Interview with
David A. Foil, Jr.
January 11, 2008
By Joyce McBride
Show Low Historical Museum
Joyce McBride: This is Joyce McBride and I’m interviewing David A. Foil, Jr. for the Show Low Historical Society Museum, and today’s date is January 11, 2008. Good afternoon! How are you doing?
David Foil: Just fine, thank you.
JM: We’re going to talk about you today, your particular history and how it relates to the history of Arizona. Do you remember your grandparents?
DF: I don’t remember the grandparents on my mother’s side because they died when I was an infant. But the grandparents on my father’s side, I remember both of them vaguely. They didn’t live too long after I was born.
JM: And what were their names?
DF: The names were Howard V. Foil and Melissa Self.
JM: Where did they live?
DF: They lived in the southern part of Louisiana, north of New Orleans about 75 miles in Washington Parish.
JM: Do you know what he did for a living?
DF: No, I really don’t. I don’t know what he did.
JM: And what were your mother’s names?
DF: The grandparents?
JM: Uh huh
DF: My grandfather’s name was Doc McDaniel. I don’t remember his correct name, but that was what he was called. Doc.
JM: Okay, the notes say Thomas Red?
DF: Yes, that’s right
JM: “Doc” for Thomas Red? They just called him, maybe Doc for a nickname?
DF: Yeah, nickname, uh huh.
JM: Okay, her name was?
DF: Whatever you’ve got there.
JM: Salina L. Blades
DF: Yes, sounds right
JM: They were born before the Civil War and the Foils were born right after the Civil War. So, do you know where the McDaniels lived?
DF: Yes, the McDaniels lived just a few miles west of Washington Parish in what is called Tangipahoa Parish.
JM: Okay, so they were both Southerners.
DF: Yes, the McDaniels were farmers.
JM: Your parents, do you know how they met, or anything about their childhoods?
DF: I know very little about their childhoods, where they met. It’s my impression that they met in Franklinton, Louisiana, which is in Washington Parish. That was just at the end of WWI and I think they married in 1919.
JM: Right after the war. Was your father in the war?
DF: Yes, he was in the military, but he didn’t go to war.
JM: Okay, because he was a farmer?
DF: No, I’m not sure. I think he just got in late enough that the war was over before he was sent overseas.
JM: You have here that he was born in 1896, so he was twenty years old, still pretty young. How many children were in your family?
DF: In my family there were three children. I was the oldest of three. I have a brother just two and a half years younger than I am and I have a sister that was five years younger.
JM: And you all grew up in Louisiana.
DF: Yes, in the city of Bogalusa.
JM: Bogalusa, that was a sawmill town?
DF: Yes
JM: And your father worked for the sawmill?
DF: Not that I remember. I don’t think he did. But that was the primary industry of the town. My earliest memory was that he was working for the railroad line that went through there.
JM: Was that an interstate railroad?
DF: It was interstate, but I don’t know that it was national, but it covered the Southern states.
JM: Okay, what did he do?
DF: He worked in the train stations. I don’t know.
JM: In the stations instead of the trains
DF: It was clerical type work.
JM: Okay, so he was home all the time.
DF: Yes
JM: Okay, that’s good. He didn’t finish high school?
DF: No
JM: Of course, in those days school was not an option like it is now.
DF: It wasn’t a big priority, yeah. He didn’t finish high school and neither did my mother.
JM: So, you were born what day?
DF: January 11, 1922
JM: Oh! Today’s your birthday!
DF: Yes
JM: Happy birthday! So you are how old today?
DF: Today I am 86 years old.
JM: 86! Congratulations! What a life! Tell me about what it was like growing up. What are your early memories of childhood in Louisiana?
DF: We grew up fairly comfortable considering the times that we lived in, especially after the Depression began in 1929. Considering the people around us, we did very well. My dad was superintendent of a hardwood furniture manufacturing plant.
JM: He lost the job on the trains?
DF: Well, he moved from one job to another and I don’t know why he moved. Maybe the railroad played out or something. But anyway, he was the superintendent of that plant, but as the Depression took its toll, there wasn’t much of a market for high-quality, expensive hardware furniture. So the plant closed down in probably 1935, somewhere around there.
