ELMER URBAN INTERVIEW

[BEGIN TAPE 1, SIDE A]

This is a Page oral history interview with Elmer Urban, taped September 26, 1995, for the John Wesley Powell Museum.

Gilmore:  Okay, what is your name?
Urban:  Elmer Urban.
Gilmore:  And your address?
Urban:  [My address is] 324 North Navajo Drive, Page, Arizona.
Gilmore:  And your date of birth?
Urban:  September 29, 1920.
Gilmore:  And your place of birth?
Urban:  Broadland, South Dakota.
Gilmore:  Your mother's name, date of birth, and place of birth, if you remember those?
Urban:  Well, her name was Grace.  She was born in South Dakota, but I'm not sure exactly when.  I don't have the date.
Gilmore:  Okay, same with your father?
Urban:  My father was born in Nebraska.  I couldn't tell you the date there either.  Floyd was his name.
Gilmore:  Your wife's name and date and place of birth?
Urban:  Donna Lee, and she was born in Fort Pierre, South Dakota, 1926.
Gilmore:  Where were you married?
Urban:  We were married in Huron, South Dakota, March 10, 1945.
Gilmore:  Any children?
Urban:  We have no children.
Gilmore:  When did you come to Page, and where did you come from?
Urban:  Well, we came on the job here in February of 1957.  I was working for the Bureau of Mines at an oil shale plant at Rifle, Colorado, and I got a call from Mr. Wiley [phonetic spelling], and [he] said that he had a job for me down here.  I'd worked for him in Alaska, and he asked me if I was interested in coming down here.  So I came down in, oh, I think November of 1956 and talked to him, and he told me what the job would be.  So we moved here in February of 1957, when the offices were in Kanab, Utah.  We moved to Fredonia, and we found a place to live in Fredonia.  We actually moved out to Page in September of 1958, when this house was completed--one of the first houses completed here.
Gilmore:  What was your position to be?
Urban:  When I first come on the job?  Well, at that time, of course, they had no town, or didn't know what they were gonna do in the way of a town, so he made me an administrative assistant.  He told me that they planned on having a town here, and he wanted me to work as part of the administrative force in the town.  I told him I didn't know anything about running a town.  He said, "Neither do I, so we'll learn together," and that's the way it all started.  So I came on the job as an administrative assistant.
 I worked with the administrative officer until such time as they determined there was going to be a town here.  Then they hired a professional city [manager].  Well, before that, they sent me over to Boulder City to do a little understudy work under the administrative people at Boulder City.  In the meantime, they hired a professional city manager here, and then I worked from then on, for some period of time, as an assistant city manager.  I can't remember the exact date, but some period of time in there, about 1969 or 1970, the city manager left and I became city manager until the time of incorporation in 1975.
Gilmore:  What were your first impressions when seeing the town site, and seeing the area?  Do you recall the first time you came out to visit?
Urban:  Yes.  While we still had our offices in Kanab, they hadn't selected the townsite here yet.  There were three potential town sites:  one over near where the checking station is now, one about twelve miles down south on Highway 89, and this site.  The designer, the architect of the town, Sam Judd [phonetic spelling], from Denver, was coming out to take a look at the town sites.  Wiley had me go down to Flagstaff and pick him up in a Jeep and bring him up to the town site.
Gilmore:  So you came up the old Coppermine Road?
Urban:  Came up the old Coppermine Road, all sand and in a four-wheel drive Jeep.  We came up here and of course there was nothing up here at all.  It just looked like the rest of the reservation out here, with no trails or anything up there.  Well, I was impressed with the location, the view from all sides, setting up on the mesa a little higher above--much more than the site twelve miles down the road.
Gilmore:  That would be where, approximately Ridgemon's Twelve-mile Hill, or below it?
Urban:  Well, it's on the east side of the highway, and there's a huge level area there, like a big meadow, I guess.  It doesn't have near the view.
Gilmore:  It's above the ridge.
Urban:  Yeah, it's above the ridge.  Yeah, after you go up the hill.
Gilmore:  There's _________ just to the south of the crest of the ridge.
Urban:  Yeah, and it's on the east side of the road.  There's a large level spot there, which would have probably been much easier to build a town.  I guess it probably wouldn't have meant rock outcroppings as they found here when they were putting in utilities.
Gilmore:  That would have been an elevation of about 6,000 feet.
Urban:  Yeah, it would have been a little higher than that.  One of the reasons that they gave for not choosing that site was the logistics of people traveling back and forth to work.
Gilmore:  To the dam site.
Urban:  There would be a lot of traffic for that twelve-mile run.  So that was one reason that they discounted that.
Gilmore:  How did they discount the west side?
Urban:  The west side, all I can say there is it was mostly political there.  They had three senators:  Arizona, Colorado, and Utah.  I can't think of their names now, but they were major forces in this.  They were, from my understanding, jockeying for position.  For one thing, the railhead, if it was on that side, it would have been up in Maryville, Utah.  And if it was on this side, it would be in Flagstaff.  Utah got into it by they wanted the Colorado River Storage Project office in Mt. Rose, Colorado.  So somehow or other, the voting with the three of 'em, ended up with this site.
Gilmore:  So it was more political than....
Urban:  More political.  I don't think there was that much difference in the proximity to the dam site, because at first our offices were in Kanab, and we were traveling out here, and they were flying people back and forth across the river, or driving two hundred and some plus miles around.  And then they got the foot bridge across, and of course then workers could get back and forth that way.  So there wouldn't have been a lot of difference in those two townsites as far as proximity to the dam.
Gilmore:  But there were obviously factors more favorable about Manson Mesa.
Urban:  Apparently, because that's the one that was selected.  I really think it's beautiful.
Gilmore:  Who made that final selection?  How did that happen?
Urban:  Oh, Denver design office would have had to make the final selection--I'm sure, with pressures from Washington, one way or another on it.  At that time, the chief engineer's office was in Denver, and he was head of the Bureau, and the commissioner's office was also there.
Gilmore:  What problems did you foresee in creating and running a community on Manson Mesa at the time?  What did you expect to be the major problems?
Urban:  Well, I think probably getting services provided for the number of people that they said was going to be living here and working here.  We tried to set it up so that we wouldn't get an overrun of service stations, we'll say--everybody comin' in and thinkin' they could make it, put in a service station.  The same way with grocery stores, liquor stores.  Of course there was no liquor at first in here at all.  So [we] set up an artificial restraint system, I guess, of some sort, to select the number of businesses.  We tried to say, "Well, we think we can get by with six service stations, maybe three grocery stores," and limit the number of ________.  We just set up a log of what we wanted.  Then we sent out a prospectus, advertising all over the Southwest--well, anyplace, as far as that goes, but specifically in the Southwest--advertising for businesses, telling them what they could expect here, and that they were going to be artificially controlled to begin with, the number of businesses, and they would be selected both by experience and lottery.  This went out in December of 1957, and we got applications from all over.  I spent the next several months traveling around the Southwest.  After we reviewed the applications, then I would go out and talk to business leaders in the community from people that had made application--find out what kind of business people they were, and if they thought they were the kind of people that could make a success in this.
 We did everything we could to try to bring in responsible business people.  We narrowed the field down a little more, and then when we got to the stage that we had to make a selection, we held a lottery.  We put the names in a hat and drew 'em out, and the first ones out, the first three out, or whatever number we had, we notified them, and they had so much time to get here and establish their business.  (clock chimes)  I think probably that was the biggest problem, was trying to get services here, because the contractor, not long after he was here, found that they were having to pay remote pay because of the lack of some services.  So we wanted to get that going as fast as we could.
Gilmore:  Were there any particular businesses where there were more applications, or some businesses where the numbers of applications were weak?
Urban:  Yes.
Gilmore:  Who were the most willing people that wanted to do business, and who were some of the least willing?
Urban:  I think service stations probably took the lead.  It runs in my mind that there was some thirty-five or thirty-six applications--over thirty applications for service stations.  Doctors, dentists, and lawyers, we didn't get very many applications there.  In fact, I don't think we had to have a lottery in that case.  Grocery stores, well, we had probably three or four, and we decided, I think, to select two to start with.  Oh, what others?  Drugstores, we had three or four drugstores.  Car dealers, we didn't have any car dealers to begin with.  In fact, today we still only have one dealership here in town.  One of the main reasons is because of the way franchises are let out from General Motors and Ford and Chrysler products.  They have a franchise in Flagstaff, and this is part of the Flagstaff area, so it took a long time to break that barrier.  But now we have a Ford dealership here, so that was one.
 We weren't overrun with too many applications on businesses to begin with.  After we got some businesses established, and people were able to see that there was going to be some kind of a community here, then we started getting more people that were interested in it.  We only maintained this control probably less than a year after everybody was set and pretty much established with their business.  Then we felt that just competition was going to control the number of people coming and going and we didn't want to artificially control it, and let people take their chances.  And as it happened, all the service station people, after the initial thrust, six of 'em got established in here, we didn't have much problem in that area.  Churches was another area where we had a lot of ___________.
Gilmore:  That was one of the questions on here:  How did you recruit churches, and how did you get them started?  How did they acquire the land and get their churches built?
Urban:  Churches, we really didn't have to advertise for.  They seemed to get it by some news media and everything else that was going on here.  We never attempted to limit the number of churches.  When they came in, the government gave them a grant on the land with a reversionary clause:  if it ever ceased to be used as a church, why, then the land would revert back to the government.  So there was no cost involved in the land.  And I have no idea how they ever got located in Church Row.  It's just one of those things that happened:  probably because the street was there, and there was no development there.  But it's a unique situation that everybody remarks on that ever comes to the town for the first time:  "How did the churches ever get located...."
