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Sumner Johnson M_1
KEN HARWARD: Okay, this is an oral history interview with Sumner Johnson as the narrator and Ken Harward as the interviewer. And we’re meeting here on May 16, 1985. That’s working. Okay.
SUMNER JOHNSON: Did you give the introductions to it?
KEN: Yes
SUMNER: All right. Well, I don’t know where to start, Ken, maybe other than just a little family history. My grandfather and grandmother started their life in Nebraska. In fact, Ord, Nebraska, and Alonso J. Perkins, although he went by AJ Perkins, [00:01:00] he was a farmer and a banker back there. And he sold out, apparently, at the tail end of World War I and came to Idaho in late 1917. My aunt tells about the amount of money he sold the bank for, but I can’t believe it. She said that he sold it for half million dollars, but a half a million dollars in 1917 kind of staggers me, so I’m not sure that’s the correct figure. And he bought 80 acres out here, west of Nampa on Midland Boulevard, which is now the OK Subdivision, bounded on the north by [00:02:00] West Flamingo, and bounded on the east by Midland Boulevard. And that two-story brick house there that sits north of that mobile home court that’s on the property is a house that he had built. In fact, he shipped all the material and the carpenter and everybody from Nebraska because he didn’t figure anybody in Idaho was competent to build it for him.
KEN: About what year would that home have been built?
SUMNER: Well, I suppose it would have been in 1918 or thereabouts, shortly after he came out. And then, he bought a 21-acre piece that’s on the northwest corner of Midland Boulevard and Caldwell Boulevard, which is now I believe, [00:03:00] the Keener Industrial Park Subdivision. And the house that he had built there was a cobblestone and brick house that was just tore down a few years ago, prior to the Skipper’s Fish and Chip Establishment being built on it. I was real busy at the time, but I regret that I didn’t go out there now and get some historical items from it, but you know, you look back at those things you should have done. And my granddad, he was a great one to raise fancy, I believe they were Percheron horses, and Jersey cows, and Poland China hogs, and all kinds of livestock, [00:04:00] a large part of it in fruit trees. And of course, as kids we’d go over there, and that was great to get the cherries and peaches and apples and so forth. And he had a garden with Filbert nuts, and English walnuts, and things that are not common around here. And so, it’s quite an occasion to go to Grandmother’s for a Sunday get together because my mother, with her five sisters and one brother, and so of course, it was always a big gathering.
KEN: The 21-acre farm there, was that for the orchard, the fruit trees, there in that?
SUMNER: About half of it was pasture, and about half of it was fruit trees. He had a great good barn, and it was a fairly fancy place. He had said horses and registered Jersey bulls, [00:05:00] and provides breeding services around. Then, my parents got acquainted while attending University of Idaho at Moscow. And see, my dad was born in Idaho at Eagle Rock, which now is Idaho Falls, in 1896, and helped there with his father, and of course, there was 11 children in his family, eight boys and three girls. And you’d be interested in know, when he was a boy, he had eight years of perfect attendance at the LDS Sunday school. (laughter) (inaudible) but anyway. When he graduated from University of Idaho, he and my mother, Leta [00:06:00] Firkins, were married. That’d be in 1920.
KEN: Now, what did your dad major in?
SUMNER: Agriculture.
KEN: And his name was Ambrose.
SUMNER: Ambrose W. Johnson. And they came here to Nampa and were married here. And by then, Granddad had built the house on the 21-acre parcel. So, then my folks moved into the big two-story brick house on the 80-acre place. And Dad farmed that till probably the fall of 1925. So, then, I was born in October of 1924. And then the year later, we moved to an 80-acre ranch about two miles south of Star. And Dad bought the place, [00:07:00] and then of course, that was in the heydays after World War I, and he got caught in the Depression of the ’30s and actually last place, had to let it go back. He continued to rent it until the winter of ’34-’35, which at the time he bought the place out just north of Nampa, where the Upland Industries Industrial Park is, the 70 acres in there. And we moved in by horse and wagon, mostly from Star to there in 1935. And of course, I was just 10 years old, but I can remember taking off from the place with a team of horses on a hay wagon and taking a load of material over to the new place. In fact, I still remember, [00:08:00] out just north of Cherry Lane on Franklin Road about a quarter of a mile there’s four beautiful, I think, they’re split leaf white birch. They’re now great, huge trees, but they were young, modest sized trees then, and I’ve always been impressed with them. But most people have trouble dying around here but for some reason, those have survived.
KEN: Over the years, many years.
SUMNER: And anyway, Dad then farmed that place, and it turned out to be a successful venture for him. I was in the fifth grade that winter when we finally moved there in February of ’35 [00:09:00] and then of course transferred to Lakeview School. Before that, I’d gone to the what they called the Lower Fairview Grade School out near where we lived at Star. That school is not there anymore. In grade school, I was quite an athletic type, but my mother wouldn’t let me play football, and come along in the sixth grade, I remember we went to the Nampa High School football game at the old rodeo grounds, the same place it is now, but it was an altogether different bleacher setup. And the stands, [00:10:00] the grandstands were on the south side and there was a few portable bleachers on the north side. And us kids kind of hung around the portable bleachers, and I remember at halftime, the sixth-grade kids from Lakeview got out there, playing around with a football in the field you know the way kids do. Of course, now, they won’t let them, but back in those days they would. In some way, the ball got tossed to me and I ran the full-length field, outrunning everybody. And Leo Matthews who was the coach of the sixth-grade football team in Lakeview, he cornered me the next day and said I was going out for football. And over my mother’s objection, I ended up being a football player. Kind of.
