Rupert C. Lindsay

              Crowder, Dr. David L. Oral History Project
Rupert C. Lindsay – Life during the
Depression
By Rupert C. Lindsay
March 29, 1975
Box 2 Folder 11
Oral Interview conducted by Julie Browning
Transcribed by Victor Ukorebi February 2005
Brigham Young University- Idaho
I am Julie Browning. Today, March 29, 1975, I am going to interview Bro. Rupert
Lindsay. The general topic will be the depression and the effects it had on people’s lives.
Julie Browning: Mr. Lindsay, where were you born?
Rupert C. Lindsay: I was born in Heber City, Utah.
JB: How long did you live in Heber City?
RL: Until I was eighteen years old.
JB: Where were your parents born?
RL: They were born in Heber City, Wasatch County, Utah.
JB: What was your occupation?
RL: My occupation was first a coal miner.
JB: And then from there, when did you get married and where did you start working?
RL: We were married, my wife and I, in 1920. But I came to Idaho in 1915 with my
uncle and my aunt and lived in Albion, Idaho. That’s where I met my wife in 1915. then
I came from Albion, Idaho and while I was going to school there, the First World War
came along and I volunteered to go to the First World War from Albion, Idaho. The first
soldiers, who left, six of us volunteered from Albion State Normal, were the first
volunteers from Cassia County to go into the First World War.
JB: OK, you said that you served in the war, what part did you go to?
RL: I was, first was a member of the second Idaho Infantry and the infantry was induced
into the national service and I became a machine gunner with a hundred and forty- six
machine gun battalion and was one of the first ten thousand soldiers transported to France
to serve the war. I served in the 142nd Division as a machine gunner.
JB: At the completion of the war, what did you do?
RL: At the completion of the war, I was discharged in Wyoming and I came back to see
my girl at Albion, Idaho, first.
JB: You came back from the war and you came to see your girl. How long did you court
your girl?
RL: In 1916, she went on a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- day Saints. In
1917, in April 1917, I joined the army. She came home in 1918 and I came home from
the war in 1919 and all our courting was done by mail. I only took her out one time
before and all the rest of our courting was done by mail. In April the ninth, 1920, we
were married.
JB: Alright, you said you courted a lot through mail, well how was it delivered and gone
through?
RL: Oh, all of the letters that I wrote to my girlfriend, they were censored. They had to be
censored by the censorer that would mail it so there wasn’t anything written in there that
would be, affect our nation. And all of her letters came to me; they were delivered to me
as I moved about. Sometimes I’d get three or four at time, but I’d written mostly every
week to her they were all censored, every one of them.
JB: The government went through them all? They had to read them.
RL: Yes, somebody was appointed to be a mail censorer and they read every one of my
letters to my girl friend. Some of that was marked out that they thought if I was telling
them what was happening in the war. They were blotting out those portions of my letter.
So some of those letters didn’t all get to her.
JB: How was the mail delivered? Was it by train?
RL: The mail was taken by train to the boats and then by boat, and then delivered to the
army over in France and then found our outfit, wherever we were and taken to us.
Sometimes it would go two or three months before we got any mail and then it would all
come in a big bunch.
JB: Now when you wrote to her, how did her letters get to her?
RL: Oh, my letters were written an censored in France and then they were put in the
military mail and came by boat to America and then by train to Burley, Idaho where her
father took the mail, carried the mail by white- top buggy from Burley to Albion and it
was delivered to her in Albion in the mail. She was working in the Post Office at that
time.
JB: You got back from the war in 1919. When was it that you and your wife were
married?
RL: She had moved to Rupert, Idaho by 1920 and she lived in Rupert, Idaho in 1920. I
came to Rupert in March of 1920 because she was ill. At the completion of her illness,
we were in Salt Lake City April 9, 1920 and we went to live in Hiawatha, Utah in the
coal mine, the coal mining camp.
JB: And you worked in the mining camp?
RL: I worked then in the coal mine for four years. Our first two children were born in
Hiawatha, Utah. I worked as a coal miner.
JB: About how much did you get paid as a coal miner? What were the wages?
