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Reiff:  This is Sandy Nevills Reiff and I'm interviewing Evelyn Greene at Greenehaven, Arizona, on February 10, 2001.  This is for Cline Library, Special Collections, at Northern Arizona University.  And I am so tickled, and we thought we would talk about Evelyn meeting Bill Greene who was the eldest child, is that right?
Greene:  No, almost the youngest.
Reiff:  Oh, I lied?  Almost the youngest?
Greene:  [Ruth?] was the oldest, and then Grace and then Bill, and then Irene.  So Bill was next to the youngest.
Reiff:  Okay.  And they are of the Greene Dynasty that was Northern Arizona's premier family in opening tourism to the area.  Evelyn is going to share how she met Bill and give dates, if you will, kind of.
Greene:  Okay.  It was in February 1945.  I had been briefly married and I had a baby.  So I had gone back to Paducah because it was a very unhappy marriage, and got a divorce at that time.  I was working, selling cosmetics in Walgreen's, and Bill had tonsillitis, so he had to go to St. Louis to have his tonsils out.  He came in the drugstore to get some supplies for that, but he saw me, and so he walked right over to me and said, "Would you give me a date?"  And I said, "Well, certainly not!  I don't know you.  I don't give boys dates I don't know."  And so I got busy and didn't pay any more attention, but kept seeing him standing there out of the corner of my eye.  He had on his uniform, you know, and was just standing there like he was contemplating, and pretty soon he walked back to the back of the drugstore and talked to the young lady who was the pharmacist. She was a friend of mine, and I worked with her, of course.  So he explained his problem to her, and she thought it was very funny.  So she brought him up front and introduced him to me as if she knew him, you know, because he told her his name was Bill Greene.  And so he said, "Now, you've met me, will you give me a date?"  And I said, "Well, I've been married and I have a baby."  And he said, "I love kids!"  And that impressed me a great deal.  But I thought, "Well, I'd better wait and be sure."  So I said, "Well, I'll let you know."  And he said, "Besides, I've been married, too."  And I said, "Oh, I'll bet," because we were both very young and that seemed like an excuse for him.
Reiff:  How old were you guys?
Greene:  He was twenty-three, and so was I, at that time.
Reiff:  And he was in the Coast Guard?
Greene:  He'd been in the Coast Guard since he was eighteen.
Reiff:  Oh, my gosh!
Greene:  So anyway, I told him that I would tell him tomorrow, that if he'd come back tomorrow, I'd let him know.  Meanwhile, some fellows from his ship that I happened to have met before, came in, and I said, "Who is Bill Greene on your ship?"  And they said, "We don't have a Bill Greene on our ship."  So I thought he had lied to me about his name, and of course that really made me mad.  I thought, "Well, I thought he was so nice, and so upright and everything, and he lied even about his name!"  So anyway, the next day he came in and he had some papers in his hand and he said, "Okay, will you give me a date?"  And I said, "Absolutely not!  You didn't even tell me the truth about your name.  Your name isn't even Bill Greene."  And he explained to me that his name was Arthur Haywood Greene, Jr., but his dad was called Art, and his dad wanted him not to be called Junior, so he said, "Let's just call him Bill," when he was first born.  So it absolutely stuck with him.  Nobody ever called him anything but Bill, even though it was not a part of his name--just a nickname.  So that sounded reasonable to me and I thought, "Well, I think...."  And besides that, the papers in his hands were annulment papers, and he really had been married for a short time.  So I believed that too.  So I gave him a date.  And he showed up at my house that night.  He found out that I liked gardenias, and here he came with a gardenia in his hand, and that was sweet, too, because I always was a romantic, I guess, and I thought that was real sweet.  But he immediately walked over to Judy and picked her up--my little girl was just eighteen months old, and she was just a toddler and had long, dark hair, and was very, very pretty--I thought, of course.  And so he just went over, picked her up, and put her on his lap and started talking to her.  He had very blue eyes, and they seemed to fascinate her.  She wasn't used to blue eyes, you know.  And so she was just sort of staring at him, on his lap, and suddenly she raised her hand and she had a bobby pin in her hand.  I don't know where she got it, probably off the couch, and it was probably mine.  But she just went like this and poked him in the eye with a bobby pin!  And of course his blue eyes were red, they were just fiery red in a second.  And I jumped up to grab her, I was really angry.  And he said, "Oh!"  And tears were running down his face, and he said, "Don't be angry with her, she's just a baby.  She didn't mean to do that."  And I thought, "That's for me, right there!"  I thought if he is as good as he sounds, I'm really for that."  And so he was as good as he sounded.  We met in February, and we were married in July.
Reiff:  Oh, my!  And when did he get out of the Coast Guard?
Greene:  He got out of the Coast Guard--see, that was '45, so he got out in October.  But from July until October, I was going to stay with my mother.  He was sent almost immediately after we got married to Dubuque, Iowa.  So I was going to stay with my mother and continue to work until he was mustered out, or until the war was over.  But he didn't want that to happen, he wanted us to come to Dubuque.  So I did go to Dubuque and we were there from August--we were married the latter part of July, and I guess it wasn't more than two or three weeks later that I went to Dubuque.  So it was in August.  And the war ended, you know, then, and so he was mustered out in the last of October in St. Louis.  And then we came out here, and his folks were at Marble Canyon.
Reiff:  Can you talk a little bit about how they developed Marble Canyon and how they got there, et cetera, ____________.
Greene:  Yeah, they had come there while--Bill had been overseas quite a while …during those years the family left Denver and came to Harry Goulding’s at Monument Valley.  Harry was Dad's first cousin.  And so Dad and Bill's mother, Ethel, and the two girls, both of their husbands were in service, too.  Now, Ruth didn't--her husband was also in service.  But they were in Washington, Bellingham, or someplace in Washington.  And so it was just Irene and Grace.  I think the four of them went to Monument Valley to help Harry.  And they hadn't been there too long, until Ramon Hubbell, who was from the Hubbell family, you know, out of Winslow, and he wanted Dad and Mom and the girls to go to Marble Canyon, and they would be partners with him and they would run Marble Canyon.  And so that was just exactly what they had sort of been looking for, you know, because Dad wanted to have something for the boys--the sons-in-law, and Bill--to have when they got back, to get started.
Reiff:  So they went to Marble Canyon.  What year was that?
Greene:  So they went to Marble Canyon.  Of course I didn't know them then, but it had to be in, oh, '43, I think, because they'd been there several years.  First they were in Blanding, and had a restaurant in Blanding.
Reiff:  Oh, my gosh!  I forgot about that.
Greene:  They went to Blanding.
Reiff:  Blanding, Utah, San Juan County.
Greene:  Yes, see, because they were near Harry.  And they did that for a while, in between helping Harry too.  And the girls worked in there.  And they were there just a short time, and then that's when they went to Marble Canyon.  And so that's where they were when we married, you see.  So I came out, though, to meet them before I married Bill, because I wanted to be sure, since I had a baby, that that would be something they would accept.  I didn't bring her with me, but I could tell they would just treat her like everybody else in the family.  And there were a lot of babies in the family.  So that's true, they were just wonderful, and they treated me like I'd known them forever.  So I was sure it would work out all right.  Travel was always by bus then, because nobody had any tires, you know, and couldn't get any.
Reiff:  Because of the war rationing?
Greene:  Yes.  So we went right back on the bus, and of course I was still working, so I had to get right back.  But at least I met his folks and knew what to expect.  And I thought the country was beautiful.
Reiff:  Was that your first time west?
Greene:  First time west!  And I really--you know, it was just so different from all the trees and everything in Kentucky, and all the rain and all that, but I thought it was just beautiful.
 So anyway, we then came out here as soon as he was mustered out.  And of course this time Judy was with us.  So we came on the bus like everybody did then.  When we got there, we stayed in the old honeymoon cabin.  Remember the old honeymoon cabin?
Reiff:  Yeah, out on the edge of the ___________.
Greene:  That was our living quarters then.  And so I started--of course this was all new to me, you know, and the only thing I had ever done was sell cosmetics.  I had started to LSU.  That's when I married the first time, I was going to LSU, and I met my former husband.
Reiff:  Is that Louisiana?
Greene:  Yes.  And I met him and I married him.  At that time, I didn't go to college.  So this was what I knew how to do, was just cosmetics (laughter) and that didn't fit in there.  So what I did was, I could type and I could keep books.  And so I started in.  I also waited tables.  I learned all kinds of new things.  I started waiting tables at six o'clock in the morning, and of course Judy and Bill were still asleep.  So Bill had to dress her, and he hadn't the slightest idea how, but he was really good at it, he tried.  From Day One, he was the best father.  I've never known a better father, he was wonderful.  And of course Judy just adored him.  And so if he would dress her, I'd go ahead and wait tables until about ten o'clock.  And then Irene and I were a team, and we would then wash and mangle [i.e., iron] ninety sheets.  It was the same every day, because that's how many cabins we had then.
Reiff:  Where were the people coming from?  And I'd like you to describe the roads in 1945.
Greene:  The roads were not paved, but they had asphalt, and they were not bad.  But most of the traffic was bus.  We had bus stops for breakfast, bus stops for lunch, and bus stops for dinner.  And of course there were about forty people on each bus.  So that was a lot of people to feed.
Reiff:  And about how long would it take, say, from Kanab, which from Marble Canyon is how many miles?
Greene:  I really don't know the exact number.  It's about seventy, because it's about the same from here.
Reiff:  Yeah.  So how long would it take a bus in those days to get from Kanab to Marble Canyon, say?
Greene:  About two hours is all.
Reiff:  So it was that good a road?
Greene:  Yes, it was a pretty good road, yeah.  It wasn't a bad road, but it was just narrow, and there wasn't a lot of traffic because people didn't have access to tires enough to go on a lot of vacations like they did after the war ended, you know.  I mean, because it took a while for them to be able to get rubber products and things like that.
Reiff:  So buses were really your livelihood.
Greene:  Buses were the main thing.  So in between waiting tables then, we'd do these--because you couldn't get your laundry done in Flagstaff, that was the closest place.  And you had to do it yourself.  And we had a big mangle--you know what that is.
Reiff:  Oh, yes!
Greene:  We mangled those sheets, and then when we got through that, it was lunchtime.  So then I waited tables for lunch.  I didn't get to see Judy all day long, and Bill was sort of looking after her, but he was busy too.  And Butch was there--he was the same age, approximately, as Judy.  And Betty Jo was older, and she was there as well.
Reiff:  And Butch and Betty Jo are?
Greene:  They're brother and sister.
Reiff:  And their parents are?
Greene:  Their mother was Grace.  Her name was Grace Williams then.  She was married to Ira Williams, called "Bud."  So she had the two children.  Betty Jo was about, I guess, four years older than Butch.  They just played by themselves and learned.  And also Linda, who was the daughter of Ruth, the oldest daughter, and her name was Baker.  Ruth was married to Vern Baker.  And they came back because he had been in the Coast Guard also, but he was stationed in Washington, he never went overseas.  So Linda was a few months younger than Judy, so there were quite a few little kids there.
Reiff:  Who did the cooking?
Greene:  Bill's mother.  Oh! she was the most wonderful cook in the world.
Reiff:  Well, the Greenes have a reputation.  It started with Ethel.
Greene:  Oh, I know.  Ethel was renown for her cooking.  She made homemade buns for the hamburgers, homemade bread for everything else.  And those buns were as big as about ten inches.  You can imagine the size of the hamburgers.  I don't think they ever made any money off of their food, because their steaks would lop over the side of the plate.
Reiff:  I remember.  And you must have had a powerplant then (Greene:  They had a powerplant.), because you weren't connected with electricity.
Greene:  Not yet, no, it was a powerplant.  But the electricity was later.  There were no telephones.  And so your only means of getting messages in and out, other than letters, were telegrams, and they were sent to Flagstaff, picked up by the bus driver, and the bus driver would bring them out to you.  And that's the only communication you had with the outside world.  So I was, of course, this was totally, totally new to me, but I loved the whole family, I just fell in love with them immediately because they treated me wonderful.  And I don't know if you knew Aunt Molly.
Reiff:  I didn't, I don't think.