KEN: Well, what are some of your earliest recollections of school there, at Lakeview? Now, you started there in the third grade.
SUMNER: Fifth grade.
KEN: The fifth grade you started. Do you remember any of the teachers?
SUMNER: Old [00:11:00] Flossie Stark was my sixth-grade teacher, and a fella by the name of Earl Cook was possibly my fifth-grade teacher. But Flossie Of course, ended up being the librarian at Nampa High School for a number of years, and in fact, there’s a Flossie Stark Library out in... What’s the name of it?
KEN: Midland Manor?
SUMNER: The retirement center, there on 12th Avenue.
KEN: Oh, that’s the Sunny Ridge Manor.
SUMNER: Yes, Sunny Ridge Manor. Anyway, and she was a very, very influential teacher and a good teacher, one of the better ones. I always had fond memories [00:12:00] for her efforts to get the most out of me.
KEN: At the time, you were then living on the farm. How’d you get into school each day? Walk?
SUMNER: Well, they had school buses in those days, and it came right by the place. And I would be the last one, practically, to get on because we were about a mile and a half from school, or whatever the distance was. And then when we’d go home at night, I was lucky, they’d reverse, and I’d be the first one to get off. But again, as I got older, I wouldn’t be caught dead riding the school bus. That was an insult. And so, in the grade school, I rode the bike in good weather. But in junior high school and [00:13:00] high school, if at all possible, I’d ride my bicycle, clear from there to Central, and then of course, this site here where the city hall is now, because it was the old high school when I was in high school, sleet, snow, whatever it is, I’d ride that bicycle before being caught on that school bus. Only sissies rode the school bus in those days. Going back to when we lived out by Star, one of the things I can remember there was a gravelly hill that’s about a half mile north of what is now Highway 20, because we lived on the southeast corner of Highway 20 and Star Road. And in those days, in the wintertime, when the ground was frozen and [00:14:00] so forth, you’d haul gravel, pit run gravel, and the wagons they used were kind of a box type wagon, but in the bottom of it, they had, as I remember, they were two-by-fours that were just laid loose through the bottom on crossing stringers, and you’d load the gravel in with a shovel by hand, and then when you get back to the ranch and want to gravel the driveway or whatever you’re graveling, you’d pull up with your team and stop the wagon, and then you’d work those bottom two-by-fours up, lifting up on them, and pretty soon, the gravel would fall through, so you didn’t have to unload by shovel. It would fall through. It was a bottom dump, so to speak. I don’t remember ever seeing one of those in a historical setting.
KEN: I’ve never heard of one.
SUMNER: So, that’s [00:15:00] kind of an interesting sidelight. Of course, now I had two older brothers. Wayne was three years older, and Gene was 15 months older. And things were tough. And I didn’t know what a new pair of britches was. I got the hand me down britches with patches on them by the time they got to me. But I didn’t know any difference and I was happy. And of course, in the summertime, barefoot continuously, the whole summer. I could run across the hay stubble field by fall, you know, because you had such calluses on the bottom of your feet. It was just one of those things. Then, in, I think it would be about the Christmas of 1933, the one Christmas present that I can remember the most, the folks had absolutely no money. We had food, raised it, Mom canned, [00:16:00] and rendered lard, and cooked. I mean, we butchered our own beef and butchered our own pork, and Dad would cut them up. And it was very common. But they didn’t have any money. And apparently, the day before Christmas, the folks went to Boise, and they found a broken toy that was a little steam engine type thing. It was round at the base, maybe about three inches in diameter, and came up as a cylinder, and on the top, it had a flywheel and it had a little petcock that you could turn, and so, when steam was generated, steam would come out there and make a whistling effect. And down at the base, inside that cylinder, [00:17:00] was a little place to put, I guess it’d be a kerosene lamp burner thing in it. And anyway, that flywheel had been broken and Dad figured out that he could weld it. They bought it at a very great discount because was broken, and brought it home, and that night, welded or soldered the thing back together, and that was the one toy for us three boys on Christmas morning. And of course, I was only eight or nine years old, and my mother was scared to death of me using it. But Wayne, my older brother would actually like the matches, and get the burner going, and put the water in, [00:18:00] and then that flywheel would get to going, and then we’d open that petcock, and the thing would whistle. Greatest toy I’ve ever had in my life. That was our sole toy for the three of us there, that Christmas. Far cry from nowadays.
KEN: Yeah, sure is.
SUMNER: So, that’s just kind of an indication of what you did. You didn’t have TV and so forth. And of course, I learned to play cards, pinochle, at an early age because in the wintertime, that’s what you would do. And we had a neighbor friend that would come down, and in the process, out of the whole family, we’d end up with four of us playing cards. That was a wintertime pastime. Then, another thing I can remember distinctly is, you see, we didn’t have refrigerators in the summertime. And we all had ice boxes. [00:19:00] You know what an icebox is?
KEN: I do but go ahead and explain it. I’d like you...
SUMNER: Well, it looks about like a refrigerator, except there’s one cubicle that you put a block of ice in, and then there’s a place for, as it melts, which it will, the water drains out, and you have a discharge out to, in those days, we didn’t have a whole lot of sophisticated indoor plumbing, but you’d drain it to wherever your sink drain went. And, anyway, we were about 1,000, maybe 800 feet, from Star Road. And the iceman’s route would be heading north on Star Road. He didn’t use Highway 20. It wasn’t there then, of course. And [00:20:00] so, mom had a sign that she’d put in the winter that had, in big red letters, “I-C-E,” on white background and when she wanted ice, she’d put that in the window, and of course, then, the iceman would turn down our road and deliver his ice.