Gilmore:  That wasn't carefully planned?  That just happened?
Urban:  It was just a happening.  The same way as the one that located down here.  He was a latecomer.  This was one of the later churches to come in down here on Vista.
Gilmore:  Which church is that?
Urban:  I don't even know the name of the church, but it's the one right across from the hospital down here.  But all the rest of 'em are located on what is affectionately known as Church Row.  (chuckles)
Gilmore:  They made their own site selections?
Urban:  Yes.  Yeah, the only limitation we put on 'em was that they utilize the land.  They had to have a plan on what they were going....  You know, they couldn't just come in and ask for two, three acres.  They had to show a plan with a reasonable development period, so that they weren't setting on two or three acres of land at that time.  And it turns out pretty good, none of 'em are hurting for space, and they've had to expand, some of them.  Some of them have--well, the LDS church, for instance, has put a second ward out in the northern part of the community.  I think it worked out pretty well for not having made any specific plans.  In other words, we didn't go around the townsite and say, "This is a church."  About the only thing we did in that respect in the original zoning plan was we set aside areas that we thought would be typical motel sites, and as it turned out over the years, that's exactly where they went.  When they come to buy land, they picked the spots that we had selected as motel sites.
Gilmore:  That brings up another question:  How did Page derive its layout, and what are some of the hows and whys of how the zoning districts were set up?
Urban:  Well, the design of the community was made by the Design Section in Denver, in the chief engineer's office.  Sam Judd, I believe, was the architect.  And I think he was also the architect for the layout of Boulder City.  We get a lot of comment about the shape of the community, the street layout--no straight streets or anything like that.  I don't really know what he had in mind, but it's worked pretty good.  It's a little difficult sometimes to tell people how to get someplace.  There are probably more three-way intersections than there are four-way in this part of the community, and pretty much in the new area of town.  To begin with, on the zoning situation, everything to the easterly direction of what is now Lake Powell Boulevard, with Seventh Avenue.
Gilmore:  (inaudible)
Urban:  Yeah, everything east of that was designated as contractor's townsite.  When it was determined that that was going to be probably the main street in town--in other words, the business loop road--then we went back to the contractor and took the frontage on Seventh Avenue, which is now where Sticks Market, and Kentucky Fried Chicken, and all up and down on the east side of the street--took that back from the contractor, so the businesses could develop at least on the frontage part of the main street.  And then the contractor had everything east of that to the airport.  Our problem was to zone, so we had an engineering staff in the City office, and we set about to write what we called the "red book" at that time, (chuckles) and it's still called the red book, although it's not used anymore.  We zoned for businesses, zoned for different classes of houses, different size houses; zoned for mobile homes; industrial.  And then the next problem was to get enforcement of that.  We had to go to the county and get the county to adopt that by resolution.  So we spent a lot of hours traveling back and forth, and going to county supervisors' meetings, and county zoning commission meetings, getting them to accept our zoning.  We never did have a real hard test with it, because the county had some doubt as to whether they could enforce the zoning as detailed as we had it, because the county zoning isn't that restrictive, they don't go into the detail that we did on this:  yard setbacks and the coverage on a lot, and that sort of thing that we had to get into on our zoning.  So we were fortunate in that we were never tested in court on any of the detailed zoning.  Our attorneys in Salt Lake held their breath all the time, as did, I think the county supervisors and the county zoning board, because it could have busted loose here, and people could have ended up, I guess, having chickens in their back yard or whatever.  (laughter)  But as it happened, we got through that period, 'til incorporation, of course.
Gilmore:  So your zoning plan for the town layout was actually more tight, more restrictive, than what you would have found under civil government in Coconino County.
Urban:  Yeah, it was, really.  Of course to begin with, they had real good enforcement here of very few police.  In fact, the first few months we only had two policemen that we hired out of Boulder City.
Gilmore:  Do you remember who they were?
Urban:  Mike Slattery [phonetic spelling] was one of them.  He's the one that stands out in my mind, and I can't think of the other one now.  He wasn't here as long, and he wasn't quite as well-known as Mike.  But I remember the first jail we had was nothing more or less than a trailer, an eighteen-wheel trailer like you haul goods up and down the highway.
Gilmore:  (inaudible, same time as Urban)
Urban:  And it was just more or less to hold until the sheriff's office could get up here and pick someone up.  But our best enforcement was that if they didn't abide by the rules, they didn't have a place to live or a job, because if they worked for the government, the government would let 'em go, and they'd have no place to live, no work.  If they worked for the contractor, the contractor would move 'em out.  So we didn't have near the problems with vandalism from children because the parents had to accept the responsibility of those children.  So that was real tight enforcement to begin with, when we didn't have a lot of policemen.  And of course we didn't have the county sheriff up here at that time.  (clock chimes)  A little later on, why, the sheriff's office put a substation up here and had one or two deputies here off and on.
Gilmore:  So law enforcement problems were pretty minimal.  But what law enforcement problems did exist, or did they have?
Urban:  Oh, I would guess the biggest problem to start with was drinking and fighting and gambling.
Gilmore:  Page was a dry town then, no beer also?  No beer, no liquor?
Urban:  No, there was no liquor here.  That was kind of artificially regulated too, to begin with.  Then somewhere down the line, they determined that it wasn't going to work, because people were going to get liquor in here, and the idea of going down to Marble Canyon or into Kanab and Buckskin and those places, and traveling these long distances, is probably going to cause more accidents and more problems than to put it here where they could regulate it a little bit.  I think probably in the early days, fighting and gambling, you had a lot of single men staying in barracks and everything, and consequently they were gonna....  It wasn't the fact that they were playing cards and gambling that they were being rousted for, but the fights that resulted from the drinking and playing cards and things like that.  We didn't have a lot of problems like vandalism and robberies and that sort of thing.  It just might happen once, but the word soon got out that if they had a trailer, it was moved out of town.  (chuckles)  And that was it, you know.  That was pretty good control, I thought.
Gilmore:  What were some of the problems?  Did you encounter any particular problems in the actual physical construction of the town, like putting in the initial Bureau of Rec. homes, and doing the streets?  Were there such things as, say, sand depth or proximity of rock on the mesa?  Did that create any particular problems?
Urban:  Yeah.  Of course they run a lot of test holes in here to determine where the sand was, and where the rock was.  They had to do a lot of blasting for putting in the streets and sidewalks, and foundations in some cases--houses.  You can still tell today, some houses are not centered directly on the lot.  Sometimes it was because of rock, sometimes it's because the lots were not established before the houses were put in.  They put the houses in, and then somebody someplace drew the lines on a map, and that became a lot.  So the blasting for utility lines, some places it was almost solid rock so they would have to blast it out.  Well, for the first few months you lived here, the people that were here initially, you could hear blasting going on all the time--they would [shoot 'em up then?].  When it come time to put in trees, they had different trees for different streets--that's the way it started.
Gilmore:  Bureau of Rec. provided some of the landscaping?
Urban:  Yeah.  The Bureau did the landscaping for the front yards.  The back yards was pretty much up to the people that lived there.  The Bureau furnished the seed and fertilizer and everything to get the yards planted in back too.  They actually had to blast in some places to put trees, because they wanted somewhat symmetrical when they went down the street and put in a tree, since this street had all Marin locust on 'em, and they tried to put 'em certain distances apart, and a certain distance from the street.  So some places they couldn't dig and they'd go down a little ways and blast and break the rock and plant the trees in there.  It made an interesting job for the contractor because while they had the test holes to determine where there was sand, it didn't always work out that in between those two places there could be an outcropping of rock.
Gilmore:  There were a lot of surprises.
Urban:  A lot of surprises.  And a lot of times they'd dig ditches, they learned after a while that you didn't dig a ditch today and dig a half-mile of ditch for utility lines, expecting to come back tomorrow and put the pipes in, because with the winds that we were getting at that time, and nothing up here to stop 'em, they could be filled-in again by the next morning.  Nothing to break the wind at all.
 Some of the early arrivals here, when we moved in here, in this house, there were no houses over there at all.
Gilmore:  They'd be on Gum Street.
Urban:  Gum Street, or beyond here.  You could look clear up across the whole mesa there.  So when the wind blew, and of course the contractor at that time scraped off everything, and the streets were all laid out--they weren't paved.  So the only way we could plant a back yard, we got some cyclone fencing about three foot high and put some burlap backing on that and then we started to plant grass.  Even that sometimes would get covered a little bit, but it did break the wind, and eventually we got grass in here.  But it was a tough go to begin with.  People would plant lawns, and somebody eight or ten lots down the street would eventually reap the benefits of their grass, because it was blowin' (laughter) around with the dust storm.  And that's how Page got a reputation of being so windy.  But really, Page isn't that windy.  It has its season.  Spring you get some.
Gilmore:  It's quite windy in outlying regions.
Urban:  Yeah.  Well, just a sideline here, NASA at one time had a lease of a piece of property up here, and they come up here and determined this was a place that they could launch balloons, these high atmospheric balloons.  Some of 'em were 500-600 feet long.  They had to have perfect weather conditions, and they selected Page because of calm weather.  This completely contradicted everybody that was here in the beginning, contradicting their thoughts that Page was so windy and everything.  But they did, they launched two or three balloons here, and very successful.  One of 'em was launched out of the canyon, one they launched off the airport out here.  So people that live here today, they still remember windy days in spring, but there are more calm days like today than there are windy ones.
