William Lewis Adamson

              Crowder, Dr. David L. Oral History Project
William Lewis Adamson – Life
during the Depression
By William Lewis Adamson
March 3, 1975
Box 1 Folder 2
Oral Interview conducted by Scott Karren
Transcribed by Victor Ukorebi January 2005
Brigham Young University- Idaho
This is oral history. I’m Scott Karren and today is March 31, 1975. I’m going to
interview William Lewis Adamson. The general topic will be the 1928 depression.
SK: Mr. Adamson, where were you born?
WA: Murray, Utah.
SK: How long did you live in Murray, Utah?
WA: ‘ Till I was fourteen.
SK: Where did you live after Murray?
WA: Well, the first year after we left Murray, we went to Big Horn Basin and stayed
there one year. Then we came back to Idaho, and lived in Annis. I was twenty- one, got
married at twenty- two. Then we started dry farming here at Antelope. From there on,
well we just dry farmed the way the old fashioned dry farmers used to do, with a team of
horses. We didn’t have any tractors. We used plows, harrows, and everything was done
with horses. It seems though, everything we bought we went to the store and bought. It
wasn’t like it is now. You couldn’t buy canned goods same as you do now. You could
buy canned tomatoes for about two cans for a quarter, and your work shoes cost you
about, oh around one dollar and seventy- five cents. I think bib overalls were somewhere
around a dollar, and you buy a five gallon can of honey for three dollars, no four dollars
and fifty cents. We used to always buy that after we got a family, after we got started
raising our kids. Our first child was born after we started the dry farm. He was born in
Annis. We moved there in the next spring and we started farming. The way we farmed
then, we used headers and binders, and horse powered thrashing machines. That’s the
way we thrashed our grain, with a horse power, with six teams of horses on a tire that
went around and round and it had a tong, also a rod that went up to the thrashing machine
and two men stood up on the thrashing machine and fed it in by hand. People pitched off
from the stack. It had a stack on each side; we pitched it off into that. That’s the way we
farmed. Later on, why we got a thrashing machine up there with a closed steam engine
on it, but you had to pull it around with horses. Up to about 1918, that’s about the way
we thrashed. After that, well we started to come in there with bigger tractors, and big
steam engines, and thrash blowers. The thrashing machines we had the first place, we
had to have a man stand at the back end of the thrashing machine as the straw came out,
and stack it up as it came out through a carrier. It came out the back and as straw.
SK: Where were your parents born?
WA: My parents were born in Utah. Their parents were pioneers, but my father and,
mother was born in the southern part of Utah and my father was born somewhere around
Murray, in Salt Lake County.
SK: What was your occupation?
WA: I’ve always been a farmer. After I started farming for myself, I used to work for
wages. I worked in Montana, the Woods Livestock Company up there a few years before
I was married. I was up there to work and a year before I was married I went up there to
work. After we got married why then we started farming on Antelope for ourselves,
worked for wages too. Didn’t make enough up there. Dry farm grain was cheap, about
ninety cents a hundred for the grain as I remember. When we first started farming up
there and pigs was around five, five and one half cents a hundred for fat pigs. We milked
some cows and mother used to make butter. There was a store down here just west of
where Ririe is now. It was called Filmers Store. We would have to come down there and
buy our groceries. She’d bring butter down, and sell it there for about fifteen cents a
pound. Eggs was about, oh all the way from twelve to fifteen cents a dozen and meat was
right cheap. Everything we bought was cheap. We bought your flour and made your
own bread, and your vegetables. Mother used to come down to the valley and go around
to different orchards and fruit was ripe, and gather up fruit and can it. We always after
our family got any size at all, we’d always can it in two- quart bottles, seem like it took
two quarts for every meal. She put up her vegetables that way, and we seemed to get
along okay, but a lot different than it is now. People had to do it that way now; I think
they’d starve to death. Had a lot of difference in the way we had to live then, and it is
now. When a fellow looks back and sees what he went through he wonders how he ever
got growed up to be a man.
