D.D. Wilding

              Crowder, Dr. David L. Oral History Project
D. D. Wilding- Experiences of the Depression
By D. D. Wilding
January 22, 2005
Box 2 Folder 53
Oral Interview conducted by Ryan Layton
Transcribed by Sarah McCorristin February 2005
Brigham Young University- Idaho
I am Ryan Layton. Today December 10, 1974, I am going to interview D. D. Wilding. The general topic will be the Depression in the Upper Snake River Valley.
Ryan Layton: Mr. and Mrs. D. D. Wilding, where were you born?
D. D. Wilding: Well, I was born in Downey, Idaho, and Ma was born in Stockholm, Sweden.
RL: How long have you lived in Rexburg?
DW: Oh, about all my life ( since 1911). I come- I was two years old when we came to Rexburg. I was born in Downey, Idaho and then we moved from there to Rexburg in 1911. So I’ve been here most of the time since.
RL: Since 1911?
DW: Since 1911, yes.
RL: Where were your parents born?
DW: My father was born in Utah out Hunter Ward they call it, west of Salt Lake, and my mother was born in Sheffield, England.
RL: What was your occupation?
DW: Well, earlier my father was a farmer and we were all raised on the farm; and that’s what we did until after I got married, left home and got married and went on my own. Then I’ve had several occupations since then.
RL: Can you kind of expand on what occupation you had then?
DW: Well, at the time I got married, I was working for Utah Power and Light Company in Salt Lake City and then we got married there, and that was right at the beginning of the depression in 1930. When we got married we got married in the Spring. Then in the fall ( I think) or the following year, I don’t remember what year it was. Do you remember what year it was, honey, for sure we came from Salt Lake up to Rexburg? We came in ’ 30? In ’ 30. We were married in the Spring of 1930 then we, that’s when the depression first hit. All the fellows were getting laid off at the power company, and I was on e of the new men there so I knew I would be one of the first ones laid off. I never was laid off, I quit and left there and went to my dad’s ranch out at that time, he had a ranch out at Medicine Lodge our west of Dubois, and we went out there and worked for, oh, we were there two years off and on. That was really tough times! We was taking anything we could get in those days.
RL: Was everybody being laid off?
DW: Yes.
RL: As soon as the depression hit?
DW: Yes, soon after I quit in Salt Lake, all the fellows that I was working with got laid off so the depression really hit that fall and that winter and it was just as well that winter and it was just as well that I left there, because I would have been laid off anyway and I would have had to go if I hadn’t moved. I herded sheep purt near all winter. And ya just did anything that come along, you didn’t stay much with a profession of any kind, because, oh, I guess some of the fellas did in the bigger cities, but around in this farm community we didn’t, we took any kind of a job we could get.
RL: What were some of the most prevalent jobs?
DW: Farm work!- was mostly it. Farm and livestock or anything that had to do with farming, or like I said now my father had a little bunch of sheep put- several farmers got together and made a herd, see, and then hired a herder and all of them shared the expenses to a man that would take care of them, and this is what I did for one winter. I herded sheep put near all winter and it was just a community herd. I got as I remember, I got $ 45.00 a month and my food, I had to keep my own camp, of course, but I got my food and $ 5 a month for taking care of that herd of sheep.
RL: Was that good pay in consideration?
DW: That was good pay at that time, you bet! That was good pay! But then that was kind of a problem too, being a community herder, I got part of it, and part of it I never did get. Some of the men just couldn’t afford to pay. Just had no money that was all. Of course, some of it took- I got it later on. Some of it took pretty near a year and a half before I got that. So, in those days you just took anything you could do to earn a little money. We’d swap back and forth and change labor with our neighbors or maybe hire out to the neighbors for a day or two, few days during hay season or in the Spring, planting crops, or in the Fall, threshing, or something like that, but you just took anything you could find.
RL: How about in the dead of winter, what was available then?