RL: The wages then were, they were on contract. They were not very much but they were
paid by the amount of work you did. So much a ton, you were paid so much a ton for
loading the coal, paid down that way. They were not very big wages, they were about, oh
may be one twentieth of what they are now.
JB: OK, after working in the coal mines for four years, what did you do then?
RL: One day in the coal mine, I crippled one of my men. I was a motor man at that time,
in the mine. I ran over one of his fingers and cut it off. Then the next day they gave me a
new brakeman on my motor, so I got another man and he got between the cars and broke
him right in two in the middle. They took him out and I thought surely some one of these
days this will happen to me if I don’t get out of this coal mine. So I decided that I would,
after I’d gotten up in the morning at 6: 30 to in the coal mine and by 10: 30, I had decided
to come back home. And my wife said, “ What are you doing home this time of the day?”
“ We are going to leave, we’re going to go.” “ Where are we going?” “ To Rupert, Idaho”
We came that day or that afternoon to Rupert, Idaho not knowing anything about what we
were coming to in this town. But we came here then.
JB: Have you ever heard of Rupert before or did you just come by chance?
RL: No, I had heard of Rupert before. My name being Rupert, we had decided either goes
to Lindsay, California, or Rupert, Idaho. We choose Rupert because we knew something
about Rupert. We came, that was on the twenty- second of February in 1924.
JB: Did you build a house here?
RL: No, this house that we live in now was a vacant at that time and we applied to the
man who was taking charge of it, by the name of Tom Holliday and we rented this house
and we’ve lived in it ever since.
JB: What was your occupation when you first arrived in Rupert?
RL: Oh goodness, I didn’t have any occupation. I didn’t know how to do anything much
only coal miner. I came here and the first job I got that was possible to get was to sort
potatoes. I sorted potatoes for, maybe, the next fifteen or twenty years. In the winter, I
sorted potatoes; and in the summer, I stacked hay and worked on the farm for the farmers.
JB: Did you own this place that you are living now? Did you ever buy it?
RL: No, mame. This place belongs to a woman in California and she was renting it and
we just rented the place first. The first year on the crop basis, we rented it and paid so
much of our crop to it.
JB: Now you own the farm now. How did this come about?
RL: Oh, we were renting this place and a man had bought an option on it and had paid
seven hundred and fifty dollars down on it with the understanding that in the fall he
would, in the winter he would sell his potatoes and then he would pay the balance. But
potatoes went down to nothing. He couldn’t sell them at all and he had to haul them out
unto the desert. So when spring came, he couldn’t pay his debt. So this lady in California
was going to foreclose on him and move him out. He became angry about it because he
had paid seven hundred and fifty dollars down on it and he couldn’t pay anymore, so he
had to have another five hundred dollars. So he met on the street, we had been moved out
of this place in the winter time out to another place. And he met me on the street and he
said if you want that seven hundred and fifty dollars that I paid in that place, rather than
them take it back from me I’ll give you that seven hundred and fifty dollars if you could
raise the five hundred dollars. Well, we have ten calves at that time that we had raised to
heifers and we sold them so that we could make the five hundred dollars, and he gave us
the seven hundred and fifty dollars and our five hundred dollars made the payment. He
turned his option over to us and that made the purchase. Then we had a difficult time
paying for it each year, we just scraped in every way we could and we were going to lose
it and the government passed a law that they couldn’t foreclose on poor people. That they
were to be given an opportunity to pay for it by Small Home Owners Loan Corporation
where we could borrow our money from the government and pay for it over a period of
time. They made our payments low enough so that we could make payments by our
meager income that we had. We had a terrible time. That’s when we had to go out on the
desert for our fuel and get our sagebrush in. we’d take a hayrack and go out and get a
whole load of sagebrush from out on the north side and came and used that for our fuel.
That was when we could buy a sack of flour for eighty- five cents. To get the eighty- five
cents was quite a difficult thing to get money. Money was a very scarce item. We worked
for our, all of our food almost; we worked for it and got it out of anything we could. We
raised some beans on our own grounds so we could have beans and potatoes and that’s
about what we lived on mostly.
JB: Were other farmers around the area in the same situation? Did they, you said that
they dumped potatoes out on the desert?
