Beverly Ricks Interview

              Dr. Radke- Moss Women’s Oral History Collection
Beverly Ricks
By Beverly Ricks
January 20, 2005
Box 1 Folder 25
Oral Interview conducted by Richie McGuffin
Transcript copied by Dawn Kim
Brigham Young University- Idaho
2
Richie McGuffin: It is Thursday the 20th of January 2005. this is Richie McGuffin, and I am interviewing Berverly Ricks for History 497, a women’s history seminar. I guess, that my first question is when and where were you born?
Beverly Ricks: I was born in a little town called Plano, just outside of Rexburg. My grandparents on my mother’s side lived there, and she was at their home, and I was born December the 10th, 1926.
RM: How many siblings do you have?
BR: I have two brothers, both younger. Quite a bit younger and they built model airplanes. And they never chased me, and we never fought.
RM: So you grew up in a utopian family?
BR: I did.
RM: This question is, probably, a bit ridiculous but I wanted to ask for information: were you born into the church?
BR: Oh yes! On both sides.
RM: That’s wonderful. How about your parents?
BR: My father came to the United States of America when he was eleven months old. His mother and her two sisters had joined the church in Germany, and her husband was very angry and upset. So they divorced, and he stayed there. And she came here with her sisters. And she worked in Salt Lake in a bakery for awhile, and then someone introduced her to my grandfather Walz, who was also a divorced man. Imagine he was a bishop for 29 years but his wife was just, he couldn’t live with her. She would lock him out of the house. So they finally, and my grandmother raised the family; he had five children, and she had my father then they had two girls of their own. And on my mother’s side, the Jackson’s and Jacobson’s. Well, the Jacobson’s were from Denmark, and the Jackson’s were from England. And they just joined the church over there when they were young and came to the United States. We have pioneer stories, you know how that goes.
RM: Well, that’s really neat that both of your families can trace their conversion stories all the way back to Europe. What was your childhood like?
BR: Oh, it was idealic [ sic.] we lived on a farm three and half miles west of Rexburg. We had the river down in the pasture where we could. You know, my brother would fish, and I would read books. Sitting there by him, he was four years younger. Then, when I was a senior in high school, my mother had another baby boy. It was supposed to be Nancy but it turned out to be Ryan ( Laughing). 3
RM: A little bit of surprise. What sort of activities did you participate in aside from reading as a child?
BR: Oh, I was active in everything in high school. My main focus was just getting good grades and doing well in school. But I was on the yearbook staff and the paper staff, and I was in all the plays because there was a speech person. I took speech, a lot of speech. And I just had a wonderful high school career.
RM: You grew up during the Depression era, so what was that like, and what affects did that have on you and your family?
BR: Well, Jay, I think, can tell you more about that than I can. But in our family my father had milk cows, and we got a monthly milk check, and, you know, we had a farm. And my mother raised a wonderful garden, and we never went hungry. And I had two aunts, who were speech, school teachers, and they gave my mother their beautiful old dresses, and she made them over into cloths for me. They married late in life. these two aunts and one of them never married, and the other one married a serviceman that she met when she was teaching army kids in Germany, and they were fantastic together, Grace and Tom. And when my aunt Grace and my aunt Gladys died, they left the bulk of their estate to Ricks College, and I am now the recipient of a stack of mail like that from students who have received scholarships from that stipend that they gave the college. It was the largest private donation ever made, 600,000 plus.
RM: And students are sill to this day getting…
BR: Oh, yes. Joe, in fact, I talked to, he’s in my ward, the one that bring me the papers. He said, “ I’ve got a stack of papers for you,” and I said come whenever you want Joe.
RM: Do you ever respond to them?
BR: No, I don’t. I couldn’t begin to. But I appreciate them, my cousin really worked with them more than I did, and he was from Salt Lake. And he got old and he said, “ Beverly would you be the one that contact in Rexburg” and so I am. And because of that I am a member of the President’s Club at Ricks College, and we’re invited to all the nice affairs aren’t we, Jay?