DW: Not much, not much. It was the same thing; of course, I don’t think we had it as tough as people did in the bigger cities because usually in a farm community, if a man will work a little bit, and try a little bit he can get something to eat. Now, I never remember of any of us going hungry during the depression or we had clothes enough to get by on. There was not surplus of any kind, I’ll tell you that, and you just had to do anything you could to raise a few dollars, you didn’t argue too much about the price if you could earn a few dollars, you’d go and do it, no matter what you had to do. I even went into Montana, spring, let’s see, second spring we was up there- I even tried to learn to shear sheep. Well, I did shear a few sheep, but that’s a hard job, I was real slow at it, never did do much good at it, so I was kinda discouraged on that one. RL: Getting back to employment here in the Rexburg area, were there any factories or plants of any kind that people would work at, besides farming in the area?
DW: There was no manufacturing here at all at that time. The sugar factory was at Sugar City and that was the only main thing.
RL: How many did that employ here?
DW: About 300.
RL: 300?
DW: Uh- huh. And you usually start when the beet harvest would come on in the Fall and the run would usually go into January. Sometimes it would end before the first of the year. Now I worked at the sugar factory, but not after we got married, did I? No, before we got married I worked in the sugar factory two years, but it was just kind of a fill in for farmers, ya know, mostly farmers would to the sugar factory and work there.
RL: What kind of wages did the sugar factory have?
DW: Well, I had one of the top paid jobs in the sugar factory outside the foreman jobs and so on, and I made $ 5.10 in a 12 hours shift. We worked from 6 in the morning till 6 at night that was a full 12 hour shift, and I was spinning sugar on the white spinners, that was one of the top pays other than you know, foreman second hand or something like that.
RL: In comparison, how much would the farmers be making as compared to you?
DW: Well, on the farm we got in the, in the hardest part of the depression. Now we stayed, when we left Salt Lake, we went to Medicine Lodge, and we stayed there two years, and things got pretty tough, pretty hard and it was hard to get along with, cause father had a big family there just wasn’t enough money for all of us and, of course, that always leads to argument and so on and father and I didn’t get along, didn’t see eye to eye so I just took off and I walked in from Medicine Lodge, in here to Rexburg, I had a brother here in Rexburg, of course, I walked and hitchhiked. I got a couple of rides and I had to walk quite a ways, but I made it in one day, I left over there in the morning and I got here about dark at night. Didn’t have a cent of money, didn’t have anything. I remember I had three pennies in my pocket and I stopped over at Anna’s and bought three pieces of licorice, that’s what I had for dinner, and I come on into Lorenze and then I caught a ride out of this side of Lorenzo and got into Rexburg, and borrowed a car from my brother and went back out to the ranch and got my wife and we had one little girl at the time and we moved into Rexburg that Fall. Now, it was in the Fall, most of the labor was over for the year, other than harvest, I went to work topping beets and helping on the thrashing machine, peas and wheat and oats and so on. And topped beets again and that’s beet toppin is always the last job of the season, and I got 15 cents an hour, and that was a dollar and half, and my dinner for a 10 hour day. And then when we went to topping beets we got paid by the ton, and I don’t remember what the price was, but a good hard day’s work in the beets, you could make close to $ 3.
RL: I see, that’s quite interesting. When winter come did many of the hired hands and the worker’s in the fields, did they move elsewhere?
DW: Well, yes, we always have that tranch in labor, you know, or labor that comes in from other areas to help with the harvest and then when winter- winters get pretty disagreeable in this country, and they all go south if they can. Of course, the natives gets so poor they can’t go south, so they gotta stay here, but we stayed that winter, and I rented two rooms from a cousin of mine for my wife, and like I say we had the one little girl, and we paid $ 5 a month for rent for the two rooms, and let’s see- I don’t remember whether we paid our bill in the- separate from that of course, it was city water in the house, and you didn’t- water cost very much in those days, anyway; but I know I paid $ 5 a month rent or was supposed to and I couldn’t do that during the winter. I couldn’t pay anything and my cousin let me go and let me live there until the spring. He was a carpenter and he did some remodeling around town and so on in some buildings and I worked for him to pay off the rent that I had gotten behind in during the winter time.
RL: What’s interesting to note is the prices then as compared to now, for instance let’s cover food. Food is pretty high today, what were some of the costs, well some items you might want to talk about in comparison with today, such as milk and eggs.
DW: Well, I don’t remember exactly what the price of milk was, I think 10 cents a dozen for eggs wasn’t it Ma? Ten cents a dozen? I think it was. Now for milk, I worked for a farmer out north of town here and he was milking a bunch of cows at night. I think it was about seven or eight cows, and then he would give me my milk for that, I would get a couple of quarts of milk, but I think….
