that you can do, so we were both involved in things. Then when she graduated, she went up to Utah State. That was probably the biggest adjustment for me. I can remember going into her bedroom, I had done laundry and there was some of her clothes to put in her closet, and thinking, “She’s never going to be back to this.” It was an interesting reality that it’s just me and she’s up there, she’s living her life. ESW: You went to school together, did you guys stay connected the whole time? ED: John and I? ESW: Yeah. Did you run into each other? ED: No, I was Riverdale City recorder, and he was in the volunteer fire department there so we just bumped into each other. Well, a girlfriend of mine from Buffalo, New York, she worked at The Seven Knights Club there on Riverdale road part-time as a bartender. I had stopped in there one night and there was a fellow, Jim Kilburn, who painted and he was looking for a place to hang some of his paintings. It took me a long time to find my final career. I did a number of things, but I was the assistant manager for a number of years at the Ramada Inn in Ogden. They had this big hallway, and he had come in and asked me if maybe he could hang some of his paintings there in the hotel and I said, “Yes, 22 absolutely.” We became just good friends and he gave me one of his paintings for letting him do that. Lo and behold, this night that I stopped over to see Linda at the Seven Knights, he was in there with John. They were good friends. They were both in the fire department there in Riverdale. Jim and I, we were talking and John was kind of on the outside and not part of the conversation, because we were talking about art. But anyway, we just reconnected then and I knew that John was in the fire department, but that was just a Monday night deal. That was how we reconnected. Then it was interesting, because when I worked at Sinclair, I had gotten a phone call one morning and it was from John, and he said that Jim Kilburn had committed suicide up at Snow Basin on one of the chairlifts. He had gotten into one of the chair lifts and shot himself. A couple of people at Sinclair knew about this and I said, “Yeah, I know who it is because I had a connection.” Neat, neat guy. He used to do a lot of the F-16 paintings. Things have changed dramatically in the workforce. Is there such a thing as a professional workforce? I read where one of the stock brokerage firms, they are doing away with the business suits. Women have taken the dress things, and there’s no class to it anymore. Even some of the female news recorders, I mean all of the cleavage, no. The dresses clear up to here, and you sit on the end of the table so you get the exposure. You’re not on the back so you get the exposure, and women, to carry on a conversation, they are loud, the more noise you can make… you have to talk over everybody. It’s like Lynn Richardson… Do you know who he was? LR: The name is familiar. 23 ED: First Security Bank, and Paramount. His wife’s family, Paramount—it used to be Paramount Diary and Paramount Bowl and that. Anyway, Lynn Richardson was First Security forever and ever, and I remember him saying about somebody, “You know, he thinks that if he speaks the loudest he wins the argument even if there’s no context in what he’s saying.” I’m trying to think of who the fellow was. But I thought, “You know, there aren’t conversations anymore. There are very few conversations.” That’s why I say women are their own worst enemies. You are doing a disservice to all of the women that got women the right to vote and did so many things. There are a lot of women who have done a lot of good. A lot of people look up to Eleonore Roosevelt, I don’t care for Eleonore Roosevelt. No. But there are a lot of women that have done great things. LR: Is there a specific reason for your feelings about Eleonore Roosevelt? I’m just curious. ED: Just the whole background to the Roosevelts. I just think that she was way, way overhyped. The Bush women, I have great respect for them, both of them. Barbara Bush was more outspoken than Laura, but yet the way that she did it, it wasn’t loud and obnoxious. It was just, “This is my opinion.” Even Ladybird Johnson, she was very successful in her own right, owning a broadcasting company when that was a man’s business. LR: I’m kind of amazed, you said that it took you a long time to find your career, the job that you wanted to be in. I think that I’ve counted six different jobs that you had, and that’s including Sinclair, where you were for twenty-five years. Through 24 all of that, you were just trying to find, as you said, your career, or was it just getting bored? ED: A lot of it was getting bored. When you get with a company sometimes, and the reality of where they are headed, it’s no, not that. In Riverdale City, even though it wasn’t an elective position there, politics are ugly and we wound up in court over an election. The mayor, the gentleman who was mayor at that time, didn’t get enough votes in the primary, so he wasn’t on the ballot and it shocked people. Just there wasn’t a turnout in the primary, and so they did a write in campaign for him. He won the election and was elected mayor again. Well, somebody said they had passed out these little stickers that said, “Vote for Leon.” Somebody made the comment that they were stapled onto the ballot, and they wanted a recount. John had said to me, “You know, what you ought to do with the ballots while there is all this controversy is go see Lynn Richardson at First Security and have them locked in the vault there.” So I did, and we wound up going to court over it because they were saying, “No, they were stapled.” I keep thinking about the election in Florida, but in court they sat and they went through all of the ballots looking for staple marks, and there were none. So that was kind of an interesting… LR: Yeah, that’s crazy. ED: You know, I’ve had a good life. I’ve had some major downsides to it, but I’ve learned a lot and it’s not been to my detriment. 