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Lloyd Castagneto_1
JACI WILKENS: This is an interview of Lloyd Castagneto given by his grandson, Craig Castagneto. It took place on May 29, 1985. It was given in the home of Lloyd Castagneto on 224 Westwood Boulevard. It concerns [00:00:30] the history of Nampa.
SILENCE: [Gap]
CRAIG CASTAGNETO: [00:01:30] One of the first things that I thought we'd go over, Grandpa, is this 1900s, the 1910 to 1920, that was the period you came to Nampa.
LLOYD CASTAGNETO: See, I came to Nampa in 1917.
CRAIG: Tell me for a minute what brought you here and how you were introduced to Nampa.
LLOYD: Well, I was working for the railroad in [00:02:00] Pocatello, and I was working as a carpenter there in the gang, and they used to send me out for a lot of jobs down at this end of Boise, Nampa, Ontario, Payette, Weiser, and out and home all these places when there was a little job of some kind around the depot with the door checks and various [00:02:30] things, money kills and so on and so forth. And I'd ride all day down, or ride all night down, ride back on the train. Clear to Pocatello. Yeah, no expense money, my own meal. And I was getting 35 cents an hour. And that's what—so along [00:03:00] one day, Mom and I was wheeling the baby buggy down Carrison Avenue there in Pocatello, and it was in the evening. It It was right around—that's where all the fishers—and we happened to go by the MB&B supervisor's house, and he was out working in the yard, this old fella. And he—I stopped and asked him, I stopped [00:03:30] and talked to him a minute or two, and I told him, I said, I I said, I spent an awful lot of time going back and forth out of the West End, and I said, Did you ever give any thoughts to putting a man down on that end somewhere? See, Nampa, for instance. And he said, No, I never have. And I said, I'll give it a thought. So [00:04:00] in less than a month, he called me up one day and asked me if I wanted to go down there. And I said, Sure. He said, I got authority to do it, and authority to put you on a flat salary of $99 a month. He said, That's the same salary that a passenger brakeman gets now.
LLOYD: And I said, Okay. So he made arrangements for her to have a boxcar set [00:04:30] aside there where I could put her things in, free billing, down on load. And we landed in here at 2 o'clock in the morning, two little girls and another boy on the way. And we were at the depot at 2 o'clock in the morning, and we didn't know a soul in Nampa. [00:05:00] And we sat there in that hour of daylight, and then we set out, and we went across the street there. There there. There was five, four or five restaurants there, I forget. I don't know. I think there was four that I know of. And then we started out hunting a place to celebrate. And we walked over to the north side, and we saw where there was a little house there for rent. So we found out we could rent it for $20. And, by the way, we landed in Nampa with [00:05:30] $38 for her name. That's the only money we had. Twenty of it went there, and ten of it paid the payment over there, and I had $8 left. Ten of it went for what?
CRAIG: Huh? You spent ten for what?
LLOYD: Having the furniture brought out of the boxcar. See, See, it was shipped down pre-building in a boxcar from Pocatello. [00:06:00] And I had to hire a driver here to bring it over there.
CRAIG: Oh, so somebody brought their wagon cart over and carted it over to your new place where you rented, huh?
LLOYD: Well, I hired a fellow in the town, a #dreamer. They had dreamers that ran here through different ones here. They did that because everything was doing with horses then, you know. And then [00:06:30] after we got the furniture in, I went out looking for a place where we could get a few groceries. And I #equated around, and I come up on 12th Avenue just between 1st and 2nd Street, and there was two brothers, #shoemate [00:07:00] brothers, that had a store there, and a grocery, and they had a butcher shop. So I stopped there and went in there, and I introduced myself, and I told them I had been moved down here, and told them what we had, and two youngsters, and told them what my work was, and all that.
LLOYD: [00:07:30] And I all that. And I said, one thing I don't have, and that's any money. And I got to have some credit. Okay, we'll take care of you. So they did. I traded with them a long time for that reason. And then I used [00:08:00] to go out of here to Weezer, Ontario, and Payette, and Boise, and Bounton Road, and those places. And it just started to grow then.
CRAIG: Now, was Nampa a big railroad town then, or what kind of railroad town was it?