Greene:  Do you remember the name?
Reiff:  Yes.
Greene:  Well, Aunt Molly raised Art and Harry Goulding, and Charlie Goulding.  Their mothers died when they were two years old--Charlie and, well, Harry--but I guess Charlie was about five, and Harry was two, and Dad was two when his mother died.  And so Aunt Molly was the sister of the boys’ mothers, and she raised those three boys.  So they were like brothers, you know.  And Aunt Molly called him Arthur, the only one who didn't call him Art.  And Arthur was her pride and joy.  And so she lived there too at Marble Canyon.  So there was quite a big family.  Of course the family was very hospitable to everyone who came there.  And every night they would have like dancing and they played poker.  And Mom, after cooking all day long, would sit there and play poker half the night with the men.  I never saw anything like it.  She was just terrific.
 But Bill had a little problem, and his problem was that he was extremely jealous.  (laughter)
Reiff:  (inaudible)
Greene:  It was so bad, it was really, really bad.  So he would stand in the doorway with his arms akimbo, like this, you know.
Reiff:  Folded across his chest.
Greene:  To see if I spoke to anybody I waited on--you know, any man.  (laughs)  So anyway, that was the only bad thing.  And everybody talked about it.  Did you know J. H. McGibbney?
Reiff:  I don't think so, who was he?
Greene:  He was a very well-known photographer, very famous for his pictures of especially Navajos.
Reiff:  Say that again.
Greene:  J. H. McGibbney.  It was M-C-G-I-B-B-N-E-Y, and you'll see a lot of his pictures in the old Arizona Highways.  Anyway, he was there all the time.  He was a close friend, and he was there constantly.  And he absolutely couldn't get over the way Bill was.  He really insisted that he thought he should go to a psychiatrist, because he had been in a very tough war, and he'd been injured, too, and he'd been through a lot in his life already.  And he just couldn't quite trust anybody--especially me.  And so finally I just couldn't stand it any longer.  I was there almost a year, and there was a very famous artist there--a lot of artists used to come there. (Reiff:  Yes, I remember.)  And her name was Nora Cundell.  She was from England, and she was an artist who drew animals, mostly dogs.  But she was very, very well-known for that.  And she was a real dear lady, and she watched me quite a bit.  She was there a couple of weeks at least, and loved that country.  So she finally came over and she said, "My dear, I think you need a friend.  Could I help you in some way?"  I said, "Could you mail a letter for me in Flagstaff?"  She was leaving the next day.  And see, we had to mail the letters, put them in a big basket, and Bill always got my letters and opened and wrote more on them, because they were to my mother or my sisters or whatever.  So I didn't want him to see this one. So she mailed it to my sister.  And I just said, "Get me out of here!"  (laughs)  Because I just couldn't stand that anymore.  It was really oppressing.  But I loved him very, very much.
 Anyway, so my sister....  See, there were no telephones out there, so she sent a telegram and said, "Come at once, Mother going to marry...."  What do you call it when somebody's trying to get your money?
Reiff:  Like fly-by-night?
Greene:  No, well, like a fortune hunter.  And my mother was a nurse and lived at the hospital in Paducah, Kentucky.  So she was not so loaded with money, but that's all my sister could think of.  So she said, "Come home at once."  So that gave me enough courage to say, "I've got to go home, [there's a] problem."  And Bill said, "Oh, no, we're going to Tuba City and call your sister."  So Tuba City was the closest telephone.
Reiff:  How far?
Greene:  It's sixty-four miles, out on the reservation.
Reiff:  And then, how long would it take you to get there?
Greene:  Well, it would take a good two hours, because the roads were not too good.  And so we drove all the way over to Tuba City, and the phone lines were horrible.  They crackled all the time.  You've probably had that experience, too, when you were younger.
Reiff:  We didn't have [telephones] in Mexican Hat.
Greene:  When you ever got them then, the phone line crackled.  And so Bill would yell "Hello!" and then she'd yell back "Hello!" and then crackle, crackle, crackle.  You couldn't hear a thing.  I was saved.  So he finally gave up and he said, "Well, I can't understand her, she can't understand me.  So I guess you need to go home then."  Because I kept saying, "Oh, no, something really bad has happened!"  So I did.  Judy and I went on the bus back to Paducah.  I knew it wasn't a mistake, because I knew we loved each other dearly, but he had to have something wake him up from that, because he had to trust me or we couldn't go on.  So he followed me.  I got back to Paducah, and then I went to Cape Girardeau, Missouri, to my aunt's, because I figured he wouldn't be able to find me there, but he did.  He went to my grandmother, and she told him where I was.  I wouldn't even talk to him [and talked to my aunt?].  He knew then that I had not planned to come back unless something changed.  So I finally went back to Paducah then--it wasn't very far--maybe seventy-five miles or something like that.  I went back on the bus to Paducah, and he was at the Irvin Cobb Hotel.  See, that was Irvin Cobb's hometown.  And so everything's Irvin Cobb or Barkley--Alben Barkley was from there, and he was the vice-president, before your time.  But he was the one that started the VIP deal.
Reiff:  Very Important Person?
Greene:  Yes.  And they used to call him "the VIP."  So in Paducah everything is either Barkley Avenue or one of the other of those guys.  So he was staying at the Irvin Cobb Hotel and I was staying at my grandmother's when I got back, because my mother and father were divorced and my mother lived at the hospital.  My dad lived in a hotel.  So I couldn't live with them.  So anyway, I stuck by my guns and I said, "No, I just couldn't do it.  I know it's important to your family to have you," because Bill was the businessman, he was the money-raiser, and the one who knew how to develop a business.  And so that was his main purpose.  Dad was loveable, and everybody adored him, but he couldn't handle money at all, and didn't even try to, it wasn't his thing.  And I knew it was very important for Bill, and I said, "I don't want to stand between you and your family, but I cannot be there when you treat me like I'm in prison."  And so, oh, he would change.  But he said, "I realize that I shouldn't have brought you there first.  I should have....  You know, bringing you out there with the baby and you neglecting the baby...."  She got lost almost twenty-four hours one day.
Reiff:  Oh, my land!  Tell me about that.
Greene:  We couldn't find her at all, and that's what made me decide to leave.  So Butch was used to it, and he would go....  One time some people picked him up off the road.  He was asleep in the middle of the road, and brought him back and said, "Does this child have a home here?"  And he could have easily been killed, but Butch survived all those things, you know.
Reiff:  How many cars went by, would you guess, in '45, during the day?
Greene:  Maybe fifty, at most.
Reiff:  And that's including the buses?
Greene:  No, there was probably fifty cars, and they always stopped, and they'd get gas and everything.
Reiff:  Can you tell a little bit about that, between Flagstaff and Kanab, wasn't Marble Canyon at that time....
Greene:  Marble Canyon was the only place....  Well, no, Richardson's at Cameron, you could get gas there too.
Reiff:  Oh, that's right.
Greene:  And then you could get gas at Flagstaff to Cameron, to Marble Canyon, and then from Marble Canyon there wasn't really anything to Kanab.
Reiff:  So Jacobs Lake wasn't developed at that point?
Greene:  They didn't have gas, I don't think.
Reiff:  That's what I was thinking.
Greene:  It was just more primitive for hunters and things like that.  But the people didn't really come down through Jacobs Lake, you know, even if there had been.  So when travelers saw that Marble Canyon was the first and only place for miles around to get gas, food, etc.--they all figured they'd better get gas while they could--and a meal too.  So they stopped at Marble Canyon.
Reiff:  So how did Judy get lost for almost twenty-four hours?
Greene:  We just couldn't find her.  I figured, I just knew she'd walked down--because she loved to--she was kind of a tomboy, and she was walking--by that time she was two years old, but she couldn't walk very far.  So I figured she'd gone and fallen over, because it wasn't very far to walk down there and fall over 350 feet.
Reiff:  So you were afraid she'd fallen into the Colorado River?
Greene:  I was afraid she had fallen, and I was just hysterical.  And so anyway, everybody kept looking every place for her outside.  Well, what had happened, she had gotten tired and gone in one of the cabins, and it wasn't rented, and it was made up, and she just got on the bed and went to sleep.  And she'd been asleep in that cabin.  I don't know where she'd been in between, but that's where somebody found her.  And that's when I decided I just couldn't stand that.  I felt like I was neglecting her and everything.  But see, Butch, being a boy, and he was really very much a boy--you can imagine.  (laughter)  He got bitten by scorpions so many times, he was immune to them.  Mom would put just plain old ammonia on the bites, and it worked.  You didn't have access to anything else like that.
Reiff:  Did all your own doctoring, didn't you?
Greene:  All of our own doctoring.  There was a doctor in Kanab, and when anybody had a baby, or when anybody had something serious--like Bill's mother had had tumors and she had to have surgery up there--and there was a doctor there.  I guess he was a good old country doctor, seemed to be popular with people.  But out there, there was just nothing.  And so anyway, what Bill said was, "I realize I shouldn't have brought you out there that soon.  It was so different from where you'd been and everything.  I promise I won't be that way anymore, I won't be so bad."  So he got a bunch of pots and pans and things from his mother, and some sheets and stuff like that.  And he took them--I had not said I'd go back yet, and I was still in Paducah--and so he took them to Phoenix and he stayed at the "Y."  He had already planned to go to Tucson to school anyway, the following September, but he didn't get up there.  He couldn’t go back to school.  Bill was very smart, very smart, and he had had some college at....  Let's see, what was it?  It was at the Colorado School of Mines.  But see, he went overseas, so yeah, he didn't get a chance [to graduate (Tr.)].  So anyway, he wanted to go on to college.  So he got us a place to live in Phoenix and everything before Judy and I moved to Phoenix, and he'd write these letters, "Daddy has this for you," and "Daddy has that...."  And Judy just worshipped Bill.  I couldn't do that.  And I didn't want to make another mistake, and I knew I loved him very much, and I knew he loved me, and I knew Judy loved us both.  So here I came back, and I went to Phoenix and he said he had a place for us across from a beautiful school.  It was just really nice, and I was going to love the location because it was across from this beautiful building and everything.  (chuckles)  It turned out to be the mental hospital, the state mental hospital, and he didn't know it.  (laughter)
Reiff:  At Twenty-fourth and Van Buren?
Greene:  At Twenty-fourth and Van Buren.  They had more cabins then, you know, than they did motels.
Reiff:  Was that out in the sticks then?
Greene:  It was out in the sticks, Twenty-fourth Street and Van Buren.
Reiff:  Was it paved?
Greene:  It was paved, yeah, but it was definitely out in the country, kind of.  And it was tough to live there.  (laughs)  Anyway, the first night I was there, I heard this screaming about four o'clock in the morning, and that was every night after that, we would hear that lady scream.  And then he went to work.  He had gotten a job with a heating and cooling....  See, he had some training with that in the service.  And so he just went in and asked this guy--it was the biggest one in Phoenix then, D. S. Horrall--and he asked Mr. Horrall for a job.  And he said, "Sir, where have you been?"  He said, "Well, I just got out of the service."  He said, "You know you have to belong to the union before you can even ask for a job.  I admire your guts, so I'm going to give you a job," but of course he had to join the union.  And Bill never was cut out to work for somebody else, but this was temporary, and we knew it.
Reiff:  What was the population in Phoenix then?
Greene:  Oh, my gosh, it was so much smaller.  I imagine it was maybe not over 200,000.  Probably it was that big, counting Mesa and all around, you know.  It's twenty times as big as it was then.  So we stayed there in that place, and Bill was always looking for something better.  He wasn't planning to do that very long.  Well, Ramon Hubbell really liked us, and he had the biggest collection of Indian rugs in the world.
Reiff:  Oh, I didn't know that.
Greene:  Still, I'm sure the Hubbell estate at Ganado still has them--unless they've sold them all, I don't know.  But they had the largest collection of Navajo rugs in the whole world.
Reiff:  And they were housed in Winslow?