JM: He made it pretty good though. That’s about halfway through, wasn’t it?
DF: Yes, we were very fortunate. I will say that considering the economic lifestyle of today, we were still very poor people but we were better than most people around us, so we thought we were great. We didn’t realize how poor we were.
JM: Woodworking was part of your life from childhood on. You’ve worked in woods.
DF: Yes, my family did. Uh hum.
JM: So what happened when the furniture plant closed?
DF: The furniture plant closed and there were very few jobs to be had in that day and time. I like to compare it to, if you’ve ever seen the movie, “Tobacco Road?” Everywhere we looked was Tobacco Road. There were no jobs to be had. It was a very poor area that we lived in, in Southern Louisiana. So he moved to poor jobs for a couple of years. Moved from one to another just trying to make a living. In 1936, the two men that owned the furniture manufacturing plant in Louisiana, they started a plant in Bernalillo, New Mexico for the manufacture of ironing board tabletops and rub boards, the old washing machine rub boards? That’s what they made. They hired my dad to come west and run this plant for them out here. So that moved us west, and that was in 1936. We arrived in Bernalillo, the family did, in May 1936. We lived there two years, and that’s where I finished high school.
JM: What school did you go to there?
DF: (Laughs) I can tell you already know the answer! (Laughs) I attended the Catholic Convent for Girls. That always makes people raise the eyebrows!
In this small town, north of Albuquerque about 20 miles, very small town at that time, but they did have this woodworking plant there. But there were no public schools. The Catholic Church had the only school there and it was in connection with a convent for girls. The school was across the highway from the convent where the girls actually stayed unless they were attending school.
The County made a deal with them that they would take on a day basis all the rest of the students eligible for high school in that area and run them in their school. Because there were no public schools the county made a contract with the Catholic Church to educate us. I went to school there two years and I got along fine. I was a non-Catholic and. . .
JM: And a non-girl
DF: (Laughs) Non-female! (Laughs) You enjoyed reading that didn’t you!
JM: I can just see this!
DF: There were 17 people in my graduating class.
JM: and what, fifteen of them girls?
DF: No, there was probably about equal girls and boys, but I would say there was only 3 or 4 that were non-Catholic because that area was heavily Catholic, being a Mexican village.
JM: Right, and having the convent there, so.
DF: Actually, I did very well there and they gave me a good basic education. There were no frills, just readin’, ritin” and “rithmatic.” And so that has stood me in good stead the rest of my life, even though I did not have a more elaborate education. I went to a trade school later.
JM: What was your father doing? He was working at this plant and?
DF: The plant only lasted a couple of years. The main cause of that was that Maytag came out with their electric washing machine to do away with the rub boards. And the other product they made was the old wooden ironing board tabletops. About that same time they started making those out of metal because it was cheaper and more durable. So both products that they had went out of vogue at that time and the plant shut down.
In February 1938, my dad answered an inquiry at McNary, and he came over here and was interviewed. They hired him to be the purchasing agent at McNary for the sawmill there.
In May, when school was out, I went ahead and finished high school in Bernalillo, way graduated. And then in May we moved, the rest of the family moved to McNary. So we were in Bernalillo almost exactly two years.
JM: What was like? This was a mill town that was about, how old was that, about 10 years old, maybe 15?
DF: Probably, it depends on what point you consider it’s origin. It was founded and developed somewhere in the 1920s. Depending on the original community, to the best of my recollection was first founded down where the HonDah Casino is now, in that area. And they called it Cooley. It later moved to its present site where the mill was.
It was named after James G. McNary, who came there. I’m not sure when he came there, but it was probably around 1930 or sometime like that. If I remember correctly he was a citizen of El Paso and he got controlling interest in the mill and moved to McNary, and the town was named after him from that time on.
JM: There was another town called McNary, too.
DF: In Louisiana, yes
JM: In Louisiana. You didn’t have any connection with that?
