A Personal Tribute to the "Real" Historic Twenty-Fifth Street

A Personal Tribute to the “Real” Historic Twenty-Fifth Street

By Fred Seppi

Long before city council members dubbed it “historic,” Twenty-Fifth Street in Ogden, Utah, was notorious in the predominantly LDS community, particularly the three blocks just east of the Union Station between Wall Avenue and Washington Boulevard. By day the area differed little from Twenty-Fourth or Twenty-Third, the business streets running parallel to it. But after seven in the evening, several establishments, including my father’s National Tavern, opened their doors and Twenty-Fifth Street lit up.

In those days, during the Big War, the train depot, located one-and-a-half blocks west of my father’s place, was where passengers—soldiers, most of them, on the way to their deployments overseas—had to disembark for a two-hour layover in one of the driest, most pious places in the United States of America.

A dance at Ogden’s Union Depot, circa 1930.

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Ours was a prosperous railroad center where train crews were changed, where food from the station commissary was prepared and loaded onto the diner, and where minor repairs to the cars, brakes, and engines were made following the steep and mountainous descent through Weber Canyon just east of town. After traveling seven hundred miles from Omaha on the Union Pacific tracks and before enduring another seven hundred miles to San Francisco on the Southern Pacific after this stop, for many civilians, Ogden was just an inconvenience. But for the soldiers on the way to an overseas assignment, it might have meant the last two hours of real entertainment stateside.

Everyone got off the train, and if they were lucky, Mr. John Steele was on the street to greet them. Mr. Steele was a grandfatherly, impeccably groomed gentleman who, toward the beginning of the evening, was the most respectable-looking person in town. He always wore a dark suit, white shirt, and red tie—in the coldest of winter he simply added a heavy sweater beneath the suit jacket—and attired this way, he might be taken for a college professor or a physician. Perhaps it was this gentle, elderly, furrow-browed appearance that encouraged the easterners to tap his shoulder and explain their situations and their confusion, walking along a street differing so radically from their native haunts in Boston. Could he direct them to a local lounge where they could buy a drink? By the time the train arrived, about eight o’clock p.m., Mr. Steele would be a few beers on his way to the moon and more than happy to help.

“Right here on Twenty-Fifth Street you have three city blocks of saloons. Just depends on what you want to drink. If you want Salt Lake beer, ask for Fisher’s; Ogden, then get Becker’s, and if you want to pay double the price, ask for Milwaukee beer and get Budweiser. Much better than the local stuff.”

If the visitors requested wine, Mr. Steele looked heavenward as if he might expect a vision. “For wine you’ll have to take a taxi two miles up the street to the state liquor store,” which he knew full well was near the more expensive homes in Ogden on Harrison Boulevard. There, he’d mention, they’d have to fill out an application and prove they’d lived twenty-one years before the liquor store manager would approve the purchase of two bottles of alcohol. “Wine or whiskey, no matter.”

“But we only want one glass each,” the visitors might object.

“Then you better settle for beers in Freddie’s saloon, right here,” Mr. Steele would say, pointing to my father’s bar and ending the dialogue with a wink for any witnesses he thought he might have entertained.

We never did find out much about Mr. Steele. There were rumors around that the drama department at Weber College had employed him until the administration found out about his drinking habits and his escapades in the bad part of town. Dad once said that Mr. Steele found the bars on Twenty-Fifth Street paid him more for his acting abilities merely walking the street, greeting strangers, and enticing them to enter the various establishments than he could ever make teaching drama to youngsters at the college.

My mother, my youngest sister, and I, inside our 1931 Chevrolet, angled to the curb, were usually among the Twenty-Fifth Street spectators on weekend evenings. Parking on “Two-Bit Street,” as the town teetotalers called it, was at least as appealing as staying at home listening to the Montgomery Ward Airline radio—an imposing appliance, which stood on four legs like the thirty-inch console television that would one day replace it—with an aerial wire that pierced the wall and ended ten feet above the rooftop. Hopefully there would be no thunderstorms between Denver and Salt Lake City, replacing the human voice with static—and certainly here on Twenty-Fifth Street, the show went on, rain or shine, the comedy of real life, music, pathos.

