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Wilma Patterson Recording 2 of 2
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WILMA PATTERSON: -- TV talk shows and he was an environmentalist who thought that every dam should be dynamited. They were a government hazard to the country as far as environment was concerned, and that any proposal to build any war dams would be criminal. And he was the speaker ahead of me. And Murray didn’t even know it was Arthur Godfrey because he isn’t much bigger than I am and I’m only 5’2”.
He was [freckle-faced and red-headed?] and he read his statement and I thought, even a man that’s so good on television should be able to say what he thinks without reading it. But he did, he [stood there and read it kind of monotone?] so I thought, well this will just be a pushover. I’ll get this damn business [00:01:00] too right now.
But as far as either he continued, we didn’t leave alone of us, made any impression because there were no dams ever came out of it. The Garden Valley Dam was coming up the Congress at that time, it was proposaled to irrigate the mountain home desert and all this land between Boise Valley and Emmett. The Black Canyon District, all that water that was impounded would be impaled in the Garden Valley Dam, which in play between Cascade Dam and the Garden Valley Dam and Anderson Ranch Dam. They were going to build a tunnel and tie three dams together, and that was all set up to go through. The Vietnamese War came along and that put a stop to everything, all the money that congress had to play around with went for the war and all these projects were shelved and they’ll probably never be considered again. [00:02:00]
But that was interesting because when so many different opinions come up between the Sierra Club and the practical-minded people, and then you’ve got the timber element that wants to cut every created there is to be found. And right now between the BLM, the forest service and the environmentalist and the grasshoppers, we’ve got a real conflict going. And right over here in the Whitey County, they’ve got a new obnoxious weed called the leafy spurge, but it’s poison to cattle and flock and so forth. And the BLM is proposing to spray for it, eradicate it before it gets to stock. And there’s certain segment of the people that are posing it and as [00:03:00] of now, it’s being sided until the argument is set. It’s not confined in one county. It’s in Boise and Valley County, and they’re all vulnerable to it all. Vulnerable to the grasshoppers.
Surprisingly enough, the wild animal is still with us, because my office that’s down here 1510 First Street South, and I walked out last week and there was bull snake coiled up in the middle of the street here, and the gentleman across the street brought his cane out and picked him up and the lady came along in the car and he put it in the bucket and she took it home because she said it’d kill mice and she was going to take it home to get the mice.
FLORENCE: That, that should remind you, Wilma, of a story that you have here and they kind of tie in, if you want to tell that little story.
WILMA: Well, [00:04:00] when the Snake River Stampede was looking for publicity, thought somebody dreamed up it’d be great to have a rattlesnake hunt. And a rattlesnake –
FLORENCE: When was this, what year? Just roughly.
WILMA: would’ve been about 1935, 36. So the group of [simple-minded man?] organized the expedition into Owyhee County and they found a few snakes and they gathered them up and they brought them home and the rodeo board ordered some gourmet canned rattlesnake meat that was advertised someplace, and the little infinitesimal amounts. And they ordered all these hamburgers, made out of good, edible beef, and they sprinkled a few drops of this rattlesnake meat, [00:05:00] this canned rattle snake meat on so it would be authentic. And they offered those for free down at the city hall. They were going to serve these free hamburgers made out of rattlesnake meat so they thought. And you know, there was some very few takers there. They had all that hamburger left and nobody had ordered it. They really believed that it was rattlesnake made meat and they just assumed they’d go buy their hamburger someplace else. (laughter) But it was a real good publicity stunt, because people came from miles just to see who was going to be brave enough to eat rattlesnake meat. (laughs)
FLORENCE: Now, along with the stampede, Carolyn was...
WILMA: She was the Rodeo Queen in 1951.
FLORENCE: Is that right?
WILMA: That year my dad died Carolyn was rodeo queen. She was so bashful and so shy, since I’ve asked her -- why she was about [00:06:00] 20 and inexperienced -- why couldn’t she have been Rodeo Queen when she was a little older?
FLORENCE: And then she’s a musician. And has gone many places. Playing for the Western group.