KEN: And was that a horse drawn wagon?
SUMNER: No, that was a motor vehicle in those days. We had no Model-T, then. And my mother used to drive then, but she had a wreck or something, I can’t remember, it wasn’t too serious, but that would have probably been before ’35, and she has, to this day, never driven a car again. She’s petrified of it and will refuse to. And she’s still alive, but if she travels anyplace, [00:21:00] somebody has to take her.
KEN: Where did they get the ice? Where’d they store the ice in the summer? What did they put it in?
SUMNER: Well, you see, the icehouse was, the best I can remember, the old brewery over on Ninth Avenue North, there on the south...
KEN: The Overland Brewery?
SUMNER: Yeah. They had an icehouse there. And I remember after we moved to North of Nampa, we’d go there and get ice. And they made it and manufactured it there, you know. Now, up at places like McCall, in fact, there’s an old timer up there, still alive, I can’t think of his name now that tells it, that worked, and that was his business going out on the Payette Lakes in the winter and cutting blocks of ice, and then hauling them and they stored them in some kind of [00:22:00] –
KEN: Insulated –
SUMNER: -- setting, yeah. And of course, they’d put them in there at way below freezing temperature, the natural weather temperature, and then, they would apparently keep all summer long and they’d be able to supply ice to people. Of course, that was before my era. Down in here, the ice we talked about was manufactured by some electrical process.
KEN: Well, what were the streets like here, your earliest recollections of the streets in Nampa?
SUMNER: Okay. Well, I’ve got an unusual recollection. We moved there on Franklin Road, which at that time did not come on into 11th Avenue, as you realize. See, that was built in the late ’50s [00:23:00] or early ’60s, that section through there from the interchange at I-84 on in. And it used to turn around what is Third Avenue and come in on Sixth Street North there, at I guess it’d be Fourth Avenue probably now, I’m not sure. Anyway, it used to wind around and take a curve there at our corner and go due north. Well from our corner -- well, I guess all of that, was built as a federal aid secondary job and started in the summer of ’34 and wasn’t finished till the fall of ’35. And they paved that section road by our house on September 5th [00:24:00] my mother’s birthday 1935. And I’ve always remembered that because it was my mother’s birthday, and the dust was so terrible, and she considered that her birthday present. And then, of course, the streets in Nampa, they had a pavement coat on them in a form, and I don’t know how it was developed in those days. Now, the old Warrenite pavement in downtown Nampa, that was done in the late ’20s and Caldwell Boulevard, clear out, I think clear to Caldwell, from Nampa to Caldwell, was done with that Warrenite process. And they’d go in and fracture rock out of a quarry, and it was fairly large, not uncommon to have two-inch material, [00:25:00] and it would be placed by hand, and then they would go through a process of pouring Warrenite-type asphalt on it, and then putting fine materials in it and wedging it together. And of course, the street project this past year downtown tore out a bunch of that old Warrenite. It lasted all these years. It’s amazing.
KEN: Yeah, that was a pretty thick base there, a lave rock base right now, at the bottom.
SUMNER: And the real benefit is it was porous enough that any moisture that got in it went through it, and so, you didn’t have any serious problems of frost or excess moisture. A very expensive method because it was done by hand so much, you can’t use okay. And [00:26:00] then as I got involved in the city situation, I discovered that the Nampa Highway District was originally created and did take care of all the city streets, as near as I can tell. I haven’t researched the record. But then, when World War II came along, nothing was done on local roads in any place, probably, in the United States. And then when they came back, after World War II, as near as I can tell, the highway district had gotten in a good habit of not doing anything on the city streets and still do. Now granted, their function is farm to market Road. That’s a kind of a pet peeve of mine, I might add, that they should be doing the farm to market roads in the city limits because we’re part of their district. But they don’t.
KEN: Right, [00:27:00] the city limits is part of (inaudible).
SUMNER: And probably, someday, the city ought to get this annexed from them, and it would be an economic benefit for the city at least. But as such, they weren’t doing anything. And then, the city had to develop a system to maintain the residential streets, because the highway district had apparently been maintaining them. And of course, the old sprinkling tax was a tax that they put on businesses and property, and they would sprinkle with water, horse drawn teams. I can remember those as a kid, seeing them go through town before the streets were paved. And so, then, after the war, World War II, it was necessary for the city, [00:28:00] the, to create a street department which they did. And they started to maintain the streets. And the highway district was still working with the city and doing the farm to market stuff on a cooperative basis. But as that finally got into the period when I went to work for the city, why, they were starting to practically do nothing. And the city, then, had their own street department. And they had put on a tax for street and road construction, and apparently, they kept it on during the World War II. And they were able to build up quite a cash situation, where George Shellaberger, who was the city clerk, had it going so that he could pay cash for everything, didn’t have to worry about getting the tax receipts in before and borrowing money against them and so forth. I went to work for the city in [00:29:00] ’49 as assistant city engineer and the thing I found is that the records were a shamble as far as engineering office. Nobody had kept the sewer-service connection book up to date, and there was hundreds of those that we tracked down through the city clerk’s records and got recorded. And the maps, nobody had kept them up to date and they were a shambles. And we logged and recorded in an orderly fashion so that we could find the old sewer records and the old water records and so forth. And the water department maps hadn’t been kept up for a number of years. So, we had to work with the water superintendent to get those so we could record those. And in the process, they started to do a [00:30:00] little street construction Sure. But they really weren’t too well organized on it. The mayor, Peter Johnson, he was not a businessman, so to speak. And so, the economics of how to leverage the city’s street department was not his forte. And so, the streets really didn’t start to be a real good improvement to the city until Preston Cappell came in as mayor. And he was mayor, maybe six years. And during that era, he used up all the surplus, so to speak, and spent about twice as much money for street construction as he took in because he used up all the surplus and was able to get a lot of street work done in the old residential part of town. [00:31:00] I could be a little bit critical if you want to look back, because they didn’t put enough base in. And so, they haven’t lasted as well as they should have. But on the other hand, he was able to spread it farther and get all the potholes.