Mrs. Wilding: Most of those dairy things- we got them for working. We didn’t have to pay for them and it’s hard to remember the price. I remember bread, now, when we could afford to buy it was five cents a loaf. Of course, now, everyone baked you know.
That winter after the harvest was over, I didn’t’ have anything to do but my brother was manager of the Safeway store here in town and he had a little pickup, and he let me use that and give me the job delivering groceries, and for this store I made two deliveries a day around town, for this store. A delivery in the morning just before noon, and a delivery just before closing time and I got $ 5 a week for it, but I had to pay car expenses out of that and it costs me about a dollar and a quarter a week for gasoline that would buy five gallons. I usually used about five gallons a week, and it was 25 cents a gallon for gasoline and I would buy five gallons each week and that would get us by usually.
RL: There were no stamps, then, for gasoline up here?
DW: No.
RL: Did everybody have plenty of gas?
DW: Everybody that had money to pay for it. I never remembered of any shortage of gas, no shortage, the shortage was money. Just didn’t have the money to buy it.
RL: How about some household commodities, few things like that, what were the prices of these things?
DW: Oh, I don’t remember too much- kinda hard to remember the prices of lard soap.
Mrs. Wilding: I know for years and years I could fed our family of six on $ 10. We did that for years.
RL: That’s amazing.
Mrs. Wilding: We ate pretty good.
DW: But right during the depression, gee, if we had a couple of dollars to buy groceries the wife and I and my little girl, we’d get along fine for a week. Of course, like she said, I’d rustle the milk where I could help out and we had an aunt there that use to slip us a little butter ever once in a while and that helped too, quite a bit.
Mrs. Wilding: I don’t know- we helped each other.
DW: We would just have to help each other, that was the only way to get along. Now, I know if my cousin would’ve insisted on us paying that $ 5 a month or moving out, we would’ve had to move out, we just didn’t have the money. But I didn’t get behind, I paid maybe about half of it during the winter time, but I still owed him quite a bit of money in the spring when I went to work for him, but; of course, it didn’t take long to pay it off then.
RL: How about, how about let’s say tithing for instance. I am sure many of the majority of the citizens here in the Upper Snake River Valley were LDS, how about tithing. Was there any problem in paying that to the church?
DW: I don’t think there was any more problem then there is now, it’s still a tenth, if you made up your mind to pay it, gee, a tithing on what I was making, was a tenth which would be 50 cents a week, see, so it wasn’t much. But we were especially after we got going a little more and got in the beverage business and in the, in the, roller skating business our tithing always come off of the top, that was the first thing we saved and we never missed it, we never have. We’ve done that all our lives. We’ve just don’t miss tithing, mainly because we don’t have it in the first place.
RL: How about doctor bills? Dentist ad medical bills in general?
DW: This is kind of interesting, when we not- when out children were born our oldest girl, the first on e was born in Salt Lake and while I was working with the power company there. I had bee buying a little stock, they would take some of it out of every payday, see, and I had saved up enough money to pay for here when she was born. But then the rest of the children, three of them were born here and Dr. Rich was our doctor and the standard charge then for delivering a baby was $ 35. he would take care of the wife all during the pregnancy and then when the baby was born, it was $ 35, that’s what it costs and it was all. They were all delivered at home, all of our children were born at home. And this like everything else, we got behind on it. Couldn’t pay it, and didn’t have the money, of course, somebody had to take care of it after things started opening up a little and getting a little better. Then Dr. Rich build a new home downtown here, the home is where Bob Wallace lives just two blocks down, and I worked for Dr. Rich to help build that home and that’s the way I paid for the children. I think, I think we owed him about around $ 75, excuse me, $ 75 or $ 80 and I worked there for him and he would give me half of it pay and half of it would go on what I owed him until he got it paid off. And so, it really wasn’t you know the cost then in comparison to what you made.
Now as our children grew a little older then they had to have their tonsils taken out so I talked to Dr. Harlo Rigby about it and he said, “ Well, why don’t you bring them all down and we’ll take them all out at once.” And I said, “ Gee whiz, all four of them at once?” “ Yea,” he says, “ Just as well, while we’re at it, we’ll get them all together.” And I said, “ Well, what’s it gonna cost?” He said, “ WE usually charge $ 25 a piece,” but he says, “ I’ll take the four of them for $ 75.” So that’s the way we did it, we took them all down.