Greene:  In Winslow, that was where their home was.  And so he wanted to know if we would like to start a shop in Phoenix, and Ramon would supply everything on consignment to us.  Then I would run the shop, and Bill would continue to work with Horrall.  He would also work at the shop when he could at night, he kept it open until about nine o'clock at night.  So we fixed up an old home, right on Central, in a real good location, but it was an old home.  And we fixed it up and painted all the shelves a different color and had it just really nice.  And then Bill built a hogan out in front of it.  And Ramon sent a Navajo weaver down.  In the back of us there were some old cabins--been there forever, I guess.  And so Nanebah Clah stayed in a cabin in back of us, and of course we fed her.  She had a stove in there, too, when she wanted to fix something, because she didn't like some of the things that we ate.
Reiff:  And she was a Navajo from where?
Greene:  She was a Navajo from Pinon, and he had a trading post at Pinon.  And at that time I probably weighed 94-95 pounds.  She weighed about 300 pounds, but she had a baby, a brand new baby, and his name was Hubbell Clah.  A lot of people named their kids Hubbell, or whoever the trader was--they did that.  Anyway, she had this baby in a cradle board, which appealed to the tourists.  So she would weave out there by that hogan that Bill [had built (Tr)].  And this was right on Central by Macayo's, if you know where [that is (Tr.)]--right down the street.  It's a big, tall office building now, but anyway, it was quite unusual for Phoenix.  We didn't speak Navajo then, Bill and I didn't--of course we didn't know how to do it, and especially me, from Paducah!  And so Nanebah, every night, would come in after we'd close the shop at night, and Bill had a pencil and a little pad in his pocket.  And so she named him Hosteen Bee ‘ak’e’elchihi, which is "the man with the pencil."  And I was always called ‘Asdzani Yazhi, even after I got on the reservation, which is "little woman."  And then they called him Hosteen Tso, which is "big man," afterwards.  But she called him Hosteen Bee ‘ak’e’elchihi..  And so anyway, we would point to things, and she would say it in Navajo.  She couldn't speak a word of English.  And she would say the word, and Bill would write it down the way it sounded.  So we learned nomasii for "potatoes," to totilchosee for "pop," and chloe-chin [phonetic spelling] for "onions."  And words like that.  We learned about, I'd say, twenty words very well--we knew those real well, but they didn't make any sense--and mostly items from the kitchen or whatever.
 Bill continued to work [doing heating and cooling (Tr.)], so I was with her during the daytime, and she had an understanding with me--we understood each other.  I took her to the dentist and got her teeth pulled--she had some bad teeth.  And that's right by the Indian School, so they did it for her there at the Indian School Hospital.
Reiff:  Talk about that.  A lot of people don't know Indian School [Road (Tr.)] was named for....
Greene:  Because there was a school there, and the children could go.  And it wasn't just Navajos, it was all tribes in Arizona, and there are a lot of tribes in Arizona.  So it was a big, big school there on Indian School [Road].  It is still there, but it has changed quite a bit.  They sold part of the property, and I don't know how many students there are now, but then there were a lot of them.  But any Indian could go in and get medical attention, free.  And so I took her there.  And things like that, so we got really close to each other.  And I'd have to hold her arm like she was the child and I was the mother.  It was kind of funny, because she was so much bigger.
 But anyway, we got to love each other.  And so what I would do is, the tourists would come and just swarm around, watching her weave her rug, you know.  It was very interesting.  So I would go out there, and the people would say, "Oh, this is so exciting!  I'm seeing somebody weave a rug!  I never saw anything like that before!  I would love to have that rug."  They'd say, "Could you tell her that I'm from near Lake Erie," or wherever, you know.  And so I would say, "Nanebah," and she'd look at me wisely, you know, and I'd say, "chloe-chin nomattsee " [i.e., nonsense "kitchen" Navajo (Tr.)], and I'd use emphasis on the words, and she would nod wisely.  (laughter)
Reiff:  Now translate that.  ____________
Greene:  I was saying "onions, potatoes...."
Reiff:  I kind of thought you were!  (laughter)
Greene:  So anyway, they had no idea, of course.  And so I would go all the way through all my little repertoire of about twenty words, and I'd use different emphasis on it, you know, and she would nod.  And when I would quit talking, she would then start saying Navajo, and looking at me real wisely, and telling me all kinds of stuff in Navajo, but I had not the slightest idea what she was saying!  (laughter)  So anyway, then she'd stop, they'd say, "What did she say?" and I said, "Oh, she said, it sounds so beautiful where you come from.  And she's never been away from this part of the country, and someday she hopes to go and see your beautiful country too."  And then they'd say, "I've got to have this rug.  I mean, I talked to the lady that is weaving it."  So they'd buy it before it was finished, and we'd make a deal that when it was finished, I would notify them, and I knew how much it was going to be, because we charged about the same for every rug, whatever size it was.
Reiff:  What was the markup then on rugs?
Greene:  Oh, (laughs) none of your business!
Reiff:  About a hundred maybe?
Greene:  Yes.  And so anyway, because now on the reservation they weren't quite that much, but about like that, and that's what Ramon told us to do.  Anyway, I'd sell those rugs like hotcakes, as fast as she could make them, because people would see it.  And later, oh!, a young person thinks they can do anything.  And I wouldn't do that now for anything!  Oh, I'd be scared to death, because Phoenix is full of retired Indian traders who speak very fluent Navajo, which I learned to do myself, later, but not then.  Say, if Clarence Wheeler, who we later were with, if he had stopped by there, finding it interesting that there was a Navajo, weaving there, and listened to our conversation he would have had a good laugh.
Reiff:  Tell me who Clarence Wheeler was.
Greene:  Clarence Wheeler was the dearest man.  He was from the area over near Blanding--the Wheeler family was--and they had been Indian traders for many years.  I think there were three Wheeler boys, and Clarence was in with his brother, Lon Wheeler, and then a brother-in-law--and I can't think of his name right now, but he had Sunrise Trading Post at that time, the brother-in-law.
[END TAPE 1, SIDE A; BEGIN SIDE B]
Reiff:  You were just going to tell me who Clarence Wheeler was, so go ahead and pick it up there.
Greene:  Clarence Wheeler was a very, very dear man, and one of the most wonderful Christian men I've ever known in my life.  He was a trader.  They were originally from the Blanding area, I believe--the Wheelers were.  In that area, at least--maybe not Blanding, but close by.  And they had quite a number of trading posts. After working for Ramon Hubbell a few years we met Clarence Wheeler whom we worked for later at Rough Rock.  People left Phoenix in droves in the summer, because there wasn't much air conditioning then.  And so they would go home.  That summer [Ramon] asked us if we would go to Oraibi to his place there.  And so we decided to do it.
Reiff:  Can you tell me where Oraibi is?
Greene:  Oraibi is on the Hopi Reservation, and this was New Oraibi, so it was very--it was the oldest continuously inhabited place in the country, really.
Reiff:  In the United States?
Greene:  In the United States, yes.  And the Hopi people are very different from the Navajos whom we had become acquainted with then.  By that time we knew a little about Navajos, having been with them at Marble Canyon also.  So Hopis were new to us too, but we went out there.  And it was quite an experience.
Reiff:  Can you talk a little bit about the differences that you saw then between Navajos and Hopis?
Greene:  Yes, there was a lot of differences, and mainly the Hopis were not nomads like the Navajos.  Navajos moved from hogan to hogan somewhat, and they'd take their sheep to the different locations.  But Hopis were like we are more.  They have their pueblos and that's where they stayed all the time.  And their ways were much more like Anglo people.  And so they were not quite as jolly and fun people as the Navajos, but they were very dedicated people.  They were very dedicated to their religion, too.  And they were very interesting to be around.  We stayed there for some time, and of course it was a really old, old trading post, and it had been the original Juan Lorenzo Hubbell Trading Post.  He was the first Indian trader on the reservation.
Reiff:  I didn't know that.
Greene:  So then his son, Lorenzo, took over, and he was a very loved man by the Navajos, by everybody.  But Lorenzo had passed away by this time.  Ramon was the only one left, so he had all these trading posts he had inherited.
Reiff:  So Ramon was the grandson of Juan (John) Lorenzo?
Greene:  The son of Juan.
Reiff:  And Lorenzo was....
Greene:  His brother.
Reiff:  And Lorenzo's home trading post was Ganado, wasn't it?
Greene:  Yes, it was.  Ganado and Oraibi.  They had all kinds of interesting things, like for example Oraibi had been run by some Navajos that didn't really understand the value of the paintings they had there, and so when we got there, they were just piled, and some of them had been mutilated.
Reiff:  Were these paintings on canvas?
Greene:  They were on canvas, and they were called "red drawings."  Have you ever heard of those?
Reiff:  No, I haven't.
Greene:  Well, they're very famous paintings now if you ever go to the museum there in Ganado.  They have all of them there.  And that was the ones that were at Oraibi when we went there, and they were just piled in big old piles in the corner.  And the mice had been in there, you know, and they just weren't taken care of at all, because Lorenzo had died, you see.
Reiff:  Why were they called red drawings?
Greene:  They were all done in red--it wasn't ink, it must have been charcoal, but it was red, and they were all red paintings.
Reiff:  What was their topic, usually?
Greene:  It was all Indians, faces.  They were all types of Indians, with their hats on or whatever.
Reiff:  And who had drawn them?
Greene:  His name escapes me, I'm sorry.
Reiff:  That's okay, we'll come back to it.
Greene:  At Oraibi.  And very, very expensive drawings now, because there'd be no way to replace such things.  And they were very good, but they were all done in red, and so they were known as the red drawings.  Anyway, when we got there, everything was just a mess.  There wasn't even any indoor toilet or anything.  So the first thing we did was--Bill knew how to do that, so he put in a bathroom.  Then we cleaned up everything as best we could.  It was extremely interesting, especially for Judy who was very small, a little girl then.  The kids would all come and stand in the window and say, "Judy!  Judy!"  And then she'd go out and play with them.  So she learned to make piki.
Reiff:  Native bread.
Greene:  Yes, with blue corn and all.  They made it on a stone.  They'd just pour out this blue corn [batter (Tr.)], and real thin, and so it was almost like a potato chip texture, you know, that had a wonderful flavor.  They still, of course, make that.  And she learned to do that, and she loved the children there at Oraibi.  But we'd been there about, I guess almost a year, and what we did was, we wanted to learn all about the culture and everything, so we went to their dances all the time.  We went to the Snake Dances, we went to the Butterfly Dance, which is beautiful.  The local missionary then, who was there at that time, didn't think that was right for us to do that, but we wanted to learn all about it.  We were going to be in the Indian business, we loved them, and if you're going to be there, you should know about their beliefs and habits and culture, I thought.  So we did it anyway.  And we went to all of those dances, and we got to know all of them.  And they're lovely people.  They are not drinkers and all, like some of the other tribes.  They're much more conservative.  They had peculiar names, though:  Sekaquaptewa and things like that.  It's a little hard to pronounce.
 But anyway, we stayed there about a year, and then Ramon suddenly needed somebody at his Pinon store.  And since we were more involved with Navajos than with Hopis, and we had been there long enough to clean it up and everything, and he, I guess, found someone who could--I think it was another Navajo, but he found someone who could take it over there, but not at Pinon.  So we went to Pinon.
Reiff:  Which is....
Greene:  It's on the Navajo Reservation.  It's about, oh--it's near Black Mountain--it's about fifty miles, I guess, from Oraibi, but on very bad roads.  (both talking at same time, neither discernable)  But wonderful compared to what it was then.  So when we got up there, then the roads were so bad that we couldn't get out a lot of times, at all.  And so Bill learned to fly, and we got an airplane, because that's the only way we could get out.  First we got a Jeep, but sometimes they were too bad for even a Jeep.
Reiff:  And this is what year now?
Greene:  That would be like '51.
Reiff:  And was Judy school age at that time?
Greene:  She had reached school age, but I tried to teach her that first year with the international thing, you know.
Reiff:  Calvert System?
Greene:  Calvert System!
Reiff:  Yes! I was taught through the Calvert System!
Greene:  And it is advanced over [public (Tr.)] school.
Reiff:  Extremely advanced.