LLOYD: Nampa? Nampa was a good railroad town. You know, see, in there then, Nampa [00:08:30] was on the main line. Boise was not. See, the main line went right through here. There was a ___line through here to Boise. There was a branch line from here to Boise. And there were lots of passenger trains then, about six or eight passenger trains each way every day. And there was a train that came in from Boise, and met up a train too, and they took the passengers, brought them in, took them back. That's why there were [00:09:00] so many restaurants right across from people, because people, while they were waiting for a train, they'd go over there and eat and whatnot. And, yeah, Nampa's always been a good railroad town.
LLOYD: And then, I was trying to think what it was. [00:09:30] I didn't know the year they built the railroad around through Boise. I'd Boise. I'd forgotten. But anyway, that was, the job that I had was a job called a traveling carpenter. And the first thing I knew, I had an interest in more jobs, a bigger job, and job, and then some men. And first thing, I was still a traveling [00:10:00] carpenter, but I had a crew of 22 men. That was a long time. I I was putting in the track scales there. And so then...
CRAIG: Now, the track scales, what scales were these? Track. these? Track.
LLOYD: It's a track scale with [00:10:30] a whole freight car on it, see? Tracks run right over it.
CRAIG: I see.
LLOYD: And, yeah, it was quite a big job.
CRAIG: That was here at Nampa?
LLOYD: Yeah.
CRAIG: Uh-huh. Now, what was Nampa like when you came here? There were just...
LLOYD: Well, it wasn't too big, and it wasn't too small because there was quite a few...
CRAIG: #Have you talked to them personally?
CRAIG: [00:11:00] Anyway, back to this deal with Nampa in 1917. That place that you got, you paid $20 rent for. What did you get for $20 in those days for rent?
LLOYD: Oh, this is a small house. It had two little bedrooms in it. It was a very small house. But I suppose there was [00:11:30] places in town that rented from us, they rented for even more, but I don't... I really don't know what it was.
CRAIG: So it was just a...
LLOYD: Yeah, what the regular rent was. We moved out of there after about a little over a year, a year and a half, and moved over onto 18th [00:12:00] Avenue and rented a larger place because we were cramped up there after Bealcon. And we lived there through one winter. And then the next June, I went down and bought [00:12:30] a lot down on 6th Avenue South, the 300 block, and bought that lot, and then I started to build a little house in there. And I in there. And I worked nights and Sundays, built a little home on the back of the lot so we could live there.
LLOYD: And Mom and the kids would... [00:13:00] And I'd go out on the road and come in on what they called a little pony. It had two trains that were called a pony. One left in the morning at Boise and went to Huntington, and one left Huntington to Boise, same thing in the morning, and they'd just reverse at night. So I'd come back on that at 6 o'clock, about 6 o'clock in the evening, and I'd get right off of the train and go right straight over there and start on the house, [00:13:30] get all the daylight, all the summer daylight. I got it so we could move in after about three months. We moved in there in 1919 and lived there in that little house in the back where the kids were growing up.
LLOYD: And 1926, I built a house on the front of the lot. [00:14:00] The one in the back wasn't good. There was no sewer there. The toilet was just outside the back door and just a hole in the ground, a typical toilet.
CRAIG: [00:14:30] Was the high school there at that time, just a street over?
LLOYD: No, the house, no. I forget when they built the house.
LLOYD: I see the house, hm,
LLOYD: [Silence]
LLOYD: I guess it was, [ ] yeah, I guess it was built just about that time.
CRAIG: And that was just a street or two over, just one street over?
LLOYD: Hmm? [Timestamp correction]
CRAIG: [00:15:00] And that was just a street or two over, just one street over?
CRAIG: Was the high school just one street over?
LLOYD: Well, it was the same as it is where the city hall is now. It would be about two blocks.
CRAIG: [00:15:30] Two blocks away. Was that just the high school or was that the elementary school too?
LLOYD: That was the whole thing. They had another elementary school over here too.
CRAIG: Was Kenwood around in those days? That Kenwood school that used to be where?
LLOYD: Yeah.
CRAIG: I think that's where Dad went to school, [00:16:00] wasn't it?
LLOYD: Yeah.
CRAIG: Went to Kenwood then over the high school.
LLOYD: Yeah. Well, then he went to high school too. He graduated from high school.