RL: How about that!
DW: Boy, that was the day, thought, I wouldn’t want to do that again.
RL: Getting back on the economic view of the depression, what was the, what was the feeling that you had when you read the newspapers and heard of the depression coming?
DW: Well, you know, you could read all the national problems and everything and think about it, but you didn’t have much time to worry about it. You had so many problems of you own you had to figure out.
Mrs. Wilding: We didn’t have the coverage, the TV, you now have. It told to us ever time we looked, you know, pictures, you know TV is different form newspapers. It’s a lot more frightening, because you know they keep you up to date every second.
DW: The media now covers everything all over the country, everywhere, all the time. And you’ve got it within half an hour when it happens, but then it would come out in the paper, you’d see red lines, they’d call them, and soup lines. People in the big cities, of course, we never as near as I can remember we never had any around here. I never saw people standing in line, we did use to get, they had some commodities you could get, through the county. I don’t remember how it was rationed to you according to how many people in your family you could get some of these commodities. We got some once or twice, and they had canned meat there, and it was good meat, it was canned beef; but I made the mistake on that one time, my wife fixed some of it for dinner, sat down to eat and started to eating and I said, “ Gee, that’s not too bad,” and she agreed and says,” I know it, it’s not too bad.” And I said “ It’s pretty good for horse meat.” Just kidding. Boy she never tasted it again.
Mrs. Wilding: I went hungry rather than eat it after that.
DW: So we didn’t get much of that.
Mrs. Wilding: Well, we forgot to tell you we were on- I was pregnant at that time and boy when you get that you just don’t forget it and I just couldn’t eat it. I’d stick to bread and milk, anything to get away from that horse meat.
RL: What were some of the signs of the depression coming? That you could feel and see?
DW: The thing I remember was the stock market crashing and Wall Street, and then all the advertising was, of course, I was just a young buck, just barely married and I didn’t know anything about depression, hard time, good times, or anything of the sort.
Mrs. Wilding: I think we ere just too young to really realize what was going on.
DW: We never have had a lot of money anyway, ‘ that’s just that way we were raised nobody had a lot of money in those days.
RL: How did the older folks in town feel about it then, can you remember that? What did they think of this?
DW: Well, most of them as near as I can remember had just got their cellar full in the Fall and would take care to getting prepared. Like the Church is encouraging us to do right now, get some food stored ahead, and that’s what they tried to do. Of course, that was a way of life around here. Now I don’t think anybody, these farmers around here they all raise the sugar factory and get their sugar; and then you didn’t see any 10 pounds of sacks of sugar in those days. Pretty near everybody bough a hundred pounds of sugar when they’d buy it. And, and then flour, the farmers would take their wheat…
Mrs. Wilding: Fifty pounds of flour always, we never bough less.
DW: The farmers would take their wheat into the flour mill and take flour for it. They wouldn’t have to wait till it was milled or anything, so much wheat and then the mill would just give them so much flour for it. And then they had their milk and potatoes and vegetables and meat on the farm. And this is the reason why I think anybody that had a little push and would try they didn’t, they don’t have to go hungry in a farm community. They may have to in a big city, but I don’t think you have to in a farming community.
RL: Was the financial status well, yourselves, at that time? DW: You never had any money, you never did. When you would get paid it was divided up as fast as it would go and that was it. Very seldom that you had any money, oh, you’d try to hang on to a few pennies to get you buy until the next time that you got paid.
RL: Who had the money in town?
DW: There wasn’t very many people that had money. A lot of the farmers who had been farming for years, they lost everything they had. The livestock went way down, when we left, when my father left here to go to Medicine Lodge, he bought a bunch of sheep at $ 12.50 a head, and that was according to prices today, that’s real low price. But after he had been out there for about three years, he couldn’t sell them for $ 2.50 a head. You just couldn’t get rid of them. Nobody had any money. Wood’s Livestock went broke at that time. That was one of the biggest outfits in the Northwest, actually they run 80 herds of sheep.
RL: Is that here in Rexburg?
