This is Matt Stringham interviewing my grandfather, Jay Thoral Stringham, on March 10, 2007 in Salt Lake City, Utah

1. What is your earliest memory that you have?

When I was just walking as a child, I used to visit my grandfather Jacobsen down in Provo. When they built the kitchen there was a gap between the kitchen floor. There was a step there about 18 inches. It was so big that as a child I couldn’t get up and everyone else would leave and I couldn’t get past that 18 inch step. I still remember that as a little child when I couldn’t get over that step.

2. How old would you say you were?

Oh, I was three, maybe, something like that. I always loved it. They had an artesian well out there and a stream running through the yard. I used to go out there and play in the mud all day.

3. Where were you born and where did you grow up?

I was born in Vernal, Utah, on the 11^th of July, 1922. I grew up all my life in that little town of Vernal Utah and never left there until I graduated high school.

4. You worked as a sheepherder growing up, right?

Yeah, in the summertime after I was out of school, I generally went to the mountains with my dad. We lived in tents and sheep wagons and had horses and tended the sheep, and lambs. The last few years of my life in high school, we always went to the high county, the bald mountains and helped heard the sheep through the mountains. There was an area we had camp just around the timber line at about 11,000 or 12,000 feet.

5. Was that something that was difficult for you or did you enjoy it?

Well, I enjoyed it because I was out in nature and I enjoyed that. And I had a horse they let me have. His name was Billy Sunday and the sheepherders started calling me Billy Sunday after the horse. But the fishing was terrific in the lakes and the streams and the meadows up there were so beautiful. The grass was so high and the sheep did very well and we brought lambs out of there and almost all of them weighed 100 pounds.

6. You said you left after you graduated from high school. Where did you go?

I graduated from high school and went to BYU for a year. I studied architecture and found out I didn’t enjoy that too much. The next year, my sophomore year is right when world war two broke up and my brother Irving joined the air force and I got discouraged in school, so I left the university during my sophomore year.

7. And you joined the military?

I joined the navy. And I’ll never forgot how difficult it was to join the navy and get my dad’s signature and everything. Once I was in the Navy, I wondered why I had tried so hard to get in.

8. What was so hard about getting in, and then once you got in, what was so difficult?

Well, the thing of it is, my father was my guardian and my mother couldn’t sign me in. But my father was herding sheep over to green river Wyoming and I had to travel with my mother all the way from Salt Lake to Green River Wyoming to get my dad’s signature to sign my up in the Navy. I wondered why I tried so hard to get into the service.

9. Once you got in, what was so hard about it?

Well, I was sent to Cordelane, Idaho up lake ponderay and it started snowing the day I got there and continued snowing until the day I left. We used to get up for breakfast and it was 25 below zero. And they had me working in warehouses up there stacking products that came from the navy in warehouses there. You either worked or you froze because there was no heat there in the warehouses. It was quite a thing. I finally had gotten to a school I wanted to go to, which was aviation metal school. I finally got accepted there and that’s when I left Cordelane Idaho in the month of March.

10. Was there water up there to train in? When I think of the navy, I think of water.

Well, one of the most beautiful lakes in the world is Lake Ponderay. And some of the fishing up there was just gorgeous. We only had one day on whale boats to go out on the lake and it rained so hard that I never got on a boat while I was in boot camp.

11. How did you hear about world war two breaking out, specifically the united states involvement?

Well, I grew up in vernal and there was National Guard unit there and nearly all my friends joined but I didn’t because I was working in the mountains all the time. And they were some o f the first boys to go into World War Two and that’s why it came close to me because all my friends joined the national guard.

12. When you were growing up, would you listen to the radio very much? Was it common?

Yes, it was very common in the area. It was our source of information. We had programs we listened to like Red Frew the mounted police in Canada and his dog, buck and different stories like that. We played records or music ourselves and listened to the radio and that was our entertainment.

13. Do you remember the first time you heard the radio? Any thoughts or experiences? Did it seem weird to you to hear this sound coming out of the box?

I don’t really remember when I first heard the radio. We had an old Philco. We were one of the lucky families in vernal to have a radio. But, what I do remember is laying in my bunk in the sheep wagon at about 8,000 feet up the mountain and we would get Del Reyo Texas in the morning advertising Carter’s little liver pills. And I wondered how someone from Del Reyo Texas could come out of that box and talk to me up that mountain in Utah. It always fascinated me that you could run a radio by battery and have those early morning programs and music.

14. Did you read the newspaper much when you were growing up around this time?

I didn’t pay much attention to reading much at the time. I enjoyed working with my dad. We had a three and a half acre place for raising animals. We had cows and a grainery and so on. The chores we had, just feeding the chickens and the cows and feeding little bums lambs in the spring.