WILMA: She was one of those playing at the park. And she traveled with the sons of the pioneers, and she traveled with [Rex Allen?] a few times. And then the last time she left, she went with Ken Curtis, who was known as Festus on Gunsmoke. And she traveled a whole season from Calgary, Stampede, toured down south and everything.
And that year, Ken Curtis retired from traveling and Carolyn retired too because she couldn’t leave me to take care of everything here while she traveled. She traveled with a [pop?] [00:07:00] band before she went with him, but her heart and soul was with the Western music, so she went back to that. Back then, you can’t travel and run the cattle ranch in Garden Valley. She had a choice.
FLORENCE: Now, you said that you specialized in ranches and farms rather than residents. As you think back over your real estate years, what ranch or farm sale stands out in your mind? Or sales? What stands out in your mind?
WILMA: One of the oddest things that I ran across, we sold a big cattle range over by [Ironsides?], Oregon. Now, if you’ve never been to Ironsides Oregon, you don’t show a cattle ranch from the paved roads. You have to go way off, down some little lanes and roads. And this was a big [00:08:00] ranch in there. And the man we took over, looked at it, was from Italy. He spoke with a broken accent. Between the two of us, we had an awful hard time figuring out what it was he’d want.
But anyway, he came back from thereafter. The point is, you had to go in there and you stayed overnight with the owner of the ranch, and you rode on a horse to show him the ranch. That’s where I had to be able to ride a horse. You can’t sell a ranch sitting in the living room looking out and pointin’ out the assets.
So he went back, and he said, “I’ll send my son and his daughter out here, and if they like it, I’ll buy it.” And so in around a week, his son showed up. Now his son spoke excellent English, but his wife was from Italy. [00:09:00] They had gone back to Italy and bought him a nice, well- trained housewife. And so he took her up there to show her this place, and at that time he went over to Bend and Cambridge, and there was one hill that was just quite a winding road. Was quite a drop off to one side. It was a kind of a winding snake-y sort of road. And as we came back on that one side, that girl tried to open the car door and jump out. He yelled and I screamed, and I finally got her to stop. He got her in the middle and where she couldn’t get to the door, and asked her what was wrong, and she said if he bought that and she’d live back there, she’d never learned to speak English and she wanted to get [00:10:00] out and be like a modern [girl?], so she wasn’t quite as downtrodden as they had thought, because women’s lib -- they must have reached into Italy, because definitely she didn’t wanna live back there where she couldn’t learn to speak English.
So we came back, and the father-in-law was still here in the Radley, at the hotel and he said, “Well, doesn’t wanna live there, we’ll ship her back to Italy.” So she agreed. And you know, I met her about five years later and she spoke good English and she joined clubs, [the whole thing?], the 4-H and the Ringleaders of Modern Society.
But she was not the picture of a true Italian wife that’s concerned only live with home and babies and husband. She really lived it up. But that was the most [00:11:00] interesting sale that I made. And it’s a sample of what you had to do. You didn’t, you didn’t just drive them out and find out that this is about a pretty house and a nice view, and they wanted to know a whole lot more about it than that.
FLORENCE: Would you say that most of your sales have been to people in the area? Was that unusual to have someone come as you say, from Italy and so on? We’re most of your sales, or I should say, are most of your sales to local names that you have known? Are they not?
WILMA: Back in 1940, 50, 60, most of your sales were people I hadn’t spoke with. A lot of Californians. A great many we sold from Nebraska and Kansas and in there. This this is [00:12:00] the only one from outside the United States borders: I had one Dutch looking for a dairy farm, and they did locate here, but I couldn’t understand them. Now, that’s whole thing.
FLORENCE: Well, when you first went into real estate, were you at that time specializing in farms and ranches, or were you always having to? There aren’t very many of you in town who specialize.
WILMA: You go in with your father and that’s all he knows is land. He wouldn’t know how to show a hat. So the only time we sold houses, we sold somebody on the farm and then he moved to town and we sold him a house then, so we don’t have a big backlog of big clients that we sold houses. We’d sold some, but not in comparison with land. Because my husband was engaged in land and cattle and my father and [00:13:00] everybody I knew seemed to be that. So automatically when they wanted a farm, a cattle ranch, they came to someone that’s engaged in that business. And I know another time I took one of these [modernists?] out here up by [Naples?] someplace and it was -- [you had these siphon tubes?].