CRAIG: Now, during this period of 1917, 1919, when you were renting and then you built the little house, okay, that was the period of time right coming to the end of World War I. Did [00:16:30] that affect Nampa very much that you knew of?
LLOYD: No, I don't think it affected them very much. I think it was a very patriotic place here. Everybody was in O.C. It's hard to remember some of those things in there. A [00:17:00] year or two ago, I wouldn't have had a bit of trouble with them.
CRAIG: Well, some of the things I'm going to ask are some that probably we don't even need to, you know, they might be things that you remember, they might not be. I was wondering, was there more railroad traffic in those days because of the war or transporting things back and forth?
LLOYD: Oh, yes,
CRAIG: Transporting important stuff because of the slowdown because of the war?
LLOYD: Oh yes, because they you see you didn't have trucks. [00:17:30] You didn't have good highways. You didn't have anything like that. You had highway, but you didn't have good. They were have good. They were just two-lane roads. You didn't have any big trucks of any kind. And [00:18:00] so railroad moved an awful lot of stuff. Yeah, they were not big, long trains like they have now, but they were short trains with lots of traffic on them. And in 1926 when I got that house on the front of the lot there on 6th Avenue, [00:18:30] that's the first time the kids, it was such a thing as a bedroom, a separate bedroom because there was only two rooms and a lean-to in the little house in the back. That same little house was over there on Dewey.
CRAIG: [00:19:00] Un-huh, On Diamond?
LLOYD: Yeah.
CRAIG: On Diamond, yeah.
LLOYD: Not Dewey, yeah.
CRAIG: What was there for entertainment in those days? Just building houses? or were there uh?
LLOYD: Well, it was a big dance hall up on the north side, and that was a very popular place to have a dance, except Sunday almost every day [00:19:30] of the week. People would just crowd in there dancing. It was... And then there was a couple of picture shows. People used to, back then, of course, it only cost 15 cents, so they could afford to go, you know.
CRAIG: What [00:20:00] did... Did the dance cost anything? Did Did they have a live band there every night?
LLOYD: Oh, they used to. Different price, but most of them was 5 cents a dance. You got tickets. Sometimes, you know, you'd buy a bunch of tickets for 5 cents a ticket, and then they'd come around every so often and pick them up off there, see, from there.
CRAIG: [00:20:30] Also, to a certain degree, it was like you paid by the dance, just about, rather than for the whole evening. So a guy could sit there and listen.
LLOYD: Yeah uh, The main thing about it was that they were such clean debts, you know. There wasn't a lot of drinking and whatnot. There was things like that weren't served there. Oh, I don't say that there wasn't guys [00:21:00] that'd go there that'd been drinking, of course, but it just wasn't a regular general practice.
CRAIG: Was Prohibition at this time existing in Nampa?
LLOYD: Yeah. I can't remember the year, but it had Prohibition here, yeah.
CRAIG: Now, what was downtown? Right across from the railroad, you said, were restaurants.
LLOYD: Yeah, Yeah, there's a bunch of restaurants [00:21:30] there, and then there's stores, see, because a lot of things, a lot of people would come out from different places. You didn't have these little places around here, there, and around here. You had only just the main stores. So there was lots of business here for what they had there. Some of these old stores are still big stores now. [00:22:00] I don't think Penny had one here, but the different ones, the Fox at Boise, they had a store here at Nampa.
CRAIG: Now, the only restaurants in town were the ones that were right across from the bus depot, or from the train depot? Those were the only restaurants?
LLOYD: Oh, Oh, no, I think there was [00:22:30] probably a restaurant or two, I can't recall, because that was the main thing right there, the people that ate most. There wasn't too many people looking for a restaurant, and if they did, they could go down there and eat anyhow, too, see. I see there was the Nebraska and the Oregon, and nearly all of them were. Idaho, nearly [00:23:00] all of them was named after a state.
CRAIG: You said Nebraska? One restaurant's name was what, Nebraska?
LLOYD: Nebraska, Oregon, Nebraska, for nearly all of them, they were in a row along there.
CRAIG: And they were named after states, huh?
LLOYD: Yeah, they just used the state's name, yeah.
CRAIG: How would a typical meal go? I mean, [00:23:30] was there lots of beefsteak in those days? Every meal was a beefsteak meal?