In his hometown of Ruffrè, in northern Italy, my father would have been more than respectable, but in Ogden of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s he was anything but. His establishment is now a tavern called Brewskis. Inside, the long, hand-carved bar with its ten stools has been moved from the west wall to the east wall. But the tables on the west, the two pool tables in the center of the room, the bandstand, and the restroom near the back door are still the same, as are the gaudy neon signs and beer displays behind the front windows.

In those bygone years, every weekend the pool tables disappeared to accommodate a small dance area, the local college band, and just enough room between tables to seat the customers who found that slumming on Twenty-Fifth Street for the cost of several ten-cent beers was enjoyable and economical.

The main attraction for much of the town, though, was what went on outside the bars on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Even the local gentry, who would never be seen in a drinking establishment, could be found parked on the street, enjoying the camaraderie of the crowd—entertained by antics of the half-schnockered, as well as by simple friendly conversation. The music of the day spilled out along the street; a little jazz but mostly Benny Goodman’s romantic songs: “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” “I’ll Be Seeing You,” and “Harbor Lights.” And then there was the fashion show, courtesy of men and women disembarking the eight o’clock train. The gentility of Boston and New York sifted in among the gold miners, cowboys, and bronc riders, their clothing presaging styles that wouldn’t reach us until six months hence—astonishing to women like my mother and her closest friends, Consolata and Virginia.

Twenty-Fifth Street, circa 1930.

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Like many people, my parents would park the Chevy on Twenty-Fifth and spend a couple of hours watching the show on the sidewalks—which probably reminded my folks of evenings sitting in the old-world piazza where their townspeople would gather and mingle. We preferred the spot in front of the three-story building in the middle of the block, the building housing my dad’s bar on the first floor. On the second and third floors above it was the Shy Ann, known to be the brothel over which Mary Belle, as I’ll call her, presided. My parents would cast knowing glances whenever they saw a soldier meet a pretty girl, talk a while, and then accompany her into a tavern or into the Shy Ann itself. But viewing these encounters was of no interest to me at all. Weekend nights on Twenty-Fifth Street mattered to me for three reasons: number one, the treats—root beer, candy, and ice cream brought to our car by the visiting wives of the Trentini farmers or Twinkies and candy bars brought by my father from the bar; number two, playing with kids my age; and number three, the musical entertainment provided by the Salvation Army Band.

My parents looked forward to sitting on Twenty- Fifth Street because it afforded the possibility of meeting old farmer friends who worked seven days a week to provide vegetables, meat, and milk for the community as they tried to eke out a meager income to sustain themselves and their families. The farming community surrounding Ogden City had many immigrant farmers from the same Italian-speaking region as my parents, Trentino, in the Tyrolean Alps. On Saturday nights, whole families of the Trentini convened in their cars along this stretch of road.

By and by, the farmers and their older boys entered the bars to drink a few beers and discuss events of the past week—mostly politics, the economy, and some personal aspects of their lives. The firstgeneration Trentini wives, brought up with the virtues of the old country, wouldn’t be caught dead in a bar. Crossing that threshold would be left to the second-generation Trentini, the wives who accompanied their husbands for a night out. Dancing in the bars cost a couple of beers, much less than the five-dollar admission fee to either the White City or Berthana dance halls cloistered on the upper, more respected part of Twenty-Fifth. The bars on lower Twenty-Fifth Street realized their economic advantage and so started clearing enough floor space for some dancing.

The author, Fred Seppi, as a child.

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Older women like my mother instead gathered two or three at a time in friends’ cars to gossip. These informal meetings did not require a prior telephone call to set up a time and date for a visit, even among the closest friends, as prescribed by the day’s etiquette.

Meanwhile we kids sat in the back seats eating treats and playing games: checkers, tic-tac-toe, and sometimes the new game called Monopoly. But often Monopoly extended beyond the two-hour limit for parking in a single location, and we had to disband prematurely without a clear winner—or without me having my fill of the stories the mothers told, which I would be relating far into the future.