SK: What brought the depression around? Do you know?
WA: Well what brought the depression, when the world war started in 1914, and we
joined the war in about 1918, well then grain jumped up to about four dollars a hundred.
And after the war was over then it sunk back again, and it just seemed about the thirties
when President Roosevelt took over, why that’s when the depression was on. Wheat had
dropped then to about thirty cents a bushel, pigs got down to about three dollars and
seventy- five cents a hundred, and there was no work. You couldn’t get any work in the
winter time so they started what they called the E. W. A., I believe that’s what they called
it, and they hired people to go out. We got jobs and that some of us single handed and
some of us had teams. We’d haul rock, and the river was getting so it in its channel. But
they found out later on that didn’t work too good because when the high waters would
come, why it would was this riff- raff away and so they finally found out they’d have to
dig big channels along the edge of the river and fill it full of rock, so they could hold the
river in a branch, which they still have to do that to keep the river in the bank. But the
depression, the actual cause of the depression was the grain, just every went to pieces,
just the same as it is now. There was no work, people couldn’t get work. Of course, we
didn’t suffer, Seemed like we always had plenty to eat. Everybody was in about the same
boat around here, so we didn’t do any suffering. The food or anything, there wasn’t
fancy stuff like you go to the store and buy now. You couldn’t buy canned stuff like you
buy now. It was just a different way of living. People if they had to live that way now, I
think they’d be like elk. After they started feeding the elk, the elk would starve to death
before they’d go out and hustle. I think that’s what people would do now if they had to
go out and hustle like we did. Go out and hustle wood for fuel in the winter time, we
couldn’t always get coal to burn. We would go down on the river and hustle dry wood
that had been wetted down. Though they didn’t have high water there would be a lot of
dry wood coming down the river. People would go and gather it up and they’d have saws
and saw it up made out of an old automobile so they could make a saw and put a buzz
saw on it and saw it up into twelve foot lengths and smooth it up. So we always had
plenty of wood to keep us warm.
SK: Do you think the city people had it worse then the country people?
WA: Well yeah. I’ve heard that city people, in fact, I got a brother- in law here that come
form Germany, and he said that they seen the time when all they had was just some bread
to eat he said. Now I’d heard them tell that they had soup lines in the city where people
line up for soup but it never got that bad out here in the valley where we lived. I’d never
heard of anybody going hungry. It just seemed like everybody was about in the same box.
We always had time to stop and visit, but now you meet everybody on the road, why you
never have time to stop. We had these heavy wagons and horses and hauled grain to
Ririe. First we had to haul it clear to Rigby from Antelope. We had to haul big loads to
Idaho Falls, but there was no market in Ririe ‘ till about after 1914, I think about when
they first started to build Ririe up, as a center to haul your grain to. After that, why we
fixed it so we could make a round, sometimes in the winter time it would take two days
to make the round trip, time you’d get down here and get unloaded. We’d stay overnight
and go back the next day when the roads was right bad. Wasn’t like it was now with
paved roads. The roads got so bad in the fall of the year they’d be so dusty and rutty that
you couldn’t hardly sit on the seat of a wagon as we were coming down over those roads.
SK: Would you trade with the other people around here, like maybe trade eggs for
potatoes or something like that, or would you mostly just raise your own stuff?
WA: Well, up on the dry farm we didn’t raise potatoes, we came down to the valley and
bought them, but we could go to farmers and buy them but it seemed like they didn’t
have the market then like we do now. We have the big spud houses and not just small
places to sell to. It was a lot easier to go out and buy your stuff. If they had grist mills,
you’d take your own wheat there and have it ground up. They’d give you so much and
give you like, I think, they’d give you about fifty pounds of flour for a hundred pounds of
wheat. That’s the way we always took our gain to the mill and had it made up. Hope we
had a year’s supply made in advance. Through all the years we always had plenty of
bread. We butchered our own meat, had a way of curing it. If we wanted to keep it in the
summer, why we could put it in a barrel and make a brim and put salt on it and make it
salty enough to keep. Or if you wanted to smoke, we would have a smoke house. We
could use apple wood; that would make good smoke. Later on we got so we could buy
some bottled stuff that we would use to put on meat and it would taste the same, pure just
like smoked meat does now. But we didn’t have to go through all that bother of having
to hire a butcher and have him cut it up; we didn’t have freezers to put it in so we had to
have our own way of taking care of it I know, cheaper too. One way mother had of doing
it, she could fry the meat and put in the bottles and cover it with grease and then she’d
open the bottles up, warm the meat up. It was just like fresh meat that is pig meat. I
don’t think she tried it on beef or anything like that.
