Morgan (Speaker 1)  0:00  

Today is February the 16, 2022. We are in Kaysville at the home of Bill Sanders. I am Fawn Morgan and we are interviewing Bill about his family, about growing up in Kaysville, a little about his work in the Kaysville Layton Historical Society, and the Heritage Museum. We may have to come back another time, okay, you’re welcome anytime to get all that. So tell us a little bit about your background, your full name and your birth.

Sanders (Speaker 2)  0:32  

Okay, my name is William Van Sanders, and I was born on Halloween October 31, 1937. I was actually born in Salt Lake, but I lived in Kaysville at the time. My parents lived on First East between the- well it was 70 North 200 East and so I lived there for the first three years of my life. And then we moved.

My dad purchased a Wienell Mill farm. Well, I got to step back a bit, my uncle, Hod started the Clover Club potato chip factory. So, when I was born, my dad was working for the Layton Sugar Mill. But uncle Hod started the Clover Club potato chip company. And so, he and my dad had this idea. He was buying his potatoes from the state of Maine in order to make potato chips because at that time the potatoes from Idaho had such a heavy water content that it was difficult to make chips with them in the old format that they were doing that Hod had learned. So, he and my dad decided that they would buy a Kaysville farm where they could raise potatoes. And so the Wienell Mill farm was available. And so, my dad and Hod together, bought that farm and we moved over here and it's just across the street here, from where we are now and so from the time I was three, until I was seven, we lived on the Wienell Mill Farm.

My dad was going to quit his job at the sugar mill and was going to be a potato raiser and they were going to put 40 to 60 acres of that farm into raising potatoes. But then World War Two came along in 1941. And because Kaysville had a flour mill and a cannery, the government told farmers in the area what they should raise, and so potatoes was not one of them. So, they were to raise vegetables. And so they raised peas, beans, corn, and then a lot of tomatoes because the Kaysville cannery was a really big producer of tomatoes, canned tomatoes and tomato juice and all that. So, my dad and my uncle's potato farm thing never worked out. So, my dad then became a full time farmer.

So, I grew up at the Wienell Mill Farm and Second North at that time was the end of the city north. There were only just a few houses north of 200 North. Crestwood Road which we called Cemetery Road then, had a few people living along it. But then we were really well considered outside the town. And we walked to school, from the farm and everything my dad, who during the war they raised he raised a lot of tomatoes during the war. And then they needed extra people at Hill Air Force Base, so my dad went to work at the farm, or at Hill Field.

 My dad was Elias Van Sanders and my mother was Thelma Williams Sanders, but my dad hated the name Elias. So he went by Van all of his life. And my dad's family story is interesting, because my dad was the youngest of 30 children in an LDS polygamy family. My grandfather Sanders had three wives. His first wife had 12 children, his second wife had 11 children, and my grandmother had seven children and my grandmother and grandfather were married in 1885, five years before the LDS manifesto was passed. So what the manifesto said was, there would be no more polygamy marriages. So the LDS man could not marry multiple wives. But the manifesto did not say practicing polygamists cannot have children with their current wives. So several of my dads brothers and sisters were born after the manifesto was passed.

4:59  

And as the youngest of 30 children, that affected me in a really interesting way. Because on my Sanders side of the family, there were 30 children. Four of them died as infants, and one didn't marry, so when I was growing up, I had 25 uncles and aunts, who married, who made 50 uncles and aunts, and 15 of those families lived in Farmington, Kaysville, and Centerville, and 10 of them from the second wife lived in Idaho Falls and Rexburg, Idaho. So when I went to school, I went to school with all kinds of relatives. Because my dad had, well, he had three of his own family who lived in Kaysville, and then 15 of his half-brothers and half-sisters who lived in Farmington. So, we are a well spread out family. And the interesting thing about that was my dad being the youngest, he still kept in contact with most of those families. And then there was another anomaly there. He had nine nieces and nephews who were younger than he was. And then he had some several nieces and nephews who were older than he was. And so we had a spread out family. My mother's family was not quite as big. There were six of them. And they mostly lived in Syracuse and Kaysville, so I had quite an extended family. And we've always had big family reunions and all that kind of stuff going on.

I lived in the Wienell Mill Farm until we were seven, and then uncle Hod decided to build the factory that was down on the corner here, the potato chip factory. And when Ray Ashton the architect drew up the plans for the factory, they were an acre short of having enough land to put the chip factory on that property that was that little square where the park is today. So Hod and my dad got together. Hod had already bought a farm by the cemetery, it was called the Simmons Ball farm. And it was just west of the Kaysville Cemetery so my dad and Hod decided to exchange farms. So Hod took over the Wienell Mill Farm and my dad and mother and we moved up to the Simmons farm. And when I grew up there on Cemetery Road, below Fairfield Drive, there were six families live there. On the corner of Crestwood Road and Fairfield the Cottrells lived there and we lived next to the cemetery, and above the cemetery there were only three families that lived above the cemetery going all the way up to Fruit Heights. So above us, the Walter Buhler family lived and then Fellshaw King, William King family lived up there, and then Ray and Winifred Ashton. So they were-that was the only people who lived on what is now Crestwood Road above the cemetery. So, I grew up with really close friends with the Cottrell family. Don Cottrell was the same age as my brother David, and they were friends of your uncle Kent. And then Jim Cottrell was just a few months younger than I am. So, we were a foursome. The two Sanders boys and the two Cottrell boys, and we were together forever. We did everything together. And when we were kids, if, if Jim and I were playing, and we happened to be at our house when the sun went down, then he would sleep over at our house, and if I was at his house when the sun went down, I would sleep at his house.

Morgan 9:04  

So you had a second mother?