DF: No, we didn’t have any connection with it. But yes, he was also the founder of that town. And that’s how, really, the Black people got introduced into this area. There were none here, but he, there’s a good story about him bringing a trainload of mill workers from the town in McNary, Louisiana to the town of McNary, Arizona. I don’t remember what year that was. It was in the 1920s. A lot of those were Black people and they got introduced into the area here.
JM: Skilled workers, that’s why he did this?
DF: That’s right. They were experienced.
JM: Now you saw that they came on the train. Was the Apache Railroad already there?
DF: I don’t think so.
JM: So they would have gotten off in Holbrook and come this way?
DF: Possibly. At some point and time, Southwest did develop the Apache Railroad, Southwest Lumber Mills. They did develop the Apache Railroad that ran from McNary to Holbrook. I don’t think that railroad was there at the time they brought these people out here. All their household goods and everything, they rode on flatcars and boxcars and stuff. And they were hauled out here in total families.
JM: And their housing was set up for them as well? They had company housing?
DF: No, I’m not sure they did. I think they were given materials, probably, but they had to kind of patch up a place to live to take care of themselves in those early days. Now the Company did develop a town site as the years went by, and it was segregated. But to my knowledge there was no racial strife in the area. We had a community of Indians and a community of Blacks and a small community of Mexican people, and the Caucasians.
JM: Was their housing equal?
DF: No, their housing was not equal. It was a very disparity in that.
JM: Did all the children go to the same school?
DF: No, they did not. There was heavy segregation, different schools.
JM: How about their stores, grocery stores?
DF: Well, you could shop in the same store. There was only one store so everybody used it.
JM: And the restaurants?
DF: I don’t recall whether there was any rule about that or not. There was one restaurant. Of course, it being a company town, there was just one of everything and it was pretty much company owned.
JM: How big of a town was McNary when you came here?
DF: In 1938 it was approaching, if not at its peak period of time in history. As I recall, the mill, and I worked in the payroll office for a period of time, so this may or may not be exactly right, but it’s close. There were around 700 employees there. That’s what we handled on the payroll. And the town population was estimated at about 3,500. It was a good-sized town.
JM: It had a hospital or a medical facility of some sort?
DF: Yes, McNary General Hospital. Of course, it was Company owned and the Company hired the doctors.
JM: A pretty self-sustaining town then?
DF: Yes, it was because communications was very poor at that time. Telephone was very limited. It only operated certain hours of the day. We used Teletype for sending telegrams, but you could only do that certain hours of the day and never at night. And there were no private phones. They were only in the general office or the business area.
JM: It’s hard to imagine! Compared to today’s day! Of course, there was no TV, and there was probably no radio. Was there a radio station?
DF: Yes, there was no station but you could get some of the more powerful stations from around the country. You could get them. They were on the long-wave I guess you would call it, the more powerful stations. And so you could get radio. It was “staticky” and there was trouble with it, but you did it because that was all there was.
JM: The community leaned upon the old fashioned mail to communicate outside.
DF: Yes, that’s right.
JM: So there was probably a mail run. What was your nearest place that you would go to?
DF: Well, they had a post office in McNary, and you could mail your stuff there and receive it there, and it was hauled by truck to Holbrook.
JM: Holbrook was the closest?
DF: Connection, yeah
JM: To any, to the rest of the world
DF: That’s right. You went through Holbrook.
JM: So that was about what? An hour and a half, or two hours?
DF: Depending upon what time of the year you were going. Late 1930s and early ‘40s, this country experienced cold winters and lots of snow. We had lots of snow. The first trip we made, I’m talking about our family now, that we made from Holbrook to McNary by car, we were some five hours. But it was in February. They were dirt roads and it was very muddy, big ruts in it. It took us a long time to make the trip.
JM: We had a lot of thick forests in those days. Did you get out into the forests?
DF: Yes, that was our recreation. We didn’t have a lot to do. I worked at that time, even though I was still quite young. But there was a lot of young people there and we worked six 10-hour days. There was no overtime. You were hired for six 10-hour days. I went to work at 7 in the morning and got off at 6 at night. In the wintertime you went to work in the dark and you came home in the dark. You ate your supper and went to bed and made it for another day.