KEN: Up to that time, were there mostly dirt streets in residential areas?
SUMNER: Well, they were dirt with some kind of a strip of oil.
KEN: Dust oil?
SUMNER: Yeah, as I remember, it was a hard surface. It wasn’t like a dust oil. But it was only about 20 feet wide. Curb lines were out 40 feet wide. And so, there was a dirt shoulder between the edge of the paving, which was some kind of a penetrating oil with sand on it or something. And very [00:32:00] poor drainage. Drainage was a disaster. And nobody really addressed it until we got involved as city engineers, under contract from Johnson and Underkofler in 1957. And one of the early things we did was start a street program, as I mentioned, too, the other day, developing a five-year program. And then, the more streets we paved, the more drainage problems we created. So, we did a drainage study for the city. And there really was no way to fund it, because to do it as one project, we’d have to have a bond issue, but you can appreciate the only people who had problems are the ones who were in the low spots, the ones on the high ground, so to speak, they wouldn’t vote for [00:33:00] a storm drain systems because they didn’t have any problem. So, in those days, the city had, as I remember, some 30 -- well, I think they started out when we came as city engineers in ’57, I think they had like 35 or 36 employees in the street department. And through the process of efficiency, we got that down into the low twenties, as I recall, and did about twice as much work because we just got the thing organized better. But in the wintertime, we didn’t want to tear up residential streets and leave them a bog hole for people. So, we conceived with the council’s blessing to start the sections of the storm drainage system. And the street department, in the wintertime, would lay storm drain. Fortunately, we didn’t have winters like last winter, which here, [00:34:00] was terribly cold. We had fairly open winters. And after a number of six or eight years, they put in most elements of that storm drain system. And so, now that area is...
KEN: Was that about the mid-50s?
SUMNER: Yeah, that started probably in like ’58 or ’59, and then went on through into the mid-60s to finish it. Though it was a very efficient way, an economical way for the city to get a storm drain system, because they did have an extensive street department that up until then, wasn’t doing much in the wintertime.
KEN: I’d like to get into more of your experience in the public works development, but let’s go back, because we left you personally back in Lakeview school, about the sixth grade or so. And of course, having been born in your grandfather’s house over where [00:35:00] now the Skipper’s restaurant is, and then going to Star, and then back to the farm there, just off Franklin. And a little more about your early childhood days in Nampa, sixth grade?
SUMNER: Well, even before then I can remember coming to town and usually on Saturdays, with Dad, because that was farm day to come to town, you know. And where Firestone’s store is, there on the northwest corner of 14th Avenue and Second Street, there was some kind of a sale yard, a country sale yard where they’d sell livestock and people would bring their old used furniture, whatever it was. And Dad [00:36:00] would stop into the sale. And then catty corner from that was a feed store. I’m not sure it wasn’t Vale’s, but then and he’d stop into there to get the special mixes he might need for supplement for cattle feed, or calf feed, or pig feed, or something. And then, probably where Herb Carlson’s sports shop, or in that vicinity was the old Maclean’s hardware store, if I recall, and that was always a place that Dad had to stop, because of farm tools and so forth. And I’ve always had some inclination to like to browse through hardware stores and I [00:37:00] still do to this day. And I don’t know whether it’s because of that. And then another stop that we made is where the First Interstate Bank is, there on 11th and Third Street. That was the old Co-Op Oil gas station. And as a farmer, Dad was a member of that, and we stopped there. And then where Pioneer Federal is was the old Lindsay Ford garage. And Dad had Ford cars, and that was always one of the stops. I can remember those types of facilities very distinctly. The Subway there at 11th, for some reason, I don’t have a strong recollection of it. It was built in the mid or early ’30s, but for some reason that doesn’t ring a bell with me is as far as visually seeing it [00:38:00] go up. Now, when I was about in the seventh grade, I was going to Central, they built the gymnasium there as a WPA project. It actually was when I was in the sixth grade. And I can remember that we got out on the street, in I think it was in the fall of about 1936, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt came by in his car, and we all...
KEN: Oh, he personally came through town.
SUMNER: Yeah, came through town. And I suspect it had something to do with dedication of that gymnasium. The record might show, but at the time I didn’t realize, I just remember that we stood there, I think I stood on 14th, [00:39:00] just west of the Old Central School when he toured by. I can just vaguely remember that. And of course, when you’re in the grade school out there, Lower Fairview, the PTA was a big social event. And I think they’d have PTA one Friday night a month or something like that. And of course, as kids, we’d play, and run, and holler, and do everything but go to a PTA meeting. But one I can remember very, very bad situation at one PTA meeting were three of the sons of PTA members were in high school at the time, [00:40:00] one of the boys were able to get his folks’ car and they headed south on Star Road to come to Nampa. And that car had visors, or whatever you call them, over the headlights. And where the main line from Boise crosses Star Road there, it was on a fill. It wasn’t a smooth transition up like it is now. And those kids didn’t see the freight train going across the crossing, and they plowed...