LLOYD: Oh, yes, they had typical meals like people had in their home. They were more like that, you know, see. They'd bring you a plate out there with a great big T-bone on there, you know, and fried potatoes, and people, hey, you're going to know what fried potatoes is now, you know. And [00:24:00] soup, and homemade bread, and all that kind of things. I can remember them when they moved up to 35 cents a meal, and then 50 cents, and they moved up a little less. At first, Frank Kibler's father had one of them. [00:24:30] He used to own or manage, whether they owned it or not, the Ontario Hotel, which was the main hotel outside of the Dewey Palace here, west of here. People used to come a hundred miles there. They'd have balls for dancing. They'd [00:25:00] have a ball there. They'd come from everywhere, you know. See, clear up in Burns, all that country in there. And Frank Kibler's father owned that. And he'd come up here then, and he had one of these restrooms. [00:25:30] See, I think Frank Kibler probably was only about four or five years old when they moved up here. They ought to get a hold of him. His memory's better than mine. He can really fill them in.
CRAIG: You've got a plenty good memory. So when you first started coming to Nampa, back when [00:26:00] you were traveling on the train every day, you could buy a great big meal like you described for what, for how much money? What's the lowest figure you can remember?
LLOYD: Oh, I can remember 25-cent meals.
CRAIG: With the T-bone steak and the whole works, huh? Yeah. Yeah.
LLOYD: Oh, yes. Yeah, I can remember that. I say that as business began to pick [00:26:30] up a lot more, why, they began charging a little more of them. Because their help, you see, didn't cost them anything, hardly. And then I started to tell you a little bit ago, while I was building this [00:27:00] little house on the back there on 6th Avenue, we were living over on 18th Avenue, and Mom would wheel the kids over and bring a hot dinner over. I'd work till I couldn't see anymore for the darkness, and then we'd all sit down and eat a dinner, then we'd go back. And sometimes it'd be 10, 10.30 before we'd get back over there home, and I'd be up at 6 [00:27:30] o'clock the next morning headed on the road someplace to wherever the job happened to be.
CRAIG: Very little of your work then was here in Nampa. Most of it was traveling.
LLOYD: Well, right at first it was, and then I began to pile on a little bit more and a little bit more while I built a shop over across on 14th Avenue [00:28:00] and started hiring men, like I told you there. And from then on, they had four or five bridge gangs outfit cars at several locations around, see, up on Burns Branch, [00:28:30] up out of Weiser, and out of Payette, to McCall, and then it began to drop off, Lord, and we began to get more things in the radius of a certain distance of Nampa here. That was my beat, you see, and each one of them had one.
CRAIG: Mm-hmm. [00:29:00] So you got to spend more and more time closer to Nampa as the years went on then.
LLOYD: Yeah.
CRAIG: Okay. When you built these houses then, you were spending, when you built your house in 1926, how do you finance a house in those days?
LLOYD: Well, finally I had to get a loan, and, see, it only cost, [00:29:30] I think it only cost about $4,000 and something for three bedrooms and almost a full basement and three bedrooms and a big living room, and it's between $4,000 and $5,000. It wasn't hard to [00:30:00] get a loan like that because you didn't have to pay too much interest, and maybe interest, and maybe you didn't have to pay too much interest, but it was probably 5% or 6%, and you didn't have to, what was I going to say?
CRAIG: Would you get it from the bank?
LLOYD: Oh, yes, you'd get it from the bank or a loan company. I think [00:30:30] I got mine from a loan company that headquarters, the the first one was the headquarters in Salt Lake City, I think. I forget the name of it right now, but I think that's where it was. And, of course, your payments probably didn't run over 25 a month, you know, see?
CRAIG: What did you do for your first little house, [00:31:00] the one that only had two rooms in it that was at the back of your lot?
LLOYD: I left that there and rented it for a long time. That helped to pay for the first house in the front, see? And then, of course, one thing that helped, see, after I built that house in there, [00:31:30] I was gradually advancing in the work that I was doing, see? There see? There was an increasing in the credit loan and the payment work until finally, and I was still, like I told you, I had 22 men that time working one time, and I was still supervising [00:32:00] them as a traveling carpenter. The various bridge gangs in the territory were all getting seniority over me. So I said to the supervisor, I said, I'm going to have to do something about this. I said, I'm just...