Now, those of you who’ve never sat at a siphon tube knows that it’s not a simple matter, a two-year-old kid can just make a big success of it. He can slap that siphon tube in with his thumb over the hole and start it, but we go down this [digway?] to show this place, and here’s all these siphon foods, irrigating this field on my right, and this man was some [bikey?] someplace, and he said, “Stop, I want to see what this is like.” So he gets out and he picks up a couple of siphon tubes to look at them. [00:14:00] Before we go on, we had to start those siphon tubes again. We couldn’t let that farmer come out and find that was two of the siphon tubes dry down in the middle of the field. Let me tell you, it was an hour and a half before between him and -- [down in that ditch drive, it was about that siphon tubes?]. (laughter)
FLORENCE: It looked simple.
WILMA: Looked so simple. And did you ever try to explain to a man from someplace else what those [leafcutter bee shacks?] were out there in the middle of a field? They looked just like little outhouses scattered around the field of alfalfa seeds. And he tried to tell a man that’s got -- you’ve got a bee but what’s the -- but what you got ’em in there for? You know, it’s supposed to pollinate the seeds, but trying to explain it to him without getting out and get the board and saying, “Here it bores the holes in and it lays its tags in [00:15:00] there. And that’s the way it works.” So eventually, you get the words, you closed their [language?].
FLORENCE: As you have seen property values going back to 1946, since you started your business, how have you seen the economy [adapt?]. In the first place, prior to 1946 when the coast and other metropolitan areas near depression, Nampa really did not know depression as depression, so when we came in in 1946 into the real estate and ranches, was that an up year as far as -- that was they -- (overlapping dialogue; inaudible)
WILMA: People were moving out of the depression. Now, that was a more optimistic attitude, and also the fact that at our time things were priced down [00:16:00] lower. You could buy -- in Nampa here -- $7,500 would buy you an average little two-bedroom house. Get $500 [down?]. Now, today that same home would be $45,00 or $40,000, and they would want more than $500 down.
A lot of the land firms -- the Federal Land Bank can mortgage them. And Federal Land Bank was anxious to get big farm in production. So if the farmer could pay the water and the taxes and a little interest on the mortgage, they would give him x number of years to get them ready to buy. And so it was easy to make savings. Because a man didn’t have to have 25,000 to 30,000 to get in business.
FLORENCE: And interest was there.
WILMA: That’s right, interested of [00:17:00] seven percent was considered high. You could buy a business, you could buy a little motel the same way. You could trade them, you could trade a house for so-and-so, and it was easy to make savings.
FLORENCE: So then in ’46 and in there were high years. I don’t mean high in price. I mean good for sales. And then what other years -- and now you’ve been in it almost 40 years, 40 years next year, 1986. What had been the pilots, when had the good years been in real estate?
WILMA: The good years. In 1952, we had a little recession that slowed people down. Adjustment periods. Then in about 1956, it picked up. And from 1956 to [00:18:00] 1970, the [full years?], things went up and up and a lot of people made [fortunes?]
FLORENCE: Fourteen years? Wow.
WILMA: And then in ’73, they had the gas shortage, which leaded to fear into our domain there?]. You know, you saw pictures of Nampa and Boise Valley [bore a turnpike?]. They really didn’t get hit by any of these. For me, 1973 was a good year, and yet you saw the pictures on TV of the lines a mile long at the gas stations, and it was a terrific shock to the experts, dealers, you know, the mobile homes and the campers and so forth, because they were scared they wouldn’t be able to get gas ’til they got out of town. So from 1973, ’74, about, [00:19:00] had hurt a little economically because of that gas shortage.
FLORENCE: But if you ever really being hurt as much as –
WILMA: No, I always said people were trying to [get out?]. We were the last to feel the depression, maybe we’d be the first to last to pick it up, but it was been good for this community until about 1979 we noticed a slowdown. And it’s kept slowing and slowing and slowing until now. Then it’s a question of finding people who can afford the payments and the interest, even though we interest is down. But it’s really slow for real estate, because it isn’t as easy just to go out and order somebody $500 down on the $7,500 house that you can pay for in few years.
