Interviewee: Reinard W. Brandley
Interviewer: S. Turner
 
S. Turner: It is 1997 and I am sitting in Grayson Dennis Fletchers home and we are talking with Reinard Brandley who came up from in California. You grew up in Stirling I suppose e that you lived here up until you went to high school.

Reinard W. Brandley: I lived here through high school.

S. Turner: When did you leave?

Reinard W. Brandley: I left after high school.

S. Turner: And then you never came back after that except to visit.

Reinard W. Brandley:That’s right.

S. Turner: Okay so we are going to want to concentrate on I think on those first seventeen eighteen years of your life. We can talk a lot about your life after that also. This is to remember the purpose of the project. I am sure that you don mind if we concentrate on that.

Reinard W. Brandley: That’s fine, whatever.

S. Turner: Were you born in your grandpa’s store, in the apartment there?

Reinard W. Brandley: No I really don’t know.

S. Turner: That’s what the Stirling history boos says so I just wondered.

Reinard W. Brandley: I really don’t know I suspect that I was born in the hospital in Lethbridge. I haven’t really researched it to find out.

S. Turner: What were your first memories of your grandfather or where were you living when you first remember.

Reinard W. Brandley: Well we first lived upstairs in grandfather’s store. Just down the street here. Shortly there after I don’t remember any of that because I was very young, my father and mother lived in a home just next to Grace and Dennis’s, just to the north we lived there, well I lived there basically all the time I was there in Stirling. My father lived there for probably about twenty years after I left there. When he retired from farming they moved up to Lethbridge. So I lived in this house just to the north of here during that period.  

S. Turner: Now I have been told that part of that house was a bishop store house or was at one time. Do you know anything about that?

Reinard W. Brandley: Never heard of it

S. Turner: Okay could you tell me a little bit about you dad and your mom.

Reinard W. Brandley: Well both of them were remarkable people I had a great deal of respect for both of them. My mother in particular, as long as I can remember one of the major things she stressed was education it was never a case of if you go to collage it was when you go to collage the same also with my father. Along with that my father was a patient man and ended up devoting a great deal of time training me to run the equipment on the farm and take car of the animals on the farm. Basically live a proper live, he game me the fundamentals that were necessary to make sure that when I first stared my life. He always gave me great deal of credit for doing a good job giving me the confidence that I believe is necessary to make a success of your self later on in life. He was on\e that I never argue or fight or anything else this was a relationship that is almost unheard of. Mother used to be so proud of it and I told her that the reason why was because my dad would never fight with her. Which was probably true his brother was much spunkier than my father was and that was probably a reason why. If she was with another man she would have fought more but never with my father, never harsh words. They set the highest standards and the greatest ideals and with the whole family it was the most important thing while you were young was to get the best education possible. That will put you in the position where you
can do w3hat you want to do in life.

S. Turner: I guess you still believe that.

Reinard W. Brandley: Very much so, very much so

S. Turner: It is interesting that both of your folks praised education. What kinds of educations did they have?

Reinard W. Brandley: Mother was a, I think she graduated from collage. She was from Farmington Utah and lived in Salt Lake City.  She lived Farmington the early years of her live and then lived in Salt Lake City afterwards. Her father was an attorney and she had a collage education. My father went to Salt Lake one year I am not sure which school it was at but was post-secondary education. That’s not where he met my mother he didn’t know her then he did not have more then one year of pasty high school. My mother did have a collage education. They were both pushing really hard for education. My father wanted me to be a dentist; he said that dentists have the best ranking in the world. He wanted me to be a dentist, he didn’t push me into it, and he wanted me to be what I wanted to be. I selected the field of engineering and I quite enjoy it.

S. Turner: I presume that he was happy with what you chose wasn’t he. Your mom was highly educated, you dad had one year of school. Do you think that they pushed education as a child for you a little
more than other families and you sisters?

Reinard W. Brandley: I think probably.

S. Turner: Were they concerned about what kind of grades that you got?

Reinard W. Brandley: They were concerned we didn’t give them much mean to be concerned I was a pretty good student.

S. Turner: Going back those rows that you were talking about, was that with a horse or was that with a tractor.

Reinard W. Brandley: With a tractor. My father sold his horsed in 1928 to buy a tractor and a big old heavy duty combine. He was the first one to have a combine In Stirling; he was the first one to have plumbing in his house in Stirling, he was the first to do a lot of different things here in Stirling, a very aggressive individual.   

S. Turner: First one to have plumbing so I presume he was the first on to have a pump in his cistern then.

Reinard W. Brandley: We had a basement in the house and the basement leaked so we dug a well next to the basement we pump out by hand all the time until we got a electric pump to pull it out to keep the water out of the basement so when we put plumbing in the house we put a pump in that well and we used the water just for the toilets and we put a pump in the cistern and we would use it for the others, so we had a dual system to conserve water. They had the regular bathroom and the first one in town all the ones prior to that were the one or two door ones out back.

S. Turner: So you are no stranger to outhouses then.

Reinard W. Brandley: No stranger to outhouses.

S. Turner: The planning in that is really interesting to me they’d have water from the well in the basement going around to the toilets and into the showers to.

Reinard W. Brandley: Just the toilets

S. Turner: Just the toilets. Where they full of rust all the time?

Reinard W. Brandley: No it wasn’t full of rust this was a very shallow well it was just about three feet deeper than the basement and it was just outside the basement. You would pump it out and it would
keep the water from coming into the basement. 

S. Turner: Did you have your turn at pumping it when it was a manual pump?

Reinard W. Brandley: That was my morning and evening chore one of them, along with milking the cows.

S. Turner: I bet that you were got when you got an electric pump.

Reinard W. Brandley: That was life changing.

S. Turner: So you helped your dad farm all the time.

Reinard W. Brandley: Exactly, as a matter of fact by the age of fourteen I was running the combine. We hired an eighteen year old kid to drive the tractor.