25 LR: If you had an opportunity to talk to your grandchildren—your granddaughter specifically or the young women of today, what would you tell them? What advice would you give them? ED: I would say, it’s a big world. There’s a lot you can do. My oldest granddaughter is thirty. I have three granddaughters, one grandson. But anyway, she is thirty and she is a very left leaner. You can’t tell women what they can wear. She finally graduated from the U a year ago in December, and she had her diploma mailed to her father. I said to him, “Give it to me and I’ll have it framed for her.” She did a study abroad in Thailand, and she had such a good time that she forgot to come home. Instead of three months it was almost a year. She kind of lost connections with the U and, like I say, she finally got her degree. But her degree is in International Studies, and she has a very humanitarian mind but doesn’t know quite how to execute it. I said, “Jordan, go to D.C. get a job, get in foreign service if you want to do that.” It’s a big world, there’s a lot of places that you can do a lot of good for mankind, for humanity and that. It’s interesting, I’d like to shake her and smack her across the side of the head, but she’s also bulimic, which is bad. She’s in Nashville, North Carolina. She was in her fourth stay in rehab, and her brother was back there not too long ago and he said, “She has put some weight on.” I’m trying to think what she’s working with, some medical thing. I saw this saying and I had it copied and framed and sent to her, and it says, “Don’t look back, that’s not where you’re going.” Hopefully she’ll take that to heart. Don’t be just so verbal, put your actions into something productive. There are so many women out there involved in things, but I think, “Is it just a flash? 26 What is it? You are being very vocal about things, but is it really, really doing that much good?” We’ve seen that in some young politicians, women. I don’t know, are you really just talking about things and not really doing things? That’s my real concern about women nowadays. LR: That makes sense. ED: There’s a lot of quiet things that you can do that really produce things. It’s a very different world anymore. All of the online exposure, I have a problem with that, it’s not going away, but I think, “Is it self-destructive?” Women tend to be more involved in that than the men are. “Hey, your phone is not a body part.” It’s a text, not even verbal phone conversations. Conversations, they are not happening. A text is not a conversation. But, I think women are far more vulnerable to that kind of use than men are, and to me, that’s what’s always differentiated men from women. Men, it’s like I said, working with them, “This is my job, this is what I need to accomplish, this is what I need you to accomplish for me, for you too.” How many men even want to hire women anymore because they can’t say a compliment. By some women, it’s taken as being offensive. I always took it as, “Hey thanks, I appreciate that.” Why do you have to be so careful in everything you say and what you do? I mean, don’t you feel that way anymore? There’s a bunch of us that worked at Browning together, and we go to lunch once a month and we talk about how the women gave back just exactly as well as the men gave it. We laugh about it now, they were fun working conditions. I never in all of the jobs that I had, and the different people that I’ve worked with, I’ve never had a job where I left because I felt that I was being mistreated. I wasn’t given 27 opportunity, and there were bigger opportunities at other jobs than there would ever be at the job I was at. LR: So it sounds like is what you did was you went looking for a better opportunity instead of just settling for something. ED: Right, exactly. Any woman can do that. It’s a learning process, and you have to educate yourself. Sometimes what you think you are looking for in a job, in whatever you are doing, when you get involved with it, maybe it’s not the right fit. There’s a better fit in both your extracurricular activities that you are doing and the workplace. LR: So I have one more question that I’d like to ask, and before I do, is there any other story that you’d like to share? I’m literally just blown away with everything that you’ve already shared, but is there any other story that you’d like to throw out before I ask my final question? ED: I can’t think… LR: Okay, so this is a question that I’ve been asking everyone within this project. How do you think women receiving the right to vote, shaped or influenced history, your community, and you personally? ED: In the community, I don’t know, in this state, this is just a different state. To me, I’m very interested in world events. I’m very interested politically and voting is a big, big thing. I don’t care if there isn’t someone on the ballot that I want to vote for. I would write someone in versus not voting, but not just any name. I value the vote and what it provides for us, very, very much. I think back to the women, 28 the suffrage movement, that was such a big break through. That one thing has triggered a lot of breakthroughs for women. I think to a point, they’ve been very positive. Some of it now, again, I question. What are you really looking for? But I think it’s been very good and, like I said, I’ve never felt discriminated against. I feel like I’ve always been able to express my opinion, men tend to take it better than women sometimes. But then women, there’s more competition among women than there is among men, women to women and men to men, which I don’t think is a positive. You know, everybody has a plus somewhere. Look for that plus and play on that. LR: Thank you. I really appreciate your time and your willingness. This has been really rather fascinating for me. But I’m very grateful for your time.