Gilmore:  You mentioned Page's early reputation for being, as the bar says, "The Windy Mesa."  And that was largely a byproduct of construction (Urban:  Yes.) blowing sand, because there was nothing to tie it down, it just exaggerated the effect.
Urban:  Yes, I think so.  Of course it was a bad time.  If you got a couple of months that it blows every other day, it might only blow three or four hours that day, but that's what sticks in people's minds more, if it blows hard and they get sand in their house through the windows and doors and everything else, they remember that more than they remember the calm days.
Gilmore:  Okay.  Wasn't blowing sand something of a problem for the street system?  How was that solved initially?
Urban:  You mean maintenance of the streets, or during building?
Gilmore:  Uh-huh.  Or during the early years.  Was there stories of the drifting sand having been a problem also for the streets?
Urban:  Yeah, well, constantly removing sand drifts, drift areas, and areas that weren't protected by buildings or something like that.  Well, like where Block 17 is here now, the shopping center here in the center of town between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, before that was developed.  And the area where Bank One is, is of course still partially not developed.  There was always sand blowing off there onto streets, so they were constantly hauling sand off.  Street sweeper wouldn't take care of it.  They would pick it up with front-end loaders and haul it off and dump it someplace.  So that was a problem, but that's pretty well solved now with all the trees and ground cover that we have, and development.
Gilmore:  What were some of the other weather aspects of Page?  You mentioned that spring was windy. [Compared to] where you'd come from, how did the climate seem, the difference between winter and summer?  How did you find winters and summers here?
Urban:  To me, Page seems to have more or less two seasons.  We don't have a real hard winter, and we don't have a severe summer, like they do down in the valley.  We average--I've kept weather records for thirty-seven years now--and we average about sixteen days a year that it hits 100o.  Our peak temperature was 109o, and our low temperature was 11o below.  You can count on one hand the number of times it's been below zero here, because the weather is not that severe.  It's an ideal temperature.  It's a dry temperature.  Average annual rainfall is somewhat less than six inches.  We get snow occasionally, but when we do, it doesn't last.  The most snow we ever had that laid on the ground was nine inches.  That was accumulated depth.  It was also in one snowfall.  So that laid on the ground for a while, long enough that people that didn't have snow shovels were looking for snow shovels.
Gilmore:  Do you remember which year that occurred?
Urban:  I can look it up in my weather records.  Do you want me to do that now?  Or I can give you that, if you want to....  It won't take me but a minute if you want to shut off [the tape recorder].  (tape turned off and on)
Gilmore:  So according to your records, the greatest snowfall that Page ever had was January 19, 1979.
Urban:  Yes.
Gilmore:  There are stories from the construction era, that some of the Page settlers describe, that the town occasionally closed off certain streets, if the snow was deep enough, to allow kids to sled.  Do you recall that?
Urban:  Yeah, I think that was during this snowfall.  Fourth Street, they closed off Fourth Street, because it has a pretty good grade, and straight down the hill.  They closed that off, and the kids that had sleds....  Those that didn't, got with kids that did have.  (chuckles)  One of the rare times they could use a sled here.  Rainfall was the same thing.  We had a flood here in August of 1963.
Gilmore:  I believe I've heard of that.
Urban:  Let's see if I can give you the amount of rainfall, but it all happened in a very short period of time, and actually I've got a picture of it someplace.  In just a matter of an hour or so.
Gilmore:  One point nine seven [1.97] inches.
Urban:  One point nine seven inches, 1963, August 31.
Gilmore:  That was during the construction.  Did that cause flooding problems in Page?
Urban:  It really did.  It went through some of the houses, because at that time, of course, they didn't have all the ground cover that they have now.  Well, it come up even with our back door out here, because there wasn't grass all the way up the street, and no storm sewers could take care of it.  Had hail that actually, some pictures--and I could show you those a little later--down on Main Street, it was floating on top of the water, about four inches deep, just like small icebergs.  (laughs)  The car parked on the street up at the corner of North Navajo and Date, a station wagon belonging to Al Roché, who was one of the people that put in one of the first grocery stores here, had his station wagon parked out in front, and the water on the street got deep enough that it floated the car down about, oh, several hundred yards from his house.  And that all happened, you know, we're setting on top of a mesa here that you'd think that water couldn't get that deep.  But it actually ran through some of the houses up here--Dr. Kazan and some of 'em--went in the front door and right out the back.  It was quite a flood.  We lost an employee during that flood.
Gilmore:  How did that happen?
Urban:  He was working at the pumping station down on the river.  At that time we had the water system pumping station down at the river, and there had to be an attendant down there.  And it started raining, and water started coming over the top of the cliff, and then rocks and everything else coming over the top in such quantities that he got scared and he called up here to Wiley and told him that it was just coming down rocks all over the place.  Wiley told him he was safe, to stay right where he was, that he'd be better off there than trying to get out, because the only way out at that time was a road up the side of the cliff, into the tunnel.  He started up the road, he got scared--probably anyone would have, with the boulders and everything coming down--but he decided he couldn't take it any longer, and he started up with his Jeep, and he got partway up the hill and a big boulder and water and everything come down, took him off the road, down to the bottom of the canyon.  So that was really a big plug.
Gilmore:  Worst flood in Page's history.
Urban:  A lot of water, yes it was.

[END TAPE 1, SIDE A; BEGIN SIDE B]

Gilmore:  I want to ask some questions about some of the infrastructure brought in.  How did Page initially get its water?
Urban:  Well, to begin with, we put a pumping station down on the river and they built a basin right in the river itself, in a wash area where it was not in the current.  Built a basin in there, put strainers in there, and then a large intake hose down in there with a strainer on the intake hose, go to the pumping station.  Then we're bring it up over the canyon wall--and this was an exposed pipe, about an eight-inch pipe at that time, because the population wasn't that great.  That ran across, above ground, up onto the mesa and into some big tanks that we had up here.  This was the first water system we had.  So consequently there was a little rust in it once in a while.  The water went through all the purification process, and once in a while there'd be some sand in it from holes in the pipe.
Gilmore:  How was the silt removed from the water?
Urban:  Just from settlement tanks.  Very primitive.  This was at the very first until they got the filtration plant up here.  Then when they got the filtration plant up here, they had big tanks down below that let it set and get the heavy solids and everything out of it before it was pumped up the hill, and then went through the plant up here.  Of course by that time we had the elevated tanks and everything, the water towers and storage tank and everything.  But to begin with, they were just small tanks to service the trailer park and the few houses that were here at that time.  That iron pipe--it was thin-walled iron pipe, it wasn't very sturdy.  Occasionally it would get bent, somebody would run over it or step on it--or not step on it, it wasn't that thin-walled.  But there are places where you can still find some of that pipe today, down on the golf course.  The nine-hole course, there are places that you can see sections of that pipe that was used originally to pump water up the hill.  Eventually, of course, they went to a much larger pipe, and lined pipe.  It was all buried.  It was exposed coming up the side of the cliff, but from there on, it's all buried.  And the pumping station is now in the dam.  There's no processing down there.  They just take the water that comes in from the reservoir, and into the dam, and then the large pumps there pump it up the hill to the water filtration plant up here.  So it goes through the process up here.
Gilmore:  How was electricity brought in?  What stages did they go through developing electricity for the town?
Urban:  To begin with, the contractor brought in some diesel generators, and they were placed over on the west side of the canyon behind The Beehive, near where the highway comes down, just before it comes on the bridge on the west side of the river.  They produced power with those diesel generators for, oh, several months.  It could have been in excess of a year before APS got lines in here.  Arizona Public Service brought lines in, and then we got on their system, coming from the south at that time.  Actually, the diesel generators did a pretty good job; we had pretty constant power here.  In fact, I don't know as we had any more outages with power there than we ever had with APS, with their single line coming up here, because they were subject to a lot of storms and accidents, people running into power poles on the highway or something like that.  We had no backup power from anyplace.  We could be without power there.
Gilmore:  So at a later stage of power development then there was an APS line.
Urban:  Yeah, APS lines eventually hooked into the grid coming from the north also.  So now power pulls from one area, comes in from another.  Because of the substations that are set up here, very seldom do we ever have a power outage here anymore of any consequence.  Lightning could strike and take out a breaker or something someplace, but they get it back in service pretty fast.  We've had probably more problem for a while with construction, when construction was going on, where there were underground lines, interruption there.  But anymore, it doesn't seem to be a problem, like it did to begin with.
Gilmore:  How was gas service handled initially?
Urban:  Let's see, Petrolane Gas, LP Gas, was issued a contract by the City to serve the city.  They had tanks distributed.  Each block in town would have one or two huge tanks, and then the houses were served by service lines from those tanks, and they would....  Well, actually, the service was about like a natural gas service would be, because they didn't have to come to your house, you had a meter at your house, and they just kept the tanks full all the time, and serviced those.  Didn't have any problems with those at all.  A little later on, Petrolane sold out their interest in Page to Black Mountain Gas.  And Black Mountain Gas then put in, piped the entire city.  So there are no tanks located in the residential area now--it's all piped in from their large service tanks.  And so, again, it's served like natural gas.  Some people have taken off the gas service and gone all electric.  But nevertheless, the gas is there.  It runs down the community lines, serving all the community.