FLORENCE: I’m certain being in real [00:20:00] estate, you’re always close to land values. When the land for the current Nampa High School was bought, clear out there on the edge of town, did you along other people debate why they would put a high school out that far?
WILMA: I think they paid $22,000, if I remember right. It was something of that sort eight. [And we also had plans to go way out there for it. [Open the bridge, the way the city was built?]
FLORENCE: No, I don’t think so. And when you went to high school, did you go out towards [the city lines?]?
WILMA: Up on [Tyler Boulevard?]
FLORENCE: And so when you went to Kennedy, did you only went through grade school? It was a grade school.
WILMA: There wasn’t a junior high.
FLORENCE: Oh, so you went eight years to grade school and then four years to high [00:21:00] school. And this high school is where Annie Laurie Bird was.
WILMA: Yeah. (inaudible)
FLORENCE: When you talked about politics, and of course I can see that gleam in your eye, you truly enjoyed that, didn’t you? That was when I knew you. Do you remember when you went over to the dinner for [Cecil D Andrus?]?
WILMA: Yeah.
FLORENCE: And I was so impressed when he remembered my name when we came out. And when I see him today, he still remembers my name. Isn’t that phenomenal?
WILMA: He’s almost too good, the fact that he could remember more names than I never did know how to.
FLORENCE: Mm-hmm. And then I saw you speaking. Don’t you remember the time that you spoke? And I can’t even remember when. You were talking, telling stories from your book and telling stories about Nampa and [00:22:00] ranches and farms and that sort of thing, and I tried to remember where that was, but you did speak around there.
WILMA: Oh I spoke at lots of places. I spoke to bunch of university women, lots of girls there. And one of them said to me, “Miss Patterson, which university did you attend?” (laughs)
FLORENCE: And another time I recall, and again, vaguely as far as date is concerned, [Venice?] was having some doubt, what was that? It was having to do with cosmetology?
WILMA: Yes. Each of ’em had to flip on a skit.
FLORENCE: Oh, that’s right. And you wrote a skit.
WILMA: Yeah. And she said, “Can you dream up a little skit?” So I borrowed Caroline’s western outfit. [Gowns?] Don’t you remember that? (laughs)
FLORENCE: Yes, now I remember. [00:23:00]
WILMA: (laughs) That was a lot of fun. My goodness’s, I’ll never forget this, she has this mood [grad?] and she got up and introduced us. (inaudible) and just broke her in half. (inaudible)
FLORENCE: In sort of summarizing your life, and going back to going to Kennedy and going to Nampa High, seeing a stampede, and we haven’t said anything about the Harvest Festival, but being located where you are, certainly you were close to the Harvest Festival. Would you like to see that come back?
WILMA: Oh, that was the highlight of that town. It should come back, because it involved everyone. The merchants, the people, every civic club, hub, something down there. And the streets would fill with people, [00:24:00] that was the entertainment, just to go down and walk around and watch the people.
FLORENCE: So then you went into real estate the ranching farm area, and still a broker, went in and got your broker’s license and are now, and have moved from in town to what was then out of town, and then acquired the range and so on. What could be your summary of your years in this area in Nampa? Do you feel they were good to you?
WILMA: I feel that this area has been good to me, that there’s nothing that I can complain about economically. It’s been rewarding socially, it’s been rewarding. And as far as enjoyment, where in the [00:25:00] world would you be able to find a place where you can live, earn a living, fish, hunt, hike, hey, right a horse? Where can you be an individual as much as you can be in the Nampa area, because there was no limit. This is not a snobby town. You can be anything you want to be as long as you don’t hurt your neighbor.
FLORENCE: And accepting.
WILMA: And I think that this has been, to me, a rewarding area. I’ve never had the desire to live any place else. And fact of the matter is, I have no desire to tour Europe and see the old buildings over there when we can look at the city hall and some of the new buildings here and have just as much history as they have over there. So I [00:26:00] have, I feel that the Lord has been good to me here, and I have no complaints about anybody or anything.
