Charles Orrin Douglass

              Dr. David L. Crowder Oral History Project
Charles Orrin Douglass – Life during
the Depression
By Charles Orrin Douglas
December 4, 1975
Box 1 Folder 33
Oral Interview conducted by Karla Piquet
Transcript copied by Victor Ukorebi May 2005
Brigham Young University- Idaho
This is [ an] oral history. I am Karla Piquet. Today, December 4, 1975. I am going to
interview Orrin Douglass. The general topic will be the depression.
Karla Piquet ( KP): Mr. Douglass, where were you born?
Charles Orrin Douglass ( COD): Smithfield, Utah.
KP: How long have you lived in Teton Valley?
COD: Seventy- seven years.
KP: Where were your parents born?
COD: Well, my father was born in Smithfield, Utah. My mother was born in Chicago,
Illinois.
KP: What’s your occupation?
COD: Farmer.
KP: When did you notice when the Depression started?
COD: Well, it was about 1929. The jobs begin… they begin to lay off men and in the
railroad and the… everything just went to pieces. You couldn’t get a job nowhere. I used
to play for dances, and we milked a few cows. We could take a ten- gallon can of cream in
and get six dollars out of it. We had a few chickens, and I raised a few pigs. We had to
depend on what we… what we raised ourselves in order to live. We had a car but we
couldn’t run it because we didn’t have no tires, and we didn’t have no money to buy any
nor no gas if we’d had tires. So we worked along that way for, I don’t know how many
years it was, I don’t know when it begin to end. Not until we got rid of President Hoover.
We never got nowhere as long as we had him. He did nothing, absolutely nothing for the
poor people. He just sat there in the Whitehouse and didn’t do a thing. Finally, they got
him out of there and got Franklins D. Roosevelt in and he told the big bankers and stuff
like that to let loose of that money or he’d issue some more, and then it began to ease off.
So he even created jobs for men. Now we got [ jobs]... we was allowed to do public
works, like putting in water lines and stuff like that in the cities and like that. We got…
we was allowed to make twenty dollars a month, that’s all we could make. We could
work that much… ten days and they paid two dollars a day and we could work ten days
and then we was off. They had em then he put em to work the CCC’s they called them. I
forget what that means, but they worked on roads and forests and stuffs like that. I think
they got thirty dollars a month and their clothes and their board. They had to go out
wherever they sent them they had to go and work. But as far as me telling you anything
there was so many things that happened. We used to, in order to get our clothes; we’d
send to Montgomery and get our clothes because they was so much cheaper there than we
could get them here. Then we’d get our flour, a forty pound sack flour, you could get it
for eighty- five cents if you had eighty- five cents. There was a lot of them that didn’t have
it. Cattle wasn’t a right big steer, nine hundred pound steer you might get fifteen dollars
out of em. I had a little bunch of sheep, and I sheared them. I got ten cents a pound for the
wool, and when I sold the lambs that fall, I got two dollars and fifty cents a piece for em.
KP: Was like… was that an awfully lot of money though?
COD: But you could buy as much for a dollar than as you could with seven or eight now.
Now you see flour, I don’t know what it is now, it’s around four dollars or five dollars a
sack, we’d get it for eighty- five cents. Eggs, we… I can remember the first case of eggs
we took in. For thirty- dozen I had to pay thirty cents for the case, and I got five cents a
dozen for them. Oh there was a lot trouble there. I’ll tell you one thing that the depression
done for me, it made the best democrate out of me that ever was. Franklin D. Roosevelt
was the best President that they’ve ever had in my span of life. He didn’t only talk it, he
done it. And then when they put him out and they put Harry Truman in, Harry Truman
was just like him. Then they have to get some Republican in there, and they ain’t never
had anything since. But I could… there’s so many million things as happened while I
was… while that depression was going on. Yet I couldn’t remember half of em… I know
that I couldn’t… there was days and days that I couldn’t get a job. You could get coal
then for four dollars a ton, a lump coal for four dollars a ton. It’s forty dollars now. But I
didn’t have no four dollars to buy a coal, so I’d take my team and go to the canyon and
get a load of wood, and I hauled wood for all through the depression. We never burned
no coal. I’d take and go to the canyon and get a load of wood and fetch the home, and
then I’d saw it up the next day while my team was resting and the next day we’d go to the
canyon again.