15. So you went from Vernal to Idaho for basic training, then were did you go after that?

Actually, to start out with I went to Weber State college before I went into the service nad learned how to weld soft metal under the guidance of Hill Air Force Base which was in Ogden. And after I graduated, I worked for less than three months at Hill Air Force base and then I got drafted into the service. That’s when I applied for aviation welding because I was already a soft metal welder.

16. So is that when you left Utah, when you got drafted?

When I got drafted, I went immediately to Cordelane, Idaho up at Lake Ponderay.

17. And is that where you did most of your service?

No, I was there about six weeks for training and then they put us to work unloading freight cars because only half of the base was built and they were still building the base. Only three units of six were built so we were like slave labor for about three months. And I made application for this school, metal smith school and it didn’t come, so I almost had to strike a rating in warehousing, but I’m glad my name finally come up to go to Normal, Oklahoma, the metalsmith school there after I’d been in Cordelane, Idaho from October to March.

18. So then you went to Oklahoma?

Then I was shipped to Oklahoma, and what a contrast being up at the Canadian border and then ending up in windy Oklahoma.

19. What was different? Was it the people?

Well, the people were different, too. Oklahoma was quite old-fashioned. They had drug stores you would go in with sawdust on the floors. When we would got to town in Oklahoma City, the buses were wrecks. You couldn’t get much transportation during the war so they would put together anything that would carry people. And they would shake, rattle and roll, but they would get you there.

20. What are some other areas that you ended up being in during your involvement in the navy?

After I got into aviation metal smith school, we finally got around to the part in class when we would learn to weld and to show you how hard it was to get talent to even teach in the navy, I taught the instructors how to weld aluminum while I was there because they didn’t know how to do it. And they tried to get me to stay in Oklahoma to teach after I finished, but I didn’t want to because I didn’t like the wind there, mostly. Then I shipped out after I got my rating as a third-class petty officer and there were nine boys and we all went down to Jacksonville, Florida to the naval air station there.

21. What was that like?

Well, there were only about 50,000 military on that base and it was about six miles from the front gate at the john river to where our barracks were. It was so huge and they had their own pilot training, their own hospital, and most of the planes that came in on the east coast came to Jacksonville, Florida for maintenance, so we were a huge maintenance place. They used to bring aircraft in close to east coast and they would fly them in to Jacksonville Florida and bring the planes that needed repair and take the repaired ones back out. So they could trade in the old ones and take a repaired one back to the aircraft carrier?

22. And how long were you there in Florida?

I was in Florida for two and a half years and I worked 8 to 10 hours a day and my top pay was $2.90 a day.

23. Was that high for the time?

Well, some people thought it was. I worked alongside the civilian help. They were getting 20 and 25 and 30 dollars a day and I was only getting $2.90. But they always said that I had a bed to sleep in, and food to eat and a roof over my head. So the number of military people there was 50% of the work force. I think it was kind of a slave labor group, I think.

24. Did you save up a lot of money while you were working? It sounds like you had your basic needs cared for.

No, not very much. I had a little bank account but when I got out of the service, I had less than $400 in my bank account because I enjoyed going in to Jacksonville to see a movie every once in a while and get a hamburger to eat in the cafeteria.

25. So did you finish your service when the war ended?

Yeah, when the war ended I was still in Jacksonville and I got discharged in March. I was engaged to a girl in Washington, D.C. and I had a little Chevrolet car that my dad let me have a $1,000 when he sold his sheep for me to buy. And I drove up the coast and picked up Viola Arlene Coles who I was engaged to then. And we drove to Iowa together to visit with her folks on the way home after my discharge.

26. And you ended up getting married in Salt Lake?

Viola stayed in Iowa until I got settled. I came to Utah and my dad, my mother and I went into business and bought the colonial village motel on 1530 S Main Street, Salt Lake City. Then Vi came out, that was in may and in July she came out from Iowa and we were married. But we were married civilly because I baptized her a member of the church before we were married and she had to wait a year before we could go to the temple.

27. In like, movies and in class we learn about how after the war ended, there was this idealized American dream of living in the suburbs and having a family. Did you have any kind of goal like that or dream of some sort of happy life?