RM: What exactly is the Presidents Club?
BR: Uh, people who donate a thousand or more a year can be members of the Presidents Club. And, uh, I don’t know all the stipulations, but I do know that it is the big donors in large part, and they have two or three big affairs every year. And we are invited to them. But, like I said, my husband can, maybe, tell you a little bit more about the depression years because he seemed to live it more. You know, they had struggles on their farm. You tell it better than I ( directed at her husband). 4
Jay Ricks: We lived on a farm, and we always had plenty. We raised barley and wheat. I never felt the Depression. We didn’t ( inaudible).
BR: Your father ran a little store too, huh?
RM: I guess, as children, it would be less noticeable because it’s your parents that are really shouldering the burden. Now, earlier you told me that you and Jay met your senior year in high school, would you like to explain a little bit about that once again?
BR: He was senior class president. The seniors always put on a play, and I, of course, was always in the plays. So I got the leading role for the girls and because he was class president, he had to do it, because no one else would. All the boy were into athletics. Anyway, he had the male lead opposite me, and we were supposed to kiss each other in this play. I was the adorable spendthrift, and he was in love with me. Anyway, his friend kept betting him that he couldn’t kiss me. I wasn’t a great dater, I dated a few times; you know, the dances and stuff but I concentrated on other things. He had to do this, and so his friends egged him on. And finally, he kissed me one day while we were rehearsing, and after that it was smooth sailing. No, I am exaggerating, we started to date almost immediately and fell in love.
RM: So after your senior year, you, probably, went directly… what year did you graduate high school?
BR: Nineteen forty at Ricks, ’ 44 at high school.
RM: So you graduated high school in 1944. So, right after high school I take it, Jay, that you went into the military, and when were you deployed?
JR: I was drafted ( inaudible: goes on to talk about basic training and the different forts that he was stationed at. He also mentions that he went to Europe and was part of the army of occupation).
BR: He was one of those 90- day wonders. He made Second Lieutenant in 90 days.
JR: While I was in Georgia, the Germans surrendered in June, I believe. And in August, the Japanese surrendered. I graduated ( inaudible: talks about his service in Europe and some of the responsibilities that he had, such as guarding the German soldiers).
RM: So, during the time that he was away, you were up at Ricks College, what were some of your experiences or what was it like?
BR: Oh, it was wonderful. We had the finest teachers in the world, even then. I took speech and journalism; in high school, I kind of dreamed of being a foreign correspondent. I ended up a farmers’ wife. It was wonderful, un; I was always very active in all the activities at Ricks. My second year, I was student body president, and it 5
was just a wonderful experience in every way. I gave a talk this fall to the new teacher’s wives, and they had a large group of faculty with them and so forth. And I told them what it was like because this summer, I would walk downtown a lot to mail letters and things. And I’d pass the old homes of my speech teacher, and my science teacher and the president of the college and, you know, you… and I knew them all and their wives and their families. It was a wonderful experience.
RM: Now, I take it most of the boys were away, so what was it like up on campus?
BR: No, dancing. Second semester of the second year, I think, we had one, maybe two dances. They started to come back.
RM: I bet you that was a pretty happy occasion.
BR: Yeah.
RM: That would be interesting. So not only was the war going on while you were at Ricks but it was also going in high school.
BR: Yes, very much so. And we used to, uh; go up, you know, where the alumni office is downtown on Main Street? Now, it’s just one…
RM: With the blue flags.
BR: Yeah, up above there. There’s a lot of space and things. We used to go up there and role bandages for the Red Cross. We, also, kept corn off the cob and canned it to sent to service personnel and so on; people needed it. So we were active in that way in the war. Then in high school, we sold savings bonds, what they called savings bonds, didn’t we Jay? And I was kind of in charge of the little booth where we sold the savings bonds. Our goal as high school students was to raise enough money to buy a P- 51, an airplane, you know.
RM: What kind of effect did the war have on the community, on Rexburg or on the area?