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KEN HARWARD: Okay, this is an oral history interview with Sumner Johnson as the narrator and Ken Harward as the interviewer. And we’re meeting here on May 16, 1985. That’s working. Okay.
SUMNER JOHNSON: Did you give the introductions to it?
KEN: Yes
SUMNER: All right. Well, I don’t know where to start, Ken, maybe other than just a little family history. My grandfather and grandmother started their life in Nebraska. In fact, Ord, Nebraska, and Alonso J. Perkins, although he went by AJ Perkins, [00:01:00] he was a farmer and a banker back there. And he sold out, apparently, at the tail end of World War I and came to Idaho in late 1917. My aunt tells about the amount of money he sold the bank for, but I can’t believe it. She said that he sold it for half million dollars, but a half a million dollars in 1917 kind of staggers me, so I’m not sure that’s the correct figure. And he bought 80 acres out here, west of Nampa on Midland Boulevard, which is now the OK Subdivision, bounded on the north by [00:02:00] West Flamingo, and bounded on the east by Midland Boulevard. And that two-story brick house there that sits north of that mobile home court that’s on the property is a house that he had built. In fact, he shipped all the material and the carpenter and everybody from Nebraska because he didn’t figure anybody in Idaho was competent to build it for him.
KEN: About what year would that home have been built?
SUMNER: Well, I suppose it would have been in 1918 or thereabouts, shortly after he came out. And then, he bought a 21-acre piece that’s on the northwest corner of Midland Boulevard and Caldwell Boulevard, which is now I believe, [00:03:00] the Keener Industrial Park Subdivision. And the house that he had built there was a cobblestone and brick house that was just tore down a few years ago, prior to the Skipper’s Fish and Chip Establishment being built on it. I was real busy at the time, but I regret that I didn’t go out there now and get some historical items from it, but you know, you look back at those things you should have done. And my granddad, he was a great one to raise fancy, I believe they were Percheron horses, and Jersey cows, and Poland China hogs, and all kinds of livestock, [00:04:00] a large part of it in fruit trees. And of course, as kids we’d go over there, and that was great to get the cherries and peaches and apples and so forth. And he had a garden with Filbert nuts, and English walnuts, and things that are not common around here. And so, it’s quite an occasion to go to Grandmother’s for a Sunday get together because my mother, with her five sisters and one brother, and so of course, it was always a big gathering.
KEN: The 21-acre farm there, was that for the orchard, the fruit trees, there in that?
SUMNER: About half of it was pasture, and about half of it was fruit trees. He had a great good barn, and it was a fairly fancy place. He had said horses and registered Jersey bulls, [00:05:00] and provides breeding services around. Then, my parents got acquainted while attending University of Idaho at Moscow. And see, my dad was born in Idaho at Eagle Rock, which now is Idaho Falls, in 1896, and helped there with his father, and of course, there was 11 children in his family, eight boys and three girls. And you’d be interested in know, when he was a boy, he had eight years of perfect attendance at the LDS Sunday school. (laughter) (inaudible) but anyway. When he graduated from University of Idaho, he and my mother, Leta [00:06:00] Firkins, were married. That’d be in 1920.
KEN: Now, what did your dad major in?
SUMNER: Agriculture.
KEN: And his name was Ambrose.
SUMNER: Ambrose W. Johnson. And they came here to Nampa and were married here. And by then, Granddad had built the house on the 21-acre parcel. So, then my folks moved into the big two-story brick house on the 80-acre place. And Dad farmed that till probably the fall of 1925. So, then, I was born in October of 1924. And then the year later, we moved to an 80-acre ranch about two miles south of Star. And Dad bought the place, [00:07:00] and then of course, that was in the heydays after World War I, and he got caught in the Depression of the ’30s and actually last place, had to let it go back. He continued to rent it until the winter of ’34-’35, which at the time he bought the place out just north of Nampa, where the Upland Industries Industrial Park is, the 70 acres in there. And we moved in by horse and wagon, mostly from Star to there in 1935. And of course, I was just 10 years old, but I can remember taking off from the place with a team of horses on a hay wagon and taking a load of material over to the new place. In fact, I still remember, [00:08:00] out just north of Cherry Lane on Franklin Road about a quarter of a mile there’s four beautiful, I think, they’re split leaf white birch. They’re now great, huge trees, but they were young, modest sized trees then, and I’ve always been impressed with them. But most people have trouble dying around here but for some reason, those have survived.
KEN: Over the years, many years.
SUMNER: And anyway, Dad then farmed that place, and it turned out to be a successful venture for him. I was in the fifth grade that winter when we finally moved there in February of ’35 [00:09:00] and then of course transferred to Lakeview School. Before that, I’d gone to the what they called the Lower Fairview Grade School out near where we lived at Star. That school is not there anymore. In grade school, I was quite an athletic type, but my mother wouldn’t let me play football, and come along in the sixth grade, I remember we went to the Nampa High School football game at the old rodeo grounds, the same place it is now, but it was an altogether different bleacher setup. And the stands, [00:10:00] the grandstands were on the south side and there was a few portable bleachers on the north side. And us kids kind of hung around the portable bleachers, and I remember at halftime, the sixth-grade kids from Lakeview got out there, playing around with a football in the field you know the way kids do. Of course, now, they won’t let them, but back in those days they would. In some way, the ball got tossed to me and I ran the full-length field, outrunning everybody. And Leo Matthews who was the coach of the sixth-grade football team in Lakeview, he cornered me the next day and said I was going out for football. And over my mother’s objection, I ended up being a football player. Kind of.