RL: Yes. Many, many of the farmers dumped their potatoes because they couldn’t sell
them. Had to take them out on the desert after they’d kept them all winter. A great
number of the farmers on our project here, I would guess eighty- five percent of them, had
lost their places. They couldn’t pay for them. They had to make some kind of
arrangements. Many, many of our people lost their place, lost their home and moved
away from here.
JB: Was there a shortage of food? Did people have very much?
RL: No, there was no shortage of the kind of food we had. We were very lucky in our
country here because we raised potatoes and rather than throw them on the desert, you
could just eat them, if you wanted to and you could feed them on your stock. We raised
pigs, had our own pigs and we could raise our own pork, we could raise our own cattle.
We were luckier than most people throughout the country. We could do these things; it
was hard to get clothing, to get shoes. We had one girl that had to have a pair of shoes
every month and it almost took all we could make to get her a pair of shoes and pay our
rent, or our payment on our home. We didn’t have much other than that.
JB: Was, I’ve heard that before that there was some rationaling. Like you got only so
many pounds of flour?
RL: Oh, everything was rationed. Fuel was rationed, gasoline was rationed, sugar was
rationed, beans was rationed, potatoes were rationed, butter was rationed, everything was
rationed but the things we raised ourselves. Our own eggs, our own milk, our own
potatoes, our own garden, these were the things that we lived on. But the things we
bought were all rationed and taxes were on them also.
JB: What did you do mainly for transportation?
RL: Oh, this transportation is quite a thing. When we came here from the coal mine, we
didn’t have any transportation and we had some lovely neighbors, Henry Baker and J. R.
Noble. One of them had an old horse and one of them had an old buggy, so they gave us
the horse and the buggy and we didn’t have any hardness, we had a horse and a buggy
but no hardness. So we just scraped all around and everybody, all of our neighbors all
around helped us make a harness for this horse and buggy that’s the way we went then. I
remember when David I. Garner came by with- he had an old T- Model Ford and when he
saw us walking to town, he would come along and ask us if we wanted a ride. There were
so many heads sticking out of the car we couldn’t see how another one could possibly get
in there. But he said this one thing, “ Where there’s room in the heart, there’s always
room in the wagon.” And we would pile into that car and give us a ride to town, and my
goodness how we’d enjoy it. Then when we got our own buggy, we didn’t have to ride;
we could go plodding along in our old teetery buggy.
JB: Cars were very scarce then?
RL: Yeah, there were only a few had cars, only a few had cars. Those who were good
managers on their farms who had saved their farms and who had good machinery, they
were only ones that had cars.
JB: What did you do mainly back then for recreation?
RL: Oh my, recreation we just had recreation every day we didn’t have much to do, but
some of the things we did….. When we had bought an old car for forty dollars. An old T-model
T car for forty dollars and we got enough gasoline to go up to Sun Valley to Warm
Spring Creek to the CC Camp, and we took our potatoes and our carrots and our onions
out of our garden and our beans and our stuff, some flour and we went to live in the CC
Camp and we fished in the day time and at night we went to this CC Camp and we fished
in the day time and at night we went to live in the CC Camp and as we crossed we got in
there and it had been abandoned. It was vacant so the packrats were in there. We didn’t
know that when we packed in, but when we, and it rained and we all got in the place and
the rain just pattered down on us and our kids they just had the fun about it. Now when
we got in there at night then, something was carrying off our silverware and we only had
one flashlight and I got up to see and there they was carrying off the rat and our girls they
got scared and they went and got and slept in the old Model T Ford the old forty dollar
Ford and they were scared to sleep in that CC Camp. But they have now, as they look
back now, this is one of the most enjoyable trips they ever had in their life was to go
there. When we came home, on our way home, the old car pooped out on us in Shoshoon
and we had to get in a motel ‘ till our car was fixed so we could come home. I remember
coming across the desert, it run out water and we had to carry water with it and every
little ways we had to put water in the darn thing and I guess we watered it forty times
from Dietrich to Rupert, Idaho across the desert.
JB: were cars hard to keep up then? Did they fall apart a lot?
RL: No, they were just; the only ones that we could get had to be old. We never did buy a
car until it was after around sixty or seventy thousand miles on it before we ever could
get a car. We were, I guess, we were too poor of managers to get a good car.