Greene:  But I didn't have enough time to get through it.  So we then had to--what we did was get an apartment in....  Well, first she lived a year in Ganado, went to school there, that first year.  My mother came and stayed.  They had a great big hogan--  you've been there, haven't you?  (Reiff:  Yes.)  Outside of their store there's a big hogan that's really a home.  And it was a gift to us.  That's where my mother and Judy stayed that winter, and she went to school that first year there.  But then we got an apartment in Gallup, and my mother would just leave Paducah at the hospital.  She'd come out here in the winter and keep Judy in Gallup.  And so she went to school from then on in Gallup.  But we couldn't even get in to see her half the time.  That's why we got this plane, and Bill used to fly sick Navajos to the hospital, and things like that.
Reiff:  Nearest hospital was Ganado?
Greene:  Was Ganado, but he would even fly--there was also a doctor at Keams [or Kings?] Canyon, and he'd take them there, if they wanted to go there.
Reiff:  What was the airplane?
Greene:  The first one we got was a wide-winged....  Oh, starts with an "S."
Reiff:  Stinson?
Greene:  Stinson, yeah.  Real wide wings.  And then after that, we had a fellow who came to work for us, and he could fly.  So Bill let him fly some supplies over to Cliff Dwellers, and there was a big old windstorm, and he didn't have it tied down good.  And those big, wide wings, just flipped [the plane (Tr.)] over, and it was demolished.  So then we got a Tri-pacer [phonetic spelling], and the Tri-pacer worked great.  And so that's what we had from then on.  And so he would, you know, fly not only Navajos--that was helpful--but also he would--not only when they were sick, but if they had any kind of....  I mean, we'd have things like murders and a few things like that out there.
Reiff:  Do you remember any of those events?
Greene:  Oh, yes.  Well, our first experience, if you really want to hear about all of them, we had just barely gotten out there....
Reiff:  To Pinon?
Greene:  To Pinon.  And we never locked our door or anything.  And I wore cowboy boots and Levis all the time because I had to climb a ladder--you know, they built very high, great big shelves.  So I wore those all the time, and I always had the cowboy boots by my bed.  I also was a railroad retirement agent.  And I was a notary public.  So I had to sign all the men up for unemployment every Thursday.  And of course I was employed by the government, and I was bonded, I was under a $10,000 bond to tell the truth about any of them that might lie or anything like that.  So (chuckles) anyway, what was my original thought, I forgot!
Reiff:  The murder.
Greene:  Oh, yeah.  This is not quite a murder, this one, but it was the most traumatic thing we'd had, because we--it got worse, but we were more used to it after that.  This fellow came in and he said that his daughter had been raped, and oh! we just fell apart.
Reiff:  A Navajo?
Greene:  Navajo.  And it was a very young girl, I think she was fifteen.  So of course we were just devastated, we thought it was just terrible.  And so Bill was trying to question him about it, if we could do anything to help find him or do something about it, and certainly take the little girl to the hospital.  He didn't want us to take her to the hospital, and he told Bill if he would give him fifty dollars, I think it was, he would tell him who raped her.  He knew who raped her!  And that was the worst experience of our lives.  We couldn't get over it.  My mother happened to be there at that time, and she was just....  Oh! she just couldn't understand it.  It was just devastating.  And Bill told him he certainly wouldn't do that.  Told him if he knew who it was, to tell him, and he'd see that he was punished.  And do you know that that fellow would not tell him, unless he gave him fifty dollars.
Reiff:  What's he going to do?
Greene:  So we just tried to....  My mother looked the little girl over, because she was a nurse.  But there were nurses at the school over there, too.  They had a boarding school over there, and they looked her over, and she was harmed, too.  She was bruised.  And the father wouldn't tell who it was unless somebody paid him.  So we had to leave it up to them to do it.  We couldn't take it any further than that.  But we just let him know that we were willing to help in any way we could to find him, and certainly to protect the girl in any way.
 So then after that we had....  Oh, one night, the reason I told about the cowboy boots, we left the door open at night, and one night, in the middle of the night, a Navajo walked in and he was just standing by my bed, and he said that he had killed his wife.  Well, I quickly pulled on my boot and something was tight in there, so I kept pulling.  I thought, "Well, maybe that's my sock."  So I pulled it off and it was a mouse!  (laughter)  We had a lot of mice up there.  You could never get rid of all of them.  I had killed that mouse in my shoe!  (laughing obscures comment)  It was really, really interesting, to say the least.
 Well, the guy said that he killed her, and Bill said, "Well, are you sure she was dead, and he said, "Yes, there was blood coming out of her head."  [Bill] said, "Did you feel her pulse?"  He said, "Oh, I didn't touch her."  They don't touch them, if they're dead, you know.  So anyway, Bill called the police....
Reiff:  That were where?
Greene:  At Window Rock.
Reiff:  How far away?
Greene:  Oh, it was at least eighty-five miles west.
Reiff:  And bad roads then?
Greene:  And bad, bad roads then--terrible roads.  And the policemen would sometimes arrive there in as bad a shape as what we called them for!  (laughter)
Reiff:  These would be Navajo police?
Greene:  They were Navajo police.  And so anyway, it took hours and hours.  He was perfectly willing to wait there.  And Bill kept trying to get some more information.  He wanted to know....  He said he was just drinkin' and he was mad, and he hit her in the head and killed her.  So when the police finally came, why, they did take him off, but they didn't do a thing with him--nothin', at that time.  They're more strict now.
Reiff:  Had she died?
Greene:  Oh, yeah, she was very dead.  She'd been dead several hours by that time. So that way, we didn't have to participate in the arrest of him, except that they arrested him at our house, but they didn't do a thing.  He didn't have to stay in jail or nothin'.  But now, they do.  And jail is the worst thing a Navajo can have.  They cannot stand to be cooped up, you know.
Reiff:  Was that an area that had a lot of witchcraft?
Greene:  Yes.
Reiff:  Can you talk about that?
Greene:  They didn't call it witchcraft, of course.
Reiff:  No.  What did they call it?
Greene:  They had medicine men.  The medicine men were very revered, really.  And we knew who the medicine men were, and we knew that they got things in the mail.  It was peyote, and you could smell it.  So we got to know.  Of course we had the post office right there in our place, and we handled all the mail.  And so we knew what it was, but you don't interfere with somebody's culture unless it's something that's hurting somebody, and something that you have authority to do it with.  And actually, the medicine man, the most prominent one, he was crippled, he had a bad leg.
Reiff:  Do you remember his name?
Greene:  I don't at the moment.  I'll think about it and get back to you.
Reiff:  You bet, _________.
Greene:  I may think of it, because I usually do that way, if I haven't thought of anything for a long time.  But anyway, he was a sweet little man, real sweet natured.  We could find no fault with him.  But we had a fellow from Johns Hopkins University come out and spend a summer with us to study peyote groups, and his name was David....  [Oh, I forgot?]  There again, I'll have to think about that.  But he has written books about it, and they're available now.  His first name is David, and I will think of his name before--because he stayed with us all summer, lived with us.  He was Jewish, but he didn't object to having--because we didn't have a lot of sources of meat, you know--and he would eat bacon and things like that.  He wasn't an Orthodox Jew.  But a really nice guy.  And he went out to the peyote clans' meetings, and participated, because he wanted to understand what peyote did.  There had been rumors about infanticides, there had been things like that happen at some of their meetings when they had had peyote.
Reiff:  Was that rumored, or fact?
Greene:  It was rumored.  I didn't know any fact about that, but it was rumored among the other Navajos, very much so, because they weren't all Peyote Clan, you know.  And perhaps a lot of it was exaggerated.  But the ones who were not Peyote Clan would tell all these stories about it.  And of course we were there, you're learning everything new, so you listen to all of it.  But David went and participated.  They make like kind of a tea, and they pass it around.  You know, they sit in a circle in a hogan.  He said that there was very mild hallucination, but it was pleasant, it wasn't anything that would cause anybody to become violent, in his opinion.  And so that's the way he saw it.  You know, the book he wrote was something that he had been given a grant to do.
Reiff:  So he was a researcher.
Greene:  A researcher from Johns Hopkins.  And he wrote the book with that, and I'm sure you could find it.  Aberle!  David Aberle, A-B-E-R-L-E, Aberle.  Isn't it funny!  I haven't thought about that in years.  But anyway, he wrote the book, that he thought it was more or less harmless, and he didn't think it was anything to try to arrest them for, for using drugs, or anything like that.  So I guess maybe it calmed everything down, because there were getting to be so many rumors about it, that I guess the police were wanting to try to confiscate all of the peyote.  And it was coming from....  Let's see, I believe it was Alabama.  Anyway, it only grows in a few states.  And this would come in the mail to the medicine man, see.  And of course he was of the Peyote Clan.  So it was very, very interesting.
Reiff:  For sure!
Greene:  I have so many stories that you don't even want to hear all of them.
Reiff:  Oh, yes I do!
Greene:  Do you?  Well, anyway, I could write a book about just the things that happened out there.  But see, Bill was flying over to Cliff Dwellers.  At that time, it wasn't going well over there.  The family had left Marble Canyon then, in the middle of while we were on the Reservation.  Roman was a very, very poor businessman.  I don't know if I should say that or not, but he was, everybody knew it.  He was going bankrupt.  So Dad wanted to buy it--Cliff Dwellers, as you know.
Reiff:  And that's about ten miles up the road?
Greene:  About ten miles up the road, right.  And it had all those balanced rocks, and very interesting.  Of course it was very primitive.
Reiff:  Was there anything there?
Greene:  The only thing there was that little shack built in the rocks, that's still there.  And we still own it.
Reiff:  Whoa.  So nothing was there, except ____________ cleaned that up one time ___________.
Greene:  At the moment, I am devastated by that.  It was in a picture in the paper recently, and a story written by a man named Mark Schaeffer.  Maybe you know Mark.  He's at NAU.  Anyway, he's a professor there, but he writes, too.  And the picture he had in there, somebody had really trashed it over there.  And Johnny Schoppmann’s son went over and repainted it.  He thought that was the original color, and he had turquoise on it!  It is hideous-looking.  And besides that, some of the roof had blown off, so we're going to completely renovate it and fix it up, because the family wants to keep that forever.
Reiff:  Was that the original?
Greene:  That's the original.  It was Blanche Russell and her husband had that.
Reiff:  And who was Blanche Russell?
Greene:  Well, Blanche Russell, she and her husband had come from New York, and she was originally with the Follies in New York.  (laughs)  They came out in this old car.  And of course this was many, many years ago.
Reiff:  So about what time?
Greene:  That would have been, I guess, about 1920, back then, you know, when there were almost no cars on the road.  I could get the exact dates.  It's in our archives, by the way.  We have archives that would give you other things than what I'm telling you—they are at ASU and at the Heard Museum, and it's on line, and you can get it.  You know how to do that.  Through NAU you could get....  See, that's where all of our pictures, we have McGibbney's pictures, we have priceless things in there.  And most of the things at ASU are all about all of this country.  But the things at the Heard Museum are mostly about Bill and I, because it was Indian.  Dad couldn't speak Navajo.  He could say yah-tah-hey.  But the Navajos he came in contact with over there were English-speaking more or less, and it was a little different situation than being right out on the reservation and then learning to speak Navajo, and having to speak Navajo.  And also we're the ones--McGibbney would come to our trading post and stay about a month and get these wonderful pictures.  He set up a studio right in the trading post.  So we have some wonderful stuff that you'd love.
Reiff:  You're right, I would.
Greene:  And you could certainly have access to it, because you're working at NAU.  I would have to ask Judy and check to see if I could do that over the phone.  She can tell you--you know a lot about computers, I guess, don't you?
Reiff:  Not a thing.
Greene:  That's the way I am too.  That's why I can't work my computer very well.  I have one now, they gave it to me for Christmas, and I'm learning, but Judy knows all about them.
Reiff:  Yeah, Special Collections.
Greene:  Judy taught at ASU.  She's an artist, and so am I.  These are all my paintings.
Reiff:  I didn't know!  I wondered who the artist was.  Oh, my gosh!
Greene:  Mine are just the way they look to me, but hers are abstract.  She taught weaving, she's a wonderful weaver.  See, that's what she did when she was a little girl, watched women weave in summertime, so she got interested in it, and she's a really good weaver.
Reiff:  That's wonderful.