BR: It lasted so long, Richie, that, you know, we just became accustomed to always being at war. You couldn’t buy things at the store; we got coupons for two pairs of shoes a year and things like this. And the gas rationing…
JR: Three gallons a week. The shoes were rationed, the food was rationed…
BR: Sugar was rationed… everything.
JR: The bread, the sugar, and all those; you had ration stamps.
BR: And when we were on our honeymoon, May came home, and we got married within about two weeks, two and a half weeks. 6
RM: And what year was this?
BR: Pardon?
RM: And what year did you get married?
BR: Nineteen forty- six. He came home in November, and we went on a wonderful honeymoon to California because I had never seen the ocean or anything, and you know how you are. And he just treated me so royally. And, you know, we would go in stores, and we would buy jello, and tuna fish, and coconut, and things that we hadn’t seen for years; you know that you just couldn’t buy in the stores. So that was kind of fun, and then we were going to move into an apartment, he was remodeling in his mother and dad’s home, and we needed a stove of some kind. And in Placerville, California, we found this, what do you call it, a wall stove. And we bought it and got it in the back of that Pontiac somehow, I’ll never know, it was a two- door Pontiac. Yea, we brought it home with us, so you know it was kind of a neat thing.
RM: Placerville is old Hang Town; it is like 40 minutes from where I live.
BR: Is that right? We’ll never forget Placerville.
RM: Um, I’m sure that there were a lot of young men in the community that went off to war and didn’t come back.
BR: There were.
RM: What was that like?
BR: Very hard, especially, if you had known them personally.
RM: Did you have any relatives or close friends that has that happen?
BR: My cousin; my favorite cousin who was about two or three years older than I was, a navigator on a B- 17. And we, I wrote to him regularly because he would come up and work on my grandparents farm in the summertime, and I’d back him cakes and cookies and stuff like that; you know, I was a teenager. We became very close, and so we wrote to each other all during the war, John and I. I called him my favorite cousin. Oh, he was good looking. Anyway, he was killed in October of 1944 and that was very hard, very hard for me and for his mother. His mother could never give up the fact that he was shot down over Diseloff, and she was sure that he was over there somewhere, you know, alive.
RM: Now, did people in the community do things to show support for fallen soldier? I’ve read about people putting things, ribbons and such in their front yards. Did that happen around here, did people show support? 7
BR: You know, I don’t recall specifically but you ought to go get our 1944 yearbook from Madison and show him what we as students did to collect all the names and put them in the yearbook. It’s downstairs in the green bedroom, the 1944 yearbook. And I was kind of in charge of this project for the yearbook, and I went down to the county offices and got the names of every one of the county boys that was serving and the ones who had been killed and so forth. So it was a hard project, but I thought it was very nice that they put all of those names in our yearbook, and we could honor them that way.
RM: I can’t imagine, the closest person to me that has ever died in the military was my grandpa’s brother, and it was in World War II.
BR: I can remember coming home. Pearl Harbor day was on my father’s birthday, and we had all been to church and came home and turned the radio on. And that is all we did the rest of the day, was just listen to all of the ramifications of Pearl Harbor.
RM: I bet you, uh, was that just… when that happened you were just a freshman in high school?
BR: Oh, we were grief stricken. My ward and I had four or five very good Japanese friends. The Japanese kind of came to this area and farmed a lot of them, and I think that is why Eric has such a close attachment to them.
RM: Yea, you know, that is a question that I was actually going to ask you about. You know having spoken with Brother Walz about Japanese and about the Japanese in this area, he said that before the war and for a time afterwards there was quite a few Japanese people in the area.
BR: Yes, they came here to stay with relatives and things like that, I think.
RM: And you had friends that were…?
BR: Oh, did I ever have friends?
RM: How were they treated when the war came up?
BR: Oh, we didn’t treat our Japanese friend any different than we ever had, did we? They were just our friends in high school.