The treats and games quickly lost their appeal when the women got together per chiacchierare, an Italian phrase pronounced like the cackle of a hen. What I learned about the Trentini community from these chiacchierare amazed me. Often I’d lose a game simply because I became more interested in hearing about Mr. P’s drinking problem or the details concerning the concealment in a shed of Mr. R’s homemade wine or when and where the grapes from California were to be delivered. Or how Mrs. B, during her illness, learned that Mr. B was courting Widow C.

One thing I found hard to understand when discussion centered around the Shy Ann and Mary Belle was the degree to which Mrs. Rauzi found Mary Belle to be the equivalent of a suffragist and a modern, independent American woman, while my mother viewed Mary Belle as a tool of Lucifer and an embarrassment to the Trentini community. As soon as I developed a losing streak in the games, my mother would glance toward the back seat and me. The other women in the front seat, after noting mother’s wink, quickly changed the subject to my dad’s rose garden or some other innocuous thing. But before long they were back talking about why the young T’s or the second-generation P’s were getting a divorce because they weren’t old enough to understand the rigors of married life.

Of course, part of the wonderful spectacle on those evenings could be credited to alcohol, much to the dismay of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (many of whose adherents were in attendance). Yes, there were disagreements between friends sitting around a bar table, disagreements that ended up with fisticuffs either in the center of the bar or on the street curb outside. Although we always tried to avoid a parking place that might become a boxing ring, there were occasions when we happened to park right in the middle of a dispute—such as the night when a burly man was knocked down against the front of our car onto our double-steel bumper, necessitating an emergency call from Dad’s bar to the police. Once the police had hauled the brawlers away and Dad had cleaned the blood off his bumper with the bar towel he always had draped over his arm to wait on bar patrons, my mother (ever the pragmatist) said, “I hope he finds a clean towel for the customers.”

For those of the LDS faith who ran our town, Twenty-Fifth Street was a disgrace, especially the threeblock stretch on the north side between the Union Station and the Broom Hotel on Washington Boulevard. But for many—those in transit on the trains and the many farmers who had emigrated from Trentino to Weber County—it was a refuge, a place to talk politics, economy, or whatever topic governed the local news. And, of course, to listen to the music and to dance.

The saloons had limited space, but every Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday at five p.m., the chairs and tables in Dad’s bar were crowded together to permit the half-circular stage resting with its flat side against the wall to be lowered into position to accommodate Mr. Pilcher’s five-piece band. Mr. Pilcher played the violin, and his orchestra consisted of coronet, trombone, bass drum, viola, and on occasion a singer to render the Tommy Dorsey- Glenn Miller genre of song popular during the war. Since the dance floor was very small, during the summer the entry doors were left open so couples could dance outside in the fresh air, and of course, the sound of music filled the cars at the curb.

A calendar from the National Tavern.

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During the musical intermissions every hour or so, Mr. Pilcher himself stood by the opened door of the National Tavern while his musicians mingled with the customers and accepted the drinks they sponsored. Mr. Pilcher had devised a collection bag, something like a sock that hung from his violin. He came outside to play Strauss waltzes on his violin and graciously thanked anyone walking by or standing on the sidewalk for their contributions. Somehow his clever arm movements allowed him to continue playing “Blue Danube” while he picked coins out of the stocking and put them into his pocket without missing a note. It was one trick for getting by during hard times.

Some nights, Mr. Pilcher’s musicians had competition from the Salvation Army band directly across the street. The maestro’s name was General Toscano (he was in the army, after all), which was close enough to be confused with the name Toscanini, a man a few years older and more well known, but to me, equally famous. Nevertheless, the adults seemed amused by what I couldn’t understand: Maestro Toscano’s name implied an adult man from the region of Tuscany, Italy—an adult of some wealth and appreciation. And since in Italian the suffix -ini means little or childlike, Maestro Toscanini was therefore the little, insignificant orchestra leader from Tuscany.

