Interview with my grandparents

Oral History Interview with
Harvey D. and E. Margene Goff

1 Nov. 2008
Ogden, UT
Kellie Goff

KELLIE: This is Kellie Goff. It’s November 1st, 2008. I’m on my way to interview my grandparents, Harvey Douglas and Eva Margene Goff about their interactions with the media.

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HARVEY: You’re talking about communication with radio. My dad was an electrician and he got into a lot of parts of electricity, and he liked radio and he made some of his own radios. I was a young guy wanting to follow in my dad’s footsteps. I made a crystal set, and the crystal somehow generated the power the run the radio. It just had to be on headphones; you couldn’t get it on a speaker. And you could pick up some of the stronger stations around. So I made one of those, and later he got me a kit to make a radio that used vacuum tubes in it. That was a little more advanced; it had a little speaker to it. But then, I was probably six or seven when dad made the first portable radio I had ever seen. It was in a large suitcase. It must have been 3 ½ feet by 2 feet by eight inches deep. It had really heavy batteries in there, and for the antennae he had coiled wire into the top of the suitcase, so it was very directional. I remember having friends over and showing off his new radio. He put it out in the center of the room with no cords or power going to it, which was quite phenomenal in those days, and he would have to turn the radio so the antennae would be in proper orientation to the stations he was picking up. The speaker came on and we really listened to radio on this box with no wires. That was quite phenomenal at the time. Of course, that’s a long way from the portable radios that we have now, and the ipods and so forth.

MARGENE: It’s amazing what’s happened just in our lifetime—how things have changed and grown. TV was not—I don’t remember how old I was—I guess I was in high school or college when TV first started coming out…I guess the first ones came out in 1927 or something like that. But they were very elementary and just in a small area…

KELLIE: I remember seeing pictures of what the first TV’s looked like and they just had a very small screen and a huge box behind it that’s generating the picture. What is your very first memory of the media? Were there any specific radio programs that either of you listened to as kids?

MARGENE: I don’t know. My first thing that I remember about the radio is…when we were little, growing up, Mother would stop everything and we all had to gather around and sit down and listen to “Helen Trent.”

HARVEY: Which is a soap opera.

MARGENE: It’s a soap opera on the radio. That’s the first thing that I remember about the radio. You didn’t have your individual radios or anything like that. Then later on, we’d rush home from school to listen to “Jack Armstrong” or something. It was crazy stuff.

HARVEY: “Jack Armstrong: The All-American Boy” was a 15-minute program that came on about dinnertime, 5:30 or thereabouts. We always had to have that on.

MARGENE: There was some other program, but I can’t remember what it was.

HARVEY: “Little Orphan Annie” I believe came on right after. They always had things you could send for. This was in the depression, so we didn’t have money just to spend that way, but oh, we all longed to be able to send for those things…Ovaltine was the sponsor—

MARGENE: You had to send something from the box.

HARVEY: Yeah, but we never had Ovaltine in our house. Then in the evening we’d sit around the radio and listen to music or whatever Dad wanted. Dad was the boss in the family; whatever he wanted, that’s what we listened to. He was usually reading the paper and maybe he’d have music on. But I recall just laying on the floor, or sitting there and drawing, and listening to the radio. Mom, as a special treat, would have some Snickers or Milky Way bars and she’d cut up little pieces and hand them around. That was our treat for the evening. It was just my brother and I in the household. So, that was the first communication—or entertainment, I guess you could call it. I’m sure they must’ve had news programs and such but as kids we didn’t pay any attention to those.

MARGENE: But there was always some kind of program. There was one called “Our Miss Brooks” that we liked to listen to. It was a program about a school teacher. I don’t remember any situations or anything, but we liked it. And Mother always liked “Our Gal Sunday” and “Helen Trent” that we had to listen to.

KELLIE: So this was a big family gathering in the evening when you’d gather around and listen to the radio together?

MARGENE: No, when we listened to it, it would be during the day when my dad was at work. Mother would just stop everything, and we all had to come in and listen to it because she didn’t want to be distracted for anything. So we had to listen to “Helen Trent” and “Our Gal Sunday.” “Our Miss Brooks” came on Sunday or something like that, and we listened to that and “Little Orphan Annie” and “Jack Armstrong.” We did sit and listen to the radio a lot like kids watch TV nowadays. There just wasn’t that much on for children, or maybe we would have listened more, I don’t know. We usually didn’t have time because there was just too much you had to do just to help around the house and the yard and everything. So we didn’t have a lot of time to sit and listen to the radio. Things have changed a lot.