JB: Was there other types of recreation? Did you play a lot of games and things at home
like baseball?
RL: Oh, all of our recreation had to be at home. My wife was quite a, the children liked
her to be around and have her tell stories. Our stories and our reading of stories on
Church History, reading Church History, these were the things that we used for our
recreation. Then we loved music. One of the first things that we got was our piano. We
got our piano and would get around our piano and sing and all of our kids came. Then we
traded that piano for a player piano and that was the center of recreation in our own town
pert near around. All the kids come here to play our player piano. And they would sit
down and we’d got about ten rows, I think, on the piano and they would have a great
time. Some of those are the tunes now we like to sing now.
JB: Back then; was there ever a chance when you could go to a show?
RL: Yes, the shows were only ten cents to go to the shows, they were the best shows. So
you see when we had our four of us it would only take forty cents to go to the shows, for
all four of us. The children and my wife and I. But still we, we went periodically to the
shows, but not very often.
JB: What kind of shows were there?
RL: Oh, there were, a lot of those were Charlie Chaplin shows, they were the best shows.
They were all pantomime shows, they were still pictures and there’s still a screen to go
see Charlie Chaplin now. He was as funny a man as there was ever in the world to just
pantomime, no talking at all.
JB: There was something else that I have just been wondering about. What kind of candy
and stuff did they have back then?
RL: Oh, they made good candy, but most candy was hard rock candy. I don’t know of
any of that thing today, hard rock candy. We had hard rock candy that you buy. The
reason we bought it, because you couldn’t chew it up, you have to suck it. It would last
longer, so it made better for the kids. They made good chocolates, but they were so
expensive for us so we couldn’t have them.
JB: OK now, you had two children?
RL: We had two children when we came here.
JB: What did they do for schooling?
RL: Well all of our children went to school in Rupert, every one of them went. They
started the buses right shortly after we came here and so our children got to go to school
all the time. And they had practically the same kind of schooling we’ve got today.
JB: They didn’t have to walk to school, they had their transportation?
RL: No, only my wife and I had to walk to school. But since we came here, we’ve always
had good transportation on Minidoka County for our children.
JB: Was there ever a shortage of books?
RL: Yes. Yes some of our books were, we would use them several years at a time, the
same books, and when you’d go to school you’d have some book that some kid that tore
the year before all up. Some pages were even gone in them, but we got them out by
borrowing from other kids.
JB: Did they have their own schoolhouse?
RL: Yes, there were many schoolhouses in Minidoka County then. That’s before the
consolation. There was the Empire School, the Big Ben School, the Pioneer School, the
Rupert School, the Minidoka Dam School, and the Acequia Schools. There were many
schools then before the consolidation.
JB: Was there very many students in each school?
RL: No, some of those classes were very small. Some teacher had three and four classes.
She’d teach three or four classes, one teacher.
JB: Back then in the depression, did you have a bank account?
RL: Goodness no, we tried. The bank account was a thing of the past then. It hadn’t even
started yet for us. We used to, about the bank account, one time I went to , when we first
got a chance to buy a cow for sixty dollars and we didn’t have the sixty dollars, but the
man, he had to have his money. He couldn’t let us have it by credit. So I went to the bank
to see if I could borrow sixty dollars, and he wouldn’t loan me the sixty dollars and when
I came out to the wife who was out in front of the bank I said he won’t let us the sixty
dollars. What will we do now? She said, “ Would you mind if I would go and try?” I said,
“ No, if you can get the sixty dollars, go.” And she went in there and borrowed the sixty
dollars from the bank after he’d turned me down. It took us about four months to get our
sixty dollars paid back to the bank.
JB: Did you think it was hard back then for people to get loans?
RL: Yes, in order to get a loan, to get my sixty dollars, the sixty dollars the wife had
borrowed, she had to get two signers to get the sixty dollars out of the bank. She had to
get two signers by people that they would accept.
JB: Did you have money in the bank before the depression?
RL: Yes, we had money in the Paul Bank, and the darn bank went broke, we never did
get a nickel of it back.
JB: And there were banks across the country that this happened to?
RL: Oh yes. There were the Paul Bank, and the Delco Bank, and two banks in Rupert,
four or five in Burley all went broke.