DW: No, that was north of here, was over in Spencer. And they shipped a train load of old ewes from Chicago and sold them and the bookkeeper said they lost $ 2.85 on that train load of sheep. It cost that much more to take care of them there, than they got out of them to get them back there.
RL: How about the banks in this area, were they still open?
DW: Most of them yes, well there used to be a Farmer’s and Merchant’s Bank that went broke. The state bank which is now the First Security that stayed open all the time. It went right on through the depression, stock Bank, what did they call that- First National Bank. There was three banks before the depression, there was the State Bank, the First National Bank and the Farmer’s and Merchant’s Bank. And the First National Farmer’s Bank went broke. And the State Bank stayed open although when Roosevelt was elected and he closed all banks for, but they were going broke oh, by the thousands, over the nation every day. They just was closing every day. So he declared back moratorian, I think he called it. I don’t remember how long it lasted, but they closed every bank in the United States for a certain length of time and in that time, then they got into the banks so that thee banks didn’t have, didn’t all close up. So the people, the bank had a chance, but lots of people lost their entire savings and their life’s earnings from banks going broke. There was a bank in Sugar City at that time, and it went broke. Every time a bank went broke it took a lot of people with it, they lost everything they had.
RL: Do you know of anybody in this area that was able to hold onto a great amount of what they did have to begin with?
DW: Well, a majority of the people in the community were so in debt, that they hung on and they hung on and it took a good number of years after that to get out again, but they, everybody was getting by on borrowed money or any way they could. There were very few who got by and never, didn’t go broke, didn’t have to borrow money or anything there was a few of them but very few.
RL: Where could you go if you wanted to borrow a large amount of money?
DW: You couldn’t unless, unless you could prove you didn’t need it, you could probably borrow it…..
Mrs. Wilding: A large amount of money in those days isn’t like a large amount of money now.
DW: In those days a thousand dollars was a large amount of money.
RL: I see.
DW: We, to give you an idea now, we didn’t buy this home until when was it honey, 30?
Mrs. Wilding: Probably 34.
DW: 34? No, no it wasn’t, it was 36, cause I was in the beverage, I went I the beverage business in 35 and I bought this home a year after that so it was in 36 that we bought this for a thousand dollars. The whole works, the property. We’ve got a lot 6x8 rods here and the home and everything. Of course, the home was I pretty rough shape at that time. We’ve done a lot of work to it, but that was to give you an idea of what kind of…
RL: That’s a pretty good idea.
DW: Of what things were like.
RL: How did the people of this area, could probably generalize it, and say the general public, what did they think of President Roosevelt?
DW: Oh, they liked him. Everybody did, because he did the things that had to be done at the time. That’s why everybody liked him.
RL: I’ve heard of some that say he wasn’t their kind of president, and that he made a lot of mistakes.
DW: Well, maybe he died, but he did some things right.
RL: What are some of the things he did right?
DW: He got some relief out to the people saving the banks from going broke was one of the first things that he did. And then he started these public work deals where fellas that had a little bit of ambition could get out and get a job and, do something you could at least if you would get out and try. Why you could have something to eat. Before it didn’t matter how, how much you try, you just couldn’t get anything.
RL: Many think that he was to blame for this. What do you feel?
DW: No, the blame of what? For the….
RL: The coming on of the depression.
DW: Well, I can’t see how he could be. He didn’t have, the depression was here, we ere right in the bottom of the depression when he was elected. So I don’t see how they could blame him for anything that happened before that, and did I think he, of course, on thing- one mistake he made and it wasn’t a mistake at the time, but he started this program of giving people things you know. Now, I know I started on that public works thing and I worked on it until just for one winter, until I could get off of it and got to work for myself, and go to work on another job. But a lot of people just made a career on it. See, the government that we’ve still got today. I think that was the mistake, but it, it wasn’t intentional. He started it because we had to have it at the time and then everything just went up, up, up, up, and up, and then the war broke out and that brought on the boom during the war and it was no end to it then. They just been spiraling ever since.
RL: Then in your opinion, President Roosevelt was a great president?
DW: He, he was alright, he was what the country needed at the time.
RL: Let’s see now, he brought forth the Civilian Conservation Corps.
DW: Yea.
RL: And what did they in this particular area of the country?