Greene:  So her pieces, like, would cover that whole wall there.  And in sections.  So they're mostly in hotels and lodges.  They're too big for most homes.  And expensive.  And they're all different things:  they're weaving, they're acrylic.  I only do oils, and she does everything except oils.  She does watercolors.  And she mixes them in.
Reiff:  So she does mixed media?
Greene:  Yes, five different media.  And I've never had any training.  She has a master's degree in art.  So she did teach there for a while, and she's freelance.  And she has a website that's beautiful, you'd love to see that.  Let me call her for a second.  (tape turned off and on)
 We stayed at Pinon about a year, and we had a little female dog there.  (laughs)  Oh boy, I tell you!  We had a real--I almost had a fight with a whole bunch of men.  My little dog got out, and she was in heat.  She was a little bitty dog, named Inky, a real black dog.  So she got out and I heard a commotion out front, and these men were all laughing.  Of course these Navajo dogs had gotten to her, and I just went bananas.  (laughs)  I ran in and got a bucket of water, and threw it on the dogs, and it didn't do any good, of course it was too late.  But they were standing there laughing, and they wouldn't help me, because they thought that was fun-nee!  And so anyway, she had some pups.  I believe there was four of them, and we kept one of them and that was Cle-Cha.  I told you we had him.  He was black too.  But he was built real funny, I had no idea what-all he was.  He had legs about that long.
Reiff:  Little short ones.
Greene:  Yeah, that was appropriate for me, I guess.  But he was really short.  He was real full of life.  We somehow adopted, without knowing it, another dog, a Navajo dog, that looked just like a skunk.  You know, he had that stripe and he was black and white.  So we named him Skunk.  He didn't come in the house, but we fed him all the time.  And he was Cle-Cha’s buddy.  Of course we shortened it to Clay.  And here was this big ol', tall, ugly dog, and little ol' Clay down here.  So Clay would jump in a bunch of mean dogs.  They were in gangs.  And he'd go right in the middle of them and start a fight, and then he'd run out, and old Skunk would have to fight the fight.  So one day--he was old, I guess, and nobody claimed him, 'cause they're not very kind to their dogs.  And so we went out one day, and there was old Skunk, layin' under a tree, dead.  And that just broke our hearts, even though he wasn't really our dog.  But then Cle-Cha was with us at Pinon, Rough Rock, and finally at Cliff Dwellers.
 Of course Bill was a pilot, you know, and we had a plane, so he could get in and out of there easily and go visit Judy in Gallup.
Reiff:  Did you have to put in your own airfield?  That's what my dad did.
Greene:  Bill always put in his own airfields.  He'd drag it and drag it and so on.  Anyway, we finally had to give Clay to Ruth and Vern over at Cliff Dwellers, he was over there.
Reiff:  And Ruth is Bill's sister?
Greene:  Yes, Ruth is Bill's sister, and they were running Cliff Dwellers in about 1957.  And of course at that time we were starting Canyon Tours and Greenehaven.  We had really no way to take care of Cle-Cha.
Reiff:  So you were talking about the airstrips.
Greene:  Oh, he put in the airstrips everyplace.  He put in the airstrips at Marble Canyon too.
Reiff:  Oh, I didn't know that.  And then you said that Clay went over to Cliff Dwellers.  And I'm not sure, for the people who are listening, if we made the transition from Pinon, or from Marble Canyon, actually, how long were the Greenes at Marble Canyon?
Greene:  They were at Marble Canyon until, let's see, it must have been 1949, I guess.
Reiff:  And they moved ten miles up the road?
Greene:  Yes, the family bought that property up there.  Bill and I were at Pinon at this time.  Bill's mother died in '57, so without it being written down, it's hard to remember those dates, but as I recall they were building new Cliff Dweller’s in 1950 and were using old Cliff Dweller’s as their home and base of operations until the new one was completed.
Reiff:  Okay, so in 1949 the family moved up there, you were saying earlier, the only thing that was up there was the little building in the rocks.  And did you use that as your trading post?
Greene:  No, Mom cooked in there, and she served--she had big groups.  Can you imagine that?!  They had benches and long tables.
Reiff:  How big would you say that little building was?
Greene:  There wasn't enough room at all inside for anybody to speak of--maybe three couples.  But they took tables outside and they had like Boy Scout troops and stuff like that.
Reiff:  Oh my gosh!
Greene:  And she would just have all that good food.  And of course the stove was very hard--it was just a wooden stove.  And she baked her own bread, made her own buns for the hamburgers.
Reiff:  And did they live in tents, or what?
Greene:  They lived in the rock building and two smaller buildings that were on the property.
Reiff:  They actually....  Oh my!
Greene:  Bill and I were on the reservation, so we did not live there, but he was over there a lot, because he'd fly supplies over there to them.  See, Grace had married Mel Schoppman and moved to Kanab, so she wasn't there.  So it was Ruth and Vern and Irene and Earl and Mom and Dad, during that period.  But of course we were there an awful lot, but we just didn't live there, because we were making a living on the Reservation at that time.
Reiff:  True!  So when did the building start ________.
Greene:  The Cliff Dwellers Restaurant?  They started it pretty much right after they bought it from Jack Church from Kanab.  His dad had purchased it from the Russells.
Reiff:  And about how big a piece of property was it originally?
Greene:  It's a section.
Reiff:  Which is how much?
Greene:  Six hundred and forty [640] acres.
Reiff:  Okay, now I know.  I'm not familiar with that.
Greene:  See, it's all layered.  Some is up on the top, and that's what I was telling you about.
Reiff:  Oh, ____________.
Greene:  There were quite a few....
Reiff:  Hollywood actors.
Greene:  Yes.  Dennis Hopper is a Hollywood actor and he's very well-known.  He usually plays weird parts, but he's a very good actor.
Reiff:  Wasn't he the star in "Easy Rider"?
Greene:  He was one of them, yes.  It was the Fonda boy and him--or, man.  And he also has made movies over at Cliff Dwellers.
Reiff:  Oh, I didn't know that.
Greene:  And Brooke Shields was with him in the movie made at Cliff Dwellers.  But anyway, Dennis Hopper had moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and I think he still has a home there. But at that time, he was kind of out of favor in Hollywood because he had a problem with drugs, and it was a well-known problem, so I don't mean to be telling anything I'm not supposed to.  He loved this country over here, so he bought forty acres from us over there.  And he was going to build a place.  He wanted to be away from the world, and all his friends were the same type friends, so they bought over there too--____ quite a few of them.  And among them was a fellow named Ed Abbey.  Have you heard of him?
Reiff:  I've heard of him.
Greene:  He was the first one to buy forty acres, before Dennis Hopper.  In fact, he finally ended up with eighty acres, before he died.  So anyway, Dennis Hopper wanted us to come over so that he could buy forty more acres.  This event occurred around 1976.  He wanted to walk it and look at it and be sure what he wanted and everything.  So we went over and he had his little girlfriend with him, so she and I kind of visited while he and Bill tramped the ground and everything.  And he was making his decision, but the whole time he was doing this, he and Bill were really drinking.  He, in addition, had had some kind of drug, you know.  So he was getting extremely loaded.  When we got back to the restaurant, the Cliff Dwellers Restaurant, he didn't last very long, he passed out in there.  And this little girl was such a young girl, and she was from Santa Fe too, and she made jewelry, designed jewelry.  Sweet little girl, but she was helpless, and he was laying there passed out.  So we decided that we had to come home, because we had a fifty-mile drive and it was in the winter, and very cold.
Reiff:  After you flew in?
Greene:  No, we drove a big Suburban, a great big Suburban.  I had never driven it, because it was so big.  All we could do was tell the little girl to tell Dennis to call us over at Greenehaven and get back in touch with us over at Lake Powell about the land.  But as we walked out of the restaurant, walking down the steps, (Bill himself had put these in, and it was a stone front porch, and then there were three stone round steps--you know, different diameters.  And it was slate-like rock, and so a piece of it was loose). Bill always wore rubber-soled shoes, and also he'd had a few drinks.  (laughter)  As he stepped on that piece of broken rock, he fell, and his whole body landed on that one leg, and it was twisted under him.  He could not get up to save himself.  He tried and tried.  And of course I was too small to lift him at all, or try to get him up.  So I finally got him a little bit up, and then I went inside and got Chuck DeWitt and his wife, who had bought the place from us in around 1974.  I got them to come out and help me, and I got him in a sitting position, and then Chuck and I put our feet on his behind and she took him by the arms, and I opened the door to the Suburban--they're very high, you know--and we pushed him in.  I knew his leg was broken, because it was so--he never complained about pain, and he was--actually, tears were coming down his face.  And so we got him in that way, but I had never driven that big Suburban.  The back window was down, and it's in the middle of winter and it was very cold.  It's about 10:30, 11:00 at night, you know.  So I asked Chuck and his wife to call over at Lake Powell, where we had a home there.  At that time we had a mobile home down there with Grace and Mel.  And I wanted Grace and Mel to meet us when we got here at Lake Powell, Greenehaven, because they could help me get him out of the truck.  I could not get him to go to the hospital.  I tried and tried all the way over here.  And also we were freezing, because I didn't know how to close that back window, and he couldn't tell me.  So we had a terrible trip home, but we finally got here, and Grace and Mel helped me get him out at our house, and his leg and foot were swollen three or four times the normal size, and they were black-looking.  I mean, it was black-looking, so I knew it was broken, but he wouldn't go in there.  So he said he'd go in the morning.  So that's what we did, we waited 'til morning, and of course it was terribly cold.  Took him to the hospital, and they X-rayed his leg and it was broken in about four places.
Reiff:  Oh, my gosh!
Greene:  All down around his ankle there.  They put a temporary cast.  It was not the kind he needed, because being diabetic, he had to have an old-fashioned cast.  So they put this softer cast and told me to get him to Phoenix immediately.  So that's what we did.  Meanwhile, Dennis had come over to pay, he was going to come out and talk to Bill.  See, he was passed out, he didn't know about Bill's leg.  (laughter)  So he started driving over to Greenehaven, and had still been drinking, and he got picked up and put in jail!  (laughter)  And to top it all off, he had an eagle feather in his hat! and they got him on that one too.  (laughter)  We have not seen Dennis since.
Reiff:  Is he still on the land?
Greene:  He's still owns the land and loves it, and he....

[END SIDE TAPE 1, SIDE B; BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE A]
Reiff:  We're with Evelyn Greene, 2/10/2001, Side 3.  You were just mentioning Dennis Hopper, and you said you haven't seen him since.
Greene:  No.  And he will never live over there now, the way he wanted to at that time, because he's into much bigger....  You know, he's in a big estate now.  At that time, he was at a low point in his life, and he wanted to get away from everybody.  But in order to make the kind of money he makes, he has to do it in Hollywood.  So he'll never move here, but he loves it.
Reiff:  I want to ask you, Evelyn:  I always knew that Bill was considered the brains, as you said earlier, of the family, good businessman.  And it sounds like financially, that you guys were absolutely essential to developing both Cliff Dwellers and Wahweap, is that right?  Can you fill me in on that?
Greene:  When the family started at Wahweap and we formed Canyon Tours, Cliff Dwellers became a part of the Canyon Tours assets.  Cliff Dweller’s was owned by the family (not us) and that was their contribution to the Canyon Tours assets.
Reiff:  When you say their part....
Greene:  The rest of the family.  That's what they had as an asset to put in.  And we had the cash.  And so that was okay, because it became an asset of Canyon Tours.
Reiff:  And you guys originally bought how much land?
Greene:  We didn't buy any land--that was a thirty-year lease.  The government will always own it.
Reiff:  Okay.  And it was a school section?
Greene:  No, it was owned by the state.  It was originally for grazing lease.  We purchased the lease from a Navajo.  His name was Curly Tso, T-S-O, and he was an old friend.  So we purchased all that grazing lease from him, and we did have some cattle to put on it, because Mel was a cattleman, so it was a family deal.  This was around 1957.
Reiff:  How did you know where the dam was going in?
Greene:  Because of Bill's flying over it to bring supplies over to Cliff Dweller’s all the time.  He picked, and he said, "I know it has to be this spot."  You could tell from the air.