Gilmore:  Still using the original utility lines installed in the fifties?
Urban:  Yeah.  I think that different places in town, even the new areas of town, when they've put in utility lines, the gas lines and everything all go in at the same time, so that they're not digging up streets to put in water and then electric and then sewer and everything.  Most all the electric is going underground now too.  It would be nice if the old overhead powerlines could be put underground, but that would be quite a problem with the development that's going on now.  So I doubt if they will ever get to that.  The new golf course had all overhead powerlines serving the town, and before they put the golf course in, they put a conduit in, so all of the overhead lines there are going to be removed.  As soon as they pull the lines through the conduit, we won't have those on the horizon anyway.  Of course if it wasn't for the pole lines stickin' up in town, here for the first few years, there wouldn't have been anything, because we didn't have any trees.  (laughter)
Gilmore:  They were Page's skyline.
Urban:  Yeah, that was Page's skyline at that time, was the utility poles.  Now you can't see any of 'em because of the trees that are growing there.  I think that was one of the problems of early development, I think, the lack of any trees or shrubbery or anything.  The first thing people did when they started landscaping was put in trees and shrubs.  All the shrubs, of course, were small.  The trees were small, and so the tendency was to put in too many, too close, so some areas are just overrun with trees and shrubs.  As a result of that, people over the years have been taking out trees and shrubs and let it spread out a little bit.
Gilmore:  That's interesting, there was a tendency to overplant.
Urban:  Oh yes.  Well, this house in back of us is a good example here on Gum Street.  That back yard, those two houses are full of trees yet, of all kinds that are in there.
Gilmore:  Was one of those Eddie Clad's [phonetic spelling]?  (Urban:  No.)  He was a notorious gardener.
Urban:  Yeah.  Well, they removed trees out of that.  He had beautiful rose bushes and everything in there.  A lot of 'em are still there.  This was Finch's house, right in back--Fred Finch, the photographer.  I don't think he planted all of 'em, but he planted some of 'em, and then people that come after him planted some different ones.  And then people put fruit trees in among all of 'em, so (chuckles) they've got a forest back there.
Gilmore:  What were the best types of trees for those early plantings?  Probably looking for high growth trees?
Urban:  Well, the fruitless mulberry was a good shade tree, a fast-growing shade tree.  They planted a lot of those.  On North Navajo here, for the front yards, they planted Marin locusts.  Then they also, going back, they have cottonwood trees.  They don't have the cotton.  What do they call them?  Poplar trees?
Gilmore:  Poplars?
Urban:  Yeah.  To my knowledge, I don't think there are any of the cottonwood trees that have the cotton.  At least I don't ever recall seeing any in this part of the townsite--fortunately, because they are really a pest when that stuff starts comin' off the trees.  There's a few fir trees, not too many of 'em.  Fruit trees, (clock chimes) about any type pit fruit, like peaches and cherries, cherry trees.  There are a lot of apple trees, apricot trees.  People have been quite successful with grapes, too.  I don't know of anyone that had any success with any citrus fruit at all here.
Gilmore:  Too cold.
Urban:  Apparently.  But it seems like most anything will grow in this soil with a little water and a little fertilizer, because there's no problem with drainage--well, except where you're on a rock.  (laughter)
Gilmore:  Another infrastructure--television.  Do you remember when and how television first got to Page?  In the early years, _______ without it.
Urban:  I can't tell you exactly when, but as soon as we got people--I would say probably in 1958, started experimenting with it, because we had lived in Fredonia, and Carl Haughten [phonetic spelling] had Kaibab Radio, and some fellows in Fredonia put up....  Not reflectors, but what do they call 'em?
Gilmore:  Microwave dish?
Urban:  Well, no, they weren't that sophisticated at that time.
Gilmore:  Translator?
Urban:  Translators!  Yeah, they had not much more than an antenna with a booster on it.  We put one up between Fredonia and Kanab and were able to pick up one of the translators from Las Vegas.  So when we got moved out here--Carl Haughten moved out here about, I think, in late 1958 or 1959.  Well, it had to be 1959, couldn't be 1958--he started experimenting out here, he put an antenna on his truck that he could jack up in the air.  We found one time down near where the water tower is now, he got the antenna up there and he was able to get a signal.  They had a translator someplace up in Utah that they were able to pick up a fairly good signal there.  At that time, it never got to the point where people could pick it up by the house, but he picked up some sporting event up there one time, and a bunch of people went up there, just out in the open, in the back of a truck, and watched it.  Very shortly thereafter, we had a television company come in, wanting to bring cable in here, and the City issued a permit to 'em to string cable.  We were able to get Phoenix channels at that time.
Gilmore:  So the cable is strung kind of like phone lines?
Urban:  Yeah, they made a contract with the Arizona Public Service and the telephone company, some sort of an agreement there where they pay for [pull?] use and everything, and run it to everyone's house that was in the community at that time, with the Cablecom __________.  I think that was the name of it.  A few years later, I would guess probably in the middle seventies, Utah was putting up more translators to the rural communities, and they were able to put up a translator out here and receive, I think, three Utah signals.  It was all a voluntary contribution thing to maintain it--people that put up antennas.  There are a few in town yet.  Primarily it was aimed at the Navajo Reservation and at Greenehaven and Wahweap, because at that time they didn't have cable.  So they were the primary supporters of that, and it's still in operation, and they're still getting it in town, but now they have cable and satellites and everything, so they don't rely so much on the translators and signals that you get that way.
Gilmore:  How did Page handle the fire department in the early days?
Urban:  Our fire department, at that time we had one paid fireman.  He was a Bureau of Reclamation employee, he was the fire chief.  We had two old trucks, and they were really old trucks.  They transported them in here from someplace where they had outlived their usefulness, but they had them brought in here.  Other than that, it was all volunteer.  To begin with, it was mostly government employees, but as more and more contractor employees' families moved in, why then they were contractor employees and businessmen that were all volunteer firemen.  We existed that way for a number of years.  We gradually were upgrading the firetrucks, but we never got to the sophistication of the trucks that the City has now, after incorporation.  And of course we got a lot of nice firetrucks and ambulances.  We didn't have EMTs at that time.  In the early days they had an ambulance.  Actually it was one the contractor had that they used down on the dam, and it run out of the hospital instead of out of the fire department as they do now.  But that was pretty effective.  We didn't have any really disastrous fires.  We had fires.
Gilmore:  What were some of the fires that occurred?  Of course you had a lot of mobile homes.
Urban:  Yeah, that was the biggest problem in wintertime with the mobile homes.  We had a few [fires] in some of the permanent houses up here.
Gilmore:  Oh, there were?!
Urban:  Yeah, one right down the street here.  I don't know how it started.  It didn't completely destroy the house.  It destroyed the kitchen and some of the appliances [and that part?], so it was able to be refinished.  During construction of the school, before it was completed, they had a fire up there started by a welder's torch--a little setback in school construction, but nothing disastrous.  There was no loss of life or anything like that.  Other than that, offhand I don't think of any.  A Bureau laboratory, when it was on the west side of the river, over where the checking station is now, caught on fire.  That destroyed everything in there.
Gilmore:  There weren't a lot of major fires?
Urban:  No.
Gilmore:  It was a volunteer fire department.
Urban:  Yeah.  Yeah, they were pretty effective, and they are today.  I mean, it's a real effective and enthusiastic group of fire department employees and EMTs that do a great job.
Gilmore:  Let me ask some questions about some of the public facilities created in the early days.  An obvious one is how did the initial golf course and country club come into being?  Of course when some of these were created, Page was a government town.  Was this a cooperative community-government effort?
Urban:  While we were still in Kanab, another Bureau employee and myself, Howard Ness--remember the picture I was showing you a while ago--and I started talking about we want to have a golf course out here.  Well, Wiley was not a golfer, and he [had to give it much thought?].  But he didn't discourage us, so we decided we would sell memberships in a golf club.  So we started selling memberships to a nonexistent golf course in Kanab.  Before we moved out here, I guess we had probably eight or nine people that had signed up, given us a hundred dollars, and signed up for the golf course.  When we got out here in 1958, we went to Wiley again and asked him about where we could have a golf course.  And he eventually showed us the area where we could have it.  Well, we went to contractors--several contractors, as a matter of fact--and told 'em what our idea was.  We got great cooperation from 'em, not only in use of equipment, but use of equipment and employees.  So it wasn't uncommon to see a Mary Chapman Scott heavy equipment operator down there, laying some ribbon dirt and digging trenches.  And Bureau employees.  The supply contractors donated rocks for the building and concrete.  And electrical wiring, contractors come in and wired it.  It was all built with donated labor.  In early 1959, we were ready to start planting grass down there.  Johnny Bowle [phonetic spelling], a professional golfer, a tour professional, out of Phoenix, was a friend of a First Interstate Bank vice-president or president--I don't remember which--who was a friend of Wiley's.  Wiley at that time saw the progress we were making on that, so he asked if Johnny Bowle might come up and be interested in taking a look at it and see what we were doing up here.  And so he come up and from very scratch he laid out and helped us work on the greens, and laid out the golf course for us.  Today, it's still in the same place that he put it to start with, and some of the greens that he [broke?], and the different grasses that he recommended and everything, are still growing down there.  So there's other grass mixed in with it, of course, by now.  It was all a volunteer effort.  Then we formed the country club, and as a result of those first memberships we incorporated with contractors and individual members.  Some of the business people in town at that time didn't have time to play golf (clock chimes) or didn't know how to play golf, signed up to help support it.