SK: How many kids did you have when the depression started?
WA: Well, I think we had most of our family. I only had one child born after the
depression, and we had nine children before that. Our youngest on is forty- one last
December. So you see the depression’s been forty, about forty- five, in the thirties when
the depression was on.
SK: Did your children have to work, or did they just like work around the farm or did
they go out and try to find jobs too?
WA: Well, they used in the spring of the year when beet thinning was on, they’d get
about four and one- half an acre for thinning sugar beets. Used to use a short handled hoe.
In the fall of the year we would go out and top beets for different people before we
started raising beets of our own. We would top them and then throw them in piles and
then drive along with our horses and wagon. We got so after a while we got what we call
a Holo Wagon. It was a rubber tired outfit. Take the body of an old car, and just use the
frame and make a wagon out of it, and that seemed to make a pretty good wagon. It was
rubber tired, and you could put a pretty good load on it. It was a lot easier on all the beet.
That’s before the trucks got so plentiful.
SK: What other kind of work was there? Like oh, teenagers or younger people could do?
WA: Well, about all they do was in the year around the farms people would hire them to
put up hay. We didn’t have bailers like they do now. They’d rake it up and then they’d
pick it in shocks, or piles, then you’d go along and pitch it on a wagon and haul it in and
stack it. We did have Jackson Fork, what we called a Jackson Fork. Somebody would
run the derrick horse and we would take that off and make a pretty good stack out of
loose hay. We didn’t have no bailers.
SK: Just how scarce was money? Was it real scarce?
WA: Well, there was in the winter time there was hardly any kind of work at all. You
was lucky in the summer time if you could get a job for two dollars a day pitching hay.
Two dollars a day and board was bout the going wage in the summer time on a farm for
pitching hay. I remember when I first started farming, about thirty dollars a month is
what I got to work all summer on a farm and do chores after doing a hard days work in
the field. Then, I went to Montana, I think they paid me about forty dollars a month up
there to work livestock on the ranch, and they raised hay up there and grain. I worked up
there, I think, that’s about what they paid then was about forty dollars a month and board.
SK: Those government working jobs you were talking about earlier, about how much did
they pay?
WA: Well, EWA paid about five dollars a day I think that’s about all they paid. Course
you were driving your team, I think you got somewhere maybe three or four dollars a day
out of a days work for a team hauling rock or brush or whatever they had to get people to
work, but I don’t think that lasted too long. It finally turned out tat they took it out into a,
took kids out I think took them up into mountains, and started to clear timber up in the
mountains. Made parks and one thing and another. I never really did do much work
outside of, after we got things going we never had enough cows and enough stuff to raise
enough so we could keep our family. But, I do remember when we first moved down in
hear and they started a school. Why there we moved down to Ririe. We had a home we
stayed on the ranch, and sent our kids to Ririe to school, and for two or three years, I
drove a school wagon. Furnished my own team, and wagon, then furnished the covered
part of it. That’s what we hauled the kids to school in with a team, and horses. When the
snow would come so we could put in on a sleigh we would go to school and sleigh and
cover it in, but it wasn’t very warm.
SK: So the depression really didn’t affect the kids getting to school?