KEN: Well, what are some of your earliest recollections of school there, at Lakeview? Now, you started there in the third grade.
SUMNER: Fifth grade.
KEN: The fifth grade you started. Do you remember any of the teachers?
SUMNER: Old [00:11:00] Flossie Stark was my sixth-grade teacher, and a fella by the name of Earl Cook was possibly my fifth-grade teacher. But Flossie Of course, ended up being the librarian at Nampa High School for a number of years, and in fact, there’s a Flossie Stark Library out in... What’s the name of it?
KEN: Midland Manor?
SUMNER: The retirement center, there on 12th Avenue.
KEN: Oh, that’s the Sunny Ridge Manor.
SUMNER: Yes, Sunny Ridge Manor. Anyway, and she was a very, very influential teacher and a good teacher, one of the better ones. I always had fond memories [00:12:00] for her efforts to get the most out of me.
KEN: At the time, you were then living on the farm. How’d you get into school each day? Walk?
SUMNER: Well, they had school buses in those days, and it came right by the place. And I would be the last one, practically, to get on because we were about a mile and a half from school, or whatever the distance was. And then when we’d go home at night, I was lucky, they’d reverse, and I’d be the first one to get off. But again, as I got older, I wouldn’t be caught dead riding the school bus. That was an insult. And so, in the grade school, I rode the bike in good weather. But in junior high school and [00:13:00] high school, if at all possible, I’d ride my bicycle, clear from there to Central, and then of course, this site here where the city hall is now, because it was the old high school when I was in high school, sleet, snow, whatever it is, I’d ride that bicycle before being caught on that school bus. Only sissies rode the school bus in those days. Going back to when we lived out by Star, one of the things I can remember there was a gravelly hill that’s about a half mile north of what is now Highway 20, because we lived on the southeast corner of Highway 20 and Star Road. And in those days, in the wintertime, when the ground was frozen and [00:14:00] so forth, you’d haul gravel, pit run gravel, and the wagons they used were kind of a box type wagon, but in the bottom of it, they had, as I remember, they were two-by-fours that were just laid loose through the bottom on crossing stringers, and you’d load the gravel in with a shovel by hand, and then when you get back to the ranch and want to gravel the driveway or whatever you’re graveling, you’d pull up with your team and stop the wagon, and then you’d work those bottom two-by-fours up, lifting up on them, and pretty soon, the gravel would fall through, so you didn’t have to unload by shovel. It would fall through. It was a bottom dump, so to speak. I don’t remember ever seeing one of those in a historical setting.
KEN: I’ve never heard of one.
SUMNER: So, that’s [00:15:00] kind of an interesting sidelight. Of course, now I had two older brothers. Wayne was three years older, and Gene was 15 months older. And things were tough. And I didn’t know what a new pair of britches was. I got the hand me down britches with patches on them by the time they got to me. But I didn’t know any difference and I was happy. And of course, in the summertime, barefoot continuously, the whole summer. I could run across the hay stubble field by fall, you know, because you had such calluses on the bottom of your feet. It was just one of those things. Then, in, I think it would be about the Christmas of 1933, the one Christmas present that I can remember the most, the folks had absolutely no money. We had food, raised it, Mom canned, [00:16:00] and rendered lard, and cooked. I mean, we butchered our own beef and butchered our own pork, and Dad would cut them up. And it was very common. But they didn’t have any money. And apparently, the day before Christmas, the folks went to Boise, and they found a broken toy that was a little steam engine type thing. It was round at the base, maybe about three inches in diameter, and came up as a cylinder, and on the top, it had a flywheel and it had a little petcock that you could turn, and so, when steam was generated, steam would come out there and make a whistling effect. And down at the base, inside that cylinder, [00:17:00] was a little place to put, I guess it’d be a kerosene lamp burner thing in it. And anyway, that flywheel had been broken and Dad figured out that he could weld it. They bought it at a very great discount because was broken, and brought it home, and that night, welded or soldered the thing back together, and that was the one toy for us three boys on Christmas morning. And of course, I was only eight or nine years old, and my mother was scared to death of me using it. But Wayne, my older brother would actually like the matches, and get the burner going, and put the water in, [00:18:00] and then that flywheel would get to going, and then we’d open that petcock, and the thing would whistle. Greatest toy I’ve ever had in my life. That was our sole toy for the three of us there, that Christmas. Far cry from nowadays.
KEN: Yeah, sure is.
SUMNER: So, that’s just kind of an indication of what you did. You didn’t have TV and so forth. And of course, I learned to play cards, pinochle, at an early age because in the wintertime, that’s what you would do. And we had a neighbor friend that would come down, and in the process, out of the whole family, we’d end up with four of us playing cards. That was a wintertime pastime. Then, another thing I can remember distinctly is, you see, we didn’t have refrigerators in the summertime. And we all had ice boxes. [00:19:00] You know what an icebox is?
KEN: I do but go ahead and explain it. I’d like you...
SUMNER: Well, it looks about like a refrigerator, except there’s one cubicle that you put a block of ice in, and then there’s a place for, as it melts, which it will, the water drains out, and you have a discharge out to, in those days, we didn’t have a whole lot of sophisticated indoor plumbing, but you’d drain it to wherever your sink drain went. And, anyway, we were about 1,000, maybe 800 feet, from Star Road. And the iceman’s route would be heading north on Star Road. He didn’t use Highway 20. It wasn’t there then, of course. And [00:20:00] so, mom had a sign that she’d put in the winter that had, in big red letters, “I-C-E,” on white background and when she wanted ice, she’d put that in the window, and of course, then, the iceman would turn down our road and deliver his ice.