S. Turner: That was pretty common in those days wasn’t it? 

Reinard W. Brandley: Yup

S. Turner: For young kids to be running big machinery.

Reinard W. Brandley: It was, I would run the combine, my dad would run the truck and we would hire someone to run the tractor.

S. Turner: Did you have any thing besides wheat or grain.

Reinard W. Brandley: We had flax a couple years, Mostly wheat.

S. Turner: So you didn’t have any horses he got rid of all of them.

Reinard W. Brandley: We had one horse and I had to ride that horse every morning and I had to drive the cows up to grandpa’s pasture and back. The little horse I remember her well she was shy every time a pheasant would jump or a tumble weed would go across in front of her I would end p on the ground. We were always out in the furthest part of the field and she would go home, and I had to walk home.

S. Turner: Was the community pasture still going when you were a kid?

Reinard W. Brandley: We didn’t have a community pasture.

S. Turner: That you remember.

Reinard W. Brandley: We used Grandpa Brandley’s pasture

S. Turner: Was that behind his house.

Reinard W. Brandley: Ya

S. Turner: That is really interesting now did all the Brandley’s get together I mean there was your grandpas house and busses house just to the north and you guys lived right here.

Reinard W. Brandley: Wilber lived just down the hill and Noah lived across the road from where Petersons used to live which would be two blocks south and then a couple blocks east of the church. Most of the Brandley’s lived here, Willis lived in Raymond, Paul and them lived in Raymond.

S. Turner: What was live like there, I mean he had I forget but it was like seventeen children

Reinard W. Brandley: I think he had 23 all together

S. Turner: Most of them were up here.

Reinard W. Brandley: Most of them, all of them except for one was here Madeline was in Salt Lake City.

S. Turner: Was there big get together one a year

Reinard W. Brandley: Christmas and thanksgiving were always big dinners at grandpa’s house.

S. Turner: So everyone would come to grandpa’s house.

Reinard W. Brandley: Everybody, all the kids would meat in the kitchen and all the adults would meat in a very cramped little dining room they had in there. For some reason or the other I caught the favour of grandfather’s eye and I got to sit next to him at those dinners, At the expense of all the other younger members of the house. I enjoyed that.

S. Turner: How old were you when your grandpa left and went back down to Utah?

Reinard W. Brandley: He didn’t go back to Utah, he died up here. 

S. Turner: He died here and then they buried him down there.

Reinard W. Brandley: That’s right.

S. Turner: Okay I guess I am foggy in the brain. How old were you when he passed away? What year did he die? Roughly, you must have been eight or ten. So you remember your Grandpa really well then.

Reinard W. Brandley: I remember him fairly well I have got some interesting pictures. One in particular, he ran the store and I would go down and visit him at the store. He would give me a piece of meat or something to chew on. I have got one picture of me chewing on this piece of baloney that was probably a foot long and four inches in diameter. He fed me rather well I guess.

S. Turner: Your sister said that he was rather generous with his grandchildren.

Reinard W. Brandley: He was.

S. Turner: How often did you thin he would go down there, once a day maybe?

Reinard W. Brandley: Probably

S. Turner: Pop in to see grandpa to give you something. What was his store like?

Reinard W. Brandley: I don’t remember that well.

S. Turner: Probablyjust like an old time country store.

Reinard W. Brandley: Basically, That’s what my dad told me it was 

S. Turner: Do you remember anything about the telephone exchange and all that stuff?

Reinard W. Brandley: I don’t remember it but I have been told about it since then.

S. Turner: Do you have any particular memories about your granddad?

Reinard W. Brandley: Not really other than those Christmas and thanksgiving dinners and visiting him at the store, but I was pretty young when he died.

S. Turner: So like seven, eight, nine, that’s no very old.

Reinard W. Brandley: You forget about what happened way back then.

S. Turner: I do to and I am just forty-five. Well let’s change the subject a little bit, can you talk about what the school was like when you were going.

Reinard W. Brandley: Well it was a two story brick school house and we would wait outside until the bell rang and then we would march into the school we didn’t go into the rooms we just stayed outside and marched into the school there was two classes in each room classes one and two was Katherine Proctor. That was when I was in high school when I was in grades one and two Dodie Oslund and Oslunds daughter was our teacher. We went up through the different grades, we used to have a, I remember one there sitting up on the second floor and that big earthquake hit down in Helen Montana and I was sitting next to the wall, and this crack went up the wall next to me, I guess something that you remember the rest of your life, but the school didn’t fall down at all. I remember the big fire that we had when the school burned completely, the bell collapsed and came clanging down in the middle of the school.  

S. Turner: Did you witness that?

Reinard W. Brandley: Oh ya. We sat up here and watched that happen.

S. Turner: Were you glad or sad.

Reinard W. Brandley: Well I don’t know.

S. Turner: No school today. Did that happen during the school year?

Reinard W. Brandley: I don’t remember, I think it was in the summer time, I suspect that it was in the summer. I don’t remember seeing snow around the place when it happened. But it burnt to the ground. The brick walls fell down, they went back in and re built it. Today they wouldn’t be able to do that; it wouldn’t be able to withstand the slightest earthquake. Some of the thing I remember, in high school Bryant Stringham was the principal Mr. Bryant was the teacher. I remember some of the gags we used to pull on Mr. Stringham those were some fun stuff. A couple of the things that I remember, I probably shouldn’t be confessing to these. I met Bryant I met Bryant two years ago at a university of Alberta reunion. I told him about these so I guess that it is alright. We ended up in chemistry that we could mix up a couple of chemicals and come up with a little plank that we would dry and we put in ton the floor and we would step on it and blue flames would come out from the sides of your foot. So we made up some of these and we spread it around the room and nothing happened all day long, and then the last period of Latin three, a terrible course. 