WA: No, I think all kids got to school, around here anyhow. I don’t know, course all we
knew about the depression in cities is what we read about it, and that sounded like it got
pretty tough in some places. I guess a lot of people got hungry. Same as they are now,
they claim that there is a lot of people getting hungry on this depression. But we didn’t
have a government relief like we got now. We didn’t know what it was to have handouts
like we got it now. Kids didn’t get no school lunches. Our kids used to have to take their
own lunches to school, and others put their lunches up and put their lunches up, and took
it to school with them. It was a lot different than it is now, because now it seems though
every school’s got a way of the government furnishing the grub, so that kids can get their
grub in school. Makes it more convenient, I guess, for the kids at home and probably
more healthy, but the kids all seemed to be pretty healthy. I don’t remember too much
sickness. I know we never out of our family of ten kids there was never one of them born
in a hospital, they was all born in our home. We didn’t have to pay the price now that
they paid. We had ten kids, if we had to pay as much as they do now, three or four
hundred dollars to have a baby born, well; I suppose we would have been in the hole yet,
with all the kids we raised.
SK: Well, was it hard to have a doctor come out or to get to a dentist, or to a lawyer or
anything like this?
WA: Well, you had to go to a lawyer alright to lawyers, but to doctors it seems though at
least all the doctors had a way of getting out. At the time of automobiles when
automobiles came around, why they use to come to you maybe have to go get them to
bring them out. When automobiles came out the doctors would come out to your home.
I remember when our second girl had appendicitis in the winter time. It was a bad winter
and the snow was drifting to beat the devil, and we had to take her to Idaho Falls and
have her operated on. The old doctor, and old doctor by the name of Doctor Price, didn’t
know our family then it was the case, and it was in the night when we got him over to our
place to find out what was wrong with her, and we had to rush her right to Idaho Falls to
the hospital. It was a real blizzard, but we had a car. We got her down there and it was
two months before we ever got our car back home again. We didn’t have the equipment
to open up the roads like they have now. They had bulldozers, but they’d push it back,
and it would just like you couldn’t throw it back away from the roads you would just
make narrow roads.
SK: Did you have to pay doctors right then during the depression?
WA: Well no. I remember when our first daughter was born cost us twenty- five dollars,
but we didn’t have the twenty- five dollars to pay him at the time. We had to owe him for
some time before we paid him, but I seems like there was always it was pretty good back
then.
SK: They even made house calls?
WA: Yes, doctors made house calls. Well, they do now to some extent. I have to give Dr.
Passey credit. We had, my wife was sick right recently, and I called him up about two
thirty in the morning. He said he had a young girl in labor or he’d come right out, but that
was on a Friday night, and next Saturday why he drove out to our home. It’s about fifteen
miles from Rexburg, and I was surprised that a doctor would even come out to your home
now. He sure did.
SK: Would you say then the depression was probably harder during the winter than it was
during the summer?
WA: Well, it was on account of, unless you was a good provider, and knew enough to put
your food and had plenty of it canned. That was the trouble, it’s just like it is now. Like
the ant and the grasshopper, some people dance away their time, and don’t put their food
up and they get hungry in the winter time. But, that old ant he always prepares for the
winter, and that’s the way it was. People that prepared for winter, they didn’t I don’t
think had much suffering in them times because they had their food and they knew how
to take care of it. It was just a matter of management, just like it is now. The people that
manages the best gets along the best.
SK: Generally speaking you grew most of your own food then didn’t you?
WA: Yes, there wasn’t very much stuff that you could buy at a bakery. We couldn’t go to
the store every time we wanted a loaf of bread, and buy a loaf of bread of a carton of milk,
or anything like that. We didn’t do it. Had to furnish your own stuff. Of course, there was
a kind of stuff that they had in the stores they had to sell then. There was no, it was what
they called evaporated stuff, it was like fruit that was evaporated and we could buy that.
It was something like dried fruit. I don’t know why they called it evaporated apricots,
peaches, and apples, and all that. I remember as a kid why they used to. We didn’t have
any stores open like they do now, so kids couldn’t go in and snatch anything they wanted
to. Everything was behind a counter and you had to go to the counter and buy over the
counter.