END OF RECORDING
JACI WILKENS: This is an interview of Lloyd Castagneto given by his grandson, Craig Castagneto. It took place on May 29, 1985. It was given in the home of Lloyd Castagneto on 224 Westwood Boulevard. It concerns [00:00:30] the history of Nampa.
SILENCE: [Gap]
CRAIG CASTAGNETO: [00:01:30] One of the first things that I thought we'd go over, Grandpa, is this 1900s, the 1910 to 1920, that was the period you came to Nampa.
LLOYD CASTAGNETO: See, I came to Nampa in 1917.
CRAIG: Tell me for a minute what brought you here and how you were introduced to Nampa.
LLOYD: Well, I was working for the railroad in [00:02:00] Pocatello, and I was working as a carpenter there in the gang, and they used to send me out for a lot of jobs down at this end of Boise, Nampa, Ontario, Payette, Weiser, and out and home all these places when there was a little job of some kind around the depot with the door checks and various [00:02:30] things, money kills and so on and so forth. And I'd ride all day down, or ride all night down, ride back on the train. Clear to Pocatello. Yeah, no expense money, my own meal. And I was getting 35 cents an hour. And that's what—so along [00:03:00] one day, Mom and I was wheeling the baby buggy down Carrison Avenue there in Pocatello, and it was in the evening. It It was right around—that's where all the fishers—and we happened to go by the MB&B supervisor's house, and he was out working in the yard, this old fella. And he—I stopped and asked him, I stopped [00:03:30] and talked to him a minute or two, and I told him, I said, I I said, I spent an awful lot of time going back and forth out of the West End, and I said, Did you ever give any thoughts to putting a man down on that end somewhere? See, Nampa, for instance. And he said, No, I never have. And I said, I'll give it a thought. So [00:04:00] in less than a month, he called me up one day and asked me if I wanted to go down there. And I said, Sure. He said, I got authority to do it, and authority to put you on a flat salary of $99 a month. He said, That's the same salary that a passenger brakeman gets now.
LLOYD: And I said, Okay. So he made arrangements for her to have a boxcar set [00:04:30] aside there where I could put her things in, free billing, down on load. And we landed in here at 2 o'clock in the morning, two little girls and another boy on the way. And we were at the depot at 2 o'clock in the morning, and we didn't know a soul in Nampa. [00:05:00] And we sat there in that hour of daylight, and then we set out, and we went across the street there. There there. There was five, four or five restaurants there, I forget. I don't know. I think there was four that I know of. And then we started out hunting a place to celebrate. And we walked over to the north side, and we saw where there was a little house there for rent. So we found out we could rent it for $20. And, by the way, we landed in Nampa with [00:05:30] $38 for her name. That's the only money we had. Twenty of it went there, and ten of it paid the payment over there, and I had $8 left. Ten of it went for what?
CRAIG: Huh? You spent ten for what?
LLOYD: Having the furniture brought out of the boxcar. See, See, it was shipped down pre-building in a boxcar from Pocatello. [00:06:00] And I had to hire a driver here to bring it over there.
CRAIG: Oh, so somebody brought their wagon cart over and carted it over to your new place where you rented, huh?
LLOYD: Well, I hired a fellow in the town, a #dreamer. They had dreamers that ran here through different ones here. They did that because everything was doing with horses then, you know. And then [00:06:30] after we got the furniture in, I went out looking for a place where we could get a few groceries. And I #equated around, and I come up on 12th Avenue just between 1st and 2nd Street, and there was two brothers, #shoemate [00:07:00] brothers, that had a store there, and a grocery, and they had a butcher shop. So I stopped there and went in there, and I introduced myself, and I told them I had been moved down here, and told them what we had, and two youngsters, and told them what my work was, and all that.
LLOYD: [00:07:30] And I all that. And I said, one thing I don't have, and that's any money. And I got to have some credit. Okay, we'll take care of you. So they did. I traded with them a long time for that reason. And then I used [00:08:00] to go out of here to Weezer, Ontario, and Payette, and Boise, and Bounton Road, and those places. And it just started to grow then.
CRAIG: Now, was Nampa a big railroad town then, or what kind of railroad town was it?