S. Turner: Latin three?

Reinard W. Brandley: Latin three and Bryant were teaching and he was somewhat bored of I to I think, somebody knocked on the end of the door just about at the end of the period. Bryant got up and walked up to the door and every step he took there was a Bang! Bang! Bang! He stopped for a second and took another step and hit a particularly large one and a blue flame came out, he turned around and looked at us and he said am I doing this. Of course the class really enjoyed that, we used to have fun, periodically we used to have some good times. We weren’t all angels.

S. Turner: Thank goodness, why did they have you learning Latin three?

Reinard W. Brandley: Well Latin was an important course to have if you wanted to go to university back in those days. I don’t know why but they taught French and Latin in high school here. 

S. Turner: Did you use any Latin in collage.

Reinard W. Brandley: No

S. Turner: Okay just wondering.

Reinard W. Brandley: Our grade twelve were the standard exam but I am not sure if they give provincial exams here anymore but I got 51% in Latin in grade twelve and I was prouder of that 51% than I was of my 95% in algebra. Latin was a tough course and I wasn’t interested.

S. Turner: Was it required?

Reinard W. Brandley: Three years ago it was required and it started out French one would start one year and then the next year Latin one, and if you happened to be the wrong year you were stuck with Latin.

S. Turner: Or you were stuck with French.

Reinard W. Brandley: Ya but French was a piece of cake compared to Latin.

S. Turner: I believe it. Could you tell me a little bit more about your home, you said that it had a basement and you had to manually pump the water out when you were a kid. What was the kitchen like?

Reinard W. Brandley: Well we started out my father built the house it was basically a half basement. It had two bedrooms and a kitchen and a living room and a big front porch. As the family grew we filled in the porch. My bedroom ended up being the north east corner of the house which was the old porch. The other part was turned into an expansion into the living room. The kitchen, we expanded the kitchen to the south east, this is one of those houses that just kept growing.

S. Turner: It is still in the same place.

Reinard W. Brandley: The expansion into the kitchen, at breakfast I snuck over there, was to provide enough room so that we could put the bathroom in between the kitchen and the bedroom. And that was the first bathroom that was ever built in Stirling. There is a little interesting memory in that house, the front porch was a very large front porch full with of the house and probably about ten feet deep and the roof came over it and the big banisters that came out in front, mother always used to have hanging flower pot out there. my father had a unique method of disciplining my sister and I used to have a few scraps and when we got to a point where my father got to the point where he couldn’t stand it anymore he put on a pair of boxing gloves and he would put us out in the porch and tell us that when we had our problems sorted out we would come back in. We would really have at it. I came back several years after that and the neighbours used to tell me how much they used to enjoy watching those fights.

S. Turner: Was Mary older or younger than you.

Reinard W. Brandley: Mary is four years older.

S. Turner: So would she get the better of you some times.

Reinard W. Brandley: Well the first part of the year she could take me but then when I got big enough to take car of her we stopped fighting.

S. Turner: That’s unfair. Now I presume that you had a coal burning stove in the kitchen.

Reinard W. Brandley: Coal burning stove in the basement was but the stove in the kitchen was coal burning for cooking. Then we had a furnace in the basement and we had a room in the basement for coal and every year we would haul in some coal from Letbridge and put it in there and then we would take it and light up the furnace. The furnace was one that would come up in the middle of the house and you would end up with the four corners of the house would be cold and this would be hotter than a firecracker. But that was the type of heat that we had in the house.

S. Turner: And that was for all the time that you were in the house. I was so intrigued that I forgot whether you said that you had a cistern or not.

Reinard W. Brandley: Oh yes there was a cistern that we brought the ditch water in and chlorinated it and used it all winter. We ended up with the plumbing we put a pump in the well and we put a pump in the cistern. The cistern was used for the water that we cooked and drunk and that with, the well was used for everything else.

S. Turner: Do you remember having electricity there?

Reinard W. Brandley: We had electricity all the time I was there, well I cant say all the time because when I was really young we had Coleman lanterns, I don’t remember them that well but mother tells me about them. Then we put in the electricity I remember growing up in the attic and looking at the insulation that was up there and they had these insulators that would sit on top on the ceiling Joyce and the wires were running down through there to some ceiling lamps and that was basically all you had there were some ceiling lamps around the house. Real fire trap, I don’t know why all those houses didn’t all burn down. That was the type of insulation that we had

S. Turner: Were they bare wires or did they have insulators on them?

Reinard W. Brandley: They were insulated wires.

S. Turner: You always had electricity that you remember so I suspect that when natural gas came to town I suppose that you were already gone.

Reinard W. Brandley: I was already gone before that.

S. Turner: I bet that you remember the roads.

Reinard W. Brandley: I remember the roads. They were difficult to get through in the winter time. When we were here they had gravel on the roads

S. Turner: Did you help do that.

Reinard W. Brandley: No I never did help with any of that. But I remember that being done. The frost would hi them in the winter time and down in front of Spackman’s store there was always a big mud hole. And there was always another big mud hole in front of the post office; those were the two critical spots.

S. Turner: Maybe you went a lot to the post office in the worst part of the year. Was your bedroom freezing cold in the winter time?

Reinard W. Brandley: It was cold in the winter time. We had enough blankets it was no problem.

S. Turner: Now you had indoor plumbing does that mean that you had a bathtub as well a regular bathtub with running water.

Reinard W. Brandley: When we brought the plumbing in when I was young we had a big metal bath tub it was probably four feet long by one and a half feet wide and a couple of feet high. We would set it up in the kitchen and put hot water in it. By the time I was probably twelve we got plumbing for the bathtub. 
 
Tape 1 Side 2
 
S. Turner: Now would you consider your family ‘well to do’ back in those days in Stirling.

Reinard W. Brandley: Not really my dad had to borrow money to put me into collage. A lot of people in Stirling had the perception that the family was very ‘well to do’ my father had borrowed money to buy the farm. He never did get all that paid off until about 1938 or something like that. We finally got a really good crop one year of flax and we planted the crop and mad some money off of it and was able to pay off the farm. It was from that day on that they started living pretty comfortably. Prior to that they were in debt with the farm and various other things and they lived through the depression and the drought in the thirties. Those were tough years.