The entire Army orchestra consisted of one trumpet, one violin, a piccolo, castanets, a drum, cymbals, and a chorus of five Salvationettes dressed in red and black. To my young ears this band rivaled the New York Philharmonic. Conducted by General Toscano, the Army always played eight numbers, half of which were either Neapolitan songs or operatic melodies. Before each selection the band played in its half hour on stage (which was a portion of sidewalk next to the curb) the maestro explained the composition and something about the composer. Of course, nine times of ten the composer was Verdi. And the compositions were all the well-known arias often heard on radio soap opera commercials, such as “Brindisi” from La Traviata or the elephant march from Aida. Come to think of it, every school child was singing the toreador song from Carmen: “Oh! Toreodory / Don’t spit on the floory, / Use the cuspidory, / That’s what it’s fory.”

And the child that I was, listening in the parking stall to these concerts, I became a devotee of opera forever.

But beyond the boisterous spectacle on Twenty- Fifth Street there was the sorrow of the war. How many young soldiers and sailors walked the pavement to meet the girls who motioned to them and asked, “Buy me a drink, soldier?” Together they entered the bar, only to emerge a half hour or so later and pass through the door to the Shy Ann.

Unlike my father, most Trentini immigrants in the vicinity of Ogden resided on family farms, planting and harvesting crops as they had back in Italy. Generally, those who stayed on the farm did quite well thanks to the agricultural economic policies of the U.S. government. Because they knew how to improve the alkali soil near the Great Salt Lake, they could buy that otherwise unfarmable land for almost nothing and have it producing in a short period of time.

Pete Rauzi often discussed with my parents how he was able to acquire his large corn and vegetable fields at a reasonable cost. When he first arrived in Weber County from the coal mines in Superior, Wyoming, he bought a few acres of seemingly worthless land for $1,000 he borrowed from First Security Bank in Ogden for one year. Periodically he drove his wagon to a friend’s sheep camp in the mountains east of the city and transferred sheep dung to his farm to enrich the soil. Well before his loan was to be repaid he returned the $1,000 to Mr. Squires, head of the bank, and asked for another $1,000 to buy additional acreage.

The banker found it hard to believe the land could be so profitable. When Mr. Rauzi requested a fourth loan, Mr. Squires suggested that he might be manufacturing and selling some hooch in violation of the prohibition laws. Mr. Squires wanted to see this miraculously profitable farm for himself. After touring the hospital-clean stables that housed the cows and milk production and seeing the abundance of tomatoes, corn, and the like, and plants common to Italy such as flat beans, zucchini, eggplant, grapes, and peppers—the seeds for which had all been sent to Pete Rauzi from relatives in Trentino—Mr. Squires was impressed enough to approve any additional loans Mr. Rauzi might apply for. Good for Mr. Squires. But no one in the Trentino community ever doubted that the liquids derived from the California grapes arriving nightly by truck at the beginning of each autumn also helped make the bank loan payments. What Mr. Squires didn’t know couldn’t hurt him.

In general, the first generation of Trentini immigrants found success by either staying with their parents to help on the farms or by attending the local agricultural college, studying methods to improve production efficiency. The Trentino farming community was large enough in Weber County that the Trentini formed their own social organization called the Friendly Club for periodic social gatherings. The club thrives even today; within the past twenty years the Ogden chapter has hosted two of the quaternary meetings of the Trentini nel Mondo International Club, with officials from the old country in attendance.

The original Trentini immigrants were such a cohesive and insular group that many of the wives saw no need to learn English. Whenever Mrs. Prevedel came to downtown Ogden from her country farm and my mother was not home, Mrs. Prevedel had no difficulty telling me in the Nonese dialect what she wanted. I understood her perfectly from listening to mother and her friends Consolata and Virginia, who visited every second week. But, since I could not speak Nonese, I had great difficulty making Mrs. Prevedel understand that mother would be home on the next bus from downtown, and that she should have a chair for a few minutes. And when my mother did arrive there was the discussion about how difficult Mrs. Prevedel found coming to America (meaning downtown Ogden) when she was content to stay in Little Italy (that is, her farm) where she understood her own language. Translated: Mrs. Prevedel felt out of place in downtown Ogden and preferred to stay home on the farm where her neighbor friends spoke her native language. Her husband and other Trentini farmers who wanted to sell their produce in town—along with immigrants like my father and their families who established businesses and homes in Ogden—had to learn English to live and trade among their neighbors.