Reiff:  Okay, so I want you to really get into that, because people may not know that the Greene family literally built and actually created the tourism on Lake Powell, because there was nothing on _______.
Greene:  ______________.  You know, the rumors had been flying for quite a long time that they were going to put a dam in here.  And Bill flew directly from Rough Rock over to Cliff Dwellers, so when he did, he passed all that area, and he'd make a little whirl around and look it all over real good.  And he took Dad up in the air, and they decided that was it, that was where it was going to be.  So that's why they wanted to make sure they got the lease on the land that was there.  So Greenehaven was part of that lease too.
Reiff:  Greene Haven?
Greene:  Greene Haven was also part of that original lease that they got from Curly Tso.  Actually, we got six sections from him.
Reiff:  And six sections is....
Greene:  Each section is 640 acres.
Reiff:  Okay, so lots of acreage.
Greene:  Lots of acreage, and there was nothing here at all.
Reiff:  Were there even roads up here then?
Greene:  No, nothing but just some pathways for the cowboys, just to get to their cattle and stuff.
Reiff:  So close to 4,000 acres.
Greene:  Yes, but we didn't use all of it.  This was a section, which was 640 acres, but we could not purchase all of this.  Do you want me to finish about the Canyon Tours tours?
Reiff:  Sure, however you....
Greene:  So anyway, that's how we got the land, was from a Navajo originally.  Then it had to be presented to the State Land Department that we were the ones that everybody thought should be able to get the concession.  It was very difficult because we had a lot of people fighting us.
Reiff:  And talk about what a concession is.
Greene:  A concession is the right with the government.  You have a contract with the government to have the exclusive....  You supply everything that's needed at a resort, that they have the land on.  And so they have control, they tell you what colors you can put on it and all those different things, but everything on it is yours.
Reiff:  So the competition was really strong?
Greene:  The competition was very strong when we were trying to get it.  And one of our biggest, biggest helpers was Barry Goldwater.  He was a dear friend of Dad's--and Bill too.  But he was a tremendous help.
Reiff:  And at that time he was....
Greene:  He was a senator.  Also, there were quite a few politicians who helped us.  But he was the one ____________, same thing Babbitt is now.
Reiff:  Secretary of Interior?  Oh, Stu [Stewart]Udall?
Greene:  Yes.  Anyway, Stu Udall was a big help too, and his brother.
Reiff:  Mo.
Greene:  All of them helped us, because they all knew Dad was an old-time river runner, and he knew this area, and it was just kind of a thing that should have been an old-timer that knew what they were talking about, concerning the land.  But the people who tried to get it from us were people who had a lot of money, and they would throw up the fact that we were just a family and that we couldn't really afford to do it, that we were not going to have the money to do it.  So we had to go to court and fight the battle.  But the land commissioner was a man named Obed Lassen, and he fought for us, and he had the final say.  So he would say, to the one trying to get the lease from us, he asked them how long they had lived in Arizona.  And the guy got all flustered, and he said, "Well, six weeks."  (laughs)  Because he knew it, 'cause he found out.  And what he did was, just get an apartment in Arizona.  He was from Utah.  Of course part of the lake's in Utah, but the concession had to be awarded to an Arizonan.  And so it was in Arizona.  And so anyway, he just said, "Leave the Greene family alone.  They get the concession."  And so we got it.  And it was really hard for the river runners as the change essentially stopped their livelihood on the river.  It was really something, because Dad's business would be, at that point, which would have happened to your dad, too, would have been at a standstill.
Reiff:  That's right, because in the meantime Dad, Art Greene, had started taking boat tours.
Greene:  Oh yes.  The last of Dad’s river trips was in 1969 with Gene Fannin.
Reiff:  Can you tell about that?
Greene:  He got boats with an airplane motor on them, because they were going up the river.  They weren't going over the rapids or anything, from Lee's Ferry down.  They were coming up river to Rainbow Bridge.
Reiff:  From Lee's Ferry to Rainbow Bridge?
Greene:  Yes, from Lee's Ferry.  But it was very difficult, because it was so noisy with those airplane motors.  They had to put plugs in their ears and everything else, to stand it.  But then they changed from that and finally got the boats that were compatible with the people, because it wasn't quite pleasant.  And then they had stashed--or cached, I guess you call it--gasoline all the way.  There was no way to get gas.  And of course those motors used a lot of gas.  So they cached gasoline all the way up to Rainbow Bridge.
Reiff:  And what year did he start running those tours, that touring ________?
Greene:  Directly after we went up to--in fact, he ran some of them when he was at Marble Canyon.  So he actually started them when he was there, and that would have been in '49, along in there.  He was doing it then.
Reiff:  And did it for how long, Evelyn?
Greene:  Well, he had done it before, even before your dad.  He had done it when he lived in Telluride.  Was it Telluride?  No, he was born in Telluride, but he lived in Aztec, and he started doing it way back then when he was around 18 years old.
Reiff:  Oh, my gosh!  So in about what year?
Greene:  Oh, he was born in 1895, so I guess that would have been about 1913, something like that.  But he just did it once in a while, you know.  He was just a young kid  trying to get some income started.  And then, of course, he lived in Denver meanwhile, after he left Aztec.  Then he started again when he moved to Arizona and when he went to Marble Canyon, which was in about 1943.  Well, he went there in 1943.
Reiff:  ‘43.
Greene:  Yeah, '43, I think, yes.  So he was doing it once in a while then, but he had to have a special boat built by a man called Seth Smith, who was the best boat builder in Phoenix.  Seth built all the boats for Dad, to be used on the river trips.  Dad wasn’t initially happy about the dam being built but he needed to make a living for his family.  And so Dad did not exactly think Lake Powell was going to be liked by everybody.  He knew there were going to be people who didn't like it.  But he thought, "It's going to happen anyway, so go with the flow."  And that's what we did.  Of course the people who love Lake Powell, it's created such a sensation with people that they love it so much that's all you hear about in Phoenix.  Everybody I talk to wants to know all the details.
Reiff:  Before you move any further into your Lake Powell experience, I would love--you mentioned briefly to me off tape about Shine Smith.  And I would love to know about some of the local characters who evidently populated Lee's Ferry and Marble Canyon.  Would you do that, Evelyn?
Greene:  Shine was a defrocked Presbyterian minister.  He came out here as a Presbyterian minister.  But he used....  People didn't understand how to get converts with Navajos--or any other Indians, for that matter, at that time--because they didn't understand their culture.  And so Shine used his own methods, because he understood them better.  So he got converts.  He didn't put down their beliefs, but he just talked to them like a child, and they really listened to him and believed in him, and he had more converts than anybody.  But the Church would hear about these different things he'd have, and the converts and how he'd get them.
Reiff:  Can you remember some examples of what he did?  I can see by the look on your face you do remember!  (laughter)
Greene:  Well, you know, I wasn't here when he first came out or anything, but he would join in with the Navajos, if they had anything to drink or anything like that.  He'd join in and be in their group and party like that.  He would take that opportunity to talk to them about Christianity and about the Lord and everything.  And _______ they listened to him like a little child would listen.  And other things that he would do, he would, for one thing, he had such a following, people just adored him.  He was such a very good....  So he had a lot of very wealthy people who backed him--especially after the church let him go, because he wasn't doing ethical things, the way they wanted it done ______.  So then all of these people--and one of them I remember was a man who had a blanket factory, and beautiful, big, wool blankets.  Well, the blankets that were not finished--you know, they'd have satin fitted around the edge of it, a border, and if they weren't finished correctly, where they had a defect in the trim, he would save them all up at his factory, and at the end of the year, send them to Shine for the Navajos for their Christmas party.  So he had these famous Christmas parties.
Reiff:  How did he end up in the Marble Canyon area?
Greene:  Well, he had chosen this area to come to.  I'm not sure how he got to Marble Canyon, but he chose the Navajo Reservation as his field.  And so then after the Church no longer was subsidizing him, he was given money by people who lived around here, to keep him going, and had a place to live, and a home and all that stuff.  And that's how he got to stay over there, at Richardson's or whoever--they all helped him.  They used to help him all the time, including our family.
Reiff:  Approximately what year did he come out here, and do you know where he was from?
Greene:  I don't really know that.  I think it was from Pennsylvania.  It was back east, but I have no idea what year because at that time he was an elderly man when I first came here.  So it had to have been fifty years before that, that he came.
Reiff:  Where did he live?
Greene:  He lived anyplace he could live.  He lived at the folks' place, he'd be there three or four months.  Then he'd go down to Richardsons' and be there for three or four months.  Anybody, wherever.  I think they kept a place for him there at Richardsons' that he could always come to.
Reiff:  And Richardsons, can you explain who they were?
Greene:  They were the ones who owned Cameron.  And so Cameron was more or less his headquarters, I guess you'd call it.
Reiff:  _________ Richardson.  And is that __________.
Greene:  _______ was the older man, and I really don't know the names of the rest of them.  They're all gone now.  But anyway, those families.  And then also there was Gray Mountain, he would stay there some, too.
Reiff:  So he had a route almost.
Greene:  He had a route, oh absolutely.  Just the whole year around, he'd be here three months, and then two months, and just went around like that.  And every Navajo knew of him, and they all--you know, any of them would be a convert if he was there, because they really loved him.  So he had a Christmas party at our place at Pinon one year, and it was the largest one he'd ever had.
Reiff:  A revival?
Greene:  No, a Christmas party to give them things.  And that's why they loved him so, because....  I mean, other missionaries never thought about their physical needs.  They were thinking about their spiritual needs only.  And that was hard for them to understand, because they wanted to be comfortable first, in just the basic things.  So Shine, with all of these friends all over the world sending him things all year round, by the time Christmas came....  And he stored them at Cameron in a storage place there.  So this is the largest one he had ever had.  We had almost 4,000 Navajos.
Reiff:  Oh, my land!  Oh, Evelyn!
Greene:  And so what we did....
Reiff:  What year?
Greene:  That was in, let's see, 1954.  I believe it was 1954, I'm sure it was.
Reiff:  And how many days gathering __________.
Greene:  It took us--Irene and I sorted the clothes, and Bill built bins in the stockroom, and we had these bins.  We would put women's coats, women's loafers, men's coats, men's shoes, or whatever.  And we had them all bins.  And children's bins.  All separate.  It took us three weeks to prepare for it.  And we worked hard, because we had to do it at night after we closed the store.  So anyway, we had all those clothes done, but what we did then, we hired this really very good chef, that Harry Goulding had at Monument Valley, to come over.  You know, in a trading post you always had those big zinc bathtubs--I think they're zinc.
Reiff:  Yes, or _________.
Greene:  That's what we cooked beans in, and stew.  They had never been used, they were new.  He made stew and beans.  The fry bread, I had outdoor things that he just built, because he had cooked out a lot over at Monument Valley, so he knew how to do that.  We had quite a few helpers from the school there, that helped us.
Reiff:  The school?
Greene:  The school at Rough Rock.  This was all at Rough Rock.
Reiff:  Now the party took place at....
Greene:  The party took place at Rough Rock.  See, after we left Pinon in 1951, what happened was, Clarence Wheeler came to Pinon.  He came and he had heard about us, because if a Navajo liked a trader, everything's great, and all Navajos will hear about him.  But if they don't like him, he might as well leave the reservation because you're not going to do any good with any of them.  And so he had heard about us.  And we were just in our twenties, you know, so that was pretty young for a trading post.  And so he came over and asked us if we would go with him to Rough Rock, and we would be partners.
Reiff:  And that was what year?
Greene:  That was in, let's see, 1950, I believe.  No, I think it was '51, because we'd been at Pinon, and we'd been at Oraibi.  And so most of our time out there was spent at Rough Rock, because his offer was so much better than what we had had with Roman.
Reiff:  Can you tell us in terms of those days what the offer was?
Greene:  (laughs)  Ramon Hubbell paid very small salaries, and he paid it to us as a couple, and we only made $150 a month, and room and board.
Reiff:  And did you get any overrides?