JB: What was the main reason for going broke? Was it people just coming and getting
their money out?
RL: I think everything had, yes, the people took their money out but most of them
because they had paid such high prices for their property. Like the one forty by me now.
It was bought for twenty- two thousand dollars and the man paid eight thousand dollars
down for it and when the fall came, he didn’t have the money enough to make the
payment so the man foreclosed on him and took it away from him and next year he sold it
to the man who now owns it for five thousand dollars. So you see, all of them had gone.
They didn’t have money enough and they just went broke.
JB: Since Rupert was mainly an agricultural community, how was most of the farming
done?
RL: Oh, all of it was done by teams. Everybody had from one to two teams. Some of the
wealthier ones had three. All of their work was done by teams and by hand tools, every
bit of it. The plowing was done by teams and the harrowing was done by teams, the
planting was done by teams. They planted their crops with two row planters with beets
mind you, and then they thought they were pretty smart when they got a four row planter,
but all of their beets were done one row at a time by team, by plow. It was topped by
hand, they were topped by hand and they were throwed into the piles and then came
along and picked up by hand and thrown into a wagon and taken to the beet dump.
JB: What other kinds of crops were there besides potatoes and beets? Was there hay?
RL: Oh, everybody raised hay. Hay was a great crop here because the sheep men came in
here on this project to feed their sheep in the winter and they bought the hay from the
farmers and they would stack their hay in the big stacks and sell it to the sheep men and
have they feed it on their place. That way fertilizing their crop with feeding the sheep
over it. When spring came and then they have this loose hay out on it and then they
would take it up by a hand rake, one horse, horse rake, rake it up and haul it away. Pile it
up and let it rot and make manure out of it. All the work was done that way. There were
beans. We raised beans. Always raised some beans. Then everybody had cows. Our cows
for instance, here we didn’t have any pasture for them. We had eight head cows and we
herded them on the roads, up and down the roads. Our children herded our cows and
we’d get it out in the morning and take them out and herd them for a while and bring
them back in the afternoon and take them back out in the afternoon and take them back
out in the afternoon again and bring them in the evening and we’d milk them and sell our
milk.
BJ: Did the people own the sheep that were out on the ranges? And then they took the
cattle out there too?
RL: No, the sheep men were bask most of them, and were from Bancroft, Idaho and from
up in the upper county and they would come down in winter and their sheep here in the
winter. They would drive them across the desert back up for their summer range up in the
summer.
JB: Did they pay for the use of the ranges out here?
RL: No, they paid for just the hay. The privilege to sell hay to them and feed it on their
ground, but they had their allotment from the government. Many of them owned their
summer ground up in the hills where they summered their sheep. They lambed them
down here and many a lambing shed was down here where they came down here in the
spring to lamb them and feed over the winter and lamb. And then after they had lambed
in the spring, then they would go back, drive them across the desert way up to Soda
Springs, Lave Hot Springs and up in that country for their summer range.
JB: You were talking about having your own cows, and milking them yourself. Well, did
you sell the milk in town to other people?
RL: We separated our milk and sold the cream. We fed our skim milk that run through
the separater; we fed that to our pigs. The cream was all we sold. We took our cream to
town then they began taking our whole milk and came around when Kraft started their
plant here. They came around taking our whole milk and each morning we would come
and pick it up after we quit separating.
JB: Did you make things like cheese?
RL: We sold it to the Kraft Food Company and they made cheese out of it.
JB: So they made all the things like that?
RL: They made butter and cheese.
JB: Did you ever have things like that in the depression?
RL: We try to make our own cheese. My wife’s mother and father, they were cheese
makers in their day. They made their own cheese, made their own butter, but it was much
easier for us to sell our milk to the cheese factory and have them make the cheese and
buy the cheese from them. We took it for pay for our milk.
JB: What about ice cream?
RL: We could get ice cream the same way. We could trade our milk and then they would
bring us ice cream, cheese and butter in lieu of money for our milk.
JB: So you just traded it instead of money?
RL: Just traded and took what money was over of what we used.
JB: Ok now I’m just going to ask Sister Lindsay a few questions. Back then, what did
most of the ladies do like clothing and stuff? Was there a lot of sewing done?