DW: Well, the CCC was, was more for the young fellas, and it actually was the foundation of our army. If it hadn’t bee for the CCC I don’t think we would have been able to put an army together near as fast as we did in World War II because these young fellas had had a little bit of military training and a work program and at least they had records of ‘ em. They knew who they and where they could find them and there ages and the physical conditions of a lot of them and I think it made it a lot easier for them to put an army together when the, when the war broke out. The, there was two, the CCC, that’s the Conservation, Civilian Conservation Corps. Now that was for the younger fellows, to take the younger kids that normally about draft age, you know, about 18 to 19, 20 along in there, take them out of the cities, the ones that didn’t have anything to do and they brought them out and put them to work out in the forest.
RL: Then that was a good program?
DW: Oh, they did a lot of good. It was an expensive program, I guess, for the amount of good we got out of it, but we did a lot of good out of it, and then this other thing that most of the older people went on, or the adults who were married men and working for a living and trying to make a living that was PWA wasn’t it? Public Works Administration and that was, oh they any kind of a project that was good for the community. I helped build some bridges up here on the river. I helped build a dam to take the city water out of the city canal, out up on the river and that was two projects ad not only did a big project on the cemetery, cleaning up and improving the cemetery and any kind of a public place like that that they could put some use help and the people got a chance to ear a little bit.
RL: So in your opinion then these programs really benefited the area.
DW: They certainly did, you bet they did, cause I, I happened to be in the position to get, to reap some of the benefits out of it, and boy, I know I appreciated it.
RL: That’s good. Do you know anything about the Reconstruction Finance Corporation?
DW: No, not too much about it except that that was the money made available for the finance construction, new construction at that time and it started things to moving quite a bit in this country too. I know this ah, this carpenter that I worked for as a contractor here in town was doing some building. I got started working for him and that’s the way I got off the Public Works deal and got to making a little bit better, gee, we could make instead of making a dollar and half a day, we was making between $ 4 and $ 5 a day and that was a big improvement in those days. It made lots of difference I’ll tell you. I was gonna explain this to you to give you an idea of how people made deals in those days. Now this home I was renting from a fellow and I was renting two rooms in his basement and I was paying $ 15 a month and he wanted to remodel the place and everything, so he asked me to move so I didn’t have any place to go. I looked around town and couldn’t find a place to go or anything so I, there was a sign on this place, “ See Daniel Ricks”- e was a real estate dealer downtown so I went and talked to him and told him I would like to rent this place. “ Well, it’s not for rent”, he says, “ It’s for sale.” I says, “ Gee whiz, I couldn’t buy it, I haven’t got any money,” but he says, “ How much money have you got?” I said, “ Well, I’ve got $ 15 for next month’s rent” and he says, “ give me that and go and move up there and clean it up and see if you can get in there and live in it.” So I did. The place had been closed up for years and it was really a mess when we come in there. But anyway, I give him the $ 15 and then we cleaned up and got moved in. we got a couple of rooms so we could live in them and then he come up one morning while we were having breakfast and he said, “ I’ve got an aunt that’s got a little bit of money to invest,” and he said, “ If you’ll sign this mortgage for a thousand dollars and I think the interest rate was 6%, then he says you go ahead and live here and pay her $ 15 a month, and pay it off as fast as you can and that was the way we bought this house. No down payment, or nothing just- does that show you how real estate was in those days. Gee, this, this side of town up here, there was many of these buildings these homes at that time a lot of them were vacant and wasn’t many homes around us, but these city building lots you could buy them for taxes. Maybe, maybe $ 20, $ 25 something like that. up to $ 50 you could buy some of the choice lots for and they had curb and gutter, and sidewalks and everything and you could buy them for $ 25 to $ 50, but nobody wanted them even then.
RL: That’s quite an extreme.
DW: You couldn’t do anything with them. Now that same kind of a lot would cost you 3 to 5,000 dollars so property was way down, money was, the thing was money was high value then, money is low value now.
RL: Do you think that Idaho was a good place to be during the Depression?