But on the weekends some of us would go out and just take a hike through the wooded areas. I can recall snows like up to our knees and we’d walk in that. We’d take turns breaking the route because it was so tiring. But we enjoyed it, socialized.
JM: Were there churches involved in McNary? Or other social things like that?
DF: We had a bowling alley. We had a movie house, and I believe that was all except for the commercial establishments like the stores and the. . .
JM: No churches?
DF: Yes, there was a, while we lived in McNary during those years, a Protestant church was built. A small Catholic church already existed there. That Catholic Church is still there, even till today. And the Protestant church is too, and it was primarily Presbyterian. But if you were anything other than Catholic, that’s where you went. The Mormons that lived there, when they would go to church they would go down to Lakeside. There was a church there. My guess is that they didn’t really do that too often because the roads were bad, the weather was bad sometimes, and they were dead tired. So, nothing to encourage them to go
JM: Did you do fishing? Go hunting?
DF: Many, many people did. I never did do much of that. I hunted a little and I even fished a little on occasion, but to say that I did it as a recreational thing, I just never did that much.
JM: You’d only have Sundays to do anything.
DF: Yeah, and if we went to church and ate dinner, the day was about shot.
JM: What did the women do? What did your mother and your sisters do while you and your father worked at the mill? You had a brother. Did he also work? He was young though.
DF: He was still in school at first, and later he worked.
JM: So he went to the school in McNary?
DF: Yes, he graduated from high school. Both my brother and my sister did in McNary.
JM: Did they get a good education?
DF: I guess so. It has sustained them through life. My sister died just a few months ago.
JM: Are you the only one left?
DF: No my brother still lives in Albuquerque.
JM: Oh, okay. We’ll get back to them. You made a mention of a highway robbery. Tell me the story about this highway robbery.
DF: In those days, and the reason that probably I have a good memory of that is as I mentioned earlier, I worked in the payroll office. You kept the hours and the rate of pay for every man on a daily basis and on an hourly basis, keeping the payrolls up-to-date. At the end of week everybody got paid once a week, and they were paid in cash. There were no checks. There was nothing else. I think that the pay period ended on Friday and we had to get the envelopes ready and the amount of money counted out and put in each person’s envelope and their name on it. And they came by the next day.
JM: How many people?
DF: Around 700 employees. Some of those pay envelopes would be taken out to the woods where the logging crews worked and lived. But right there in town there were still several hundred that would come by. We had what we called a pay window. And they would walk up on the outside this window and give their name, and you would hand them their envelope and they would keep going. Now, some of them got money and some of them didn’t. They could draw in advance, trading at the Company Store and put it on the ticket until the next payday, which was the end of the next week. And so sometimes they just stayed bought-up all the time. Not too different from today, I guess.
JM: Those Company stores will get you!
DF: Right here at the edge of Show Low on Old Linden Road, if you’re familiar with that, you drop down into - actually it’s a draw now but it used to kind of be a running creek when we had more moisture – Fools Hollow. You know where that is. Okay, well they have a culvert in there now.
In those early days, that was on the road to Holbrook. The highway went to Pinedale and then back to Taylor and Snowflake and then to Holbrook. That was the highway. So all the traffic went through Fool’s Hollow. You had to ford the stream there, so everybody slowed down. It was fairly slow.
The payroll truck on Friday was bringing the money from Holbrook to McNary for the payday the next day, and it got held up right there. The payroll was taken. They did catch the men a month or so later back in the Midwest somewhere. I don’t remember the details, and I doubt that they got the money back. I don’t remember.
JM: That must have been quite a stir around this town.
DF: Oh! It gave us something to talk about all winter!
JM: It is kind of a risky thing dealing in cash like that though, isn’t it? Did you have more than one job?
DF: Yes, actually I had two or three jobs there. I began work in what was called the molding mill, mill site, and worked through the first winter. Then I had an opportunity to get a job in the mill supply, which gave me an inside place to work and I jumped at it. And also, the pay was slightly better. At the molding mill I went to work for 18 cents an hour. We worked 10-hour days so I made $1.80 a day six days a week. So we got $10, and there were no deductions then. But if I got $10 per week I was in pretty good shape.