Sister Lindsay: Yes, most of it was homemade sewing. Some wore them short, some
wore them long, but most of them were kind of a medium length. A lot of them go to
school with knee dresses and the next week some down to my ankles. I used to cry about
it but that didn’t help any. They had some pretty materials, but nothing like we have now.
JB: Well, where did you get most of your materials and things like this?
SL: Well, Dad bought from a man that was traveling around in an old wagon.
JB: Like peddlers?
SL: Yes. We were barefooted only to school or to church.
JB: Oh, how did you buy your shoes and things like this? Was it done at the stores?
SL: Yes, we bought shoes at stores, and we didn’t have them very often. We didn’t buy
shoes and we kept them only for the best.
JB: You just wore them for Sunday or did you wear them for school?
SL: For school.
JB: Now when your children went to school, did you always send their lunches?
SL: Yes, we sent lunches with them until the last few years. They had a few of these
prepared lunches for them.
JB: During the depression, you made most everything, like your bread?
SL: Yes, and I still do. I don’t think we bought hardly anything in packages, our cereal
that we cooked came in packages. We didn’t buy much. We made it from starch.
JB: What mainly were the fashion trends back in the depression? How did people wear
their hair?
SL: Well, most of them wore it quite short, quite short.
JB: Did you cut it yourself?
SL: No, well someone else did in the family or some friend. We didn’t have beauty
operators at all.
JB: There were no beauty operators?
SL: No, beauty operators.
JB: You said you had two children, now were your children born at home?
SL: They were all born at home. We lost our first baby in Hiawatha. It was born at home
and we had a doctor and nurse but it was dead at birth. Then we had two others and we
moved here. The one doctor delivered all three of these first babies, the same doctor.
Then we moved back here and we had three more here. We’ve had six children. They
have all been born at home. Kolila lamp, no lights but a Kolila lamp, and you’d call your
doctor when you’re ready for him. You have no preparation much before like they have
now.
JB: And then the doctor came?
SL: And then the doctors come to the home.
JB: Well, was there any medications back then?
SL: Not too much. Before I was married, I had a doctor that gave me medicine for my, I
had a heart problem. I’ve always been kind of sickly, I guess. Not like they have now.
JB: Was there anything like penicillin?
SL: No.
JB: How was the church ran during the depression? ( Mr. Lindsay)
RL: Oh, the church in Minidoka here, we had just one ward when we first started and it
was divided and the west part was really the first ward but the bishop was in the east part
of the town so they called that the first ward. The one that usually was the first one to
start they called that the second ward, so we had two divisions there. The church house
was on the square where the tabernacle is now, an old one room building. Then they built
a lean- to on the east side of it, and that made another class in there. Then we would put
the stage across, we had one division in where the stage was and then one down below
and we’d put curtains across in the middle of downstairs and that’s where we held our
classrooms.
Our first bishop was Bishop Catmul, Farrel Catmul’s father was the first bishop and then
when divided, Bishop Borop as the Bishop. He was the bishop and the house was in the
second, the west part of town and so they put Bishop Ashton in there, and we had two
wards then and that’s the way we had just two wards. They were pretty good wards. But
it’s funny to me now to go to think we each one got our own classroom to be. We’d have
a heck of a time now going back into where we just divided four in one room and a
couple of curtains between us. The little kids would peek under the curtain and make
faces at one another under the curtain.
Mrs. Lindsay: This is the way it was when we moved back here from Hiawatha.
JB: What have been the major changes in the church since back then?
RL: Well, the magazines have been a big change and the priesthood has been put more
forward than it was at that time. Men didn’t do as much in the church as they do now,
which is good.
RL: Then there is another change. There used to be religion class. That has been
discontinued now. The primary and the seminary take its place you see religion class.
You have seminaries and they are weekday now but the religion class used to be a week
day class for everybody, religion class. We don’t have any more religion class.
Sister Lindsay: That’s where I first saw President David O. McKay. He was a young man
and I was a little kid and he came to our religion class and I’ll remember, I can still see
his eyes. They just pierce right through you and oh, he gave the most wonderful talk. I
can’t tell you what he said, but I’ll tell you us kids sure listened to him. He was a
wonderful man even then. And that’s been long ago.