Well, I didn’t have much in the way of finances except for the motel and we worked very hard as a family to operate the motel. We lived in one of the units. With a Murphy pull-down bed and a little kitchenette. They were really good and happy days. We were busy all the time bringing the tourists in and out and the renters we had in the winter months and so on. I went to school at LDS Business College and learned how to do accounting and take care of the books of the business and we lived on about $200 a month during that period of time. But our rent was paid for because we lived in one of the motel units. And in six years at very low rates due to the OPA, the office of price control, we only got $3.50 a night for two people and $5 for two bedrooms and four people. And on that kind of rate, we still paid off $10,000 a year on the mortgage note. And in the six years my father and I were in business, we lowered the mortgage $60,000 in those six years.

28. And you became the sole owners?

Yeah, my wife and I became the sole owners after mom and dad left. We gave them a contract. I gave dad back the $15,000 I borrowed to get into the business with him by borrowing it on the original mortgage. And then I had the mortgage payment to the original mortgage. It took 13 years to pay my parents back. I paid $90,000 on a $65,000 note at the time.

29. So, in total, how long did you work at the motel? Was it about 20 years?

I was there 24 and a half years. 24 and a half years before I sold out. By that time my children were tired of coming down and cleaning the swimming pool and pulling the linen and my wife was tired of doing the laundry, the drapes, scarves and linens. And we finally gave up and decided to sell it.

30. What did you do after that?

I went into real estate, became a realtor and after that I started to sell motel supplies to motel companies on the road for a couple of years.

31. Around this time is when television started to get popular. What were your experiences with television?

Well, when TV first came out, it was touch and go as for whether a person coming in to rent a room would want television or not. And so we had a fellow who would rent TVs. He would rent them for a dollar, which was really a bargain then. But then you realize we could still buy a hamburger for 15 cents. But then the first year or so, we never owned TVs. We rented them and he would come put them in the room and come back and get them the next day. And we decided that was best to raise the rates on the rooms and put our own TVs in. We started to put a few in and then a few more. And by the time color came out, we had to get rid of the black and white and put color in. Television in the motel business was a must. Finally, people expected it and they didn’t want a room without it.

32. Did you watch TV much or were you so busy with the motel that you didn’t really have time to?

I went to Business College and did most of the maintenance work at the motel. We painted all winter and scrubbed walls and so on to keep things up and in the summer time we were so busy because we were so filled up every night and there was more linen and more you had to do to get the motel back in service for the next night. Fortunately, I designed and built a little swimming pool in the back. We had lost some business to families because they would go to places with swimming pools. So I proved to myself that if we needed a swimming pool in order to get the family groups back. And we had about eleven large units that we needed to work on. When I designed this little pool and had it put in the back of the motel. We actually netted the cost of the pool in two years. It was one of the best things we did. It was certainly popular. We had up to 50 people in that pool sometime in August.

33. Was there a limit on the number of people that could be in the pool at one time?

Not according to law, but there was a lot of hollering and yelling and kids having fun and it was wonderful. One of the enjoyable things was when I moved out of the motel and up into St Mary’s hills, my three kids who were all high school age would come work with me during the summer months in the mornings. Dolly would pull linen and empty waste cans. Alan would tend the swimming pool and Bill would mow the lawns and sweep pebbles off of where they got onto the black top. It was so nice because at lunch time we would either go to Sizzler for lunch or I would get a sack of hamburgers and French fries and we’d sit in one of the rooms with the TV on and laugh and talk. It was one of the most enjoyable times of my life to be with the children. By about two or three o’clock, their chores would be done and they took off so they had their time for the summer in the afternoons. There was a lot of fun in my life then. To be with the children.

34. My earliest memory of you is in California. How did you end up there?

Well, we had a very good life. We always stayed close to the church and all, but finally after the children left and my wife started working and her personality completely changed. I wouldn’t say all the fault was hers, and it came to the point that we got a divorce. I went to California to get away and so my kids and their families wouldn’t have to put up with me visiting them one day and their grandmother the next. So, I went to California and I was pretty much on my own. I worked in minimum wage jobs and made my own way doing maintenance work in apartments and hotels. For five years I worked as the engineer in the south tower of a high-rise apartment complex. There were two towers, 17 stories, 580 apartments. We maintained all of the apartments during that five year period of time and there were three engineers.

35. You were responsible for 580 apartments?

I was responsible for half of them, in the North tower, and an engineer in the south tower and an engineer on site who took care of the laundries on site. He’d mostly service the machines because they were difficult to keep going.

36. So it was almost like a little city.

Oh yes, it was restricted. You couldn’t come in without your own key. If you had a guest, you had to have them signed in so they knew who was there on the premises. We had 580 units and the balconies looked out on the ocean and the only thing between the building and the ocean was a little park and the beach. My grandkids came down there and they thought it was just great because they could get in their bathing suits and be down to the beach in just five minutes.