JM: You lived at home?
DF: I lived at home, yes. And living conditions were very economical then. My parents had a three-bedroom house. It was on the second street and not on the highway street, on Main Street, from the second street back. And right next door to that Presbyterian Church and the side of the old school. But we had a three-bedroom house there and I think most of what I’m telling you is either accurate or very chose. They rented that house from the Mill, because the Mill owned everything, for $17 a month, including all utilities, electric, water and sewer. So, you didn’t have to make a lot of money. Actually, I had a little money. If you had a dollar though, it was quite a bit of money in those days. Not like today.
JM: And you had electricity?
DF: Yeah, the Company had their own powerhouse, and they generated power to run the Mill and the town site.
JM: And did you have public water and sewer or did?
DF: Well, all of that was furnished by the Company.
JM: It was. You had it.
DF: Uh hum
JM: So you didn’t have to have an outhouse or a well or anything like that.
DF: No, there was water piped to us and there was a sewer system.
JM: So, you were living pretty good for Arizona in those days.
DF: Yeah, you didn’t make much and it didn’t cost much.
JM: You bought your clothes. You all bought the same clothes because they were all at the Company Store.
DF: Yes! It was a great store. People still talk about what a remarkable place that Company Store was. It was great.
JM: You were nineteen years old at the time?
DF: As I was born in ’22 and I moved there in ’38, so I was 16 when I moved there. And I left there in ’41 and I was gone for several years, including World War II years, and when I returned from the War I went to Winslow.
JM: Did you go from McNary. . .?
DF: Entered Service?
JM: Yeah, you’d already left McNary though.
DF: Yes, I needed a little more education to help me find a job that wasn’t 18 cents an hour.
I left in September 1941, I believe it was, and I went to Glendale, California and entered an aircraft mechanics school. Airplanes were coming on the scene then and they were becoming more popular. I spent a year there training as an aircraft mechanic and received good certificates for it and was quite capable of making a very decent living at that. But the day I graduated I also went into the military service for World War II, so it was several years later before I came back.
JM: This aircraft mechanics - was it in your mind because the War was already started in Europe. Did you think that that would be something that would be useful in your future? Is that why you picked aircraft mechanics?
DF: Possibly, I don’t remember what my motivation was.
JM: Because so far there hasn’t been an airplane in your life.
DF: No, there was none. In fact, I had only been in an airplane once at that time. And it was a barnstorming plane. He followed county fairs and there was one in St. Johns for Apache County. He landed in a field, just an open meadow field there, and took people for rides. I paid him to take about a 5 minute ride in that plane, single-engine plane, I don’t know what kind it was, but that was quite a thrill. And it was just a few months later that I left to go to the school.
JM: I’ll bet that inspired you.
DF: It may have. I don’t know. It was called Curtis Wright Technical Institute. There were not many mechanical schools in that day and time. They became in the near future after I went there, the site of training Army aircraft mechanics. The civilians could still go there, but they contracted with the government to train mechanics for the Air Force. In those days the Air Force was part of the Army. It was not a separate entity.
JM: So that was a natural segway for you to enlist and keep going?
DF: Yeah, I could either enlist or I could be drafted almost immediately. So the day I graduated I went down to the recruiting station in Glendale and enlisted. I went to school in September ’41, Pearl Harbor occurred in December of ’41, and I graduated the next September, so we were in the War by the time I graduated.
JM: But you came back here for a while after that?
DF: Yes, there were so many enlistments and recruitments at that time that they didn’t have the organization set up to handle all the men, so they enlisted me and told me to go home and wait and “We’ll call you as soon as we can get you. You’ll just get in line to be inducted into the Service just as fast as we can handle you.” So, I came back to McNary and I worked there for a few months before they called me. And I reported for Service in Fresno.
JM: What did you do while you were in McNary?
DF: The second time?