S. Turner: What are your impressions of the dirty thirties?

Reinard W. Brandley: I was very young at that time.

S. Turner: When it was over you were about thirteen, fourteen something like that.

Reinard W. Brandley: We grew out and combine the grain and it would be about maybe twelve, fourteen inches high of wheat. I remember in some of those that you would get four or five bushels per acre and then you were selling it for twenty five cents a bushel or something like that, it was just tough. There was just no way of making any money with it, the way they live and the way they survived, we would have problems doing it today, but we raised all our own cattle we had all of out meat because we had cattle, chickens and pigs we would butcher every fall and hang them up in the garage and freeze and we would eat them all through the winter. The chickens produced the eggs, the cows produced the milk. We had a big separator in the basement and we would turn the grain and turn the butter. There wasn’t really a lot of stuff that we went out and bought because right out back here we had a pit that we excavated and put the insulated top over it with grass and logs and we would put all of out vegetables that we grew in the summer time we would take the carrots and we would burry them in the sand so that no one could go in and get them. They basically lived off the land. It wasn’t until the time of the war until that started changing a little bit it was bad enough that my first year of collage, Mary was in collage in Utah and I was in the university of Alberta in Edmonton. My father borrowed money against his life insurance so that he could get me through collage that first year.

S. Turner: I presume that everyone was eating and living the same way and everyone had big gardens.

Reinard W. Brandley: Everyone was living the same way.

S. Turner: Everybody had big gardens and everyone had livestock just about.

Reinard W. Brandley: That’s right that was a way of life. There wasn’t any welfare.

S. Turner: It seems to me that you must have lived fairly Spartan to, you weren’t running to the store and coming home with a car load of stuff every week.

Reinard W. Brandley: No way. The only time you would come home with any thing was in the summer when you would come home with a car full of peaches or a load of paper cuts so that mom could can them so we would have fruit in the wintertime. Those were rough times. 

S. Turner: It would be tough to go back to that wouldn’t it?

Reinard W. Brandley: It would. We are spoilt.

S. Turner: We really are spoilt. Well since the times were so hard, you know how everybody spends there money a Christmas now, what were your Christmases like back then. What was it like in your immediate family; you have talked about the Brandley clan.

Reinard W. Brandley: We had great Christmases. We had a real nice Christmas tree up every year. We would decorate it and we would carefully put icicles up on it. You never see that anymore but those were very carefully done. We sort of had this tradition, it was tough for the kids to do but when we got up for Christmas morning we had to all get dressed and come out in the kitchen without looking at the tree before we could go to the tree and open any presents. That was tough but things like that you remember I guess.

S. Turner: Was that so that you dad could get in from doing chores.

Reinard W. Brandley: Probably that more than anything else. We would have a very practical Christmas and you would get a pair of trousers or shorts or something or cloths and this type of thing and some fruit in your stocking and that was a sign that they were very practical. It wasn’t a case of what you see today.

S. Turner: Did religion play much of a part in you charismas activates?

Reinard W. Brandley: No more than usual I think religion played a huge part in our live all the way through and my mother. But I don’t thin that there was anything extra other than to review the reason of Christmas and the life of Jesus Christ.

S. Turner: We are talking about the church, what are your memories about the church, when you were a kid?

Reinard W. Brandley: Well we always used to have perfect attendance.

S. Turner: Did you get some kind of reward if you had perfect attendance.

Reinard W. Brandley: No that was just expected of you. That was just one of those things that happened and we were taught to respect the Church and activities also scouting was a big program with us and was a big part of the Church. I guess that the scouting act recalled about as much as any thing. I ended up being the second Queen scout in Stirling, in Stirling history. Liloy Seely beat me by two weeks; he was four years older than me.

S. Turner: Did everybody make a big deal of that?

Reinard W. Brandley: It was a pretty big event we ended up; I think it was the twenty-fifth scouting jamboree in the church they had a big jamboree in salt lake and they had had whole bunch of king scouts and a few first class scouts. From all three stakes the Lethbridge, Taylor, and Taber Stakes got together and went down and Charlie Nightcalf was the chief and Salmon who was the undertaker in Lethbridge was represented. We drove down Salmon’s truck a big two ton truck fixed some seats in the back and we had a cover over top of it. When we got to a gravel road from here Coutts, when we got to Coutts we were so filthy dirty that we cleaned off the truck and went down to the local high school and they gave us permission to use their showers so that we could clean up and go the rest of the way. We went on down to great falls for the first night and it was raining a little bit so went in and we got us into the basement of a high school there. We were having our scout circle that night just before we went to bed one of the scouts just dropped onto the floor and we thought that he was acting up and pretty soon another one dropped and another one dropped and everyone got excited so we picked these guys up and we went outside and we practiced our first aid and we gave them artificial respiration until they came back around. It turned out that there was some sewer gas in there basement and if we had gone to sleep we would have probably never gotten back up. We slept outside after that even though it was raining.  We went down to the jamboree and we were the only ones in the blue uniforms. All the Americans were in the brown ones, we had a great time. We ended up coming back in brown uniforms.

S. Turner: Trading uniforms and patches.

Reinard W. Brandley: On out way down we went down to Yellowstone Park and had a great time. On the way back up we came through Waterton Glacier Park. It was a great trip.

S. Turner: So you went in the back of a grain truck?

Reinard W. Brandley: Ya

S. Turner: They had a tarp over it so you couldn’t see where you were going.

Reinard W. Brandley: We could roll up the sides of the tarp so we could see where we were going. It was a fun trip, we had Harlen Taylor steel doors and a few of those guys form Raymond, couple from Magrath, and some from Taber, and a couple from Lethbridge. It was a fun thing to do.