Greene:  No, not with him.  None.  Very unfair, because....  But anyway, he quite often would make a comment that so many of his people that worked for him stole from him.  Of course that really didn't make Bill happy, or me either, because Bill said, "We don't steal, so we would like to make a good living."  He hadn't gotten around--so see he was about to go bankrupt, but we didn't know that.  Of course that had nothing to do with us.  He had gone into the car selling business in Winslow, and he knew nothing whatsoever about cars, and that's what got him in trouble.  But anyway, so this man [i.e., Clarence Wheeler] comes in and offers us the moon to us, and a partnership.
Reiff:  And "the moon" meant?
Greene:  The moon meant that he would give us a bonus at the end of the year, if we did well, which was what we liked, because the harder we worked, the more we made.  We would be making like $30,000 a year, and that was a real big salary in those days.
Reiff:  Lots of money.
Greene:  And we had nothing to spend it on except sending Judy to school in Gallup, because we couldn't ever leave the reservation.  How much are you going to spend on the reservation?  So that's how we saved so much money, to be able to start Canyon Tours.  We did even better than that after the first year, because the more money he made, the more bonus we got.  And I was a railroad retirement agent--also that brought in more money, because all of the signers.  And I had 144, and I was the only woman on the reservation at that time that did that.  The signers would go out and get drunk every Thursday.
Reiff:  Tell me, if you will, about what railroad retirement is.
Greene:  Well, the railroad pays an agent to sign Indians, and I suppose other communities that have very little work--they let them sign for unemployment when they're not working on the railroad.  They do labor on the railroads, you know.  They lay ties and do repairs, railways and things like that.  Of course the Navajos have no way to make money way out on the reservation like that at all, except that.  So they would sign up for unemployment.  Then I would fill out their forms and send it in for them, and the checks came to the store.  So they would pick up the checks at the store.  And of course what they bought--their clothes, everything is purchased at a trading post, because that's where they lived.  And so it's a very good thing to have in your trading post.
Reiff:  Yes, brings trade in.
Greene:  Brings trade in that you couldn't get otherwise, because the young ones don't have anyplace to work.  However, they did--see the uranium was found at that time.  We also had uranium, but it was on the Navajo Reservation where Bill would find the uranium, so we couldn't do anything about it except we could own it if we owned it with the Navajos.  So we had several Navajos that had places.  That didn't amount to much, but we found uranium over by Marble Canyon area, or Cliff Dwellers area, and we did sell one of those mines over there, so that helped some.  That was after they and we were already in Canyon Tours.
Reiff:  "They" being the rest of the family?
Greene:  The rest of the family, yes.  And we put the cash in.  And Bill also had a lot of associates who'd been in real estate in Phoenix.  Bill was the original builder of Deer Valley Airport in Phoenix.  So he knew a lot of places to borrow money or whatever.  And the family didn't have that advantage--the rest of the family--because they didn't live [in Phoenix (Tr.)], or weren't in that kind of business.  So that made us as necessary as anybody was to the family enterprise.  And it was definitely a family enterprise.
Reiff:  So with Shine Smith and his ministry....
Greene:  Shine by that time (1957) had passed away, by the time we got Wahweap.
Reiff:  I want to pick up that thread.  I don't think people know that there were huge--that trading posts sponsored parties, because I did that when I was at Marble Canyon.  So can you tell me about the 4,000 Navajos?
Greene:  Oh, it was unbelievable!  Pictures of that are in the archives.
Reiff:  Are they in the Heard Museum?
Greene:  No, they're at ASU.
Reiff:  How did most of the people get there?
Greene:  Oh, wagons.  There were some trucks then, but what they'd do, the family might have one person with a truck.  (phone rings, tape turned off and on)  ... family, that one of the young men might have a truck, and usually they had a big long-bed truck, because then everybody could get in the back of that truck and come to the trading post--and in this case to the party that we were talking about.  And if they couldn't all get in there, then they came in wagons.  So I'd say 80 percent were in wagons, and the other 20 percent had trucks.  Nobody had a car.  A car was foolish out there.  That's the way they got here.  And they came from all over.  They came from Black Mountain and Navajo Mountain, and anyplace that heard about this Christmas party.  I may have a picture at home, I don't know.  And Judy made copies of a lot of those.  So maybe we'll try to get pictures.  But we're all lined up, and we have all of these tubs full of stew and beans, and then we had, of course, frybread by the ton.  And the school helped with the frybread--the boarding school across the street from the trading post.  And then we had fruit and Christmas candy and things like that for the kids.  So they lined up.  Four thousand Navajos lined up, and they let the children and the women first, and then the men.  So we had to stand there and try to help them find the clothes they needed, etc., but we sort of let them pick it out.
Reiff:  Their clothing?
Greene:  Their clothing.  And they would all get a coat and either a dress or trousers.  And some companies sent tuxedos.
Reiff:  I know!  We had them at Marble Canyon.
Greene:  Tuxedos!  And it was  friends of Shine’s, and they just kept sending them every year.  And we had a friend finally that had tuxedos, and by golly, if he didn't send them to us, and then we had to get them out to people in need.  But not recently.  So we just gave them to somebody in Page, and they took them out on the reservation, I'm not sure where.  But anyway, tuxedos and a Navajo.  And they loved them.  They just loved them.
Reiff:  I got them too, at Marble Canyon.
Greene:  Oh, those young men would pick out the tuxedos.  We laid out a choice of clothes, you know.  And there were a few fur coats, and oh, they went fast.  (laughs)  And there were high heels, ankle strap shoes.  (laughs)  Stuff that was of no use out there, but it was from all over the country.  People had no idea who was going to get them, you know.  And so it was fun.  It was just a really wonderful time.
Reiff:  How long did the party last?
Greene:  Well, it just lasted the one day, once we got it started.  What we did, we had--oh, some of them played a few games and things like that, you know.  But it took so long to run them through.  And after they got all their clothes, then they had to come back and get all their food.  And so it took all day to do that.  But then that was the happiest day for them.  Oh, they were just....  And it just gave you a really great feeling, because they were really pleased.  And this was all Shine Smith, so no wonder he was so well-known, you know.  And they all wanted to follow his lead and become Christians.  So that's how he got his converts.  And it was a good plan, because you have to, when you're dealing with people who have a different culture from yours--and that was very different--you have to make allowances and not go by the strict rules that you follow in New York City.  And he knew that, so he was successful with them.  He had more converts than all the rest of them put together.
Reiff:  That's interesting.  Tell me about some of the other people at Marble Canyon, and who was down at Lee's Ferry at the old Lee Ranch.
Greene:  Johnsons.  They grew watermelons down there.
Reiff:  And they were a Mormon family?
Greene:  A Mormon family, yes.  That Johnson man had the best watermelons in the world down there.  You'd go down to visit him, and he'd just go out in the field and get a watermelon and bring it in and break it, and you'd have big chunks of watermelon, that's what you had.
Reiff:  How long did it take, do you remember, to drive down there?  Because I remember the road was terrible from Marble to Lee's Ferry.
Greene:  We had a big old--it wasn't even a suburban then.
Reiff:  Was that a World War II....
Greene:  It was a World War II....
Reiff:  Ambulance or something.
Greene:  It was some kind of a war surplus vehicle.  It took a long time--I would say, well, it took at least two hours to get down there.  And that's not very far, you know.
Reiff:  It's approximately seven miles?
Greene:  About seven, but you had to go very, very slow.  But of course all along the way were those balanced rocks, and you were looking at such beauty that it didn't matter if it took that long.  We made a day of it, and went down to Johnsons' and had watermelon.  It was a wonderful day, you know.
Reiff:  Was Vermillion Cliffs built then?
Greene:  Yes, it was.  His name was Rodgers.
Reiff:  Oh, was that Buck Rodgers' place?
Greene:  Yes.
Reiff:  You know, I didn't know that.  I'm going to talk to Betty Rodgers.
Greene:  Yeah, that was his place.
Reiff:  I do remember, yeah.
Greene:  You're going to talk to young Betty?
Reiff:  Yes.
Greene:  She bought this house right up here at Greenehaven.  Her name is Myers or something like that now.
Reiff:  I don't know, Joanie got me her phone number.
Greene:  I believe it's Myers--it starts with an "M."  Moyers or Myers, I'm not sure which--maybe Moyers.  But you know there's a spec house here at Greenehaven.  They just bought that.  The mother must be almost a hundred.
Reiff:  Oh, I believe it.
Greene:  Because she was friends with Bill's mom and dad, and Dad was born in 1895.  He'd be....  Let's see, five years added onto a hundred, he'd be a hundred and six years old, wouldn't he?
Reiff:  Yes.  Buck Rogers was an early Indian trader, and he married Betty Rogers, who was an adopted Navajo child of the Wetherills in Kayenta.
Greene:  That's correct.  And they had, oh, I believe--I'm not sure, but I believe it was four children.
Reiff:  Two boys, maybe two girls.
Greene:  Two girls, I believe, yes.  Betty's the one I know best.
Reiff:  And they didn't do any tourism.  Now, Vermillion Cliffs is five miles from Marble Canyon toward Cliff Dwellers, and they had no tourism stuff going on, did they?  They were just traders at that point, do you know?
Greene:  They had some tourism--very little.  Buck liked his privacy.
Reiff:  That's what I remember, yeah.  You have a twinkle in your eye.  Can you talk about him a little bit?
Greene:  Well, you know, there was no place for people to go to the bathroom traveling through, and so quite often they'd stop there, because it was kind of--it had a few things for sale and all that.  But he didn't have a bathroom for the public.  So this one guy stopped there, and just decided--he didn't think anybody was there, so he just decided to go out in the yard, you know, and Buck caught him, and he almost killed him!  (laughs)
Reiff:  No, you're kidding!
Greene:  Don't tell Betty, though, she doesn't know it.  But he really did really hurt the guy, but the poor guy didn't really know, and out in the tules like that.  You wouldn't do that in town, I suppose--most people wouldn't.  But Buck wanted privacy.  They were a lot of fun, because one time Bill and I went with Dad and Mom and Betty, the girl Betty.
Reiff:  Senior Betty.
Greene:  Yes.  We went with them, and they had, I think it was young Betty who was alone.  One of the girls lived alone.  And Bill and I had never been to Mexico, deep sea fishing or anything, at that point.  So we all went together.  We had a ball!  We really had a good time.  Both Betty and Buck were a lot of fun.  And Dad knew the man that had the Cavern, I believe, or the Cave down there, the restaurant.
Reiff:  Down in Mexico?
Greene:  In Mexico, yes.  This was at Rocky Point, Puerto Penasco.  Just this side of it is this big famous restaurant there, and it's in a cave.  It's always real cool in there, underground.  Really underground, if you have claustrophobia.  But Dad knew that man that owns it.  So we would get there, and oh gosh, we just had a wonderful time.  I think, I'm sure I have a picture of that, if you're interested in it.  The food was excellent, but it was stuff like turtle soup, stuff you don't get normally here, you know.  But it was very, very good.  So anyway, that was my only time to go anyplace with them, but they were great.  I liked Betty.  One of the boys was married to a lady that has a beauty shop up here.  Bill and I used to own that building where the beauty shop was.  I don't know who owns it now.  I can't describe it to you.  Where the movie theater is.
Reiff:  Oh, yeah.  Any more you want to fill-in about either Marble Canyon or Cliff Dwellers, that we ought to know?
Greene:  Well, I really can't think of anything.  See, the thing that I remember most about it, it was a wonderful experience, but of course in those days we went arrowhead hunting all the time.
Reiff:  You guys are famous for your arrowheads.  (laughter)  Do you want to tell us about your arrowhead collection?
Greene:  Earl is the one with the collection.  Oh, man!  But see, he and Irene were there all the time, and Bill and I weren't.  We were working out on the reservation, so we didn't get to do it.  But see, we did it mostly on our own property.
Reiff:  Tell us about the famous arrowhead collection.
Greene:  Oh, it was just wonderful.  If you had a big wind, then the next day you'd go.  No matter how many times you'd been in that spot, there would always be more arrowheads, because the wind would blow.  You know, the sand blows tons of it away when the wind blows hard.  So the best arrowhead hunter in the family was Irene.  She was excellent, but Bill wasn't far behind her.  And they were quite competitive.  And of course Earl got better and better.  And Earl made the displays.  He loved to do that.  And so we had some really good arrowheads.  And the only one that didn't come from there is this one that I'm going to show you here.  That's the only one that didn't come from that area.  And that was given to Dad from an Indian--oh, what do you call it?  Not a shaman, but a medicine man, in Oregon, I believe it was.  The color is completely different from anything here.