RM: Now, did you notice that they felt different because just a couple, you know probably, 100 miles away, they had the Japanese Internment Camp at Hunt and were any of your friends relocated?
BR: Not that I know of. The ones that were in Idaho were pretty stable families who had farms. Did you know of any, Jay? But there’s this page that’s the “ A’s” ( now showing me her 1944 yearbook that contained the tribute to the soldiers) and it tells the branch of 8
the service that they were in. And then here’s the play Jay and I were in, by the way; the senior party. It shows all of the pictures of the cast.
RM: Are you in the white dress in the front?
BR: Well, I can’t remember if I had a white dress on. No, that’s not me, I was this one right here ( pointing to her picture). This is me, and this is Jay. It was fun, it was really fun. Funny experience though, I don’t know if we would have ever gotten together it hadn’t been for Mary Welde and the play, but we had page after page…
JR: It was the servicemen. The ones that were missing in action were indicated there right?
BR: I think so.
JR: The ones killed also.
BR: See there were CB’s, we got this page. They had whether they had died or not. Here’s a Merchant Marine. I must not remember everything correctly, Richie, but I thought we had the names of those who had been killed. But I do know that for several years on the front of our yearbooks, there was honor paid. And when I went to Ricks College, I have my Ricks College yearbooks, and, you know, this dedication page that’s dedicated to the service people. It was hard for everybody.
JR: Everybody worked one way or another with the war effort, and there wasn’t anything made out of steel available to the civilian population. All of the steel went towards the war effort. Any materials, even staples were very expensive.
BR: The young people… oh, yeah… available… on the farm they really noticed it. Yeah, that was pretty hard ( they were both speaking simultaneously).
RM: Besides, like you mentioned that you guys rolled bandages, and that you know, you had fundraisers to save money to purchase a plane. Were there other things that you did to support the war?
JR: Scrap Drives.
BR: Yeah.
RM: Scrap Drives?
JR: Go around and pick up all of the surplus waste, steal and stuff.
BR: Every farm ahs a lot of scraps. 9
JR: And, also, you took in grease, from your cooking, for grease that they used for munitions. In order to get a tube of toothpaste, you had to bring in an old one.
RM: so you had to prove that you’d used all the other toothpaste that you already had?
JR: Well, they wanted the metal; the metal was just so much in need.
RM: Now, did they, my grandmother, she worked in a… I don’t know what you would call it but they produced arms and stuff like that…
BR: A defense plant.
RM: Okay, in a defense plant. Did they have any defense plants in the area close by that you guys would have had access to?
JR: Pocatello.
RM: Pocatello had a defense plant?
JR: All the naval guns, I think, were shipped there to be refurnished. And they took them out on the desert to the West to test them. a lot of people went and worked there, a lot of them went to the coast…
BR: To California to work in the defense plants, a lot of women you know did that. I had several friends older than I.
JR: Some of them didn’t come back.
RM: They stayed on the coast?
BR: Gweyn went to Los Angeles.
RM: I guess because of your age during the height of the war you were still in high school; that kind of prevented you from working in some of those areas.
BR: Some of Jay’s friends enlisted but he was a farm boy, and his older brother was a Marine on what Island was that, Okinawa or one of those islands. And so, they left him to help his father get the crop and that was very important to provide food. In fact, he remembers being in Germany after the war and Ezra Taft Benson was secretary of agriculture, or before, and came. And he was distributing food for the church and trying to see what was needed.
RM: So, I’m going, sorry, I’m just thinking, but in 1945, you would have been in either Utah or one of those, you know, Fort Benning somewhere in there right?
BR: Yeah, he was in Georgia. 10
RM: So, what was your reaction when we dropped the bombs on Japan?
BR: Can you imagine, here we were about to go to the Pacific. They said the average life span of a second lieutenant on the front was— and they were, a lot times, on the front in the war actually fighting— was very not high. Here the war ends, and he graduates the following week from Fort Benning, Georgia. So I knew that the future was changed completely, and we were so angry at the Japanese over there. Oh, my reaction was, thank the good Lord.