At a relatively early age, I became aware that the religious community to which all of my friends belonged, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, strongly approved of mother’s ethnic culinary abilities, but would have certainly and strongly disapproved of my father’s business calling. Although friends knew and said little, strangers who asked what my dad did for a living were told he was a co-owner with Ralph Profaizer, a fellow Trentino, of the grocery store located in West Weber. In those days, when so few had automobiles, that store in the countryside could have been in Chicago, and few were curious enough to want further information.

Mr. Newey, my friend Joe’s dad and our next-door neighbor, was constantly after my father to apply for a job at Southern Pacific Railroad. Mr. Newey was one of the executives who would evaluate the application and be sure to hire Dad at a better salary than he could ever make delivering beer to customers’ tables on Twenty-Fifth. My three older sisters and I, overhearing Mr. Newey’s offers, hoped on

hope that they would take hold. But each time, Dad simply replied that he knew nothing about railroads and even had trouble sometimes speaking English, so what kind of work would he be doing at Union Station—a janitor, ticket seller, or some other menial duty? No, he liked to take care of his own business, on occasion giving younger people his opinion on their problems. Not lucrative, but very satisfying. Listening to Dad’s denials, we prying siblings would shake our heads in disappointment. We didn’t really care about job details. But Dad did. To us, being able to say “My father works for Southern Pacific” or “He has a job at Hill Air Force Base” would mean we’d have a chance to fit in, to be accepted—hardly possible were the truth known: “He owns the National Tavern on Twenty-Fifth.”

The author’s parents.

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I was always walking a tightrope between the few friends who knew about the bar and where it was and those probing for information. It was a predicament I detested—and probably why I avoided large social gatherings, a habit that persists even today.

In contrast, my high school friends Tom Pappas and Eddie Simoni—also first-generation immigrant sons—enjoyed relative social ease. Eddie was a star swimming athlete, popular in high school for himself alone and very proud that his father had become half-owner of the National Tavern. Eddie’s family were devout Catholics: when his dad Joe was at the bar, Eddie’s mother went door to door to sell Douay- Rhiems Bibles to the Mormons, a very expensive edition illustrated with paintings by Giotto, da Vinci—all the famous Catholics. Even our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Newey, a pillar of the LDS Twenty-Second Ward, bought a bible—to her dismay when she learned it was the Catholic Bible, not the Protestant King James. But the full-color plates of the art were worth the mistake.

As for Tom, his family owned the tavern called The Club a block from Union Station. Tom was very popular in high school. His dad had given him a Buick Roadmaster in exchange for Tom’s promise to graduate. Mr. Pappas was inordinately proud of his Greek heritage; the Greeks had founded western civilization long before the local church was founded in New York and then transplanted to Utah, so no one could dictate what was moral or not to him. Whereas my parents discouraged my sisters and me from learning Italian, Tom, like all Greek children, was required to learn to speak his parents’ language fluently and to take great pride in his heritage. Like his father, Tom would not bow down to any religion but the Orthodox. Quite a difference from one of Italian ethnicity, who might be cowed further into social withdrawal by reports in the daily news of the Mano Nera terrorizing New York and Chicago’s Capone spreading corruption and death.

The past harbors some regrets, but also it also supplies wonderful memories that seem even more vivid now, some seventy years later. Cameras, film, and development were too expensive for families of modest means; photography was an indulgence reserved for the few occasions when a cherished relative or friend visited. I don’t need a photograph, anyway, to remember Twenty-Fifth Street. From the twelfth-floor restaurant on top of the Hotel Ben Lomond, the contrast between those few blocks and the rest of Ogden was stark. Back then, one-hundred-watt globes lit all the other streets, one fixture in the center of the street and two at the ends of each block. One small area of town, tainted perhaps according to some, was bright and alive. The rest of the city died at sundown.

Bus Widmer and His Clevelanders playing at the Ben Lomond Hotel, December 14, 1935.

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I don’t need a photograph to confirm what I can see clearly in the mind’s eye; sometimes, though, it’s an image more clouded than I’d like.