JM: Yes
DF: There was any number of jobs available because a lot of people were getting drafted. So there were a lot of jobs available. Probably the main thing I did was, the people who actually ran Standard Oil Company’s bulk plant there. They’d haul gasoline and oils and stuff for all the Mill products and the logging machinery and stuff. They had lost their help there and I worked there for a few months. I don’t remember doing anything else.
JM: Driving Mr. McNary around?
DF: Yes, there was a short period of time.
JM: That would have been unique.
DF: Yes, it was. He had a stretch-limousine. It was a Cadillac. Of course, with my history I’d never even been up close to one.
JM: Yeah, like where would you ever get your drivers license?
DF: We didn’t have drivers’ license.
JM: Oh, you didn’t have drivers’ licenses?
DF: No
JM: Oh, you just hopped in and . . .
DF: Well, I’d been driving since I was twelve! (Laughs)
JM: Oh, I see!
DF: But after the War started, a Black man, his name was Floyd, which was his driver, his chauffeur. Now Mr. McNary could not drive because he had suffered an injury to one of his knees that made the leg stiff. It would not bend. And that’s the reason this car was so long. The back seat had to be back so that leg could stick out in front of him all the time. It couldn’t be bent. And so Floyd drove him everywhere he went, even from the office to his house, which was less than two blocks, because he didn’t walk very well and he couldn’t drive.
But Floyd got drafted. I’m not sure that’s true. The draft was the threat. I think he did eventually get drafted, but at that moment, they put him to work down in the Mill to avoid the draft because wood was a high-priority product at that time and they gave draft deferments for those in the timber industry. And so I think they moved him down there for a period of time.
Probably he did get drafted a little later. But after he quit driving Mr. McNary, I became available in part of this interim time. On two or three occasions I drove him to places like to Phoenix and I don’t remember any other place. There may have been other places, but they were trips. But it was a real experience for someone with my background.
You’d go down there and you were mingling with big shot people all the time. He would put me up in the hotels. The Westward Ho was the big item then. We stayed in the Westward Ho most of the time, and sometimes we were there for several days at a time.
He would turn me loose when we got there, and he’d say “I won’t need you until next Wednesday at noon.” He’d say, “You’re free to do whatever you want to do in the meantime.” So it was quite an experience.
JM: How did you get there?
DF: Well, Highway 60 was in the process of being built. In the ‘30s, when we first came here, all of it wasn’t paved yet. It was still gravel road. But it was paved by the time I was driving Mr. McNary. But it was a narrow road. It wasn’t near as wide as it is now, and it’s been rerouted and rebuilt several times.
JM: So you weren’t going the old way through Whiteriver?
DF: No, I don’t think this car would have made it.
JM: Oh, I was wondering.
DF: No, (laughs)
JM: I’ve heard stories of how it took them all day to get to Phoenix because they had windy roads.
DF: It did. Phoenix was a one-day trip, but at the time we were driving back in ’41, ’42, you could drive to Phoenix in about 5 hours.
Of course, that beat going through Flagstaff and Prescott and Wickenburg and back into Phoenix. Or in the wintertime, you couldn’t go through Whiteriver and Fort Apache because the roads were so bad in the snow, and they weren’t maintained. They were just trails, but that was the only way you could go that way, because there was one place that was a bridge across Black River. You had to cross on that bridge. So when the weather got too bad for that, then you went around through Holbrook and Flagstaff, Wickenburg and Prescott. It was an all-day trip.
JM: That would be terrible. When you were down there and he left you to yourself, what did you do?
DF: I don’t remember anything special.
JM: It was a big city to you.
DF: It was a big city. Nothing like it is now, but to me it was a big city. They still had trolley cars in the streets, real trolley cars at that time. And you could get those for a little of nothing and ride around the city. I didn’t know many people, if any, down there. I don’t recall visiting anybody. I don’t know what I did to pass the time.
JM: Were there parks, zoos or theaters?
DF: I don’t remember doing anything but maybe sitting in the hotel lobby. I wasn’t very ingenious! (Laughs)
JM: Didn’t know what was there to want to know! Well, that’s interesting, that sounds fun.