Gilmore:  Just to help support it.
Urban:  Yeah.  So it was a very successful project, and a lot of hard work.  We put in our day's work at the office or wherever we worked, and then we'd go down there and work in the evenings and Saturdays and Sundays.  Everybody pitched in and dug holes or dug ditches and laid pipe and planted grass.  And so that was eventually turned over to the City.
Gilmore:  I've heard stories that early members even took turns watering the course.
Urban:  We did.  We didn't have an automatic sprinkling system, so we set up two-hour shifts, and you'd go down and for two hours sometime during the night--everybody had daytime jobs--so it wouldn't be unusual to go down there at, say, ten o'clock and work 'til twelve, or twelve and work 'til two, and you'd take the sprinklers off the back and move it and walk it up to the front, plug it in, and then walk back and get another one.  You'd do that for two hours.  Then the next guy would show up and he'd take over from there.  That went on for a long time, until we had enough golf course and gathering some money in to where we could hire an employee.
Gilmore:  What was your shift?
Urban:  Well, variable.  I couldn't tell you offhand.  Probably worked about anytime, during the time that we were doing that.  We probably had, oh, maybe twelve, fourteen guys that were actually doing that part of it, because that's kind of hard.  You had to really be dedicated to it, to get down and do something like that.
Gilmore:  Sounds like it.
Urban:  But as far as the other work crews, like Saturdays and Sundays and after work, we usually had pretty good turnouts.  The grocery store managers, Roché and Babbitts, when they couldn't have some employees down there, they would either make a money contribution or they would furnish food for lunches and beverage--either beer or pop--something like that, to keep people going.
Gilmore:  How did the first swimming pool come into being?  Manzanita Swimming Pool.
Urban:  Swimming pool came in about the same time, and under the same conditions.  It was a group that--people on the swimming pool were more family people that had children, that wanted someplace for their children.  It was a different group of people.  I would imagine there were probably some of the same group that worked both places, but these were more family-oriented up there, but it was the same sort of situation:  it was volunteer labor and help from all the contractors.  Put the swimming pool in and put up the building, the townhouse adjacent to the swimming pool.  At that time it was more of someplace for teenagers to go and hang out.  That was also volunteer labor.
Gilmore:  Was there an earlier teen canteen also?  Or was the townhouse the original?
Urban:  It run in my mind that there was a trailer someplace down in the trailer park that a contractor had set up for a short time for that.  I'm not familiar with that, but it seems to me that there was a place that the kids used to hang out before the townhouse was built.  For a short time there was a roller skating rink over around Eighth Avenue, in back of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Sticks Market.  Back in there, there was a roller skating rink in there for a short time.  For some reason or other, it wasn't in business for too long.  I don't know whether it didn't have the support, or what happened to it, but it didn't last too long.  But the slab was there for a long time.
Gilmore:  The bowling alley was one of the first recreational businesses.  How did that come into being?
Urban:  Ted [Solomon?] came into the office one day and wanted to know what business we needed in Page.  This was in 1958.  He was a businessman from Jerome and down in the valley someplace.  His folks had had a grocery store in Jerome.  That's what he had in mind here.  In fact, he talked about a warehouse type grocery store, where everything was left in the cardboard boxes, just take it out.  At that time we already had two pretty good-sized grocery stores, and we didn't think that we needed another one.  And I asked him if he'd be interested in putting in a bowling alley.  "We don't have a bowling alley, nothing for recreation."  He said he didn't know anything about a bowling alley, and I suggested he go to AMC or one of the companies that are familiar with bowling alleys and balls, and they would probably give him all the information he needed, and what he could do and everything.  He left the office and he went out to make [inquiries] about it.  About a month later, he came back in and asked me how many lanes I thought we would need in a bowling alley.  I said I had no idea, but the companies again could probably give him information on that.  Somehow or other he arrived at the figure of ten, and it wasn't long after that he come up here and started building a bowling alley.  At first, when he started to build it, he was his own contractor, and he started to build it, and he was using non-union labor, paying them union scale.  So he if he had an electrician that wasn't busy with electrical work, he was doing concrete work or carpenter work or whatever there was to do.  And he would keep them on all the time, instead of hiring an electrician for two days and letting 'em go, and keeping him on.  So he was really doing a good job for the guys, and keeping them working, and giving them good pay, but the union come up and started giving him a bad time because here was an electrician doing plumbing work, and everything else.  And he fought with 'em awhile, and wasn't very successful.  [Delaney?] worked quite a bit, wasn't successful in his battle.  So he said, "Okay, we'll go union, but I'll hire an electrician [and] if I need him for two days, I'll use him for two days and I'll let him go.  And the same way with plumbers and everything else."  And of course at that time the union hall was in Flagstaff, so he'd have to hire 'em there, and they'd come up for two days' work, or three days, or whatever.  So that's the way he had quite a few labor problems in building it.  He was real ambitious, and a pretty smart businessman, so he got it done.  Then he built The Windy Mesa.
Gilmore:  So he built The Windy Mesa also?
Urban:  Yeah.  When construction was phasing out, he could see the possibility in the trailer court over there, so he came to the government and made a proposition to buy the land the trailer court was on.  That was at a time when everything was going downhill.  Population was going down and there was nothing going on here.  But he still decided that that was a good proposition, so he bought almost all of the trailer park over there, contractor's trailer park.  [He] tore out the streets, put in new streets and new utilities and everything, and then started selling lots.  When the town started to grow again, of course, that business really boomed, and he got land very cheap on a downside market, and sold it on an upside.  So he got really well-heeled.  Like I say, a very smart businessman.
Gilmore:  I understand in the early days, Windy Mesa and the bowling alley were both very successful businesses.
Urban:  Yeah.  He always drove a real old Studebaker car.  It looked like a junk heap.  And he probably had more money than most people in town, because like I say, he was a real good [businessman].  He'd been successful in other places.  He didn't dress like it, he didn't act like it, and he didn't drive a car like that.  And I asked him one day, "Ted, how come you drive that old beat-up Studebaker?"  And he said, "Well, I'll tell you, my dad had a grocery store in Jerome, and there was all miners in that town, hard-working people.  And he could afford to buy any car he wanted"--and this was years and years ago--"he could afford to buy any car there was.  But he said if he bought a big, shiny, new car and everything and had it setting out in front where all these hard-working people were coming in, he would lose business.  So he just had an old car, like everybody else, and he got all the business he wanted in town.  I guess I just took after him."  But that's the way it was.  He just drove that old beat-up Studebaker all the time.  He was the one that ended up with all the land in town, too.  (laughter)
Gilmore:  I was going to say, that sounds like a shrewd move, getting the old trailer park.
Urban:  Yes.  And nobody else wanted it, you know.
Gilmore:  That was really developed by Earl Brothers and __________.
Urban:  Yeah, that was during construction.  __________.
Gilmore:  It was pretty much temporary utilities in that old park.
Urban:  Yeah.  Yeah, they had to tear out everything, because they had outlived their usefulness about the time that contracting was phasing out.  But Ted had the foresight to buy it.
Gilmore:  So that's why that part of town, with the exception of just a couple streets, the street system is entirely different today than it was in construction.
Urban:  Right.  They couldn't make a major change in it without just scraping the whole thing out.  Like some of the utilities, the powerlines and things like that, that dictated a little bit on what....  He made some changes in the streets.
Gilmore:  Arrowhead.  For some reason Arrowhead ___________.
Urban:  Yeah.  And he widened the streets all he could.  And of course he had to put in sidewalks and curbs and gutters and everything.
Gilmore:  It's interesting, he followed a similar pattern with curb and gutter that had been installed by the Bureau.
Urban:  Yeah.  Yeah, he knew what he wanted and knew what he was gonna do, I guess.

[END TAPE 1, SIDE B; BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE A]

This is Part 2 of the Page oral history interview with Elmer Urban, conducted for the John Wesley Powell Museum, September 28, 1995.  Interview conducted by Rich Gilmore.

Gilmore:  Elmer, this was a question (mic jostled, inaudible) pick it up.  What was Len Wiley's attitude or reaction to having to run a town, be in charge of a town, as well as the dam construction project?
Urban:  Well, I don't know as I ever brought that question up to him in that format.  It didn't seem to bother him that much, because I think he was looking for qualified personnel to run the town, and he was a good manager, a good administrator in that he could delegate authority.  If things were going right, then he had no problem.  He didn't want you runnin' to him every day to tell him all the little details.  If you had a problem, why yeah, you go to him.  But he wanted you to do the job you were hired for, and expected you to do it.  I think he had the same attitude with his people on the dam.  Otherwise, it could have never been done.  One person just can't do everything.  So I think that was kind of the feeling he had to it.  If he had qualified personnel running it, so be it.  That was just part of his job to come in here and build the town and build the dam and powerplant.
Gilmore:  Where did he live here in town?
Urban:  Up on the corner of North Navajo and Date.  You're probably not familiar with Sy Sorrows [phonetic spelling] either, were you?
Gilmore:  No.
Urban:  Sy Sorrows was manager out here at the Navajo Generating Station, and he was living in that house.  He passed away.  But it's right on the corner of Date and North Navajo, facing Navajo Drive.
Gilmore:  When did Len Wiley move on?  Do you remember which year?