Tonight, on a Sunday evening in June 1939, it is already 6:30 p.m. We drive down Twenty-Fifth Street to Union Station, turn over to Twenty-Fourth Street, back up three blocks to Washington Boulevard, over to Twenty-Fifth, down Twenty-Fifth, and around again three times. Nope. We’re too late to find a parking place in front of the Shy Ann or the National Tavern or the Salvation Army across the street. So for the first time I can remember, my father has decided to park on the first block from Union Station in a vacant angle parking stall on the south side of the street. Strange the difference in entertainment between the north side of Twenty-Fifth and the south, where people of all color and ethnicity can walk.

But luck is still with us: we can still enjoy the concert in front of the Salvation Army a few doors away. About two years before, the Army had converted the old Lyceum Theater into a shelter for all people in need. You can still see the outline of the theater ticket box office, now a fashion window advertising the menu for the day. Tonight the menu reads chicken stew, exactly the same as the last time we parked in this stall. Some of the brickwork on the building has decayed during its twenty years of existence, but the four Doric columns holding the front face intact appear as polished as those in front of any other theater in town. Oh, look! The door has opened and all ten members of the symphony have come outside and lined up on the street curb double file. But something’s wrong. The trumpet player hurriedly goes back through the door, and the maestro has not yet appeared. Maestro Toscano has been looking rather old. I hope he is not sick. After about five minutes of apprehension, everything is all right again. The trumpeter had forgotten to bring out the donation pot on its stand, and the maestro never showed up before the stage and players were set.

At the center of the front row are a boy and a girl, identical in looks and manner, facial features, and even in their clothing. They are the young twins of the maestro. Their violins are as polished and well-kept as they themselves. Behind them stands the trumpeter, a nervous black man at least six feet tall who continually wipes his brow with a starkly contrasting white hanky to suppress the heat of the evening. You really cannot see all of the instruments in this orchestra from here, but the two instrumentalists on the ends of the second row are obvious. The girl wearing a Mexican dress plays the castanets, and the boy on the other end has the cymbals. During concerts past, the maestro explained that he is a devotee of French and Italian opera and only occasionally plays Mexican music. So he seldom uses the castanets. He has this girl because she is so gracious and beautiful and seems to attract larger contributions to the donation pot supervised by the trumpeter. And at the end of each concert the maestro enjoys taking a quarter from his pocket and personally tipping the beautiful castanet player.

As for the man with the cymbals, he never plays in a composition either and is not handsome enough to be attractive. The maestro uses him at the beginning of each selection to make sure the audience remains awake.

The Prevedels and deGiorgeos have been late parking too, so the two farm wives see our car and crowd into the front seat to chiacchierare about the week’s Trentini social news. After little more than a half hour of gossip, we note commotion across the street in front of The Club, a lounge—no, of course, nothing so seedy as a bar—run by the Greek brothers. We can see that people have formed a circle around two men who seem to have gotten into a fistfight. From our location across the street the scuffle looks like a boxing match to settle some score. The police have been called to stop the turmoil. When they arrive it looks as though they arrest only one person, rather than two, and haul him off.

Mr. Steele, who has witnessed the conflagration, has noticed our car parked on the duller part of the street. My father explains that we had been too late for the premium parking and that was the reason we parked here in front of the Porters and Waiters Club.

My mother asks Mr. Steele what was going on across the street and how come the police only put one man, not two, into the paddy wagon.

“The preacher of the Second Methodist Church for colored people was up to his old shenanigans again,” says Mr. Steele. “The rev stopped his protests, lying down in the middle of the intersection of State Street and South Temple in Salt Lake, when the police finally refused to erect barriers to prevent him from getting run over. So he moved to Ogden, Twenty-Fifth and Washington. But then, the police let him know no more barriers in Ogden either. So now he protests on Twenty-Fifth Street.”

“What did he do?” my mother asks.

“What did he do?” Mr. Steele repeats. “He walked down the north side of Twenty-Fifth Street just like he belonged there. You know colored people can’t do that. A white guy told him to go to the south side where he belongs, over here in front of the Porters and Waiters Club, and he refused. So the white guy roughed him up pretty good.”

