Nuggets Amid Dreck and the stories they tell

There are people who clip stuff out of newspapers just because that stuff is neat, and one such was a member of the Hopkins Family that lived in North Ogden in the 1920s through at least the 1950s.

Oh brother, did they ever. I'm guessing it was Effie Hopkins, wife of Nephi Hopkins, a farmer in North Ogden.

Mrs. Hopkins wielded a mean pair of scissors. We're talking about a cubic yard, no kidding, of news clippings, most from the Standard-Examiner. There's some whole papers, but heaps and heaps of clips.

Obituaries, social notes, wedding notes, interesting news stories about President Roosevelt and his dog Falla, and more and more.

A lot of the clips are dreck, to be honest, but some are gems. The Japanese have surrendered and the EXTRA that the Standard put out that day is here -- a treasure if ever there was one.

The clips filled two steel boxes that, I am guessing, the family discovered sitting in a storage room after Effie or one of her descendants died, didn't have the heart to toss, and so donated them to Union Station's archive. They may have seen one of the several columns I did in the S-E pleading with people not to toss old papers of any sort.

Now I get to sort through this stuff. Talk about hoist on my own petard.

So I'm digging, tossing out stray comics (would you believe there was a time Dagwood Bumstead was not obsessed with food?), knitting and crochet patterns, movie star pictures and so on. This lady saved everything.

There's also a fair number of old letters, brochures and so forth. There's a postal card from the local Selective Service board to a young male member of the family asking him to call which, I am guessing, was greeted with great joy.

So today I'm fishing through and I find what you see pictured here: A World War II Gasoline ration book.

Ah, yes, those fond old days when wars meant shared sacrifice and people were told to economize because we had a war to pay for. Interesting historical note: The US was a major oil producer during WWII and actually had lots of gasoline. What it didn't have was rubber, so the government rationed gasoline to keep tires from wearing out.

Clever, huh?

This little book was issued to Nephi Hopkins, Box 324, North Ogden on April 1, 1944. He drove a 1930 Ford.

I'd heard of these but never seen one, being a post-war baby boomer, so I walked into the other room to show my find to Slim Jolley, another volunteer up here.

"Oh, that brings back memories," she said, and it did.

Slim was born in 1937, and so lived through all the rationing and stuff as a child, including occasional shortages.

"I used to tell my mother that that was OK, I didn't mind we didn't have any meat because I didn't like it," she said. Meat, too, was rationed, along with flour, sugar and many other staples. To this day Slim is not fond of meat.

She said she and her parents were visiting family in 1941, "and I was sitting on the ice cream freezer and I told my parents I had to go to the bathroom, so they said go ahead.

"I went inside and my Uncle was there and he had one of those big radios and he was sitting with his ear up to it, listening to it, and Walter Winchell was on, and you know how he was so dramatic.  He was talking about some place called Pearl Harbor and that it had been bombed.

"So I went back outside and asked my father 'Where's Pearl Harbor?' and he said, "Hawaii. Why?"

"And I said 'Walter Winchell just said it's been bombed.'  They had no idea."

Can you imagine the moment? I got shivers listening to her tell that story.

THAT'S A BIG OOPS.


I also found this story from Dec. 21, 1951, about a woman who made a very different wartime discovery.

Apparently Agnes Sasser, of Atlanta, was notified in May of 1951 that her first husband, Pfc. Walter Dixon, was missing in action and presumed dead during the Korean War. Agnes didn't spend a lot of time mourning, or had already warmed up her engines while Walter was off fighting, because she married Pfc. William Sasser in September.

Come December, the War Department tells her that her first husband, Walter Dixon, isn't dead after all, but is a POW.

Wouldn't you like to know how that worked out? So would I, and the clip may be here somewhere.

ps: Sarah Langsdon, at Weber State University Special Collections, found the follow-up article. Wify dumped the new guy. Click to read:

A blast from Ogden's Evil Evil but really fun past

In 1995 I interviewed Reuel Miller, who was then 96, for a story about Ogden's really evil, awful, illegal and massively fun past.

I'm doing a walking tour of 25th Street for the Sociology Club at WSU this afternoon and dug it out for tidbits to share. Here's the whole story. The text program, for some reason, didn't retrieve the punctuation, but it's all pretty clear.

And, no, I am NOT going to explain about the lady and the donkey.