Reiff:  It is.  When you were on the phone, I went over and looked, and I thought, "No, that's not from around here."  It's a very deep cranberry color.
Greene:  Isn't it beautiful?
Reiff:  It is beautiful, _____________.
Greene:  See, all of these are from there, and look how perfect those bird points are.
Reiff:  Oh, they're lovely.
Greene:  Of course I had never done anything like that, being from Kentucky.  Some parts of Kentucky probably have arrowheads, but not where I came from.
Reiff:  But most of these are Anasazi, are they not?
Greene:  Yes.
Reiff:  They're very, very old, beautifully displayed.
Greene:  And you can tell, Earl just really was good at that.
Reiff:  Yeah, he's very gifted.  Yeah, I remember them at Cliff Dwellers.
Greene:  So that's the thing that I remembered most when I was over there.  Now, you were here....  In talking to Betty Jo, you will probably hear more about--because she was a little girl who lived there all the time, you know, at that time.  So she probably has stories about Marble Canyon and Cliff Dwellers that I am not cognizant of.
Reiff:  Do you know what I hear from you, and have heard all day, which has made it so delightful, is your sense of excitement, even after all these years.
Greene:  Oh! I think it's the most wonderful country in this world.  I love it up here.  I just can't imagine anything more beautiful.  We had a man from Paris, who's a very well-known man there.  He has a television show, and he is an author.  He bought two big lots....  (phone rings)
Reiff:  Here in Greene Haven?
Greene:  Yes, here in Greene Haven.
[END SIDE TAPE 2, SIDE A, BEGIN SIDE B]
Reiff:  This is Side 2, Tape 2, of the Evelyn Greene interview on 2/10/2001, in Greene Haven, Arizona.
Greene:  This gentleman bought two lots in the estate part that had the largest and the best lots.  And he made the comment, he has homes in Monte Carlo and he has a home, of course, in Paris, and he has a home in, I believe it's the Italian Riviera, and New York.  And he said he has been all over the world, and never, ever has he seen such beauty as we have here.  He said, "You people don't realize, because you live here, the beauty of this country."  And I said, "I realize the beauty of this country.  I think it is spectacular"  And so did Bill.  We just felt like--actually, we felt like we were a part of it, a part of the country.  That's what makes it difficult now, because he's no longer a part of the country, but I know he's looking after it, to see that it's okay.  (chuckles)  When it's a beautiful day like it is today, there's just nothing in the world so beautiful as this.  Do you agree?  Okay.  And so, now what?
Reiff:  Well, it strikes me that you have known many, many famous people.
Greene:  A lot of them, yes.
Reiff:  And I don't think people know that, Evelyn, that this was a small country in the sense of there weren't that many people here, so everyone knew everyone.  So maybe you can touch on some of the significant people that touched your lives, or you touched theirs.
Greene:  Well, probably maybe the most interesting one, because it was the most unusual one, we had a friend who had been the ambassador to Great Britain, and his name was Douglas, Louis Douglas--Lou Douglas they called him.  He had a patch over his eye.  He's famous for it, his pictures.  He always had a black patch because he had accidentally--he loved to fish--and the fishing [lure?] got caught in his eye, so he was blind in that eye.  But he was a very striking-looking man, and he was a dear friend of ours.  In fact, he was such a good friend that he wanted to become a part of our program up here at the lake, because he loved it so.  But of course it was a family thing.  But meanwhile, he called us in Phoenix and he said....  He had been in the Court of St. James and he was the ambassador, so he had lived there many years, and in living there, right by the queen and everything, his daughter was raised with Princess Margaret.  So they were pals together when they were kids.  So Princess Margaret was coming over to visit Sharmyn and the Douglases.  The Douglases were, (his dad was the one Douglas, Arizona, is named after), living in Douglas, Arizona.  And as you know, Douglas is a very small community, and not much to entertain a princess, and her husband at that time was Lord Snowden.  And they had a big entourage--big.
Reiff:  When you're saying big, how big is big?
Greene:  Forty people, at least forty.  Because all of their Scotland Yard people were with them, and a lot of other movie people that I'll tell you about, that we happened to know, so that made it nice.  But anyway, he said, "Can you and Bill help me out?  Can you entertain them for three days, and be host and hostess to them, and we'll come up to Lake Powell?  There's no place I'd rather take them than Lake Powell."  And so we said, "Absolutely."  So he was the host, he was their host, and we were their hosts while they were here.  So we agreed to that, and so he gave me a little instruction about what to do.  And he said, "Now Evelyn, wear something very bright, because she always does.  Wear gloves when you meet her."  And he taught me how to curtsy, or his wife did.  So I did the whole bit.  I got a watermelon pink knit suit, and I had white gloves.  And this was in November.
Reiff:  Of what year, do you remember?
Greene:  It was '64, I believe.  And so I had the white gloves and did the whole thing.  So they had this big plane that was coming in, and it was a twin engine, it wasn't any small plane.  And there were about forty people.  But as I said, it was several movie actors, and among them was Roddy McDowell, who was a friend of Lord Snowden's.  He was from England too.  And Roddy McDowell we had known when he made the movie here, "The Greatest Story Ever Told."  We had already met him, so that made it nice.  And then another one who also had made a movie here was an old-time actress named Dorothy McGuire.  She was a lovely person.  And her husband, his name was John Quinn or something like that.  I'll think of it in a minute.  Then there was another young lady from England originally, named Hope Lange, and her husband, who was gorgeous.  (laughter)  He was so good looking!  And Hope was cute, too, just cute as a button.  Then there were quite a few others, but they were not people that maybe you'd know about.  Then of course there was all of the Douglas family.  The rest of them were more or less to protect her.  She had so many you would not believe it.  So we didn't have the big lodge yet.  All we had was Lake Powell Motel.
Reiff:  Which is on the now highway.
Greene:  It was there, it was on the highway as you go in.  Now it's used just for overflow, or for people who don't want to be in a big place or whatever.  But at that time, see, we had a service station, and we had a restaurant, and everything there, because we didn't have another one at that time.
Reiff:  Were the Greene girls still cooking?
Greene:  No, no.  In fact, see, Irene was working at the boat tours, and....
Reiff:  (inaudible)
Greene:  Oh no, not at that point.  Let's see, '64....  We did have the boat tours started, but it wasn't on a very large scale yet.  Grace, at that point, working at the family Trailer park.  And Ruth was over at Cliff Dweller’s.  We had the fellow from Kanab, Whit Perry.  You know Perry's Lodge?  We had Whit Perry at Lake Powell Motel Restaurant.  And he was the first manager we had.  And Ken, his nephew, Ken that has Ken's “Old West”.  He was the bus boy--he and another friend.  He wore a little red top.  Oh, he was so cute, both of them.  And so those two boys came down from Kanab, and they worked over there.  But what we did was, we had turned the public away for those three days and four nights.  So the whole place was taken over by the Royal Entourage.  And the FBI was there, the local authorities out of Flagstaff, the sheriff.  We had so much police coverage, you just couldn't imagine.  I didn't dream she had to be that protected.  But anyway, when she got here, I did my whole bit.  I did the curtsy, and you're supposed to say, "Your Royal Highness," the first thing you say to her, and curtsy.  So I did that.  And Bill did his thing just right.  But Dad, you know Dad called everybody ma'am, so he said, "Howdy, ma'am," and she just loved it.  She loved it.  Coming from him, he can get by with anything.  And after you call her Your Royal Highness the first time, then you do call her ma'am.  She has to be called ma'am.  I hate to be called ma'am.  But in England, royalty is called ma'am.  Her husband, Lord Snowden, even calls her ma'am.
Reiff:  Oh my gosh!
Greene:  And you're supposed to walk—Lord Snowden even walks three steps behind her at all times.  So anyway, it's kind of silly to us, you know, but that's the way it was.  So anyway, when she got here, oh, there were photographers, television, there was everything.  And they were all watching when she got out.  And here I had my watermelon suit and all, just as bright as could be.  And she had on a beige coat, beige shoes, a beige dress, not one bit of color did she have on.  So they got us mixed up.  We looked exactly alike.
Reiff:  Oh, my gosh!
Greene:  The same size, hairdo the same, everything!
Reiff:  She's short!
Greene:  Yeah.  And so they got us mixed up.  And what she did was borrow my clothes, because she had no rough clothes, and I had boots and I had a raincoat that had a fake, probably a rabbit fur on it, that you could remove.  And she liked that, so she wore that.  And all of this was in the paper, headlines in The New York Times.
Reiff:  Oh my gosh!
Greene:  And The Washington Post, and everything, because we had no control over what the employees and other people were telling them.  And so anyway, that was the headline in the Phoenix paper, about the clothes she was wearing of mine.  But I thought that was fun to have that in there.  I had a lot of pictures of those that I can show you.  And you can see we're in the same line, and he's in between us.
Reiff:  Lord Snowden.
Greene:  You really cannot hardly tell us apart.
Reiff:  Really?!
Greene:  Yes!
Reiff:  So she was beautiful.
Greene:  Well, I don't know if she was beautiful!
Reiff:  Well, yeah, because you are.
Greene:  I don't know, but we sure did look alike.  I saw a recent picture of her, and bless her heart....
Reiff:  Yeah, she has not aged well.
Greene:  We took care of them at their parties and everything, you know.  She is a very heavy drinker.
Reiff:  Oh, I didn't know that.  God bless her heart.
Greene:  So this is one of her problems.  And of course she was very uninhibited, and the press didn't care for her very much.
Reiff:  No, I knew that.
Greene:  So there were some stories that were told that hurt me because there was nothing said against us, but there were things said against her taking advantage of these poor people out there--you know, way out in the tules.  And she isn't paying them anything, and it's costing them a fortune.  That was all a lie, because Lou Douglas paid for everything.  And besides, it was the best publicity, and Lake Powell had just started, and nobody knew about Lake Powell much.  So between movies and her, and people like that coming here, is the way we got people to hear about Lake Powell, because they would instantly hear about it, or read about it in the paper.  "Where's Lake Powell?  We'll have to go there!"  And so it was probably a million dollars worth of publicity.  But it wasn't all good.  Some of it was, like this was really in Timbuktu Land and stuff like that.
Reiff:  That's when it was pretty _________.
Greene:  It really was.  (laughter)  Well, then The New York Times came out with a story that she had not paid her bill, and she was really taking advantage, and she thought she was so uppity and all that kind of stuff, you know.  And I cried, because I'd never had--I didn't realize that newspapers ever had lies in them.  (laughs)  And so Lou Douglas said, "Evelyn, you're just getting started, and you're going to have a lot of publicity.  You've gotta get thick skinned right now because I'm going to send a telegram to my friend," whoever owned The New York Times, because he knew him real well, and he said, "I'm going to ask him for a retraction."  It was a lady named Maxine Cheshire that wrote it.
Reiff:  Oh, yes, I remember her.
Greene:  Her husband was a writer also.  And she's an excellent writer.  And you know, he said she was too good a writer, and he would not retract the statement.  He said, "She has never made a statement yet that we've had to retract," and that was that.  And it wasn't anything that big, but it just hurt my feelings, because I didn't want her to go away feeling that we had said that, because we hadn't.  And of course it didn't say that we said it--it just said that she had done that to us.  And so anyway, she bought a pair of boots just like mine over in Page, and everybody was thrilled about that.  All kinds of things.  She had two children, a boy and a girl, and she bought things here to take back to them.  Also, their favorite thing to do was--see, everybody handed them flowers every time they saw them.  So the wife of the governor of Utah came down.  I think it was the lieutenant governor.  Anyway, this lady had a big bunch of flowers, and she presented them to Princess Margaret.  And this was a nice thing, and Princess Margaret was very sweet about this encounter.  A little Navajo girl--you remember Dora Knight?
Reiff:  Yes.
Greene:  Dora and Royce, her husband.  It was the airport they owned where the royal family landed.  So Dora and Royc