Sanders 9:08  

I did, I had a second mother. Carl and Leone Cottrell and then the home of Holmes Creek, and well then, Simmons Pond and Holmes Creek were our playground. We could go from the cemetery all the way up, follow the creek all the way up to the mountain road and then go up onto the mountains and well, we went up Webb's Canyon quite a bit, and then we hiked Bair’s Canyon a lot, but we were more familiar with Webb's Canyon because it was right at the top of where we were. And then I lived on that farm until I was in high school.

 And then we moved into this house. My dad built this house and we moved here in 1952. So I live in the house that my dad and mother built back in 1952. I went to Kaysville Elementary School. And when I went to Kaysville Elementary School there were six classes and six teachers. There were no multiple grades. My first grade teacher was Ruby Williams, then I had Ivy Harvey second grade, Mabel Gleason third grade, Zena Williams who happened to be, my aunt for fourth grade. Hannah Jarman, who was my cousin, for fifth grade and then Mr. Henry Rampton. G Henry Rampton for the sixth grade. So he was the sixth grade teacher and principal. And so, each well the second first and second grade, second and third grade.The first grade was in the basement, second and third grades were on the first floor, forth, fifth, and sixth grades were on the second floor. And so when you're, you couldn't go upstairs unless you were a fifth grader. So we had a lot of fun experiences there.

Morgan  11:03  

I just want to ask you before we move past the cemetery, tell me about playing in the cemetery.

Sanders 11:11  

The cemetery was our playground. It was the only, you know it was the only place that had a lot of lawn so, we could play football we could play well, we didn't call it soccer in those days, but we kicked balls and everything. And then we used to play tag amongst all the headstones and everything, so you would you could hide behind a headstone. And then one of our fun things was to go up there before they would dig a grave. And then the cemetery was a place where all of the high school kids drove their cars up there to park and make out as we used to call it in those days. So, as kids we would go up to the cemetery and we would hide behind headstones. And these high school kids would be parked in their cars. And then we would separate ourselves throughout the whole cemetery. And then we would moan and groan. And so the guy and the girls in the cars would get all upset and start screaming and hollering. And then the boys would say, “Oh, we're gonna catch these kids.” So they would drive their cars around and they would hear us in one corner and drive to that corner, and then somebody in this corner would scream and holler, and then they drive we keep him rolling back and forth in the cemetery for forever. And then there was a tree on one of the well, it’s the first road that you went into the cemetery. There was a great big huge tree there. It's not there now. But it used to have a limb that went out over the top of the road. And so, we would work with different people we’d say you know, get a bunch of girls and get them in the car and then bring them up to the cemetery and then park your car under this tree. And then we'd be laying on top of the limb, and then we would drop off the limb onto the top of the car and scare the girls to death. And that was when I was probably 10 to 12 or 13 but it was so much fun.

And then we lived on the farm, so we had horses and so we would play musical chairs in the cemetery on our horses, which is not too cool in today's society. But one kid would sit on a stone and then just sing a song and then we would ride our horses around the different headstones and then when the kid stopped singing, you had to jump off your horse and then get off and go and sit on the top of a headstone. And so that was fun. Very disrespectful. Though we did that a lot, and we traveled everywhere on our bicycles. I used to ride my bike from the farm up by the cemetery to the grade school and back. We didn't have we didn’t get bussed. If we didn't walk we wrote our bikes. In the wintertime we would have to walk because it was too hard to ride your bicycle in the snow. But my dad would shovel a path along one of the irrigation ditches from our farmhouse over to Crestwood Road and so we could walk along the edge of the ditch and then get on the Crestwood Road and then walked to school.

Morgan  14:36  

Was the road paved?

Sanders  14:37  

It was not paved.  When I- when we first moved up there, and then later, Mr. Ashton was a very influential guy, Ray Ashton, and he bought the old Beasley home, which was a pioneer home at the top of Crestwood road there. And so he had them rename the road Crestwood, cause that's what he called his farm and so he was influential enough during the late 1940s to have it paved as far as the cemetery. But then after you left, the cemetery was a winding road, dirt road that went clear up to highway 89. It's been straightened out quite a bit now you know, to make the road we know today. It used to be this winding dirt road that went up there. And so when we would go and play, we'd ride our horses up to the mountain because it was too hard on the old dirt road to ride their bicycles, so if we did anything above, played or went to do something above the cemetery, it was always on our horses because we couldn't ride our bikes up the hill. Too hard. There was a big old sandy hill up there. But Mr. Ashton was an architect and he- he did the Kaysville Theater, he did the Utah State Prison. And he was quite a well-known influential guy. And they improved their house and really made it into a showcase and everything up there. So he was influential enough. And then eventually the executives from Clover Club built their homes up on Crestwood Road. Ron McCormick built his home first and then Crannies built theirs.  Then Dredges, he built his on that side. And then the other executives built their homes over here in Clover Estate. Earl Locker and those guys over here so. I went to North Davis Jr. High School. I went to school during the time when there was one County High School two junior high schools, North Davis Junior High School and South Davis Junior High School in Bountiful. North Davis was in Clearfield, so we would catch the bus at the Kaysville grade school to ride to North Davis Junior High School out there. And then in 1952 I started at Davis High School and graduated in 1915 or 1955 actually.

Morgan  19:17 

Let me ask you, when you moved here on Second North, did you have to give up your horse then?

Sanders 19:23

No, we had this house property goes all the way to the back. This block, my grandparents lived on the corner down here my mother's family, Thomas and Grace Williams. And so my grandfather owned one quarter of this block. So their house was there. And then my mother bought this lot from my grandpa and then my sister bought the lot next door and built her house. And then my mothers sister bought the house going to the south of that