Urban:  No, I can't tell you what year he went out of here.  It was after construction was completed.  He went to South America from here with private industry--an engineering job in Columbia, I think, South America.  Then he went on a job out in California before he finally retired.  He retired in California, from work altogether.  He came back here.  The year before he died, he was back here a couple of times, and we took him out on the lake--up in back of the dam, and up some of the canyons, and one thing and another--really the first time he'd seen it after it had water in it and everything.  He was really quite impressed with it, and the way the town had grown and prospered.  I was really glad to see him get back here.  He was back here probably not six months before he died.
Gilmore:  He was pleased with the outcome of all those years of work?
Urban:  Yeah, he was really quite pleased with the way everything turned out.
Gilmore:  It was probably the biggest project of his life.
Urban:  Yeah.  He worked on Hoover Dam as a young graduate engineer.  I guess that's where he started his career.  And I don't know all of the different dams that he worked on.  I became acquainted with him when he came to Alaska and took over the job up there.
Gilmore:  What project was that?
Urban:  That was the powerplant, Eklutna Powerplant, between Anchorage and Palmer, Alaska.  The lake up in the mountains.  They actually drilled a tunnel from the bottom of the lake down to the highway, a change in elevation of several hundred feet.  I'm not sure the exact length of the tunnel.  Right now, it runs in my mind, about four miles.  The powerplant was built on the highway.  The water to run the powerplant, when they pulled the plug on the bottom of the lake, then the water comes down through the tunnel into the powerplant.
Gilmore:  With enough force to run the hydroelectric generators.
Urban:  Hydroelectric generating station.  It was quite a project, because it was a pretty primitive area at that time.  This was back in 1954 or 1955, in that area--quite a long time before incorporation.  Palmer was just a little farm community, so they had to build housing for all the employees, and the construction employees had to have housing.  So it was a pretty close-knit group, very similar to the situation in Page at the start here where you had to make your own entertainment, so there were a lot of house parties and picnics and things where everybody got together and made their own entertainment, because the same thing up there, they didn't have television at first, so people had to talk and visit one another.
Gilmore:  Actually communicate.
Urban:  Yeah, communicate with one another.
Gilmore:  There was a lot of that in Page then in the early days?
Urban:  Very much so, at the very beginning when we didn't have television.  People got out and visited one another a little more and had parties.  Different community projects got a lot of support, like the building of the golf course, and the building of the swimming pool and the townhouse, and things like that, where I think today it'd be pretty hard to get that many people out, away from their other interests, and working on a project like that.
Gilmore:  In addition to the unique circumstances, do you think there was something perhaps unique also about the people who moved here in those early days?
Urban:  That very well could be.  The construction people and the government people were used to moving around on construction jobs and going into areas, in most instances pretty remote.  I mean, there's not too many places that they're building dams in large cities and that sort of situation.  So I think possibly the type of people that followed that type of career, maybe they had a little more pioneering spirit or something that doesn't exist as much today, I don't think.  You don't have as many opportunities to do that sort of thing.
Gilmore:  What happened to Page when the dam construction was complete?  What did you see happen to the community?  You were basically managing the community at that time.  What happened to the community from your standpoint of your job?
Urban:  Well, I think the thing that was most noticeable was the drop in population.  Well, it wasn't a mass exodus because as different phases of the job were completed, people were leaving in large groups.  But it wasn't like today there were 8,000 and the next day there were 1,200.  It was a gradual decrease in population.  It affected the business people.  Businesses dropped off.  Some businesses closed up, and it took a while for Page to really take hold as a community standing on its own, and not just a construction town.  In other words, I'll tell you one of the things that helped bring it back was the Navajo Generating Station come in, I think in 1970 or the very early seventies.
Gilmore:  That's one of the other questions in here.
Urban:  At the same time, the lake was filling, of course, and the recreation aspect was starting to come in.  Between the two of 'em, the construction of the generating station and the recreation area, it really brought it back up.  I think ever since that time it's just maintained a steady growth.  At first it was kind of like the chicken and the egg.  You didn't have the businesses to attract people, and you didn't have the people to attract businesses.  So it just had to do a little bit at a time, you know.  One business would come in, and a few more people would come in with that business, and then it finally reached a point where today we have most of the services in any larger community.  There are probably a few things that people still go out of town for.  Offhand, I can't think....  Well, major appliances--we don't have too many outlets in town that you can go in and buy refrigerators and stoves and things like that.  I think there are some places that you can get it, but you don't have the selection of something like that.  But other than that, we're gradually getting all the things that you can get in the big city.  Maybe you don't have as large a selection, but it's eliminated a lot of travel that took place in the early days.  When people needed things, they had to travel.  They could get the groceries and a few things like that here, but you didn't have a selection of everything you needed (phone rings while clock chiming) so....  (tape turned off and on)  Yeah, I think that was the big change, the drop in population and the drop in businesses, and then getting on the road back took a long time.  Took a lot longer to get 'em to come back than it did for them to leave.
Gilmore:  Do you happen to remember roughly which year the town reached its lowest point in population?
Urban:  It had to be in the late sixties.  No, I offhand can't tell you.  I really don't know, I can't think of anything I could refer to offhand, to come up with a figure for you.
Gilmore:  It would have been probably in the period right before the construction of the generating station.
Urban:  Yes.
Gilmore:  There've been photos and accounts to show how the MCS construction trailer park became totally vacant in that period, but there are also stories that some of the houses were vacant, and some even had to be boarded up.  Was that story true?  Do you remember, because you lived right in this neighborhood.
Urban:  I don't remember of any houses being boarded up.  I don't remember of any time that there were any great number of these houses vacant either, because there really weren't that many houses.  There were 200 government houses, and those that weren't occupied by government employees, they gave priority to business people in town to live in them.  So I really don't remember any period that we had houses that stood vacant, because there was always a demand for housing.  Of course that period was a time when there weren't any private homes around either.  I mean, very few--a few of them on North Navajo Drive here, and some that Mary Chapman Scott had built for their employees.  So any house that became vacant in here, it was soon occupied by either a business person or government employee.  So I don't remember any period like that at all, where we had houses boarded up or anything.
Gilmore:  That brings up a question.  In a lot of the photos, starting as early as 1958, the apartments that are still on the area around present-day Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Avenues, some of those were--at least in photos--would have been complete around 1958.  Who built those apartments, and who were they for?
Urban:  The prime contractor, Mary Chapman Scott, built those for their employees for mostly key employees, supervisory personnel.  They had, I believe, four or five houses up on North Navajo Drive that they built for their engineers and the higher echelon of the supervisory employees.  Then they built the apartments down there for other key employees and family people; people that some of them didn't have their own trailers.  Even some of the key personnel, of course, had their own trailers in there.  I don't know what their formula was for renting the houses out to their employees, but that's what they were built for, and they were built by Mary Chapman Scott.
Gilmore:  Because you were city manager, in the late sixties, before the NGS plant was announced, I know Bur-Rec did want some fairly early point for Page to become self-governing, rather than Bureau of Rec. government.  In the late sixties, what did Page's prospects look like to achieve that in the late sixties?
Urban:  They really looked pretty good, because the....  Well, of course during the low spot in our population here, the business people--well, and the Bureau people too, as far as that goes--were not interested in trying to fly on their own.  I think everyone appreciated the support that we were getting from the federal government in running the town.  But as things started to pick up again, we really started promoting incorporation, working with the federal government, trying to get a package together that would subsidize the town to help get it started, because we had nothing to start with.  Just getting the land alone wouldn't give us much help.  It turned out, over the long run, the land was very valuable to the town, but needed some monetary support too.  We worked with the federal government and the advisory council at that time, which was the forerunner to the present city council.  We had several meetings with government officials, and we eventually come up with a package that would give us money to operate the hospital and money to operate the town, and give us the land and everything.  Then our next program was to get out and inform the people, the residents of Page.  When that came about, of course there were two ways to incorporate.  One was by petition to the county, and the other was by a vote of the people of Page.  As it turned out, we had an election and we had a good crew of people--business people and government people--that went around and talked to people, and gave 'em rides to the polling booths.  So it had no trouble, it passed the first time around when we voted on it.
Gilmore:  That was in 1974?
Urban:  Yeah, 1974.  Actual incorporation was March of 1975.
Gilmore:  How was that transition from Bureau of Rec. to civil government?
Urban:  I thought it worked real well, because what one of the provisions of the incorporation agreement with the federal government was that we would--the staff at the City offices, the government staff, would stay on for a period of, I think it was six months, and the government would continue paying them.  And then during that six-month period, those people that had enough time in with the government that were interested in retirement, would take their retirement and the City would give them a chance to go to work for the City.  So there were quite a few operation and maintenance employees that took advantage of that.  There were probably two or three of the administrative staff that were interested in transferring over, going with the City.  I think the police force, the chief of police went over from the federal government to the city government.  So as far as operation of the changeover, for the most part, I don't think people noticed any difference in it at all, because some of the same people were there (Gilmore:  Still running it.), just wearing a different hat.  Instead of the federal government, it was a city government hat.
Gilmore:  Switch paycheck sources, basically--still doing the same job.
Urban:  Yeah, paychecks were coming from a different place.
Gilmore:  What was your position?  Did you stay on in that?