FLORENCE: That’s, that’s a great final statement.
WILMA: Thank you. (laughs)
END OF RECORDING
He was [freckle-faced and red-headed?] and he read his statement and I thought, even a man that’s so good on television should be able to say what he thinks without reading it. But he did, he [stood there and read it kind of monotone?] so I thought, well this will just be a pushover. I’ll get this damn business [00:01:00] too right now.
But as far as either he continued, we didn’t leave alone of us, made any impression because there were no dams ever came out of it. The Garden Valley Dam was coming up the Congress at that time, it was proposaled to irrigate the mountain home desert and all this land between Boise Valley and Emmett. The Black Canyon District, all that water that was impounded would be impaled in the Garden Valley Dam, which in play between Cascade Dam and the Garden Valley Dam and Anderson Ranch Dam. They were going to build a tunnel and tie three dams together, and that was all set up to go through. The Vietnamese War came along and that put a stop to everything, all the money that congress had to play around with went for the war and all these projects were shelved and they’ll probably never be considered again. [00:02:00]
But that was interesting because when so many different opinions come up between the Sierra Club and the practical-minded people, and then you’ve got the timber element that wants to cut every created there is to be found. And right now between the BLM, the forest service and the environmentalist and the grasshoppers, we’ve got a real conflict going. And right over here in the Whitey County, they’ve got a new obnoxious weed called the leafy spurge, but it’s poison to cattle and flock and so forth. And the BLM is proposing to spray for it, eradicate it before it gets to stock. And there’s certain segment of the people that are posing it and as [00:03:00] of now, it’s being sided until the argument is set. It’s not confined in one county. It’s in Boise and Valley County, and they’re all vulnerable to it all. Vulnerable to the grasshoppers.
Surprisingly enough, the wild animal is still with us, because my office that’s down here 1510 First Street South, and I walked out last week and there was bull snake coiled up in the middle of the street here, and the gentleman across the street brought his cane out and picked him up and the lady came along in the car and he put it in the bucket and she took it home because she said it’d kill mice and she was going to take it home to get the mice.
FLORENCE: That, that should remind you, Wilma, of a story that you have here and they kind of tie in, if you want to tell that little story.
WILMA: Well, [00:04:00] when the Snake River Stampede was looking for publicity, thought somebody dreamed up it’d be great to have a rattlesnake hunt. And a rattlesnake –
FLORENCE: When was this, what year? Just roughly.
WILMA: would’ve been about 1935, 36. So the group of [simple-minded man?] organized the expedition into Owyhee County and they found a few snakes and they gathered them up and they brought them home and the rodeo board ordered some gourmet canned rattlesnake meat that was advertised someplace, and the little infinitesimal amounts. And they ordered all these hamburgers, made out of good, edible beef, and they sprinkled a few drops of this rattlesnake meat, [00:05:00] this canned rattle snake meat on so it would be authentic. And they offered those for free down at the city hall. They were going to serve these free hamburgers made out of rattlesnake meat so they thought. And you know, there was some very few takers there. They had all that hamburger left and nobody had ordered it. They really believed that it was rattlesnake made meat and they just assumed they’d go buy their hamburger someplace else. (laughter) But it was a real good publicity stunt, because people came from miles just to see who was going to be brave enough to eat rattlesnake meat. (laughs)
FLORENCE: Now, along with the stampede, Carolyn was...
WILMA: She was the Rodeo Queen in 1951.
FLORENCE: Is that right?
WILMA: That year my dad died Carolyn was rodeo queen. She was so bashful and so shy, since I’ve asked her -- why she was about [00:06:00] 20 and inexperienced -- why couldn’t she have been Rodeo Queen when she was a little older?
FLORENCE: And then she’s a musician. And has gone many places. Playing for the Western group.
WILMA: She was one of those playing at the park. And she traveled with the sons of the pioneers, and she traveled with [Rex Allen?] a few times. And then the last time she left, she went with Ken Curtis, who was known as Festus on Gunsmoke. And she traveled a whole season from Calgary, Stampede, toured down south and everything.