RM: So, it was an exciting time in that your loved ones weren’t’ going to have to go to war…
BR: Wasn’t gonna have to fight.
RM: Yea, how did you feel for the people? I mean, despite your anger I’m sure you realized the magnitude of the bombs and of the destruction they caused, how did you feel for those people?
BR: Oh, overwhelmed. I couldn’t believe it. I just couldn’t believe it. I don’t know how Jay felt, but he was in the service. So being in the service, did you have a different reaction?
JR: Well, originally, they… we were being trained to go to Germany and then when the Germans surrendered, see when I… actually, they had a farm doctrine so they left all those farm boys on the farm till the harvest would end. But, they, so badly, needed men that they just took all of us. See, I was in Camp Robert’s in the Battle of the Bulge, and that’s when they really got short on men, and they just shipped them all out, you know, as fast as they could. I was trained to go fight in Europe, and as soon as the Germans capitulated in June, they changed our focus to Japan. June, July, and August, I was being trained to go to the Pacific, and then they dropped the bomb and ended up sending me back to Europe for the army of occupation.
RM: I’m sure they all were writing to each other during this time…
BR: Oh, yeah…
RM: What were his letters like?
BR: Well, there downstairs in a cedar chest. I don’t think Jays written a letter since, he wrote so many letter then. It was astounding; you know, he’d write everyday or every other day.
JR: It was a wonderful experience; I don’t regret it at all. 11
BR: He wanted to take me with him, he said second lieutenants can get married and, you know, he said to me “ you can go with me,” you know. But I was student body president, and the kids had elected me, and I wanted to finish school at Ricks so badly. And my parents wanted me to and I was eighteen, seventeen turning eighteen, so I was very young when I got married.
RM: I bet that was an interesting time for the two of you, you being in the military and you being here?
BR: But we sure wrote a lot of letters.
RM: I bet it was nice on your mind to know that there was no boys up at school.
JR: Yeah ( laughing).
BR: You should see the picture; go get that picture of you. He went down to Salt Lake to see his uncle, and his uncle says “ we’re gonna go down and take your picture before you go in the army.” So this beautiful picture, perfection…
JR: He was the best photographer in Salt Lake.
BR: yea, and I had this sitting on my table at the table at the dorm all those years, and the girls would come in and look at it.
RM: Quite the catch, huh?
BR: Believe me, he was quite the Romeo.
RM: Back to the bomb. You said that you had classmates that were Japanese what was their reaction?
BR: You know, there weren’t any Japanese at the school that I remember, at Ricks College. I’m trying to remember.
RM: Not necessarily at Ricks College, but in high school.
BR: I have no idea, we kind of lost track of each other.
RM: Or you know, it would have been Ricks College wouldn’t it because it would have been, you were there in 1945.
BR: I’m sure they couldn’t hardly believe it either, none of us could believe it that we had this instrument of destruction in the process this whole time. And, now, we had used it, it was pretty overwhelming. 12
RM: As the war came to a close and as everybody eventually started coming back, what changes did you notice?
BR: Oh, there were men on every street corner. For awhile, it seemed like it was so wonderful to have them return. For that year, after the war with Japan ended, and it ended soon once they dropped those bombs, didn’t it?
JR: ( Inaudible; Jay begins talking about the GI Bill and what a great thing it was, and how it encouraged and fostered the educations of many of the returning veterans.)
BR: Yeah, all the GI’s wanted to go to school and get their education when they got home. So the population of men certainly boomed up the year after I left Ricks.
RM: I bet a lot of girls were excited about that. I heard about the dances, where there were only three guys.
BR: Yeah, the girls would dance with each other because we all liked to dance in those days, except, Jay didn’t tell until after we were married that he didn’t really like to dance.
RM: I think most guys hide that fact until they are safe in brining it up. Well, that is all of the questions that I have. Thank you very much for your time.
BR: You’re welcome, Richie.