Orson Clark-11/23/81 - Pg 17

Orson Clark: No, I kept the horses. When we moved and went to Oregon, I left the horses with a fellow and he got rid of them. He got a tractor.

Interviewer: How did you happed to go to Oregon?

Lucille Clark: I had two brothers up there and a sister.

Orson Clark: And I had been up there a time or two and I'll tell you that's one of the most productive places I ever saw.

Interviewer: What part of Oregon was it? Where is it at in Oregon?

Orson Clark: In eastern Oregon, out around Ontario.

Interviewer: I know that area, oddly enough. I got called up there on emergency. When was that, Ruth?

Ruth Knowlton: For migrant workers. It was after we moved to Salt Lake.

Interviewer: It was in the '70's.

Ruth Knowlton: Maybe '70, '72, '73.

Interviewer: They had a tremendous influx of Mexican-Americans and they didn't know what to do with them. I got an emergency call from the School Board up there asking me to come up there and give them some advice on what to do with all the Mexican-American students. So I went up and looked over the situation. I talked to the Mexican-Americans. A lot of them were coming as migrant workers. I guess that was the first time they had many Mexican-American workers there, at least as families. Oh, I know what it was. A large number of Mexican-Americans had settled out of the stream. Migrant workers were settled in those towns up there and they weren't going back to Texas. They didn't know what to do with them because they settled right there. So I advised them to bring in some Mexican-American school teachers who were Spanish speaking, to hire them from Texas. So they went down to Texas and hired about six or seven Mexican-American girls who had good reputations as teachers and spoke good English and good Spanish. They took them up there and before the year was up, all of them had married local boys. They didn't know what to do. So I got a telephone call, "What are we going to do? We bring up all these girls and they marry local boys." I said, "Well, bring up married school teachers. I spent about a week up there and it is beautiful. Where were you living? You were farming up there weren't you?

Orson Clark: Yes. We went up onto a farm in Vale.