SK: Was there some people that got along better, I mean, the more wealthy people before
the depression, did they seem to get along better than during the depression? Did they
seem to have money?
WA: Just like it is now, the people then there were people that was quite well off, of
course, they would take advantage of the low priced stuff. I remember when the
depression started, why the government started buying cows and I think they paid about
twenty- five dollars for cows. I don’t just remember what they paid for pigs. We was
always supplied on pigs and cows. The government started to buy them in. Of course, the
guy that didn’t have to sell, he could buy that stuff in cheap and keep it ‘ till it got better
priced. It’s just the same as it is now, a guy that’s got the money he’ll take advantage of it
of a lot of this. Things that start selling cheap you know they’ll put in and pinch out the
guy that’s in debt. People didn’t get in debt like they do now. They was a little more
cautious about it. You didn’t go to the bank and borrow thousands of dollars like you can
now. There’s no limit to how much you can borrow, but then if you could borrow two
hundred dollars why you thought you had pretty good credit.
SK: Did it seem that most people didn’t try to keep up with their neighbors, I mean you
know the expression, “ We’ve got to keep up with the Jones’s,” and we’ve got to have
everything the neighbors have? During the depression, do you think that most people just
tried to live just fairly simple?
WA: I think we did, I think most people just. Well they pretty near had to do it because it
wasn’t there to get. Had to live according to their means, of course, it used to be that we
could go to stores, you know, go to stores and run a store bill all summer, then pay it in
the fall. Most everybody seemed to think that, oh I never bought that much goods, there
must be something wrong, but you never took track of just how much you bought, and
you’d be surprised when you go to the store and pay your bill up in the fall how big of a
store bill you owed.
SK: So you just had like one bill all summer long then you’d go pay it in the fall?
WA: Yes, that’s the way we’d do it. They’d have us come in and have credit so you could
buy your food like they had in the store. You could buy it on credit and, you know, some
people just like it is now, they had better credit than others. The ones that had good credit,
why they’d get along a lot better than the ones with poor credit.
SK: Mr. Adamson, do you know anything about what they government did to bring the
country out of the depression? Did they get involved at all, or did they more or less just
stay out of it?
WA: Well, they didn’t get involved like they do now in the big money like they’re into it
now. Then at that time we didn’t know what it was to have what they called then was
poor houses where they put the poor old people that didn’t have anything to eat. I don’t
remember just how that they feed them, but now they get all these big places where they
keep them when they don’t want to take care of their parents, they ship them off to these
places and let them, let somebody else feed them, and the government digs up the money
to keep them there. But the government didn’t at that time, didn’t dish it out like they do
now to keep people from starvation. They just, if people didn’t take care of their own
people, why they just, they just did a lot of suffering.
SK: Well, did the government try to get the money circulating any way or try to help the
people out any way to try to bring the country out of the depression?
WA: Yes, I think that’s what the EWA was for, was to try to get money back into
circulation so people, you know, could have jobs that otherwise there was no jobs. I think
they tried a whole lot to do things like in circulation. Of course, it’s always been as I’ve
noticed all through my life, whenever there’s been a war, well that’s when there’s always,
things is always booming. Then there was no war seemed like that’s when the depression
always gets started up.
SK: Right after the war was through, the depression starts?
WA: Right after the war was through things is starting up and there would be amount of
labor. There wouldn’t be as many people hired, and things would kind of die down, and
it’s a sad thing. It wasn’t like it is now. Take now, the price hay and grain is. Why when I
was a kid, when I first started farming I remember the first time I had to buy binding
twine. I bought four dollars and fifty cents worth of binding twine to tie my grain up. I
think I got about eight or nine balls of twine, and I paid it off.
SK: Was four dollars and fifty cents quite a bit in that time?
WA: Well, no it wasn’t as much money, but you could buy so much more with it, it
seems. I don’t know what twine is now. The same amount of twine now would cost you,
probably fifteen or twenty dollars for the same amount of twine.
SK: Well, how much was clothing, and hardware, and stuff like that during the
depression?