HE LIVED THE OGDEN MOST PEOPLE TRIED TO IGNORE
 news
 by
By CHARLES F. TRENTELMAN
Standard-Examiner staff
      OGDEN   He saw the Ogden
Lyceum Theater's act with the lady
and the donkey and that's all we're
going to tell you about that story,
this being a family newspaper.
     Which is OK. Reuel Miller has
lots more.
     He could outwalk the first car he
saw in Ogden, dug the first irriga
tion ditch in his neighborhood and
helped make sure graft got collected
properly from 25th Street bootleg
gers as a  special policeman  for
Mayor Harman Peery.
     Or so he says.
     He even knows why there used to
be little cans of pea gravel on the
sidewalk on 25th Street, and we
know you've been wondering about
that.
     Miller, who turned 96 in Febru
ary, lived a life that parallels Ogden
in the first 100 years of Utah's
statehood, and his stories certainly
have the depth, color and detail of
truth. Also, there's few left to con
tradict him.
      Those years weigh Miller down.
He still gets out into the garden
and he still makes wine every fall.
But his hands shake, his eyes are
going and he tends to totter a bit
when he walks.
     He's disgusted by the whole pro
cess. Ask him if he wants to make
100 and his answer is a quick
 Lord, I hope not!
      I hate getting old,  he says often.
 I'm so clumsy,  and he says it
with the attitude of one irritated
with a tool that just won't work
right anymore.
     That tool worked just fine for a
very long time. He was born Feb.
22, 1899, on a farm in Plain City.
He had his arm stomped by a
horse, went to school a total of two
weeks, built several of the houses in
his neighborhood on 16th Street
and painted much of Ogden at one
time or another.
     If the body is aging, though, the
memory of all it went through isn't.
 I've got the damndest memory; I
can see it all now,  he said.
    There's plenty to remember. He
was right in the middle of Ogden's
last big blast, the 30s and 40s, when
prostitution, gambling and liquor
were easily found commodities on
25th Street, the police looked the
other way and the mayor said he
liked it that way.
     Miller helped make the town
what it was. It was in the mid-
1930s when he got a job with some
thing called the American Detective
Association.
     The American Detective Associa
tion had an interesting line of busi
ness, he said. In addition to the
usual stuff   an ad from the peri
od offers  Legitimate Detective Ser
vices,  and Miller said they did
follow cheating wives   it sold
signs to the bars in town that said
 This establishment protected by
the American Detective Associa
tion.  
     The signs cost $50 at a time when
50 cents would buy lunch. If you
think there was something fishy go
ing on, you're right.
     Those bars were breaking the law.
Utah, after Prohibition, had set up
state liquor stores and bars were
only supposed to sell beer. Ogden's
Mayor Harman Peery felt the local
bars should be allowed to sell li
quor anyway, and many of them
did so.
     Miller said the sign meant that
the bars wouldn't get raided by
state police trying to stop the sale
of hard liquor. The American De
tective Agency had connections, he
said. It knew when raids were com
ing, and would warn the bar own
ers when it was time to clean up
their acts.
      I sold to all the bootleggers,  he
said.  They grabbed it fast.
     It was a great deal. The bootleg
gers could get their valuable booze
out of the way. If agents seized the
place and shut it down anyway,
there was no problem: The fixtures
would be auctioned and  we'd go
to the auction and out-bid every
one,  Miller said.
      The next day they'd open up
again just like normal.
     If the police really needed to ar
rest someone, the agency provided
them with a victim, a well compen
sated guy who didn't mind sitting
in a cell while the real bar owners
went about their business.
      That's what we done. A little
crookedness, but we took care of
our people.
     One place he went to sell his
signs, he said, was Mayor Peery's
office.
     Peery, mayor of Ogden from 1934
to 1939 and several times again lat
er, didn't publicly support the graft
and corruption in Ogden, but he
did say he thought the state's liquor
laws were wrong and was often in
dispute with the state over them.
He was also an old family friend of
Miller's, his mother having bought
20 acres of land from him years be
fore.
      He opened the door; I come in
there and he wanted to know what
I wanted,  Miller said. Miller told
him about the signs and what they
did,  and he says I want to buy
that. I want that on my buildings.  
      The next day, he said, Peery
called Miller back to his office.  He
walked over to me, stretched out
his hand to me, pulled out my coat
and pinned a badge on me,  he
said, making him a  special police
man.  
     His duties were simple. Miller
said Peery's administration allowed
gambling and the sale of liquor in
exchange for  fees.  Those fees
were collected by the police, and it
was Miller's job to make sure the
collectors were being honest.
     Typically, he said, he'd station
himself outside the bar when the
collector he was following would go
in.
       He'd go in the bootleg joint and
he'd come in and pat his coat pock
et and they'd give him a cigar,  he
said.  He'd pat his jacket pockets
and they'd give him one of those
Chinese match boxes, and he'd go
out and take money out of it and
put it in a folder.
     It was Miller's job to see how
much was collected.  I couldn't
touch them, but I had to put every
thing down on paper and hand it in
to Harman Peery every night,  he
said.
     Another duty was to collect the
bad checks that people gave
madams and bootleggers from time
to time.
     One check, he said, was from a
farmer out near Tremonton who'd
had quite the party at one of the
houses on the street and his $200
check bounced. Miller said he
drove out to the man's farm and
found the man more than happy to
make the check good, just as long
as Miller would stay far away from
the farm, and the farmer's wife.
     Which he did. No need in causing
trouble.
      For all the graft that went on at
the time, Miller has nothing but
positive things to say about Mayor
Peery. He took his percentage, he
said, but that's all.  To my way of
thinking he's the finest mayor that
ever hit this bitching city,  he said.
     What about those buckets of pea
gravel on 25th Street?
     Easy, he said. If a man was
looking for a little female compan
ionship in one of the  rooming
houses  on the street, but was ner
vous about going inside, he'd take a
few pieces of gravel out of the can
and toss it at the second floor win
dows. If the occupant was avail
able, she's open the window and
ask him up.
      After quitting Peery's employ and
that of the American Detective
Agency he went to work as a paint
er around town. His life settled
down to a lot of wheeling and deal
ing of property on 16th Street, and
he made as much money doing that
as he did painting houses.
     One thing that he still laughs
about is the time he came down
with lead poisoning from the paint
and nearly died. The doctor gave
him only months to live, he said.
     So, said Miller, he took to drink
ing wine on a pretty regular basis.
What the heck, right?
     Well, three months later his
symptoms disappeared, leaving the
doctor flummoxed and Miller feel
ing pretty cocky. The doctor later
died, but Miller still keeps track of
him.
      I'm still here and the doctor's
still dead,  he said.