S. Turner: Sounds like it would be fun. What about some of the dances and some of the community activities.

Reinard W. Brandley: They were fun.

S. Turner: Did you go to most of them.

Reinard W. Brandley: We went to most of them, the dances that we had back then were great because it wasn’t a case of, I don’t know if it is here but down there part of the country you take a date to the dance and you dance with her all night. That’s the size of it. You take a date to the dance and she was on her own and you were on your own and you danced about every fourth dance with her and the last dance. You danced with all the other people that were there they were great times, and we really enjoyed them. They had it wet up very well then, all the different communities would get together and set up when they were having there dances. Stirling would have one, one night and Raymond would have one the next night, this was during the holiday period and Magrath would have one another one and we would go to each of them. They would come to our and we would go to there’s it was great. 

S. Turner: What was the typical dance like; I mean what people wore, what was the music like, what were the hours.

Reinard W. Brandley: Well the typical dance was from nine to twelve and basically the boys wore suits. They girls would always wear a dress and depending on the occasion they would be either long or not so long. They were either knee length or they were full length. Basically everybody was very well dressed.

S. Turner: It was like going to church then.

Reinard W. Brandley: To a degree, one of the famous dancers in town was Paul Zaugg, Paul Zaugg used to come to these dances and he would dance, he was a great dancer, all the young girls loved to dance with him and of course ho loved to dance with all the young girls. He would come to these dances and he would dance with all the young girls, all the way through every dance. Everybody remembers Paul Zaugg because he was his dancing abilities.

S. Turner: Did these dances have live music or was it played from a record.

Reinard W. Brandley: Live music, live music. It was dance band music.

S. Turner: Was it a local band. Or did you have different bands.

Reinard W. Brandley: We had different bands. One group that was here quite a bit was a group from New Dayton I forget what there name was but they were a pretty popular band and they were here and at Raymond it was almost always live music. As a matter of fact I don’t think that we had records then. We had the old crank mote grams. 

S. Turner: So those wouldn’t have been loud enough for the entire gym.

Reinard W. Brandley: That’s right

S. Turner: Tell me a little bit about the children’s dance on Christmas.

Reinard W. Brandley: They always had a dance for the little kids on Christmas. As I recall it was used to teach the kids how to dance. One of the ladies that I recall in my time was a sucker for a punishment who was Rose Adamson who I think is you’re…

S. Turner: Oh is that right that is my mother in law.

Reinard W. Brandley: Your mother in law that’s right. She was the one that I am sure that I tromped on her feet many times.

S. Turner: Well isn’t that interesting.

Reinard W. Brandley: I am sure that she doesn’t remember that.

S. Turner: Ya she has forgotten. I suppose that as you were growing up you had a lot of work to do, you mentioned that you helped milk cows and you helped your dad on the farm. You must have had some free time what are some of the things you did as a kid when you were on your own and some of the things that you did to make fun for yourself and the different friends that you had?

Reinard W. Brandley: Well we used to play a lot of softball in the summer time, a little bit of hard ball in the winter time. We would get together with some of the fella’s and working out and some of our closest friends were Roy Spackman, Phil Prockter, and Ralph Mickelson, Gwen Michelson and that group. We had a good group t school and we used to chum around a lot and we would go to the dances together and different parties together, we didn’t just work.

S. Turner: Would you say that in those times that they were so much simpler in so many ways, that maybe it was a better environment to grow up in today.

Reinard W. Brandley: I think that it was a far better environment because what really happed there was that we were taught that work was necessary and work was important and that work was enjoyable. We were taught that we had responsibilities and I think that these are the real important corner stones in life. I think that living on the farm and working on the farm and I considered living in Stirling and working on the farm as living on the farm. I think that it was very important from that stand point; in addition to that it was also important to learn machinery and to learn how to tear a tractor down and put it back together and learn how to make it work. We got to the point that we weren’t afraid to tackle anything, if you wanted to go out and build a granary you would go out and build a granary. Today people do know the first things of what to do especially those that live down where I do, in the city. I remember when I was building my house in California I had several people in as subcontractors doing phases of it but I would come in and one day I would be pounding nails and the next day I would be doing electrical, and the other day I would be doing some plumbing these guys who were professionals in there field would ask me is there nothing that you don’t know how to do. That because of the training that you get when you are living on a farm and I think that the farm training is probably key to whatever success I have in my life. 

S. Turner: That is a great testimony for the importance of your childhood in the rest of your life.

Reinard W. Brandley: Well I think that it makes all the difference in the world.

S. Turner: The work ethic just isn’t being taught like that now is it?

Reinard W. Brandley: In most cases I have been fortunate in being able to teach my son that type of work ethic I had the opportunity since I own the company to put him to work in it and make him get out and do the work and learn how to do it. Most people don’t get that opportunity anymore.

S. Turner: That is true. How do you feel that war affected your life and your family life and those life’s of the people in Stirling?

Reinard W. Brandley: Well the war in Canada really affected the lives of everybody because everybody basically participated in the war, and everybody suffered from the war, everybody was buying bonds to help pay for the war, and we were all on rations everything was rations it was a difficult time it was also a time when there was a great deal of pride in the country and loyalty to the country and everybody knew what we were doing was right but it was a bleak time there. It looked like our way of life might change because it looked like the Germans were winning all over the place.

S. Turner: They were at first weren’t they?

Reinard W. Brandley: They were

S. Turner: Glad we aren’t speaking German right now.

Reinard W. Brandley: That’s for sure.