“But the police only arrested one person, not two, didn’t they?” my mother asks.

“Yes, because the rev was the only one that broke the law and caused the disturbance. The white guy was in the right. And the rev insists on repeating

every now and then, even though he always gets beat up. You know some of the porters or waiters on the Union Pacific or Southern Pacific trains who are new at their jobs and aren’t familiar with the laws in Ogden occasionally make the mistake of walking over to the north side of the street; but when a resident of the city points out the law to them they graciously follow directions and go to the Porters and Waiters Club across the street for overnight accommodations until their train returns the next day to bring them home. But the rev is stubborn like a mule and continually returns with his protests. Like the rev is going to change the world and get his way.”

Later, tucked in my bed, I decide the south side of Twenty-Fifth Street is no fun—unless we’re parked in front of the Salvation Army on the second block from the station. The Army concerts with the castanet lady are still okay.

That night’s events made me begin to wonder about things like justice, truth, rights, dignity. My eyes opened just a bit to see that people in power or in established groups thought they knew ultimate truths that in reality were simply arbitrary, unjust, and harmful.

Tonight, in the twenty-first century, I’m waiting for the pizza I’ve ordered from Brewskis. The third floor is gone, and the entry from the front sidewalk to the apartments above the bar has been bricked over. During my childhood, that entry was guarded by an ornate frieze of hand-carved demons and angels, reportedly sculpted by the same artist who built the bar counter inside my father’s tavern—as well as the intricate meshwork adorning the altar in a local church. The artist was an alcoholic whose name no one considered important enough to record.

The intricately carved doorway, with its bright neon sign mounted above, announced the residence of Mary Belle and her business. The spelling on the sign was, however, a consternation for the city council.

Mary Belle, a Trentina like my mother and her friends Consolata and Virginia, owned or managed several of the buildings on Twenty-Fifth Street. She evidently pursued her business exclusively on the second and third floors of these buildings, including the one housing my father’s tavern. She preferred to remain behind the scenes, but her enormous influence upon the city council members, all men in those days, was obvious.

One of the first newspaper articles about her that I remember described a meeting in which council members objected to the sign above the entrance to her establishment above the National Tavern. Originally the sign in bright red letters above the door, Cheyenne, referred to a western town 450 miles east, which was considered Ogden’s only valid contender for rodeos of national importance. After several years, Mary Belle’s marketing and entrepreneurial instincts suggested that changing the spelling to a more descriptive homonym might increase profits significantly. The city council continually voted to require Mary Belle to change the name Shy Ann back to the correct spelling. Ogden’s Mayor Harman Peery had succeeded in competing seriously with the capital of Wyoming for the title “Rodeo Capital of the World.” Mary Belle had simply used the name of that city for her establishment as an honor to the mayor’s achievement.

That night’s events made me begin to wonder about things like justice, truth, rights, dignity.

Her argument: the city council certainly could not make her change the name simply because she had displayed a phonetic spelling over her door. According to the news article, most of the council did not know the meaning of the word phonetic and after some private discussion and, likely, tacit memories evoked by Mary Belle, the council somehow forgot their objections. The sign above the entrance remained incorrectly spelled until Mary Belle decided to retire years later.

My most indelible memory of Mary Belle concerns the local high school, which still sits on top of the bench about three miles from historic Twenty-Fifth. No question why that commanding edifice is still referred to as the “Castle on the Hill.” It and two other buildings were erected in the city during the depths of the Depression. In the 1930s, when the national economy appeared darkest, the federal government initiated two major make-work programs: the Work Projects Administration (WPA) and the Public Works Administration (PWA). When few people had enough money for necessities, these federal

governmental efforts provided work and along with it, tangible evidence that everything would be all right again one day in economically devastated areas.

During this time, the WPA erected a building in Ogden on Twenty-Fifth Street to house the offices of the Forest Service. The edifice was ornate, adopting the fashionable art-deco style of architecture of the Chrysler building in New York. City governments that could show a need for the construction of municipal buildings to improve their city’s functions also had access to funding from the federal government.