WA: Oh, I think you could buy a shirt for around fifty cents, overalls was a dollar, a
dollar and a quarter maybe. Work shoes was about somewhere around two dollars. A lot
of difference in the way things was. They was made of a lot different material then they
are now, they’d wear when you buy them. Now it seems when you buy that kind of stuff,
it’s made out of a different kind of material. It’s not made out of leather like it used to be
made for shoes and things.
SK: Well, when the depression hit, did a lot of stores or places of business, did they go
out of business? Did they go broke?
WA: Well, in the, along about, I think, around about what year was it? A lot of banks
went busted. I know we had a bank in Ririe, and I had a little money in the bank. It went
busted. The government didn’t guarantee your money in the bank like they do now.
SK: So you didn’t get any of your money back?
WA: Well, I didn’t have too much in the bank. I believe one hundred and fifty dollars or
something at that time. I think all I got back out of it was twelve dollars.
SK: That’s kind of interesting. I didn’t know Ririe had a bank. Well, did the banks go
broke right after the depression started or is that kind of what brought the depression on?
WA: Well, that brought the depression on I guess. See when things started getting tight,
what busted the banks was people would get scared and then they’d make a rush on the
bank, and draw their money out. I know there was a man that got sick on Antelope, and I
went around and hustled enough money to get him a little over two hundred dollars out of
some different friends. I gave it to him to help him with his, to get him operated on. He
was in Idaho Falls staying with his daughter, and I took the money down there to him to
ask him where I should put it. He said to bring it back and put it in the Ririe bank. That’s
one thing I always had against. I wish I would have stayed at home with it. I always held
out to get him, made some excuse so I wouldn’t need to put that money into the bank,
but the next day the bank went busted, and I put a little over two hundred dollars of that
money that I had collected for that guy and I didn’t get a penny out of it.
SK: Did the town of Ririe really get affected by the depression? Did things slow down or
speed up?
WA: Well, Ririe when it first started, it started booming pretty good for a few years, and
then it seemed like it started dying down. A lot of businesses that went broke either quit
or moved out. They made a lot of progress after the depression.
SK: Did the depression just kind of creep up or did it just kind of hit, and was there, or
did anybody know it was coming like the newspapers? Did they say anything about
maybe the country was heading into a depression or was it kind of a surprise?
WA: Well, I imagine the news then, wasn’t like it was now. We didn’t have television;
we didn’t get the news like we do now. But I remember one of my neighbors said we’d
never see dollar wheat again and then it got up to four dollars, and it wasn’t a year that
was down to a dollar and ten cents. I remember when the depression, I was buying a dry
farm up there, and I was paying ten percent interest. All I had to do was pay ten percent
interest and I paid that in ten years, and when ten years was up why I was given the New
York Life Mortgage on it. But, the bank in Rexburg had it, and it had moved up in the
market, and I paid the first five hundred dollars, for a thousand dollars on the place.
When the between years was up, I was doing good. I started making payments for the
first year. I paid the five hundred dollars, and the next year came due I went up to them,
and I said let me hold out clean till spring, and I’ll pay then. If I’d sold when wheat was
selling for a dollar and seventy cents. I’d took I had sixty- six thousand pounds of it in the
warehouse, so that I had plenty to pay for five hundred dollars, and the interest on it and
have some to run on. But I sit out ‘ till that next fall, and sold out for about fifty cents a
hundred. I couldn’t even pay the expenses of storage or anything else. So you can see
how cheap things can get. So I’m kind of worried how things are going now. I told the
family— seems like the farmer’s always the guy that gets hit first. Seems like his stuff
goes to pieces quicker than anybody else’s. You can see that just by the way cattle and
grain market is going right now. Of course, then the price of grain now, we never
dreamed of ever getting such a price that out of our grain, but it makes you wonder. Just
when you get as old as I am, you look back over things and it looks a lot different than it
does to these young guys. They don’t see. It’s something like a coyote. You take an old
coyote and they’re pretty sly, but the young ones, they’re pretty brave. That’s the way
these young kids are. They start out, buy everything that they can, and get in debt, and
then after while, why I think that’s one thing that causes so much divorce now. Kids get
in debt so bad and they just can’t make it, and they get disgusted and that causes
separation and homes busted up.