And that year, Ken Curtis retired from traveling and Carolyn retired too because she couldn’t leave me to take care of everything here while she traveled. She traveled with a [pop?] [00:07:00] band before she went with him, but her heart and soul was with the Western music, so she went back to that. Back then, you can’t travel and run the cattle ranch in Garden Valley. She had a choice.
FLORENCE: Now, you said that you specialized in ranches and farms rather than residents. As you think back over your real estate years, what ranch or farm sale stands out in your mind? Or sales? What stands out in your mind?
WILMA: One of the oddest things that I ran across, we sold a big cattle range over by [Ironsides?], Oregon. Now, if you’ve never been to Ironsides Oregon, you don’t show a cattle ranch from the paved roads. You have to go way off, down some little lanes and roads. And this was a big [00:08:00] ranch in there. And the man we took over, looked at it, was from Italy. He spoke with a broken accent. Between the two of us, we had an awful hard time figuring out what it was he’d want.
But anyway, he came back from thereafter. The point is, you had to go in there and you stayed overnight with the owner of the ranch, and you rode on a horse to show him the ranch. That’s where I had to be able to ride a horse. You can’t sell a ranch sitting in the living room looking out and pointin’ out the assets.
So he went back, and he said, “I’ll send my son and his daughter out here, and if they like it, I’ll buy it.” And so in around a week, his son showed up. Now his son spoke excellent English, but his wife was from Italy. [00:09:00] They had gone back to Italy and bought him a nice, well- trained housewife. And so he took her up there to show her this place, and at that time he went over to Bend and Cambridge, and there was one hill that was just quite a winding road. Was quite a drop off to one side. It was a kind of a winding snake-y sort of road. And as we came back on that one side, that girl tried to open the car door and jump out. He yelled and I screamed, and I finally got her to stop. He got her in the middle and where she couldn’t get to the door, and asked her what was wrong, and she said if he bought that and she’d live back there, she’d never learned to speak English and she wanted to get [00:10:00] out and be like a modern [girl?], so she wasn’t quite as downtrodden as they had thought, because women’s lib -- they must have reached into Italy, because definitely she didn’t wanna live back there where she couldn’t learn to speak English.
So we came back, and the father-in-law was still here in the Radley, at the hotel and he said, “Well, doesn’t wanna live there, we’ll ship her back to Italy.” So she agreed. And you know, I met her about five years later and she spoke good English and she joined clubs, [the whole thing?], the 4-H and the Ringleaders of Modern Society.
But she was not the picture of a true Italian wife that’s concerned only live with home and babies and husband. She really lived it up. But that was the most [00:11:00] interesting sale that I made. And it’s a sample of what you had to do. You didn’t, you didn’t just drive them out and find out that this is about a pretty house and a nice view, and they wanted to know a whole lot more about it than that.
FLORENCE: Would you say that most of your sales have been to people in the area? Was that unusual to have someone come as you say, from Italy and so on? We’re most of your sales, or I should say, are most of your sales to local names that you have known? Are they not?
WILMA: Back in 1940, 50, 60, most of your sales were people I hadn’t spoke with. A lot of Californians. A great many we sold from Nebraska and Kansas and in there. This this is [00:12:00] the only one from outside the United States borders: I had one Dutch looking for a dairy farm, and they did locate here, but I couldn’t understand them. Now, that’s whole thing.
FLORENCE: Well, when you first went into real estate, were you at that time specializing in farms and ranches, or were you always having to? There aren’t very many of you in town who specialize.
WILMA: You go in with your father and that’s all he knows is land. He wouldn’t know how to show a hat. So the only time we sold houses, we sold somebody on the farm and then he moved to town and we sold him a house then, so we don’t have a big backlog of big clients that we sold houses. We’d sold some, but not in comparison with land. Because my husband was engaged in land and cattle and my father and [00:13:00] everybody I knew seemed to be that. So automatically when they wanted a farm, a cattle ranch, they came to someone that’s engaged in that business. And I know another time I took one of these [modernists?] out here up by [Naples?] someplace and it was -- [you had these siphon tubes?].