The Ogden city council, of course, decided that old city hall needed replacement, and in accordance with the federal regulations, requested one million dollars to build a new city hall constructed in the same art-deco style as the Forest Service building. At another meeting, the council voted to petition for funds to rebuild the overcrowded local high school, asking for a mere quarter of a million dollars to construct an addition to the existing building. A week or so after the request for the high school appropriation was announced, the newspapers reported an emergency council session requested by a citizen known only as Mary Belle. During this subsequent meeting, Mary Belle insisted that if the council could seek the one million dollars from the federal government to build a new city hall for city and county employees, it could find it necessary to ask for a similar sum to build a new high school in the same attractive art-deco style for the kids who really needed improved educational facilities.

Naturally, council members were reluctant to submit a request for two expensive buildings when it seemed unlikely that even the city hall would be approved. But, according to the Examiner, after a short deliberation (and likely private conversations between some council members and Mary Belle, recalling old times), the council voted that a new high school, appointed with modern equipment and decorative architecture, would be necessary regardless of the additional cost.

Editorials at the time took the city council to task for not giving Mary Belle the credit due her for the artistic masterpiece that was our high school. Even so, I recall school teachers who, some years later, occasionally criticized Mary Belle in class, but never explained why exactly she was so bad. Few of them credited her for the beautiful building in which they worked. Even Consolata, Virginia, and my mother, sitting on our mohair sofa and chair, expressed their disapproval of Mary Belle. Consolata pondered once what kind of art and statues might lurk behind the red Shy Ann sign they had to look at when they parked at the curb on Twenty-Fifth Street to watch the weekend dramas unfold. Whenever I stopped playing with my toy cars on the floor and seemed too interested in the mystery they were pondering, the topic of their conversation abruptly changed. Little did those three know that a few years hence their little Freddie would be able to tell them that no disgusting décor was evident on the third floor. In fact, Mary Belle’s halls were more subdued than those found in the Hotel Ben Lomond.

A crowd gathered on Twenty-Fifth Street to see Herbert Hoover, 1932.

utah state historical society

A half-century ago, Ogden’s gentry was more than disconcerted when Al Capone, the infamous Chicago millionaire Mafioso, reportedly congratulated the people of the town for their free enterprise and their famous street. My dad’s bar, the National Tavern, was situated in the middle of the block amid all the shops and stores on the north side of street—the white side. The tavern faced Willie’s Barber Shop on the south side, two doors east of the Salvation Army and the Porters and Waiters Club. On the day of my father’s retirement party, Willie had to cross the street to the National Tavern with a bag over his head to attend.

Time and wisdom relieved the racism of those days. My father retired; I often wait in my car outside of the building that housed his National Tavern and Mary Belle’s Shy Ann for one of Brewskis takeout pizzas. These days, something is missing from Twenty-Fifth Street: authenticity. The authentic Twenty-Fifth Street included the rabble mixing with the religious and dance music creating the background for the gossip of my mother and

her friends. It included the tavern operator who befriended a civic-minded madam and a black barber, all that the upstanding city councilmen wished to eliminate. Inside the Summit Hotel on Twenty- Fourth Street is a lounge known, until recently, as Electric Alley; the hotel called the upscale restaurant on the west side of its lobby the Porters’ and Waiters’ Club; and the café on the east side was named after Mary Belle. They were strange, though conspicuous, tributes. Thirty years ago Twenty-Fifth Street was designated “Historic Twenty-Fifth Street,” but its history is largely erased and forgotten. For many years I kept a scrapbook of articles clipped from the Ogden Standard-Examiner, stories and photographs that pertained to Mary Belle. When I think of what Ogden was and is, what an individual citizen, an immigrant’s daughter, can do to shape a legacy for generations to come, I think of her.

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Fred Seppi, a lifelong resident of Ogden, Utah, retired from Hill Air Force Base in 1986, where he was employed as a physicist. He is completing a memoir, The Boy Under the Stairs.

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WEB EXTRA: UHQ has published several memoirs throughout the years. Read some of them at history.utah. gov/uhq-memoirs.