LLOYD: Nampa? Nampa was a good railroad town. You know, see, in there then, Nampa [00:08:30] was on the main line. Boise was not. See, the main line went right through here. There was a ___line through here to Boise. There was a branch line from here to Boise. And there were lots of passenger trains then, about six or eight passenger trains each way every day. And there was a train that came in from Boise, and met up a train too, and they took the passengers, brought them in, took them back. That's why there were [00:09:00] so many restaurants right across from people, because people, while they were waiting for a train, they'd go over there and eat and whatnot. And, yeah, Nampa's always been a good railroad town.
LLOYD: And then, I was trying to think what it was. [00:09:30] I didn't know the year they built the railroad around through Boise. I'd Boise. I'd forgotten. But anyway, that was, the job that I had was a job called a traveling carpenter. And the first thing I knew, I had an interest in more jobs, a bigger job, and job, and then some men. And first thing, I was still a traveling [00:10:00] carpenter, but I had a crew of 22 men. That was a long time. I I was putting in the track scales there. And so then...
CRAIG: Now, the track scales, what scales were these? Track. these? Track.
LLOYD: It's a track scale with [00:10:30] a whole freight car on it, see? Tracks run right over it.
CRAIG: I see.
LLOYD: And, yeah, it was quite a big job.
CRAIG: That was here at Nampa?
LLOYD: Yeah.
CRAIG: Uh-huh. Now, what was Nampa like when you came here? There were just...
LLOYD: Well, it wasn't too big, and it wasn't too small because there was quite a few...
CRAIG: #Have you talked to them personally?
CRAIG: [00:11:00] Anyway, back to this deal with Nampa in 1917. That place that you got, you paid $20 rent for. What did you get for $20 in those days for rent?
LLOYD: Oh, this is a small house. It had two little bedrooms in it. It was a very small house. But I suppose there was [00:11:30] places in town that rented from us, they rented for even more, but I don't... I really don't know what it was.
CRAIG: So it was just a...
LLOYD: Yeah, what the regular rent was. We moved out of there after about a little over a year, a year and a half, and moved over onto 18th [00:12:00] Avenue and rented a larger place because we were cramped up there after Bealcon. And we lived there through one winter. And then the next June, I went down and bought [00:12:30] a lot down on 6th Avenue South, the 300 block, and bought that lot, and then I started to build a little house in there. And I in there. And I worked nights and Sundays, built a little home on the back of the lot so we could live there.
LLOYD: And Mom and the kids would... [00:13:00] And I'd go out on the road and come in on what they called a little pony. It had two trains that were called a pony. One left in the morning at Boise and went to Huntington, and one left Huntington to Boise, same thing in the morning, and they'd just reverse at night. So I'd come back on that at 6 o'clock, about 6 o'clock in the evening, and I'd get right off of the train and go right straight over there and start on the house, [00:13:30] get all the daylight, all the summer daylight. I got it so we could move in after about three months. We moved in there in 1919 and lived there in that little house in the back where the kids were growing up.
LLOYD: And 1926, I built a house on the front of the lot. [00:14:00] The one in the back wasn't good. There was no sewer there. The toilet was just outside the back door and just a hole in the ground, a typical toilet.
CRAIG: [00:14:30] Was the high school there at that time, just a street over?
LLOYD: No, the house, no. I forget when they built the house.
LLOYD: I see the house, hm,
LLOYD: [Silence]
LLOYD: I guess it was, [ ] yeah, I guess it was built just about that time.
CRAIG: And that was just a street or two over, just one street over?
LLOYD: Hmm? [Timestamp correction]
CRAIG: [00:15:00] And that was just a street or two over, just one street over?
CRAIG: Was the high school just one street over?
LLOYD: Well, it was the same as it is where the city hall is now. It would be about two blocks.
CRAIG: [00:15:30] Two blocks away. Was that just the high school or was that the elementary school too?
LLOYD: That was the whole thing. They had another elementary school over here too.
CRAIG: Was Kenwood around in those days? That Kenwood school that used to be where?
LLOYD: Yeah.
CRAIG: I think that's where Dad went to school, [00:16:00] wasn't it?
LLOYD: Yeah.
CRAIG: Went to Kenwood then over the high school.
LLOYD: Yeah. Well, then he went to high school too. He graduated from high school.