SK: Did family life seem to get along better during the depression than when it wasn’t
going on? I mean, do you think families kind of grew closer together?
WA: Well, yes. I think we were. We were much more neighborly. We seemed to enjoy
each other more. We had plenty of time to visit. Now you go to talk to a guy who’s out
with his tractor, and you stop him a few minutes and he just sits there and keeps the
throttle working on his tractor. Well, you could meet along on the side of the road with
teams; one coming down the road and other coming up and you’d stop and chat for a
while, and have plenty of time. Now it’s different, we don’t have time. Everybody’s the
same way. They’re just in a hurry. I think that’s the big difference in the way in your life.
You’re all keyed up. I think that’s the reason there’s so many heart failures. It’s just
because people are all keyed up, they don’t have time to stop and visit.
SK: Well, even though it was harder living in those times, it really probably was easier
than living in a way wasn’t it, because you didn’t have all the pressure on you that you
have now days?
WA: Well that’s it, we didn’t have. We never did get in debt very deep you know. It
seemed like, everybody seemed to be in about the same boat, and it was a lot easier. But,
now look at the guy who goes out and buys a new automobile. Why, of course, we didn’t
do that. We just did without. But then we could get along with our older stuff, with our
older machinery, and we could get along with whatever we had. But now you got to have
the best or else.
SK: Now talking about machinery, was it hard to get parts and stuff for your equipment?
WA: No, it wasn’t hard. What kind of machinery you had you could go. If you had the
money you could get most anything you wanted. Take a wagon. I owned my first wagon
I got I think for less than about a hundred and twenty dollars. It was a big wagon so you
could put good loads on it. A harness, you could buy a right good harness for about
seventy- five dollars for a team. It seems like now why made out of good leather, makes a
lot of difference. But you can’t imagine the difference unless you went through both.
SK: Do you think the country is headed for a depression right now? Does the way the
economy and stuff is right now, is it kind of similar to what it was like back then?
WA: Well, it’s so much bigger now, that’s the trouble. We used to talk in thousands and
millions, but now they talk in billions. We got clear out of it and I had a piece here if I
could locate it. I think it was President Franklin said, something about we would be taxed
on everything, our shows and it’s sure came true just like he said.
SK: You think the country is heading for a depression?
WA: Well, I can’t see anything else. I think we’re in for something. I don’t know how
we’re going to get out of it.
SK: Do you think if we do go into a depression it might be worse than the last one?
WA: I think it well. My real thoughts of it is it’s going to be worse than the other because,
it’s just like when you try to borrow yourself out of debt. You’re going to have a hard
time. There’s always going to be a time people will limit to what you got to pay. That’s
what our government’s been doing, and been borrowing till now. Got into where the
income tax, income don’t nowhere near take care of what the expenses are. We’re spent
out. It used to be like it is now, you know, when a good percent of kids that works for the
government now but then in those days there was very few people who had government
jobs, and now there’s people who got government jobs.
SK: I think probably just the attitude of the people would make it quite a bit tougher,
because, you know, people’s attitudes are so much different now days. I don’t think they
could handle it near as well, could they?
WA: I don’t think so, and that’s the trouble. They’d just give up. I think there are more
bankruptcies going on now than there ever was, other than the bank. It looks like it’s
going to get worse. That’s about the only way you can save your hide is take out
bankruptcy. You can just keep them pinned down, take care of your needs or give him a
chance and maybe pay him back.
SK: What about religion during the depression? Did the depression drive people away
from religion or did it bring people to it?
WA: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think people were more humble and went to church.
Seems like they had to drive their food to church and get to church come winter.
SK: Thank you very much, Mr. Adamson. This tape will be placed in the library at Ricks
College for use by future researchers.