DW: I sure think so, now I spent a year in Arizona before I come u p to Salt Lake I had worked at the power company down there and I was making good money down there. I made 75 cents an hour for working down there and that was the depression, but those fellows who stayed there during the depression had some pretty rough times. But we got away from there; of course, I was at Phoenix at that time. Phoenix was more of a farming community a lot could farm all winter down there, you know, lettuce, they raised lettuce and cotton, and citrus fruits of all kinds so, but I never did do any of that kind of work down there. I come back, I quit there in the fall and come out and helped father in the harvest and then I went to work in the sugar factory. And then I went from the sugar factory back to Salt Lake back to the power company because a friend of mine was down there at the power company. He had a job there and told me he’d watch for an opening and if they needed anyone he’d let me k now so he did and then we moved down and I stayed there about three and a half, two years.
RL: How about education, school and military at this time. How many were going to these functions?
DW: Boy, if you could get money enough to go to Ricks Academy at that time Ricks College, you was, you was doing fine boy. It didn’t cost very much money to go there then. I don’t k now how much it did cost because I didn’t go, but money, there just wasn’t any money around. I just was hard to, hard to get, you could- everything was real cheap. Labor and everything else and it was hard to- it’s been so long and prices have changed so much its hard to remember the prices of things.
RL: What were the salaries do you think of some of the teachers up at Ricks College then it was Ricks Academy?
DW: Well, I don’t know I never did know for sure what they were. I remember from a lot of them talking about it, several, of hearing several people talk about it and they even working for a low salary and then didn’t get all that until you know the schools didn’t have the money. There was a man downtown used to run the Living Store down there and they use to buy up all the school warrants. Well the schools didn’t have any money but they would issue warrants see and they’d pay their school teachers that way and Mr. Levine he use to run a dry good store and he use to buy the school warrants. Of course, I guess he took a little percentage, I don’t think it was very much though. Everybody talked about what a wonderful job he did on that and he’d, school teachers could take their warrants in there, of course, they would usually buy some clothes for it, but the banks wouldn’t take it because there just was no money. They would issue it against taxes that were coming in another year or something like that.
RL: How about military, was there a lot of kids going off into the army then?
DW: Not that I remember of from around here, not very many of them, there was quite an occasion when one got….
Mrs. Wilding: They did down in Salt Lake where I was raised.
DW: Quite an occasion when one young fellow would go from here into the military. It was unusual.
RL: How did everybody feel about the German Nazism at this time and the Japanese Imperialism? Did it make the country stronger? Do you think?
DW: Well…..
RL: As far as the national security is concerned?
DW: Not at that time, you see we considered Japan a friend of ours at that time. We weren’t worried about Japan that was, we never did expect what we got from Japan, of course, Hitler’s rise was so fast and furious that he was from nothing to going hot wild in such a short time, that it took people a little while to figure out what was going on, but I think, I know that this country exported a lot of stuff to Japan, food stuff, scrap metal, especially we shipped all kinds of scrap metal to Japan, all the old machinery around this country and everything was cut up and shipped, shipped out.
RL: Things from this part of the country?
DW: Oh yes, a lot of old farm machined old farm equipment and stuff like that, a lot of it went. We’re still buying junk that was just another way to get a hold of a few dollars.
RL: In conclusion of our interview, what are some of the things that you think we can learn or benefit all in all from the Depression?
DW: Well I don’t k now how our younger generation could, could benefit from it because things were so different from what these kids know nowadays. That they couldn’t even recognize it, we have everything we need now and money is plentiful and everything and the, and the kids, it would be hard for them. I think, I don’t mean it wouldn’t be good for them, but it would hard for them. It would be real hard. Well, I don’t think, nationally, I don’t think our country will stand for it, I don’t think people will stand for another severe depression. I think I would lead to civil war more than anything, because they just won’t put up with that kin d of stuff now. RL: That’s true.
DW: We’ve got one of the wealthiest countries in the world; we’ve got plenty of everything if it’s distributed right and I don’t think people would sit by and let somebody hold everything and the rest of us starve. I just don’t believe they would do it, I don’t know. This is just a personal opinion, but I don’t think they would do it.
RL: I believe that. if you just had a few last words about the Depression, what would you have to say about it?
DW: Well, it was, it was just really hard times and I hope that the country never has to go through it again. It, it’s an experience. After you’ve had it it’s something that you don’t want, you never ask for it, but after you’ve gone through it people really watch your head a little bit and if you get a few extra dollars you kinda hang on, you don’t just throw it away.
RL: Well, we are about out of time, we would like to thank you very much Mr. Wilding. This tape will be placed in the library at Ricks College for future use by researchers.