Now, those of you who’ve never sat at a siphon tube knows that it’s not a simple matter, a two-year-old kid can just make a big success of it. He can slap that siphon tube in with his thumb over the hole and start it, but we go down this [digway?] to show this place, and here’s all these siphon foods, irrigating this field on my right, and this man was some [bikey?] someplace, and he said, “Stop, I want to see what this is like.” So he gets out and he picks up a couple of siphon tubes to look at them. [00:14:00] Before we go on, we had to start those siphon tubes again. We couldn’t let that farmer come out and find that was two of the siphon tubes dry down in the middle of the field. Let me tell you, it was an hour and a half before between him and -- [down in that ditch drive, it was about that siphon tubes?]. (laughter)
FLORENCE: It looked simple.
WILMA: Looked so simple. And did you ever try to explain to a man from someplace else what those [leafcutter bee shacks?] were out there in the middle of a field? They looked just like little outhouses scattered around the field of alfalfa seeds. And he tried to tell a man that’s got -- you’ve got a bee but what’s the -- but what you got ’em in there for? You know, it’s supposed to pollinate the seeds, but trying to explain it to him without getting out and get the board and saying, “Here it bores the holes in and it lays its tags in [00:15:00] there. And that’s the way it works.” So eventually, you get the words, you closed their [language?].
FLORENCE: As you have seen property values going back to 1946, since you started your business, how have you seen the economy [adapt?]. In the first place, prior to 1946 when the coast and other metropolitan areas near depression, Nampa really did not know depression as depression, so when we came in in 1946 into the real estate and ranches, was that an up year as far as -- that was they -- (overlapping dialogue; inaudible)
WILMA: People were moving out of the depression. Now, that was a more optimistic attitude, and also the fact that at our time things were priced down [00:16:00] lower. You could buy -- in Nampa here -- $7,500 would buy you an average little two-bedroom house. Get $500 [down?]. Now, today that same home would be $45,00 or $40,000, and they would want more than $500 down.
A lot of the land firms -- the Federal Land Bank can mortgage them. And Federal Land Bank was anxious to get big farm in production. So if the farmer could pay the water and the taxes and a little interest on the mortgage, they would give him x number of years to get them ready to buy. And so it was easy to make savings. Because a man didn’t have to have 25,000 to 30,000 to get in business.
FLORENCE: And interest was there.
WILMA: That’s right, interested of [00:17:00] seven percent was considered high. You could buy a business, you could buy a little motel the same way. You could trade them, you could trade a house for so-and-so, and it was easy to make savings.
FLORENCE: So then in ’46 and in there were high years. I don’t mean high in price. I mean good for sales. And then what other years -- and now you’ve been in it almost 40 years, 40 years next year, 1986. What had been the pilots, when had the good years been in real estate?
WILMA: The good years. In 1952, we had a little recession that slowed people down. Adjustment periods. Then in about 1956, it picked up. And from 1956 to [00:18:00] 1970, the [full years?], things went up and up and a lot of people made [fortunes?]
FLORENCE: Fourteen years? Wow.
WILMA: And then in ’73, they had the gas shortage, which leaded to fear into our domain there?]. You know, you saw pictures of Nampa and Boise Valley [bore a turnpike?]. They really didn’t get hit by any of these. For me, 1973 was a good year, and yet you saw the pictures on TV of the lines a mile long at the gas stations, and it was a terrific shock to the experts, dealers, you know, the mobile homes and the campers and so forth, because they were scared they wouldn’t be able to get gas ’til they got out of town. So from 1973, ’74, about, [00:19:00] had hurt a little economically because of that gas shortage.
FLORENCE: But if you ever really being hurt as much as –
WILMA: No, I always said people were trying to [get out?]. We were the last to feel the depression, maybe we’d be the first to last to pick it up, but it was been good for this community until about 1979 we noticed a slowdown. And it’s kept slowing and slowing and slowing until now. Then it’s a question of finding people who can afford the payments and the interest, even though we interest is down. But it’s really slow for real estate, because it isn’t as easy just to go out and order somebody $500 down on the $7,500 house that you can pay for in few years.