KEN: And was that a horse drawn wagon?
SUMNER: No, that was a motor vehicle in those days. We had no Model-T, then. And my mother used to drive then, but she had a wreck or something, I can’t remember, it wasn’t too serious, but that would have probably been before ’35, and she has, to this day, never driven a car again. She’s petrified of it and will refuse to. And she’s still alive, but if she travels anyplace, [00:21:00] somebody has to take her.
KEN: Where did they get the ice? Where’d they store the ice in the summer? What did they put it in?
SUMNER: Well, you see, the icehouse was, the best I can remember, the old brewery over on Ninth Avenue North, there on the south...
KEN: The Overland Brewery?
SUMNER: Yeah. They had an icehouse there. And I remember after we moved to North of Nampa, we’d go there and get ice. And they made it and manufactured it there, you know. Now, up at places like McCall, in fact, there’s an old timer up there, still alive, I can’t think of his name now that tells it, that worked, and that was his business going out on the Payette Lakes in the winter and cutting blocks of ice, and then hauling them and they stored them in some kind of [00:22:00] –
KEN: Insulated –
SUMNER: -- setting, yeah. And of course, they’d put them in there at way below freezing temperature, the natural weather temperature, and then, they would apparently keep all summer long and they’d be able to supply ice to people. Of course, that was before my era. Down in here, the ice we talked about was manufactured by some electrical process.
KEN: Well, what were the streets like here, your earliest recollections of the streets in Nampa?
SUMNER: Okay. Well, I’ve got an unusual recollection. We moved there on Franklin Road, which at that time did not come on into 11th Avenue, as you realize. See, that was built in the late ’50s [00:23:00] or early ’60s, that section through there from the interchange at I-84 on in. And it used to turn around what is Third Avenue and come in on Sixth Street North there, at I guess it’d be Fourth Avenue probably now, I’m not sure. Anyway, it used to wind around and take a curve there at our corner and go due north. Well from our corner -- well, I guess all of that, was built as a federal aid secondary job and started in the summer of ’34 and wasn’t finished till the fall of ’35. And they paved that section road by our house on September 5th [00:24:00] my mother’s birthday 1935. And I’ve always remembered that because it was my mother’s birthday, and the dust was so terrible, and she considered that her birthday present. And then, of course, the streets in Nampa, they had a pavement coat on them in a form, and I don’t know how it was developed in those days. Now, the old Warrenite pavement in downtown Nampa, that was done in the late ’20s and Caldwell Boulevard, clear out, I think clear to Caldwell, from Nampa to Caldwell, was done with that Warrenite process. And they’d go in and fracture rock out of a quarry, and it was fairly large, not uncommon to have two-inch material, [00:25:00] and it would be placed by hand, and then they would go through a process of pouring Warrenite-type asphalt on it, and then putting fine materials in it and wedging it together. And of course, the street project this past year downtown tore out a bunch of that old Warrenite. It lasted all these years. It’s amazing.
KEN: Yeah, that was a pretty thick base there, a lave rock base right now, at the bottom.
SUMNER: And the real benefit is it was porous enough that any moisture that got in it went through it, and so, you didn’t have any serious problems of frost or excess moisture. A very expensive method because it was done by hand so much, you can’t use okay. And [00:26:00] then as I got involved in the city situation, I discovered that the Nampa Highway District was originally created and did take care of all the city streets, as near as I can tell. I haven’t researched the record. But then, when World War II came along, nothing was done on local roads in any place, probably, in the United States. And then when they came back, after World War II, as near as I can tell, the highway district had gotten in a good habit of not doing anything on the city streets and still do. Now granted, their function is farm to market Road. That’s a kind of a pet peeve of mine, I might add, that they should be doing the farm to market roads in the city limits because we’re part of their district. But they don’t.
KEN: Right, [00:27:00] the city limits is part of (inaudible).
SUMNER: And probably, someday, the city ought to get this annexed from them, and it would be an economic benefit for the city at least. But as such, they weren’t doing anything. And then, the city had to develop a system to maintain the residential streets, because the highway district had apparently been maintaining them. And of course, the old sprinkling tax was a tax that they put on businesses and property, and they would sprinkle with water, horse drawn teams. I can remember those as a kid, seeing them go through town before the streets were paved. And so, then, after the war, World War II, it was necessary for the city, [00:28:00] the, to create a street department which they did. And they started to maintain the streets. And the highway district was still working with the city and doing the farm to market stuff on a cooperative basis. But as that finally got into the period when I went to work for the city, why, they were starting to practically do nothing. And the city, then, had their own street department. And they had put on a tax for street and road construction, and apparently, they kept it on during the World War II. And they were able to build up quite a cash situation, where George Shellaberger, who was the city clerk, had it going so that he could pay cash for everything, didn’t have to worry about getting the tax receipts in before and borrowing money against them and so forth. I went to work for the city in [00:29:00] ’49 as assistant city engineer and the thing I found is that the records were a shamble as far as engineering office. Nobody had kept the sewer-service connection book up to date, and there was hundreds of those that we tracked down through the city clerk’s records and got recorded. And the maps, nobody had kept them up to date and they were a shambles. And we logged and recorded in an orderly fashion so that we could find the old sewer records and the old water records and so forth. And the water department maps hadn’t been kept up for a number of years. So, we had to work with the water superintendent to get those so we could record those. And in the process, they started to do a [00:30:00] little street construction Sure. But they really weren’t too well organized on it. The mayor, Peter Johnson, he was not a businessman, so to speak. And so, the economics of how to leverage the city’s street department was not his forte. And so, the streets really didn’t start to be a real good improvement to the city until Preston Cappell came in as mayor. And he was mayor, maybe six years. And during that era, he used up all the surplus, so to speak, and spent about twice as much money for street construction as he took in because he used up all the surplus and was able to get a lot of street work done in the old residential part of town. [00:31:00] I could be a little bit critical if you want to look back, because they didn’t put enough base in. And so, they haven’t lasted as well as they should have. But on the other hand, he was able to spread it farther and get all the potholes.