Union Station is Going Google Virtual

Google photographer Marcel De Lima

Ultra cool stuff at the station today. It is being photographed by Google so people anywhere in the world can take a virtual tour of the museums.

Union Station is the cultural hub of Ogden, so this makes perfect sense. Google Earth will let visitors from around the world not only wander around Ogden's streets, but go inside Union Station and take a look around.

The process is surprisingly simple.

Wednesday morning Google Photographer Marcel De Lima visited each museum, and the grand hall, with a normal digital SLR camera sporting an 8 mm lens.

That is a fisheye lens capable of shooting an arc of 180 degrees, or half of an entire room in one shot. He has to stand back or he'll get a picture of his shoes.

Each time he sets the camera up he takes 12 pictures in a circle. You may ask "Why so many if the lens sees so much?"

What the camera sees

Those 12 images provide a lot of overlap so a computer program can create a 360-degree view of the room that you can scroll around seamlessly, wandering up and down and around. You can get closer to stuff, or farther away, all at the touch of a computer mouse.

You can see how it works if you go to http://maps.google.com and type "Ogden" into the search box. That takes you to an overhead view of Ogden. On the left is a scale to zoom down closer with a picture of a little man at the top. Click on that little man and drag him down onto the map -- you'll suddenly be looking at a street view of wherever you put that guy.  I put him at the corner of 25th and Grant and could scan all around to the municipal park, Imaging Depot or looking down towards Union Station. You can even walk down the street.

Union Station Business Manager Tracy Ehrig (right) with
Standard-Examiner Reporter Shane Farver, Photographer
Dillon Brown, and Google photographer Marcel De Lima

This is terrific publicity for Union Station and Ogden and I hope it lets folks know how cool it is to visit the city.

De Lima said the virtual tour will be available on-line in about a week, but it's already working. As I was leaving Standard-Examiner Reporter Mitch Shaw and Photographer Dillon Brown were walking in to do a story for tomorrow's paper.

Mitch is a good reporter, nice to see him again giving Union Station  some much-needed publicity in four counties of Utah.

From there the rest of the world is just a mouse click away.

Enforce fed drug laws, but not fed gun laws? Our sheriffs confuse me.

Interesting article in the paper Monday about how the police are opposed to making marijuana legal because, as we all know, drugs are bad.

Yes, really, they are. Not being snarky there.

The sheriffs of Davis and Weber counties are quoted as being opposed to the federal government's stand declining to interfer in states that have made MJ legal. They say drugs bring about all sorts of crime and evil, although a lot of the crime (robberies for money, for example) comes about precisely because drugs ARE illegal, a point they never like to admit, just like they don't relate crime and other problems caused by alcohol to the legalization of alcohol.

But that's not what interests me here. What interests me is that these two sheriffs are suddenly gangbusters for law enforcement by the federal government. They're really angry that the US Attorney General has told states which legalized marijuana that he would not challenge their laws.