37. What was California like?

It was a good ten years, but finally after my fifth year in the Santa Monica shores apartment house, I was 69 years old, had a bad back, two mashed discs in my back. So I decided 69 was old enough to retire, and I didn’t have enough money in social security to pay the rent, but I had a duplex in Salt Lake which my mother left me half of. Since I wouldn’t have to pay rent, I came here to Utah and lived on Social Security after that..

38. So that was around 1990?

I got here on February 3^rd, 1990. And I’ve been here 17 years and this is my castle.

39. Can you think of in your life, major events either like domestic things or foreign things. Off the top of my head, the JFK Assassination, the end of the cold war. Things like that. Maybe if you chose one or two major events and talked about what you remember or where you were.

Well, most of those things happened while I was in the motel for those 24 years. When Kennedy was killed, that was a shock for us. Some of the main things I always enjoyed was going up on the mountains where I spent time as a youngster. It was nice up there. I had a cousin whose husband had built a nice cabin in what they call Bett’s cove. We even had electricity. So we roughed it pretty hard. We always got a deer for our freezer and ate venison all winter long. There was a reservoir that they put fish in so the kids could always fish. And we always had good fishing and lots of mountain trout. All the events that went on in the world, we were a part fo them, but we had our own life of the motel and getting away to the mountains whenever we could.

40. You were saying something in the car about technology and how people and things have changed. I know you’ve seen a lot in your lifetime. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, I’ve probably lived in the most advanced generation of time for mankind as far as information coming across the earth. I had an opportunity in California while I was working at the Santa Monica Shores apartment building to learn the computer. It was something that at my age I didn’t think it was worth learning. And that’s one thing that I probably regret not doing. I never learned how to operate a computer. My children bought me one or bought one for my oldest granddaughter. It was slow and I told them that I had trouble turning the thing off. One thing I guess I regret is that I’ve just stayed completely away from computer. I don’t own a cell phone, just don’t need it. I have a cordless phone. That’s as far as I’ve gotten into technology at my house. I guess you could say I’m pretty old-fashioned in my ideas. But then, what I have is adequate for what my needs are.

41. Would you say that life is easier, as far as the comforts that are available now compared to when you were growing up as a sheepherder in rural Utah?

Well, life was hard growing up because you couldn’t even get an ice cream cone because they cost 5 cents. But, everybody was in the same boat. You weren’t any different from anyone else. Even in this day and age, I’ve never seen anyone with so much money. As we’ve progressed in my generation, we’ve improved for the better. In all the sciences, with advances in transportation, communication. We have an enhanced life so that our children enjoy things much more than we were able to. I remember having an old work horse on Diamond Mountain. It was 25 miles away from me, but I had to bring it back to Vernal. I’ll tell you that’s a long ride on a workhorse, especially on bareback, off a mountain. That’s sure the old age that you’re riding a horse 25 miles to get him home. I had some old-fashioned times in my life, too.

42. Are there any other really important experiences in your life that you would like to share?

I’ll tell you that the most important things in life are church and family. And I’m very grateful for the family I have. I have three children, all of them educated in college. Some of them have gone on for extra degrees. They’ve done very well for themselves. After they got their college degrees and everything, they never came to me for money. I gave them money sometimes, from an inheritance and so on. They’ve gone off on their own and made their own way. I have eleven grandchildren, 11 great-grandchildren and two more on the way. Now, that’s what makes me rich. A lot of people living on social security think they are poor, but I’m not. I’ve got one of the sweetest families that’s ever been placed on this earth and that’s what counts. Family. And I’m grateful to be a latter-day saint. I’m grateful to be in the church. And I’m on this earth to find out what good and evil is and the only way to be happy is to be righteous. And if a lot of people in this world would just learn that principle and choose the right, there would be a lot more happiness in this world than there would be today.

I would like to make one more comment about how much I love and appreciate this earth. You see, it doesn’t belong to man, it belongs to the Lord. He, with the help of Michael, and his father in heaven, they built the earth. Everything we possess and have. Our own bodies, everything we eat, the clothes we wear, the transportation, the communication. Everything we have comes from the earth. And even our own bodies. Dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return. I appreciate the earth and I think we should because it means to much to us. It gives us so much. Well, we couldn’t live without it because everything we eat and that keeps us warm comes from the earth. So take care of and love the earth because it is so precious to living and to life. We should be so grateful to the lord for letting us use it and to be here. It gives us the use of this earth. If we just pay ten percent of our increase. I think that’s a bargain. He says you can have this earth and it will take care of you for just ten percent. And 90 percent can be yours. Do what you want with that 90 percent, but give me 10 percent of what you have here on the earth.