KP: Well, like what did you do for fun?
COD: Didn’t have any. Oh, I’ll tell you what we did. We used to, we had house parties.
There was a bunch of us… oh, there was quite a few of em. Oh, six or eight
families… married couples you know. They’d have a house party to one place. They all
make a picnic. It would happen about once every week, maybe two weeks apart, and
we’d dance and we’d play games and monkey around that way. As far as boughten
pleasure of any kind, we didn’t have it.
KP: Didn’t you go to movies or anything like that?
COD: You couldn’t afford no movies. They was a dime. It cost you a dime for a ticket to
go to a movie but you couldn’t go because where we lived, it was too far to the movie for
one thing to drive the team and we couldn’t drive a car ‘ cause we didn’t have no tires on
it.
KP: Well, like when you played for the dances like, what did you play and stuff?
COD: I was a trap drummer.
KP: Did they have like dances every week or something?
COD: Well, they was… it would vary. I have played as high as fourteen nights straight
with the exception of Sunday. Maybe it would go along for a while and I wouldn’t get to
play for anything. My average income from that was about a dollar and a half a night, and
we’d play from… oh, from about nine o’clock to sometimes three or four o’clock in the
morning. We’d drive a team from here clear out to Drummond. I drove my team clear to
Drummond one time.
KP: How many miles is that?
COD: Oh, about twenty- five miles. I started out in the afternoon and drove down there.
Played through the dance and after the dance loaded up and come back.
KP: How many guys were in your band?
COD: Four.
KP: Were there lots of people that went to those dances?
COD: Oh, there was a lot of people. In fact, we had at that… when we was playing all the
time we had the… there was several orchestras here. We could get the crowd away from
everyone of em. All they had to do was say our orchestra was a playing and they had all
they could get in the house. But, they couldn’t charge very much a dance ticket. Fifty
cents, that’s what their ticket was, was fifty cents. Some of them didn’t have the fifty
cents. I know one time some boys, we used to live down here, I was playing over here in
old Hayden in the schoolhouse, me and Preston Fullmer and Sterling Swanner. That
wasn’t the bunch I always played with, I played with Dick Egbert and Benson from
Blackfoot and Milo Daley from Driggs and then sometimes we’d had Thora Beasley, she
was a girl that played with us. She played banjo in the Orchestra and she sang. Oh, we
had a big swing here I’ll tell you when it came to orchestras. We took here and one year
we played for the Freshman’s Ball up in Driggs. Man was that there professor mad cause
they didn’t have his orchestra— school orchestra. Went and hired us. We played for all
the Junior Proms and all that. See they had a high school in Victor then we… and we
played in Victor. They had an orchestra up there. They got mad at us. We didn’t care.
Then we played for a lot of church benefits and dances. We never charged for that. Like
the Relief Society, they put on a dance to raise some money you know, we’d play for
that. We wouldn’t charge them. You know if there was a benefit dance for some disabled
or sick person, we never charged for that. They used to have them years ago you know.
Like a man gets sick— down and out, he never has no money, none of them had any
money, that was out. We’d go and play maybe we’d get em ten dollars, that would be
about the size of it.
KP: Did you work for the railroad at all during the depression?
COD: Yeah. I worked on my section for two different summers. I got three dollars and
four cents a day. I worked all summer… well, when winter come by they laid off forty
crew. Me being one of the youngest men, of course, I got laid off. My brother, he worked
right on through because he was an old hand. He put in forty- seven years on the section.
KP: Thanks a lot. This tape will be placed in the library at Ricks College for use by future
researchers.