S. Turner: You mentioned that times were tough during the war to, were they tough like they were during the depression or was a different kind of tough. During the depression there just wasn’t, thing weren’t available to you during the depression. During the war they weren’t available because they were being used for the war efforts. Tires for cars were real tough to come by, gasoline was in low rations you had all the gasoline that you needed for your farming operations because they needed the food for the war effort. So the gasoline for the farm was all colour’d purple and gasoline for the cars was colour’d orange. You had better not have orange gas for your car or you would have problems. Sugar was rationed, I think meat was rationed, I don’t remember for sure but a lot of things were rationed because they just weren’t available. People, instead of spending money on different things they would bonds to help the war effort. It was al together a different type of thing. The economy was better during the war than in the depression the economy was as low as you could get. During the war there were jobs there was money to be made. We were making reasonable money for the crops and it was a whole different type of condition.

S. Turner: This is really interesting; did you know many of those guys who went off to war?

Reinard W. Brandley: I knew quite a few of them yes. Mainly I was off at collage when most of them went to war. When the war started I was about seventeen I guess and they wouldn’t take anybody that was any less than twenty-one. They didn’t need the troops so twenty one was the limit. We went into collage when they started needing men, the age for the draft lowered considerably. By then I had, had two years of engineering school and they passed a law that it was illegal for anybody to recruit students. The Canadians handled the war efforts as far as the science students, the doctors, the engineers much better than the Americans did. They mad it illegal for anybody to recruit a science student who was doing well in collage. You took training all the time you went through and you automatically went into the military as and engineer or a doctor or a dentist when you graduated and this is the way it turned out. The Americans what they did was they drafted everybody and it generally turned out that those studying medicine in school when they were drafted were sent to engineering school and those who were studying engineering were sent to medical school. The government paid there collage and paid them when they were there and they ended up getting educated people, trained people at the end but they paid for it, whereas here the government didn’t pay anything for it and they had the students that were able to do it. I graduated in April of 1945 so when we finished our graduation was in May and we finished collage in April the fifteenth of April. So the military SLTC colonial told us go home and enjoy your self and come back and graduate and the day after graduation come on over and we will sign you up. We had all been interviewed by the Navy and the Air force and the Army as to where we wanted to be and a lot of us. I was all set to go into the artillery. Partly the engineers, they all talked about the artillery during that interviewing period the D day came and so when we went back up and we went into the armoury after graduation the colonial came up and he said I have got some bad news for you flella’s he said we only want Joel and Pete and Peter, they took about ten people and he said the rest of you have to go out and find a job. We don’t need you anymore and so we went out and got a job after that.

S. Turner: So you didn’t actually enter the service.

Reinard W. Brandley: I never got into the service.

S. Turner: But it does sound like you did have some military training while you were in collage.

Reinard W. Brandley: We had military training for four years in collage.

S. Turner: What did that consist of?

Reinard W. Brandley: We trained three nights a week, two hours, three nights a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. We would have military training from five o’clock to seven o’clock at night.

S. Turner: You’re talking about Marching

Reinard W. Brandley: Marching and bayonet practices and firing ranges bend gun training and then there was a three week summer camp every summer.

S. Turner:Just like RLTC  

Reinard W. Brandley: RLTC is what it was.

S. Turner: Did they call it that?

Reinard W. Brandley: They called it CLTC, Canadian officers training Course 101.

S. Turner: I am assuming that you all went in as officers.

Reinard W. Brandley: They all went in as officers.

S. Turner: That is very interesting, before we move on with your life let’s just bounce back to the depression just once or twice and ask you like I just did about the dust. You remember the dust.

Reinard W. Brandley: Oh big dust storms, big clouds of dust storms come through and you would see drifts of dust all over the place, piled high they pilled up two or three feet high along side the fences just like snow drifts. The dust would come off the fields and you would have rocks exposed as a result of it.
 
Tape 2 Side A
 
S. Turner: Two or three feet deep, or no you didn’t say two or three feet deep, how deep did you say?

Reinard W. Brandley: Well you would get dust up to the bottom wire on a barbwire fence so that’s about a foot, foot and a half. You would get drifts just like snow drifts.

S. Turner: It is amazing to me that the drought and the economic depression all hit at the same time. They kind of fed each other I guess.

Reinard W. Brandley: It was a double whammy

S. Turner: It wasn’t just Canada either it was all North America.

Reinard W. Brandley: It went down through as I understand it, which was what they called the dust bowl which went way down into the United States. In the central portion there, it is more south of Oklahoma

S. Turner: So let’s just bounce back up to where you graduated from collage then. You were told to go and get a job when you were expecting to go in the army so that was no doubt a big surprise to you