CRAIG: Now, during this period of 1917, 1919, when you were renting and then you built the little house, okay, that was the period of time right coming to the end of World War I. Did [00:16:30] that affect Nampa very much that you knew of?
LLOYD: No, I don't think it affected them very much. I think it was a very patriotic place here. Everybody was in O.C. It's hard to remember some of those things in there. A [00:17:00] year or two ago, I wouldn't have had a bit of trouble with them.
CRAIG: Well, some of the things I'm going to ask are some that probably we don't even need to, you know, they might be things that you remember, they might not be. I was wondering, was there more railroad traffic in those days because of the war or transporting things back and forth?
LLOYD: Oh, yes,
CRAIG: Transporting important stuff because of the slowdown because of the war?
LLOYD: Oh yes, because they you see you didn't have trucks. [00:17:30] You didn't have good highways. You didn't have anything like that. You had highway, but you didn't have good. They were have good. They were just two-lane roads. You didn't have any big trucks of any kind. And [00:18:00] so railroad moved an awful lot of stuff. Yeah, they were not big, long trains like they have now, but they were short trains with lots of traffic on them. And in 1926 when I got that house on the front of the lot there on 6th Avenue, [00:18:30] that's the first time the kids, it was such a thing as a bedroom, a separate bedroom because there was only two rooms and a lean-to in the little house in the back. That same little house was over there on Dewey.
CRAIG: [00:19:00] Un-huh, On Diamond?
LLOYD: Yeah.
CRAIG: On Diamond, yeah.
LLOYD: Not Dewey, yeah.
CRAIG: What was there for entertainment in those days? Just building houses? or were there uh?
LLOYD: Well, it was a big dance hall up on the north side, and that was a very popular place to have a dance, except Sunday almost every day [00:19:30] of the week. People would just crowd in there dancing. It was... And then there was a couple of picture shows. People used to, back then, of course, it only cost 15 cents, so they could afford to go, you know.
CRAIG: What [00:20:00] did... Did the dance cost anything? Did Did they have a live band there every night?
LLOYD: Oh, they used to. Different price, but most of them was 5 cents a dance. You got tickets. Sometimes, you know, you'd buy a bunch of tickets for 5 cents a ticket, and then they'd come around every so often and pick them up off there, see, from there.
CRAIG: [00:20:30] Also, to a certain degree, it was like you paid by the dance, just about, rather than for the whole evening. So a guy could sit there and listen.
LLOYD: Yeah uh, The main thing about it was that they were such clean debts, you know. There wasn't a lot of drinking and whatnot. There was things like that weren't served there. Oh, I don't say that there wasn't guys [00:21:00] that'd go there that'd been drinking, of course, but it just wasn't a regular general practice.
CRAIG: Was Prohibition at this time existing in Nampa?
LLOYD: Yeah. I can't remember the year, but it had Prohibition here, yeah.
CRAIG: Now, what was downtown? Right across from the railroad, you said, were restaurants.
LLOYD: Yeah, Yeah, there's a bunch of restaurants [00:21:30] there, and then there's stores, see, because a lot of things, a lot of people would come out from different places. You didn't have these little places around here, there, and around here. You had only just the main stores. So there was lots of business here for what they had there. Some of these old stores are still big stores now. [00:22:00] I don't think Penny had one here, but the different ones, the Fox at Boise, they had a store here at Nampa.
CRAIG: Now, the only restaurants in town were the ones that were right across from the bus depot, or from the train depot? Those were the only restaurants?
LLOYD: Oh, Oh, no, I think there was [00:22:30] probably a restaurant or two, I can't recall, because that was the main thing right there, the people that ate most. There wasn't too many people looking for a restaurant, and if they did, they could go down there and eat anyhow, too, see. I see there was the Nebraska and the Oregon, and nearly all of them were. Idaho, nearly [00:23:00] all of them was named after a state.
CRAIG: You said Nebraska? One restaurant's name was what, Nebraska?
LLOYD: Nebraska, Oregon, Nebraska, for nearly all of them, they were in a row along there.
CRAIG: And they were named after states, huh?
LLOYD: Yeah, they just used the state's name, yeah.
CRAIG: How would a typical meal go? I mean, [00:23:30] was there lots of beefsteak in those days? Every meal was a beefsteak meal?