KELLIE: You had to devote a lot more time to chores.

MARGENE: Yeah.

HARVEY: Mom would always have a small radio in the kitchen, and she’d usually have it on as she was cooking or canning food or whatever she was doing in the kitchen. And that was her distraction. I do recall once—of course Mother wasn’t a member of the church at the time—Heber J. Grant being on the radio. It must’ve been conference time. I remember listening to a little bit of that and hearing the comments back and forth. So that had to be in the 30s. I’d have to look. He served for a long time, into the 30s I believe.

KELLIE: How many radios did you have in your household? You mentioned your mom used one the kitchen. Did you just have a big one in the family room?

MARGENE: We just had one in the living room and that was it.

HARVEY: Well we had a stand-alone console, a piece of furniture, really.

MARGENE: You probably see them a lot in old movies. They’re about this high.

HARVEY: I’d guess at one time we probably had about four radios in the house.

MARGENE: You were richer than we were.

HARVEY: Well, that makes some of them.

KELLIE: Was that a big thing to have that many radios in the house?

HARVEY: Oh, yes. Two in a household would be quite a few. It would almost be a maximum, and anything over that was…

KELLIE: Was this during the Depression era, you said?

HARVEY: Yes. Oh, I’m sure in the beginning, in the early 30s, we only had two. But then we accrued a couple more.

KELLIE: And those were the ones your dad built?

HARVEY: Well, dad made some of them, I remember.

KELLIE: Okay, talk to me a little bit about TV. When did that become commonplace? Do you remember when you got your first TV?

HARVEY: Well I remember the first one I really watched—maybe not the first I watched—was when I was in graduate school back in Boston. That would have been late ’49 to ’51. They had a TV in the recreation room. This was when Joe McCarthy was doing a tirade on the communists. He was calling everybody a communist and he’d have people on to interview. That’s what the students mainly were watching, and I remember looking occasionally but I didn’t spend a lot of time in there.

MARGENE: I don’t remember when my parents got their first TV, but I don’t think I was home at that time. And we didn’t have one when we first got married. Then we got a little one that you sit on a cart. They had carts to put them on. I remember the kids would come home, they’d be at a friend’s house watching TV, but we didn’t have one. I don’t remember when we got one. I guess it was when we were in Chatham.

HARVEY: No, we had one in Mont Clair, dear, a small one.

MARGENE: Now where did we put it?

HARVEY: Well it was on a cart. It was moved around. I remember it. You had come out here on a trip…

MARGENE: Oh I guess we did have one in the apartment.

HARVEY: Somebody had come out here on a trip. I was going to take a bath in the tub, and I wanted to watch the TV, some program was going on. So I wheeled the TV in there, and being a nut and not knowing enough about it, I wanted to change the station. Of course you didn’t have anything like a remote control, so I got up and I was still wet, then I touched the TV and I got the biggest shock. So I didn’t do that again.

MARGENE: Well I guess we did have a TV. I remember now.

KELLIE: What kind of programs did you watch on TV? Did you use it mostly for entertainment or did they have news broadcasts that you would watch?

HARVEY: Some movies…

MARGENE: Gee, I don’t remember.

HARVEY: I guess a few situation comedies. I don’t remember too much.

MARGENE: I don’t either.

HARVEY: It was a big deal to have a movie come into the house, because this was long before you could rent movies. You’d take whatever came over the airwaves.

KELLIE: There weren’t VCRs or anything?

HARVEY: No, they didn’t have them.

MARGENE: No, not at that time…I don’t really remember watching a lot of TV at first. Then I started watching the soap operas while I was ironing, but then the kids got after me so I decided I’d better quit it or I’d better iron at a different time.

HARVEY: Of course this was all black and white television back then. Color television didn’t come in till quite a bit later as far as we were concerned.

MARGENE: Yeah, that’s true.

KELLIE: Yeah, color didn’t come in till…was it the 60s?

HARVEY: I guess. I’d have to look it up.

MARGENE: I don’t remember when the color TV came in. The color TV was very very expensive when it first came out…

KELLIE: One last question—what were some of the big news events that you remember hearing about? How did you hear about them? Was it through radio or TV or did you just read about them in the paper?

HARVEY: Well, of course the assassination of John F. Kennedy was on both radio and TV. I guess I was at work when it happened. I don’t remember exactly.

MARGENE: Well I remember being at home and laying down on the sofa, and then I heard about it.

HARVEY: Before that, of course, was the bombing of Pearl Harbor. That was all on radio then. That was in ’41, and I remember distinctly that the radio was going all the time, tell all the news about the war.

To be continued…