JB: You said they had the MIA?
Sister Lindsay: Yes, they had MIA
JB: It is about the same as it was then?
Sister Lindsay: Oh no, it’s so much different. We just went and had a class and sang may
be something on a program maybe.
JB: You didn’t have lessons?
Sister Lindsay: Well, class lessons, yes.
JB: Was there activities like there are now? Was there roadshows?
Sister Lindsay: Well, when were married, there were. When we lived in Albion there,
they had, we went over to Almo with roadshows then. We went over and we had plays
then. When I was smaller, they didn’t have none.
RL: They have always had drama. Ever since we were kids, which was some of the best
things we had was to be in drama. I liked to be the goofed in the plays.
Sister Lindsay: There was a lot of singing done. We went around to different wards and
sang.
RL: Oh, in the roadshows we went, that’s where I used to dress up as a Negro. My when I
was a Negro, didn’t know whether I was a black man or white man.
JB: Now Sister Lindsay, can I ask you just about the Relief Society. What was it like
back then?
Sister Lindsay: Well, it was all old people and when I came home from my mission, I
went to Relief Society; I was the only unmarried person there. They were all married,
older people. They held it on Thursday afternoon.
JB: Did you do quilting? Did you have the regular work day?
Sister Lindsay: No, we just had a class, lesson.
JB: Was there any activities such as the quilting?
Sister Lindsay: Not very many quilting.
JB: Was that kind of thing done mostly in the home as a family group?
Sister Lindsay: Yes, yes. More as a family group or as friends that would get together and
do it in the home.
JB: Now Brother Lindsay could you tell now the changes in the Priesthood?
RL: Oh, in the Priesthood, we had, they’ve always been the Priesthood. But, I thought of
Brother Cambell’s, Johnny Cambell’s father, before he was ever asked to offer a prayer;
he was thirty- five years old. Only older people did all the praying, did all the preaching,
but the younger people do it now it, see. You have all the young people do the work now
in the church. Oh I think the same functions, we had the same problems but they were not
specified like they are now. Specific problems we have and I like the lesson we got now.
They’re more right down we’re thinking.
Sister Lindsay: Each prophet has prepared us more for what’s coming ahead. Haven’t you
seen it yourself even in your time?
JB: Yes, I have.
Sister Lindsay: It just seems like each prophet has had some certain thing to fulfill. And
he has done it.
JB: How did you take care of the tithing?
RL: Oh, tithing was done always, used to have a tithing office to go to. But in our day,
that was just about the time we were married, they did away with the tithing office, and
we went then to pay our bishop our tithing the same as everybody. Oh, they weren’t so
strict then with their tithing. I mean they weren’t preaching it quite as often. I guess
they’ve always preached it but people are practicing the law more. When they came to
Heber J. Grant’s time, he passed an instruction around that you couldn’t have an office in
the church unless you were a tithe payer. Many people were dropped from their office in
Minidoka Stake when President Tune came in here as the President of our Stake. One of
the leaders in the Sunday School Superintendents, he wasn’t a full tithe payer. The head
of the Mutual wasn’t a full tithe payer. Some of the High Councilmen were not full tithe
payers. President Tune said that President Grant had given him that instruction that either
be a tithe payer or else resign. Some of them did resign because they couldn’t live the law
of tithing. But since that time, I think, that everybody in our stake is a full tithe payer.
Every officer in the stake, I believe, is a full tithe payer. They won’t have them unless
they are. They don’t stay in. People have gotten now in their hearts so they’re willing to
pay their tithing.
Sister Lindsay: I’d like to tell you how I earned my first tithing. Thinning beets when I
was eight years old. Soon as I was baptized, they had me go thin beets all day and I
earned two dollars. I worked awfully hard. I got twenty cents tithing and I kept that
receipt for a long, long time. I’ve paid every cent of tithing all my life. That’s one thing
I’ve done.
RL: I didn’t pay anything until I was twenty. I don’t believe I ever paid any tithing until I
was twenty years old. Then I just got to thinking that I wanted to be an elder. Well, then I
knew that I’d better shape up a little bit and get to paying it. Tithing was a, a school-master.