Urban:  I stayed on with the federal government.  I was on the first city council, so I stayed active in the city government in that manner, stayed on the city council.  But I was still interested in my government career at that time.  Well, let's see, I guess I worked for the government about five years, six years after incorporation, and then I retired.  But I wasn't quite ready to retire.  I had a job here in operation of the dam and powerplant as administrative officer down there.  So while I was still with the government, they just transferred me down there, and I continued my career here.  I didn't want to leave Page, so I had the opportunity there and I just took advantage of that.
Gilmore:  That is a question:  What made you want to stay in Page after retirement?
Urban:  Well, I think probably the small-town environment; the weather and the opportunities for recreation here with the lake and everything.  We had traveled.  I was born and raised in South Dakota, and I went in the service for five years, traveled quite a bit in the United States before I went overseas.  Then I came back from service and went to work for the government.  Went to Alaska and worked in Alaska.  Come back.  At the time I come back from Alaska, when that job was finished, there wasn't any big construction jobs going on here at the time, so I took a job with the Bureau of Mines at the oil shale plant and experimental station in Rifle, Colorado.  Len Wiley had told me when he left there that he was going to the regional director's office--assistant regional director in Amarillo, Texas.  He didn't have a construction job, but he said when he got another job, he would give me a call and see if I wanted to come.  So I worked about three years in the Bureau of Mines, and Wiley called me one day and he said, "I got a construction job going to start in northern Arizona, and I'd like to have you come down and go to work for me, if you would like to."  And I said, "I'd sure like to take a look at it."  So I come down, and of course nothing was out here yet.  Our offices were in Kanab at that time, but he told me what the job was going to be, and what it was all about--what the job was and everything.  I said, "I'll be glad to give 'em notice and come down (chuckles) and be with you again."  So that was the way I ended up here.  I don't know, there's just something about it.  The weather, we don't have severe summers, severe winters.  We're close enough, we like to ski in the wintertime, we're only four-and-a-half hours from excellent skiing in Colorado.  Fishing in the lake.  I don't know, it just kind of grows on you after awhile, I think.  And the scenery around here I think is just outstanding.  And we don't have a lot of natural disasters that you have in other parts of the world:  floods and tornadoes and hurricanes and all that sort of thing don't seem to touch this part of the world.
Gilmore:  We don't have earthquakes here either.
Urban:  Can't remember of any noticeable ones.  Once in a while you read where there's been one someplace that the shocks were felt for miles, but I've never noticed any here, and I've experienced earthquakes in Alaska.  We had earthquakes up there.  So yeah, I can't think of any bad points about living in Page.  It's really been an experience to have come out here when there was nothing on the mesa at all:  it looked just like the rest of the desert on the reservation here.  And to see this town grow and just continue to grow like it is now.
Gilmore:  When the boom, with the boom of the construction of the NGS plant started, the population boom, you were still managing then, the city, basically, for a few years before it became independent.
Urban:  Yes, until incorporation.
Gilmore:  What impact did that have on infrastructure in the community?  How rapid a population change was it, and what difficulties were encountered in keeping up with that sudden spurt of growth?
Urban:  Well, for the most part, private industry took over, because the initial shock was for people that were construction personnel that were going to be living in trailers or temporary construction.  So between the people at Navajo Generating Station, Salt River Project people, had worked with people building the trailer parks and everything, and the Vermillion Court down over the hill to the--well, in back of what is now the Wal-Mart.  Back of the cemetery was all pretty much built by--most of it was built by private industry.  A few houses were built--well, quite a few houses were built over the next few years, as the construction started to wind down, and operation--the overlap in there where people were buying houses, or building houses.  Some of the government houses that we have here, the 200 government houses, when they were offered for sale, they were offered first to the employees that occupied them.  After the employees had the opportunity to buy, if they didn't want to buy, Salt River Project came into the office and they went around to a lot of the people that were not interest in buying, and paid them for an option to buy their house, would let them live in their house, I think for the most part they were offering a year or two years, because they didn't figure their operating personnel would be coming in.  I don't know the exact term.  But I know a lot of the Bureau people that didn't plan on staying here didn't want to buy their house, and this was an opportunity for them to get out from under it.  As it turned out, some of them were sorry that they sold their option to buy the house, because some of them decided they wanted to stay later; and also the value of the houses went up just practically overnight.  They bought the houses at $11,000-$12,000.
Gilmore:  I've heard that before, that the Bureau sold these houses for $11,000 or $12,000 in the late sixties.
Urban:  Ranged from $10,500 to probably $12,500 was about the highest-priced houses.  Of course after that initial sale, it was a matter of not years, but months, those prices went up to $70,000-$75,000, because the cost of building a house, you couldn't build a house for that price.  So the housing for the contractor's employees out there, basically trailers.  The operating personnel, by the time they come in, they were building houses.  Some of 'em going into the trailer park as it exists down here by the airport where they could buy lots, and they would go in there.  It was a pretty smooth transition.  We didn't end up with a slum area or anything because of the people coming in.  We had to upgrade the sewer plant a couple of times.  Of course this last time, hopefully that's going to hold it for awhile, because the City has put quite a bit of money in upgrading it to take care of more people.  Water and sewer lines seem to be progressing right along, as they go.  In some instances developers now, they're requiring developers to put in the main lines.  Sometimes when they want to sell lands, the City has put in the infrastructure and sold lots.  They've done that a few times.  They seem to be keeping up pretty well with it.
Gilmore:  You'd mentioned this phenomenally low sales price that the Bureau of Rec. had.  Do you recall roughly what it cost per house to build them originally in the period of 1958-59?
Urban:  No.  In fact, I don't know as I ever heard a figure, because the contract would have been let on the total number.  But I would guess that it probably wasn't much different, or much more than that--you know, coming in and setting up like they did here, where they could practically have a production line sort of set-up, because all the houses are pretty basic design.  They just go right down the line, and have a crew laying concrete floors, and a crew coming behind them laying blocks, and a carpenter crew with an on-the-job carpenter shop out here where they could precut all the framing and everything that went with it.  So offhand I'd say that it probably didn't cost them a lot more to build 'em than what they sold 'em for.
Gilmore:  Years later.
Urban:  Yeah.  I have no idea what that contract [was].
Gilmore:  When they were first occupied by people, how was that handled?  They charged rent, or _____________?  How was that done?
Urban:  They had government appraisers come out and they made surveys of surrounding communities.  Of course at that time Kanab and Fredonia were about the only surrounding communities.  They made surveys and came up with a rental rate, and furnished utilities.  They had annual surveys and raised the rent periodically or annually.  It was very reasonable rent because they wanted to keep the employees on the job, rather than have a huge turnover.  So typical of government projects, what they tried to do is recover their investment and operating costs in 'em, so that was about the only rent that they charged.  Very nominal to start with.  I can't remember.  It seems to me at the time we bought 'em, we were still only paying $100 or $104 or $105 a month rent for them.
Gilmore:  That was for a three-bedroom, two-bath house?
Urban:  Yeah.  The length of time the government had 'em in here, I'm sure they recovered quite a bit of their costs of construction, besides the operational costs.

[END TAPE 2, SIDE A; BEGIN SIDE B]

Gilmore:  You had mentioned that a lot of the Bureau of Rec. people lived in Kanab--and in your case, Fredonia--before moving to Page.  What was that experience like in Kanab?
Urban:  Well, it was an experience, because the people of Kanab and Fredonia, of course they're very small communities.  Before this happened, and to all of a sudden have all these government people and contractor people move in there, to find a place to stay....  We were fortunate that we got here among the very first, and so we were able to find a house in Fredonia at a fairly reasonable price.  But as more and more people come in, the prices went up more and more on some ridiculous apartments and everything:  apartments that were built [as] second-story apartments in a house, or something like that.
 It took awhile for the local residents to accept the influx of construction and government people coming in.  Well, the grocery stores was a good example, and they didn't try to hide it.  The local people would have charge accounts, and they would pay one price for commodities, and the government and contractor's people that would come in were paying another price.  Like I say, they didn't try to hide it, everybody knew it was happening, but there wasn't much you could do about it.  So it took a long time.  And in all fairness to the people there, it wasn't everyone there, because some of the people were a little more progressive, and they welcomed the people coming in and everything.  People that eventually moved out here to Page were glad to get out to Page.
Gilmore:  To have their own town [instead of] a subculture in another community.
Urban:  Yeah.  They were very slow in accepting the strangers coming in there.  I think probably one thing, they knew that they weren't going to be there long, disrupting their way of life.  The Bureau put in a trailer court.
Gilmore:  Was that Little's trailer court?
Urban:  Yeah.
Gilmore:  It seems as though there were a couple.  Those were Bureau trailers, though.
Urban:  Yeah, they put in Bureau trailers, and the Bureau didn't have any place for people who had their own trailers.  In fact, I don't know of anyone at this time that had their own trailers.  But the Bureau had bought a bunch of trailers and they contracted for a space up there, a trailer court there.  I'm not sure how many, probably thirty, maybe forty trailers in there for people that could not find, or did not want to look for other housing in town.  That pretty well took care of the number of people we had there, because we didn't have all that many people at that time.  Not until such time that we moved out here did the government force start to build up.
Gilmore:  That exodus in the fall of 1958, do you have any idea about how many people moved?  How long did that take?