Reinard W. Brandley: That was a big surprise. At the university the different people that needed engineers would send letters into the D and sent pictures of what was available and looked at it, it ended up pushing me into the field of soil mechanics, foundation engineering which is, there was a very new field, the one that developed the theory of modern soil mechanics which is now known as geotechnical engineering, was a man by the name of Karl Terzaghi from Austria. All those theories were devolved maybe twenty years before I graduated from collage so it was a new field and there weren’t very many people that were in it. And the Dean Hardy university was a graduate had a masters degree from Harvard in soil mechanics, foundational engineering from Terzaghi so he kind of guided me along there. The Canadian government was putting out and research project on some airfield pavements to try to design a type of airfield pavement that wouldn’t fail under the bigger loads. We had some pretty good design methods for highways. Which were fairly small loads they were probably sixteen thousand pounds on an axel or something? We were starting to get into B-29s and B-26s, airplanes were starting to weigh a hundred thousand pounds. There pavements were falling apart and had real problems. They started a research program and I had the opportunity then to head up one section of it up on the Alaska Highway. I went up to several airports there and also the Saskatoon and Winnipeg and I got to do a whole bunch of testing on different airports. One time when I was coming back up through Edmonton I stopped and seen Dean Hardy and he told me that he was going to set up a master’s course, since I was at the university. He asked me to come back and they would give me a scholarship if I wanted to come back. So I went back that year and took my masters, that year he went down to Sacramento New York, he stopped in Boston to see Karl Terzaghi and Hartha Kasigrandi, who were  the top two men in the field. They7 were fussing about how they couldn’t get any good working fellow’s to work with them in their teaching. So Dean Hardy says to them I got a man who will fit your bill, he came back and told me to write them a letter applying for that position, teaching half time and studying half time. And so I did and I got a letter, teaching, I went down there and spent three years working with these two great people, I got another masters degree and with all my work towards my doctorate in soil engineering with the two top men in the world, Which put me a real good position because at that time there were only a handful of people with that much background in that field, it was a growing field. So after I got through with that I got into my carer in engineering. My first position was in the teaching position as an assistant professor at the university in Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. I spent a year up there and I sent a year up there teaching soil’s engineering and concrete technology to fourth year student’s senior students and graduating students. In decided that that wasn’t really where I wanted to be I didn’t like Saskatoon particularly but I had to go back to, I had to Harvard to clean up a couple of things, I wrote a series of letters with my resume to a group of consulting engineering firms across the u8nited states and a couple universities and I told them that I was going to make a trip from Boston to San-Francisco and I had to come in a talk to them I had job interviews from probably twenty-five universities and about twenty consulting firms and when I got finished I had firm offers from seventeen universities and eighteen consulting firms. I took a job in California because I needed experience I took a job in Sacramento and I look at it today and I don’t know why it was so wise to do this. The job in Sacramento paid me exactly half of what I was offered in New York, Boston, Chicago, Saint Louis, and these other places but it was with a small company that had some real good work and only one other engineer in that office they had another in New York. I figured that here I was going to get a chance to practice what I had learned, six months after I got into that office the engineer that was in charge of that office went to Los Angela’s and opened up an office, so they put me in charge of the office. I Spent four years with them and branched off and went into business for myself and became competition to them actually and basically ran them  out of town in a few years I had been in business on my own now for this month my forty-fourth year. We started out doing soil’s engineering which is the design of foundations for buildings, and the foundation of dams, the deign of roads, and the deign of airports, anything that deals with the engineering of soil’s, everything that you built gets built on the soil. I was doing that type of work and another office that I had was doing testing of materials and testing of construction, to see that the things are built according to specification, and a third one that was the deign of airports. Well after about twenty-five years of this the airports became much more interesting and much more challenging and so I sold my other two businesses, My soil’s business and my testing business, and all I did was airports so for the last twenty years I have done nothing but the deign of airports and this is the complete deign the whole airport and an airport is like a city.

S. Turner:  You didn’t deign Denver’s airport did you?

Reinard W. Brandley: No nothing to do with Denver, proud of that.

S. Turner: So you are doing a lot more than just the runway.

Reinard W. Brandley: Oh ya, you are doing runways, and taxi ways, and roads and parking lots, and lighting, and everything else we do everything in the airport accept the terminal buildings. We deign the hangers and the whole bit. So we were working on small airports, big airports, we have worked on Honolulu, Seattle, Salt Lake City, you go into Salt Lake City and you go into the western terminal, The Delta terminal and on the font door there is a big plaque on the front there and you will see my name on the plaque, worked it out there. I was a designer on that phase of it and we worked in Chicago, Louisville, Nashville, Tampa Florida, Sacramento of course, Los-Angeles, San Diego.

S. Turner: Where are some of the places of the world that you business taken you.

Reinard W. Brandley: I guess the furthest away was Iran before the share was kicked out. Just two years ago I went down to Micronesia, Paul.

S. Turner: South America

Reinard W. Brandley: No that’s down in the south pacific. Its half way between Guam and the Philippines it’s a group of island in there. They are trying to develop a system of airports so they can develop a tourist train. Because they don’t have anything else, beautiful countries but they don’t have anything else, to design some airports and work them out. I did some work for them, some primary work as to where they could put an airport on the islands. What they should do for it and how much it would cost, it ended up that these were going to cost something like 180-200 million dollars to build an airport on each of these islands. There were only twelve to fifteen thousand people on the island, it was a little tough to find that kind of money so at this point in time we didn’t do anything we didn’t go any further than that. They may still do something so we sill go back and do that type of work. It is exciting job it’s a lot of fun. We would do a lot of work and the question that I get asked repeatedly is when you are going to retire. I keep telling them that I guess I will retire when I quits being fun and enjoyable. The other thing that could make me retire is a bunch of attorneys it is getting to a point now that such a living in society no matter what you do there is an attorney there trying to find a place for a lawsuit. Everybody gets one we have a couple of lawsuits but they are both a darn nuisance.

S. Turner: Expensive right.

Reinard W. Brandley: Expensive to fight, if we get far enough along that the attorneys start running the show to much than I will quit to. It has been a great career; I sat back the other day talking to Susan and I said you know if I were to start over again I don’t think I would change a thing.

S. Turner: That’s true; you are truly a lucky guy if you wouldn’t change a thing.

Reinard W. Brandley: It has been real great I have had the opportunities to have offices in all these different places, they wanted me to set up an office there and give me all there work. I would rather do the engineering rather than if you have a whole bunch of offices you are going to become and administrator. With my office I would keep it small, so fifteen people that way I can do the engineering, spend my time on engineering rather than on administrative work.

S. Turner: You were telling me that you got a special church assignment to help with the church building program.

Reinard W. Brandley: In the early to mid seventies the church was having some real problems with their buildings. The building committee in Salt Lake City wouldn’t recognise this problem they were having a lot of costs that were unnecessary building major air conditioning systems in Alaska and heavy roofs for snow in Phoenix. In addition to that they were having buildings that were failing they just had a big problem with there whole system. So they decided that what they would do was bring in some expertise that would give them advise and give them help on this they set up a group of consultants, they had a civil engineering consulting group, they had a architectural consulting group, they had a mechanical engineering consulting group, landscape architect consulting group, and the way they did it was they selected a people that they thought had the proper experience in these field’s and they issued a calling of them to work with the building committee, I ended up with the call for the civil engineering, consulting branch. We would all go to salt lake twice a year for about three days and they would present their problems and what was happening and these groups would draw on their experience and expertise and all of these were people that were practicing in the field and were working on large buildings and large foundation problems and different things and they would come up[ with some pretty good solutions as to what was causing a problem and how to fix it, the building committee responded and they accepted most of the recommendations and the program has improved very extensively, we worked on that for a period of about six years. Then they retired us and called another group down and I think that they are still doing it