Now tithing isn’t difficult for me to pay at all. Because I just pay it when I got it.
I’ve discovered that it isn’t my money, it is somebody else’s money and He just loaned it
to me and so I don’t want to spend His money, I want to spend my own.
JB: Was all the tithing paid with money?
RL: No. Oh, it began about the time we were married. Up ‘ till then, we could pay
produce. Everybody paid whatever they had. I remember sorting spuds for Bro. Blacker
out here, that’s our patriarch’s father, Thomas Blacker. He used to set his potatoes out.
The Lord raised culls he said, he just got culls and so he put one- tenth of the culls in one
pile, one- tenth of all the other potatoes in another pile. He paid tithing, one- tenth of his
culls just the same as he did everything else, to pay his tithing. Then the bishop had to
change them into money. About that time they said, no, now you give the value of the
money instead of ten percent of your potatoes. You give the value that you got off them.
When you sold them, you paid them.
Sister Lindsay: It was easier to do that way. After people did get money, it was much
easier all the way round.
RL: And so they did away with the tithing offices then, you see.
Sister Lindsay: I’d taken in eggs. We took eggs and butter to the tithing offices.
JB: What about the missionary program?
RL: Oh, the missionary program was very scarce because very few people had money to
go, but kept their missionary force in tact. But now, for instance, in our particular stake
here they asked, out of the Seventies, if one of the seven presidents to go on a mission
and at that time I was in the presidency of the Seventies. So my bishop called me to go on
that mission. I went on a mission to Canada and the Seventies paid for it. It cost them
seventy dollars a month to keep me in the mission. My wife, she stayed home and took
care of the home and the children and everything and I guess she had the toughest
mission. I served two years in Canada.
JB: So the church did help to pay for your mission?
RL: Yes, the Seventies, not the church but the Seventies. The Seventies of the stake paid.
Each of them paid so much more money into this. We did that for two missionaries and
then that ceased doing that way.
Sister Lindsay: When I went, before I was married, my folks paid all of mine. It cost me
fifty dollars a month. I went to Central States and it cost them fifty dollars a month.
JB: Were the mission mostly in United States?
RL: Oh, they had a mission in Britain and in Germany, but they weren’t like they are
now, see. I think they had about twenty or thirty missions then and now you see how
many have, got hundreds of them now to every language.
Sister Lindsay: All over the world practically now. We’re almost in every nation.
RL: Let’s see, we had the Southern States Mission, and the Eastern States Mission, and
the Northcentral State Mission, the Western Mission, the California Mission. That‘ s all
the mission there were. The Northern- western Mission in the United States and now you
see there is practically one in every state.
JB: Do you think the depression hit all the other countries, you know, just not the United
States?
RL: Yes and other parts of the United States were hit worse that we were in Idaho, too.
Because of the produce that we raised. We are an agricultural people and we raised
mostly things that you can eat. The only thing we couldn’t eat was our hay.
Sister Lindsay: We ate the animals, though.
RL: We ate the animals that ate the hay. So we weren’t hit as bad in Idaho as they were in
some other states, in the eastern states.
JB: Ok, to conclude, what do you think mainly was the cause of the depression?
RL: Oh, I believe that over spending was most of the cause for the nation and the state
and everything. High prices and they kept going and, I think, that this idea of trying to get
something for nothing all the time, each time I want a raise, I want it to go up, up with
my pay. I think that this same thing that is bothering us today was the same thing that did
in 1929. The banks loaned too much money. They were too liberal with their loans and
then when we were depending upon sales up and down, you see, and when they got down
they couldn’t make money to meet the high price that they did. They raised the interest
on everything. I think the same thing that is causing our depression today had caused it
then.
JB: So you think the United States is going……..?
RL: It’s heading that way if it doesn’t watch out. We’re just getting in the same kind of
thing like they did in 1929. It looks very much like it’s oding the same thing. You see
some of these placed are so high priced now and people buying and never will be able to
pay out. Unless, if money stays the way it is, they can. But if it should decline a bit, you
see, like it had done this last year, a lot of people in trouble right now.
JB: Thank you very much. This tape will be placed in the library at Ricks College for use
by future researchers.