Urban:  In the fall of 1958, the people that he wanted out here was the City employees, because we were setting up this building over across the street here for a City office.  There wasn't very many houses at that time.  There wasn't anything over there.  Even this street, Navajo Street, very few houses.  I mentioned before, they give us a choice on selecting a house.  You had to make two or three selections in case you didn't get your first selection.  This was not my first selection.  I had another one up the street I was more interested in, but this happened to be one of the first ones that was finished, and they wanted to get us out here, so Wiley come and said, "You can have this house, 'cause we want to get you out there."  So that's the way we ended up with this house.  As it turned out, the other house that was built ahead of this one was up the next block, and Jim Shook [phonetic spelling] and his family moved out.  He was head of operation and maintenance at that time.  Of course they were quite involved in getting utilities to some of the temporary buildings.  Of course they had the transit houses that were ahead of this.  We had engineering people in there, and some City employees were moved into those to get 'em out here, until some other houses were finished.
 Jim Shook was the first one to occupy a permanent house in Page, and that was up the street.  Of course he is long since gone.  In fact, he died several years ago.  We were the second ones.  Right now, we have lived in a permanent house longer than anyone in Page.
Gilmore:  You have the record!
Urban:  Yeah, we have the record now.  Nobody can break that one.  So there really wasn't a big move.  There were probably, oh, I'm just strictly guessing, but I would say maybe a dozen families that moved out within a two- or three-week period there, because there just weren't accommodations for that.  Between the transit houses and some trailers, they had a trailer park on the other side; then they were building a trailer park up near the transit houses, about where the--well, across the street from the school.
Gilmore:  About where the athletic club or sports club [is]?
Urban:  Yeah, where the athletic club up there is.
Gilmore:  That was a Bureau trailer park?
Urban:  That was a Bureau trailer park up there, and moved some of 'em in there.  So it was a pretty orderly [event?].  I think the thing that was most upsetting was trying to get the offices moved so there would be as little disruption as possible.  And I think that's the reason they moved the people that were involved in the City [government (Tr.)], which was me and....  Other people were mostly operation and maintenance people because we really didn't have a City staff at that time, because we didn't have a city.  (laughter)
Gilmore:  You'd mentioned the transit houses.  I think that's something that needs to be explained in the history of Page.  Photos show that they were in place before the concrete block Bureau of Rec. homes were done.  What were the transit houses, where'd they come from, and what size or layout were they?
Urban:  Well, actually today, the nearest thing you could compare 'em to would be a double-wide trailer.  So they're about sixteen feet wide and probably fifty feet long.  I'm not exactly sure of the length.  They came in on a temporary trailer, and were set down on blocks.  They were eight feet wide, the walls folded down on them, the roof folded down to make a wall, and then the roof would come up when they folded it out, and the floor and everything, and put 'em on a foundation.  And actually they were quite liveable, very similar to what a double-wide trailer would be today, except that instead of coming in, in two pieces, it was all one piece, and just kind of unfolded.
Gilmore:  Did they have their own wheels, or were they brought on a flatbed?
Urban:  They were brought in on wheels just like a trailer.  So they were meant to be set on a foundation.  Unlike double-wide trailers today that have their own wheels on 'em, these were trailered in and set down.  The term "transit houses," that, I think, was probably a patent name on it, of the company.  I've never seen anything comparable to them.  Of course they were all exactly alike, the same color and same pattern.  They just set 'em up in a row down there, and it worked out very good.  We had fifty of 'em, and it worked out very good to house people.  And as houses became available, some people were not interested in moving into a house, because they were low cost, so they were allowed to stay there.  For the most part, most of the people were interested in getting into a permanent home.  So they remained there for several years.  I can't even remember now when they took them out.  Some people lived in those the whole time they were here, and never did go into a house, even though they had an opportunity.  So they were pretty liveable.
Gilmore:  Roughly what was their floor plan--the number of bedrooms, bathrooms?
Urban:  As I recall, there were two bedrooms and just one bath, and a living room area, and a fairly good-sized kitchen.  They had room for a washer and dryer.  I never lived in one myself.  My wife, when she went to work through the telephone company out here, of course before the town was built, the telephone company was the first permanent building in town.  She rode back and forth with Norm Keeper [phonetic spelling], who was the field engineer.  And then when they had the transit house come out here, Keeper moved into a transit house until his house was built up here.  So in order to keep from driving eighty miles back and forth every day--we were good friends with them, we had met them in Alaska--they asked Donna Lee if she'd like to stay out here during the week, and just come home on the weekends.  So she did that for a while.  So she had an opportunity to see what the trailer was.  That didn't last too long because in the first place, Keepers moved into a house, and it wasn't too long after that when we were here.  They were nice enough that, like I say, some people wanted to stay in 'em and not move into another house.
Gilmore:  You don't happen to know what their ultimate fate was, or what happened to 'em?
Urban:  I sure don't.  I would guess, since they come in after them in trailers, or they hauled 'em out on trailers again, I would guess that some contractor or some individual made good use of them on another job somewhere, on a job someplace.  They were sold, I know that, but I don't have any idea who they were sold to.
Gilmore:  This is a question I'm starting to ask of everyone who was here in the early days:  What changes have you seen take place with the Navajo Tribe--particularly the members in the vicinity of Page--from those earliest days, 1957 up to the present?  What differences do you see in them now and then?
Urban:  Well, they've become more--oh, I don't know whether I want to say the word "aggressive"--a little more outgoing than they were.  In the early stages, we saw very few of them here, and those we did see, some of 'em were still traveling in wagons and riding horses.  I can remember on one occasion that we were invited, along with two or three other families, we were invited to a Navajo wedding, and it was held in a hogan, very primitive surroundings, with food being cooked over an open fire, and that sort of thing.  As time progressed, people started to come, looking for jobs with the contractors and with the Bureau.  Of course this was before the time when the law required you to hire a certain number of 'em and everything--very much unlike what they're experiencing at the Navajo Generating Station.  (clock chimes)  We set up apprenticeship programs for the Navajos.  We had a number of 'em working on the plant.  (tape turned off and on)  I think probably--and I don't know, because there are other border communities that have experienced the problems that we've gone through here, so I can't say that Page was responsible for it--but the number of Indians that come into town and drink, that you see hanging around the liquor stores and the problems that we've had with intoxication and the Indians.  Page probably made it handier for 'em, the Indians in this vicinity, but I don't think it was.  I can't say that Page introduced it to the reservation, because these problems existed long before we came here.  It took 'em a while before they started coming in, in the numbers that they did, and do now.  One thing probably it was a lack of roads in and out of here.  Another was probably transportation and that sort of thing.  The number of them that are in town now, it just....  It seems like their way of going from more of the traditional native dress and native traditional ways, to more big-city-oriented....  Well, not big city, but towards the white man's ways, I guess is the best way to put it.  Their dress, and of course attending local schools, and working in almost every business in town, at all the different trades and professions.  So I noticed that change over the years.  Today, when you go uptown, it's just a way of life.  I hardly notice, you just accept them as just another person.  Before, when they were in traditional dress and everything, you would notice it, "Oh, there's a Navajo Indian _____."  Today, for the most part, you don't even think about it.  You just have a lot of friends that are Navajo, [dropping?] friends, just somebody else that lives in town.  (chuckles)
Gilmore:  They're very much a part of the community over the years.
Urban:  Right.
Gilmore:  Which brings up a point, too.  Where the present-day town of LuChi [phonetic spelling] is, just a neighboring community of Page, do you remember what that area was like in the early construction days?  Was there a town there at the time?
Urban:  No, there wasn't.  As Page started to grow, the Navajos started to move in closer to Page.  I think the nearest--well, really not a settlement, because Navajos traditionally don't settle in settlements.  I mean, there are very few areas that they have.  But Coppermine, there were more people lived out in that area, than there were at LuChi, but as Page developed, they started migrating towards the townsite.  The same way with as the plant developed, the Navajo Generating Station, developed out there, you can go out in that area now and you can see a lot more Navajo dwellings close to that area that weren't even there during construction of the dam--more in the LuChi area here than they were out there.  LuChi has developed a lot, and some of it in very recent years.  I mean, the houses that they put out there, some of 'em I would guess as late as ten years ago.  When Page was putting in the industrial park, and extended water out there, we also extended water lines out to the LuChi area, and of course that helped get growth in that area going too, where they had an access to water.  I guess I'd say LuChi is probably as new as Page.
Gilmore:  You became acquainted with Art Greene?
Urban:  Art Greene:  while we were living in Fredonia, he had the trading post down at Marble Canyon.  We used to go out there.  They had some cabins out there, and a couple families of us would go out there sometimes on weekends and stay there and visit with him.  We became quite well acquainted with him.  Of course he had a few little cabins out here where Wahweap is right now.  In fact, the cabins still exist in the trailer park up there.  The trailer park is all around 'em, but the original cabins are still in there.  And we used to come out there, and he had--he and his wife and his daughter--had a little restaurant there.  Didn't amount to much, because there's nothing there except a few little cabins.  But we would come out there, and we got well acquainted with Earl and Irene.  Earl Johnson was married to Irene Greene, and they had boat tours that they would take up the river to Rainbow Bridge.  We would go in up near where Crossing of the Fathers was, probably about nineteen river miles, at that time.  They had an old flatbottom boat with a big airplane propeller on it that moved, because the water was very shallow at times and places along there.  So one time Earl invited us to go with him.  He had a couple from New Jersey that he was taking up, and he said he'd like to have us go with him.  So my wife and I and this other couple from New Jersey went with him on a trip up the river to Rainbow Bridge.  At that time they had a camp set up on the Colorado River, so we'd take the boat into the camp, and then you had to hike about six miles up through the canyons to Rainbow Bridge.  We really needed Earl, or a guide,