These are the same two local sheriffs who, not too long ago, told the federal government it could take a flying leap at the moon if it tried to pass any sort of federal gun law because guns are protected by the constitution and Utah's not going to let the feds tell it what to do, no way no how.

Sheriff Thompson in Weber County even wrote stuff on his blog criticizing me for (click) criticizing his stand, in my blog, but really, if you are going to demand the feds enforce federal laws, should you get to pick and choose?

The drug laws the fed isn't enforcing don't impact Utah, because Utah hasn't legalized marijuana. Other states have and, hey, what about state's rights?

When they were criticizing federal gun laws, our fine sheriffs (click) made much of Utah's right to decide for Utah and said the feds should respect that. Well, Colorado decided for Colorado, the feds are respecting it, what's your beef?

More to the point, it is pretty clear to everyone that the war on drugs has been won, by drugs. I would think the sheriff's would welcome a chance to quit fighting a losing battle.

After 25 or more years, more people are in prison than ever before for drugs, more police are spending billions of dollars for anti-drug gear than ever before, and more drugs are coming over the border than ever before. Whole industries have been built around supplying prisons to house everyone.

Meanwhile, around $15 billion a year in American money flows south to buy drugs, a pretty strong indication that Americans want the drugs that are illegal and are willing to vote with their dollars.

Yes, drug addiction is evil. The billions we spend fighting drugs should be spent on treatment and prevention -- call Weber or Davis mental health to see how underfunded their drug programs are. The money all flows to enforcement, buying swat teams and huge RV-mobile command centers and other fun toys, not prevention.

Would making drugs legal cause a boom of abuse, gang rape in the streets and all other sorts of tragedy? Probably not. California seems to have de facto legalization with all those "clinics" selling medical marijuana, but none of those other horrors.

When alcohol was made legal again (thanks to Utah!) after Prohibition, use did go up, but abuse stayed about the same. People who wanted to get drunk had no problem finding booze during Prohibition. People who only wanted a casual drink with dinner at home now and then were the ones who went without, but they weren't the problem in the first place.

Legalize drugs, you'd see people wonder what the fuss was about, but that's where prevention money comes in, and treatment. Those things work. The nation has cut tobacco use through education and treatment, and tobacco is one of the most addictive substances on the planet.

 Legalize marijuana, the hard core addicts would keep on getting what they're getting now, only instead of jail they might get treatment. And our sheriffs could concentrate on other crimes that need solving.

No on Syria

I see a lot of debate on this Syria thing, and only post here because I have a need to collect all my thoughts on it in one place.

Those thoughts come down to this: No. Don't do it.

Why?

A lot of folks say we should, citing the many people killed by the Syrian poison gas, the many others killed in the Civil War, the depravity of the Syrian president, and on and on.

Guess what? They're all right. All that stuff is horrible, disgusting, tragic, an abomination, someone should DO something.

Why should we be the ones to do something?

Mostly, because we can, apparently. The US has this massive military, this huge amount of power, this amazingly high standard of always doing the RIGHT THING because we are good and wonderful and everything the world ought to be and should want to be. Not doing something sends a message that bad people can do anything they want, so what they'll do next, of course, is nuke Israel or San Francisco, it's going to happen any second if we don't do something now.

OK, I just moved into cynical snark territory.

My response to those who say the US should do something about the human tragedy in Syria is to ask "what about Congo?"

Congo, the former Belgian Congo, has been broiled by civil war ever since Belgium left the country, it elected a president, the CIA overthrew that president and put a tame dictator in place, and civil war set in, pretty much ever since. More than 5 million --MILLION -- have died since 1998, thousands per month.

And the United States, beacon of light, guardian of peace and love, has done precisely nothing. Ah what the heck, they're black and don't have oil.

Yes oil. Sorry to sound cynical again, but the war in Syria is all about oil, the middle east, oil, Israel, oil, Saudi Arabia's hatred of Iran, and oil.

You didn't really think it was about the suffering Syrians, did you?

Disruptions of Syria could easily spread, as they already are, and since Syria is in the Middle East everything that happens there affects the price of oil. Since Middle East oil mostly goes to Europe and China (The US gets most of its oil from itself, Canada and Mexico) you could easily say "who cares?" but oil is a world commodity, its price is set globally, if the price of Saudi oil goes up, the price of the oil they pump in Wyoming and refine in Salt Lake City goes up.

So the Syrian civil war could hit home in Utah.

So, do something, right?

No. Listen.