FLORENCE: I’m certain being in real [00:20:00] estate, you’re always close to land values. When the land for the current Nampa High School was bought, clear out there on the edge of town, did you along other people debate why they would put a high school out that far?
WILMA: I think they paid $22,000, if I remember right. It was something of that sort eight. [And we also had plans to go way out there for it. [Open the bridge, the way the city was built?]
FLORENCE: No, I don’t think so. And when you went to high school, did you go out towards [the city lines?]?
WILMA: Up on [Tyler Boulevard?]
FLORENCE: And so when you went to Kennedy, did you only went through grade school? It was a grade school.
WILMA: There wasn’t a junior high.
FLORENCE: Oh, so you went eight years to grade school and then four years to high [00:21:00] school. And this high school is where Annie Laurie Bird was.
WILMA: Yeah. (inaudible)
FLORENCE: When you talked about politics, and of course I can see that gleam in your eye, you truly enjoyed that, didn’t you? That was when I knew you. Do you remember when you went over to the dinner for [Cecil D Andrus?]?
WILMA: Yeah.
FLORENCE: And I was so impressed when he remembered my name when we came out. And when I see him today, he still remembers my name. Isn’t that phenomenal?
WILMA: He’s almost too good, the fact that he could remember more names than I never did know how to.
FLORENCE: Mm-hmm. And then I saw you speaking. Don’t you remember the time that you spoke? And I can’t even remember when. You were talking, telling stories from your book and telling stories about Nampa and [00:22:00] ranches and farms and that sort of thing, and I tried to remember where that was, but you did speak around there.
WILMA: Oh I spoke at lots of places. I spoke to bunch of university women, lots of girls there. And one of them said to me, “Miss Patterson, which university did you attend?” (laughs)
FLORENCE: And another time I recall, and again, vaguely as far as date is concerned, [Venice?] was having some doubt, what was that? It was having to do with cosmetology?
WILMA: Yes. Each of ’em had to flip on a skit.
FLORENCE: Oh, that’s right. And you wrote a skit.
WILMA: Yeah. And she said, “Can you dream up a little skit?” So I borrowed Caroline’s western outfit. [Gowns?] Don’t you remember that? (laughs)
FLORENCE: Yes, now I remember. [00:23:00]
WILMA: (laughs) That was a lot of fun. My goodness’s, I’ll never forget this, she has this mood [grad?] and she got up and introduced us. (inaudible) and just broke her in half. (inaudible)
FLORENCE: In sort of summarizing your life, and going back to going to Kennedy and going to Nampa High, seeing a stampede, and we haven’t said anything about the Harvest Festival, but being located where you are, certainly you were close to the Harvest Festival. Would you like to see that come back?
WILMA: Oh, that was the highlight of that town. It should come back, because it involved everyone. The merchants, the people, every civic club, hub, something down there. And the streets would fill with people, [00:24:00] that was the entertainment, just to go down and walk around and watch the people.
FLORENCE: So then you went into real estate the ranching farm area, and still a broker, went in and got your broker’s license and are now, and have moved from in town to what was then out of town, and then acquired the range and so on. What could be your summary of your years in this area in Nampa? Do you feel they were good to you?
WILMA: I feel that this area has been good to me, that there’s nothing that I can complain about economically. It’s been rewarding socially, it’s been rewarding. And as far as enjoyment, where in the [00:25:00] world would you be able to find a place where you can live, earn a living, fish, hunt, hike, hey, right a horse? Where can you be an individual as much as you can be in the Nampa area, because there was no limit. This is not a snobby town. You can be anything you want to be as long as you don’t hurt your neighbor.
FLORENCE: And accepting.
WILMA: And I think that this has been, to me, a rewarding area. I’ve never had the desire to live any place else. And fact of the matter is, I have no desire to tour Europe and see the old buildings over there when we can look at the city hall and some of the new buildings here and have just as much history as they have over there. So I [00:26:00] have, I feel that the Lord has been good to me here, and I have no complaints about anybody or anything.
FLORENCE: That’s, that’s a great final statement.
WILMA: Thank you. (laughs)
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