S. Turner: Still doing it with a different group

Reinard W. Brandley: Ya and an interesting side line on that that relates to Stirling in particular. Was the first meeting that we had, Rod Larson was the church building committee at that time found out that I was from southern Alberta, so he asked me if I knew thin man Bishop Bill Hogenson, from Stirling. I said I Know Bill he said well he is one of the most stubborn bishops that we have ever had. I asked well why this is and what the problem apparently was this was the time that they were changing the church from Sunday school being in the morning and church at night to combined sessions. Setting up three chapels, three ward chapels, two ward chapels and hopping to hoping to keep the parking lots down, they were cutting down a little bit on the size of the buildings. But Bill Hogenson would have nothing to do a smaller sized building; they wanted to provide a building for Stirling, Bill Hogenson Wanted a building for Stirling but he wanted his building for Stirling. He held on for two or three years, Lloyd told me that if he didn’t give in a little bit that he wasn’t going to get a building.

S. Turner: So what happened?

Reinard W. Brandley: Well I think Bill won,

S. Turner: It is really interesting that you are working back home.

Reinard W. Brandley: It was kind of fun that that was one of the big problems. It was an enjoyable assignment. It was a chance to meet with a lot of people, the members of that consulting board raised people from all the way from Chicago, Texas, California, and Utah. 

S. Turner: All no doubt the top experts in their fields.

Reinard W. Brandley: One of the ones in our group was professor Rawlins, who was the head of the soils engineering department of BYU. We worked for him on this along with several other people.

S. Turner: I find that just really interesting. Let me ask you another question, Here you are living in California, I guess ever since you got out of collage.

Reinard W. Brandley: Just about.

S. Turner: But yet here you sit in one of your relatives homes in Stirling. What kind of ties or bonds do you have to Stirling now?

Reinard W. Brandley: Well Stirling gave me my start. I think that I got a very good start in high school in school here, both lower school and higher school. In Stirling I learned how to work, I learned responsibility, learned all about tearing tractors apart, equipment and different things which of course help me in my engineering field. It really gave me my start; I think that it is some place that you like to recall the good things that happened to you and maybe try to help other people to do the same teach them to do something with it, which was one of the basic reasons why I set up that scholarship here.

S. Turner: Why don’t you tell me a little bit more about that?

Reinard W. Brandley: When I was up here five years ago at the Brandley reunion I got a bright idea that maybe it was time that I gave back a little bit when I got out of Stirling. So I set up a scholarship fund at the high school I put up five thousand dollars a year until and four thousand of it goes into a fund which was gathering interest so that the fund could continue on for the rest of it some of the interest and one thousand of that per year was given to the top students that are graduating from high school to help them as a scholarship toward their education. For the last couple of year we have been giving one scholarship for a thousand dollars and two five hundred dollar ones.

S. Turner: Here at Stirling.

Reinard W. Brandley: To the top three students here in Stirling.

S. Turner: Is this the only place that you do that?

Reinard W. Brandley: Yup, so far.

S. Turner: So that is a real commitment to continue education on you, isn’t it?

Reinard W. Brandley: It is, I like to help. I like to encourage people my hope is that the student here will, that will be a challenge to them

S. Turner: Work to get that.

Reinard W. Brandley: If they will do that they will, weather they get the scholarship or not they will have won.

S. Turner: I can tell you that from having my kids down in the states and bringing them up here two years ago, this school is just wonderful academically compared to those down in the states. This is a wonderful school here, kicks butt.

Reinard W. Brandley: Well it always has been.

S. Turner: Has it.

Reinard W. Brandley: It was when I was there. It was well recognized.

S. Turner: Why do you come back to Stirling now?

Reinard W. Brandley: Well is still own part of my fathers farm here.

S. Turner: Do you.

Reinard W. Brandley: Ya, so I got to come up and kick the tires now and then. I love to go up to Waterton; Waterston is my favourite park out of all of North America.

S. Turner:I s it really

Reinard W. Brandley: Oh ya. I love Waterton. I guess that one of the main reasons why I like Waterton is because Harold Christensen was our scout master here. We used to, when I was here, every summer we would spend a couple of weeks in Waterton on a scout camp, every night we would sit around the campfire and Harold would look up at the mountains and he would say which one of these are we going to conquer tomorrow, and he meant to the top. We climbed every mountain that was up there, we went fishing and we did all other types of things it was a great time and I guess that I have real fond memories of Waterton I love Waterton

S. Turner: So you spent like a week at a time up there.

Reinard W. Brandley: We are going up there tomorrow afternoon actually.

S. Turner: Oh are you.

Reinard W. Brandley: Ya and it is enjoyable to come up and renew you ties with all your friends.

S. Turner: It is just quite remarkable that you have such strong times backed to your roots. There are a lot of people that are quit rootless.

Reinard W. Brandley: Glad to get away.

S. Turner: Ya get away and stay away just because they can.

Reinard W. Brandley: I think that I would have a hard time coming back and living here because in my old age I have become soft at my warm climate down south, warm winter it would kill me off, I is nice to come back.

S. Turner: They still have minus forty temperatures here. So is there anything else that you would like to say.

Reinard W. Brandley: I think not

S. Turner: Well I can tell you this has been a great interview, a really, really good interview. I am so glad that you wanted to be interviewed

Reinard W. Brandley: Well I appreciate the opportunity

S. Turner: You have added a lot of things that I haven’t heard on any other interview. It is going to be a very important interview in the series. I really thank you for that

Reinard W. Brandley: My pleasure.

S. Turner: Well let’s turn this thing off.
 
Transcribed by Clinton Dovell