Andrew Bacevich, a professor history and international relations, is a Vietnam Vet, father of a son killed in Iraq, and strong critic of the US considerable international effort to spread American values. He's written a lot of books explaining how the US has way exceeded its reach in maintaining a world-wide economic empire. Simply put, we're spending way more than we're getting back, and our efforts are being more and more futile as we discover that ideology is not something you can defeat on the battlefield, rendering our massive military pretty much useless.

You can bomb them back into the stoneage, but amid those stones they'll still hate you and come back to haunt you.

Bacevich summed the current situation up nicely on the Bill Moyers show:

 “If you think back to 1980,” Bacevich tells Donahue, “and just sort of tick off the number of military enterprises that we have been engaged in that part of the world, large and small, you know, Beirut, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia — and on and on, and ask yourself, ‘What have we got done? What have we achieved? Is the region becoming more stable? Is it becoming more Democratic? Are we enhancing America’s standing in the eyes of the people of the Islamic world?’ ‘The answers are, ‘No, no, and no.’ So why, Mr. President, do you think that initiating yet another war in this protracted enterprise is going to produce a different outcome?”

Which is pretty much where I'm at too -- all those arguments about the tragedy of Syria are correct -- it is a tragedy, but the real question is, what can we do about it THAT WILL ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING USEFUL?

Nothing. 

Both sides of the Syrian civil war dislike us. Even the "good" rebels, the ones supposedly not linked with Al Quida, will take our aid, and say nice things about us, but we have no idea how well they'll run Syria if they win, or whether -- as is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan -- they'll go back to hating us because we're allied with Israel because hating Israel, never forget, is the one thing absolutely everyone in the middle east agrees on, including our good allies in peace, Saudi Arabia. 

Remember, it was Saudi Arabians, spending Saudi Arabian money (earned by selling us oil) and preaching Saudi Arabian religious doctrine (Wahabism is very radical,  not all that far from the preachings of the Taliban) who hijacked those planes on 9-11.

So for all those reasons, and more, we need to sit this one out. Israel is perfectly capable of taking care of itself. We've sold billions of military hardware to Saudi Arabia, so it can take care of itself too. So can almost every other nation in the Middle East, which are all armed to the teeth with arms they've bought from us or Russia with oil money they make from us. 

And, as Mr. Bacevich so nicely says, our record of "fixing" stuff in the Middle East sucks, mostly because the Middle East needs to fix its own problems and hates anyone -- Russia, France, England, us -- who tries to do it for them.

Why? Mostly because they -- we -- are the ones who caused those problems in the first place.

History is preserved in its random junk

Floyd Jarvis was one of those quiet guys who, in his own small way, helped preserve one heck of a lot of the American railroad history.

He lived in a doublewide up on 12th Street by himself. A former railroad workers, whose father also worked on the railroads, the rails and all about them were his life.

How much nobody knew. After he died in 2009 he left his entire collection to Union Station. Members who went into his trailer said it was chock-full of books, movies, model railroad gear and so on.

A lot of his stuff was sold to raise funds, but a lot more was put into Union Station's collection: Books, slides, movies, stuff.

Fun stuff. Nothing was too small to attract his interest, apparently, and as a historic preservationist, this is critical.

I was looking for railroad schedules, of which Floyd had many, and came across another box labeled "Dining packets etc."

Dining packets?

Yeah, those little envelopes of plastic silverware, napkins and other stuff that you get on trains when you sit down to eat, or buy a hot dog in the canteen.

They don't sound important, but in historic preservation you never know what really is important. A 100 years from now nobody may ever know what a "spork" is, for example.

There are napkins here on which the railroad's name embossed on them, not the generic tissues used today. There are souvenir checkbook covers, brochures of Mt. Rainier and Old Faithful with the Union Pacific logo prominently displayed, Rio Grande paper napkins that almost feel like linen,and on and on.

Fun stuff.

The treasure of this particular box is a Pacific Northwest snack pack given to first class travelers by the nice folks at Amtrak on its "Pioneer" and "Empire Builder" trains. It would have been given to folks who paid extra for a sleeping car and looks pretty yummy.

There's a pack of salmon spread, an "Aplets Colets" snack bar, some roasted peanuts and a box of Venus brand stone ground wheat crackers.

No I am not going to taste these things. I can't see the expiration date but mid-70s is my guess. Is that spread packet's foil lid bulging a titch?

Yike!

But stuff like this, as I said, gives a hint at life back when trains were run by companies that didn't mind spending a little money to make the trip more pleasant and, incidentally, reinforce that railroad's name with that pleasant experience. They actually act as if they care whether you are comfortable.

Contrast that with the current flying experience, where they jam you in a seat two inches too small for your legs, toss a packet of peanut (there's supposed to be more than one in there?) at you and tell you to have a nice flight.