KEN: Up to that time, were there mostly dirt streets in residential areas?
SUMNER: Well, they were dirt with some kind of a strip of oil.
KEN: Dust oil?
SUMNER: Yeah, as I remember, it was a hard surface. It wasn’t like a dust oil. But it was only about 20 feet wide. Curb lines were out 40 feet wide. And so, there was a dirt shoulder between the edge of the paving, which was some kind of a penetrating oil with sand on it or something. And very [00:32:00] poor drainage. Drainage was a disaster. And nobody really addressed it until we got involved as city engineers, under contract from Johnson and Underkofler in 1957. And one of the early things we did was start a street program, as I mentioned, too, the other day, developing a five-year program. And then, the more streets we paved, the more drainage problems we created. So, we did a drainage study for the city. And there really was no way to fund it, because to do it as one project, we’d have to have a bond issue, but you can appreciate the only people who had problems are the ones who were in the low spots, the ones on the high ground, so to speak, they wouldn’t vote for [00:33:00] a storm drain systems because they didn’t have any problem. So, in those days, the city had, as I remember, some 30 -- well, I think they started out when we came as city engineers in ’57, I think they had like 35 or 36 employees in the street department. And through the process of efficiency, we got that down into the low twenties, as I recall, and did about twice as much work because we just got the thing organized better. But in the wintertime, we didn’t want to tear up residential streets and leave them a bog hole for people. So, we conceived with the council’s blessing to start the sections of the storm drainage system. And the street department, in the wintertime, would lay storm drain. Fortunately, we didn’t have winters like last winter, which here, [00:34:00] was terribly cold. We had fairly open winters. And after a number of six or eight years, they put in most elements of that storm drain system. And so, now that area is...
KEN: Was that about the mid-50s?
SUMNER: Yeah, that started probably in like ’58 or ’59, and then went on through into the mid-60s to finish it. Though it was a very efficient way, an economical way for the city to get a storm drain system, because they did have an extensive street department that up until then, wasn’t doing much in the wintertime.
KEN: I’d like to get into more of your experience in the public works development, but let’s go back, because we left you personally back in Lakeview school, about the sixth grade or so. And of course, having been born in your grandfather’s house over where [00:35:00] now the Skipper’s restaurant is, and then going to Star, and then back to the farm there, just off Franklin. And a little more about your early childhood days in Nampa, sixth grade?
SUMNER: Well, even before then I can remember coming to town and usually on Saturdays, with Dad, because that was farm day to come to town, you know. And where Firestone’s store is, there on the northwest corner of 14th Avenue and Second Street, there was some kind of a sale yard, a country sale yard where they’d sell livestock and people would bring their old used furniture, whatever it was. And Dad [00:36:00] would stop into the sale. And then catty corner from that was a feed store. I’m not sure it wasn’t Vale’s, but then and he’d stop into there to get the special mixes he might need for supplement for cattle feed, or calf feed, or pig feed, or something. And then, probably where Herb Carlson’s sports shop, or in that vicinity was the old Maclean’s hardware store, if I recall, and that was always a place that Dad had to stop, because of farm tools and so forth. And I’ve always had some inclination to like to browse through hardware stores and I [00:37:00] still do to this day. And I don’t know whether it’s because of that. And then another stop that we made is where the First Interstate Bank is, there on 11th and Third Street. That was the old Co-Op Oil gas station. And as a farmer, Dad was a member of that, and we stopped there. And then where Pioneer Federal is was the old Lindsay Ford garage. And Dad had Ford cars, and that was always one of the stops. I can remember those types of facilities very distinctly. The Subway there at 11th, for some reason, I don’t have a strong recollection of it. It was built in the mid or early ’30s, but for some reason that doesn’t ring a bell with me is as far as visually seeing it [00:38:00] go up. Now, when I was about in the seventh grade, I was going to Central, they built the gymnasium there as a WPA project. It actually was when I was in the sixth grade. And I can remember that we got out on the street, in I think it was in the fall of about 1936, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt came by in his car, and we all...
KEN: Oh, he personally came through town.
SUMNER: Yeah, came through town. And I suspect it had something to do with dedication of that gymnasium. The record might show, but at the time I didn’t realize, I just remember that we stood there, I think I stood on 14th, [00:39:00] just west of the Old Central School when he toured by. I can just vaguely remember that. And of course, when you’re in the grade school out there, Lower Fairview, the PTA was a big social event. And I think they’d have PTA one Friday night a month or something like that. And of course, as kids, we’d play, and run, and holler, and do everything but go to a PTA meeting. But one I can remember very, very bad situation at one PTA meeting were three of the sons of PTA members were in high school at the time, [00:40:00] one of the boys were able to get his folks’ car and they headed south on Star Road to come to Nampa. And that car had visors, or whatever you call them, over the headlights. And where the main line from Boise crosses Star Road there, it was on a fill. It wasn’t a smooth transition up like it is now. And those kids didn’t see the freight train going across the crossing, and they plowed...
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