LLOYD: Oh, yes, they had typical meals like people had in their home. They were more like that, you know, see. They'd bring you a plate out there with a great big T-bone on there, you know, and fried potatoes, and people, hey, you're going to know what fried potatoes is now, you know. And [00:24:00] soup, and homemade bread, and all that kind of things. I can remember them when they moved up to 35 cents a meal, and then 50 cents, and they moved up a little less. At first, Frank Kibler's father had one of them. [00:24:30] He used to own or manage, whether they owned it or not, the Ontario Hotel, which was the main hotel outside of the Dewey Palace here, west of here. People used to come a hundred miles there. They'd have balls for dancing. They'd [00:25:00] have a ball there. They'd come from everywhere, you know. See, clear up in Burns, all that country in there. And Frank Kibler's father owned that. And he'd come up here then, and he had one of these restrooms. [00:25:30] See, I think Frank Kibler probably was only about four or five years old when they moved up here. They ought to get a hold of him. His memory's better than mine. He can really fill them in.
CRAIG: You've got a plenty good memory. So when you first started coming to Nampa, back when [00:26:00] you were traveling on the train every day, you could buy a great big meal like you described for what, for how much money? What's the lowest figure you can remember?
LLOYD: Oh, I can remember 25-cent meals.
CRAIG: With the T-bone steak and the whole works, huh? Yeah. Yeah.
LLOYD: Oh, yes. Yeah, I can remember that. I say that as business began to pick [00:26:30] up a lot more, why, they began charging a little more of them. Because their help, you see, didn't cost them anything, hardly. And then I started to tell you a little bit ago, while I was building this [00:27:00] little house on the back there on 6th Avenue, we were living over on 18th Avenue, and Mom would wheel the kids over and bring a hot dinner over. I'd work till I couldn't see anymore for the darkness, and then we'd all sit down and eat a dinner, then we'd go back. And sometimes it'd be 10, 10.30 before we'd get back over there home, and I'd be up at 6 [00:27:30] o'clock the next morning headed on the road someplace to wherever the job happened to be.
CRAIG: Very little of your work then was here in Nampa. Most of it was traveling.
LLOYD: Well, right at first it was, and then I began to pile on a little bit more and a little bit more while I built a shop over across on 14th Avenue [00:28:00] and started hiring men, like I told you there. And from then on, they had four or five bridge gangs outfit cars at several locations around, see, up on Burns Branch, [00:28:30] up out of Weiser, and out of Payette, to McCall, and then it began to drop off, Lord, and we began to get more things in the radius of a certain distance of Nampa here. That was my beat, you see, and each one of them had one.
CRAIG: Mm-hmm. [00:29:00] So you got to spend more and more time closer to Nampa as the years went on then.
LLOYD: Yeah.
CRAIG: Okay. When you built these houses then, you were spending, when you built your house in 1926, how do you finance a house in those days?
LLOYD: Well, finally I had to get a loan, and, see, it only cost, [00:29:30] I think it only cost about $4,000 and something for three bedrooms and almost a full basement and three bedrooms and a big living room, and it's between $4,000 and $5,000. It wasn't hard to [00:30:00] get a loan like that because you didn't have to pay too much interest, and maybe interest, and maybe you didn't have to pay too much interest, but it was probably 5% or 6%, and you didn't have to, what was I going to say?
CRAIG: Would you get it from the bank?
LLOYD: Oh, yes, you'd get it from the bank or a loan company. I think [00:30:30] I got mine from a loan company that headquarters, the the first one was the headquarters in Salt Lake City, I think. I forget the name of it right now, but I think that's where it was. And, of course, your payments probably didn't run over 25 a month, you know, see?
CRAIG: What did you do for your first little house, [00:31:00] the one that only had two rooms in it that was at the back of your lot?
LLOYD: I left that there and rented it for a long time. That helped to pay for the first house in the front, see? And then, of course, one thing that helped, see, after I built that house in there, [00:31:30] I was gradually advancing in the work that I was doing, see? There see? There was an increasing in the credit loan and the payment work until finally, and I was still, like I told you, I had 22 men that time working one time, and I was still supervising [00:32:00] them as a traveling carpenter. The various bridge gangs in the territory were all getting seniority over me. So I said to the supervisor, I said, I'm going to have to do something about this. I said, I'm just...
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