A CCC Enrollee a Day Kept Depression Away

By Deniane Gutke Karchner

(continued)

CCC Pranks

    Order in the camp was interspersed with pranks and more pranks. Montella remembers when the mess sergeant wasn't around, there were "the biggest food fights you've ever seen." The clown of one group convinced Wright, the barber, to give him a "mohawk" (leaving the hair down in the center and shaving the rest of the head). Everyone laughed about it until one of the officers strolled over and asked where he got the hair cut. The group clown replied, "My barber gave it to me." To which the officer replied, "Tell your barber to finish the job." (Frank Wright, oral interview by Janet Wilcox, 1987, Blanding, Utah, p. 13.)
 
  
Local farmers and Indians rented their horses for CCC boys to use in hauling wood and clearing land.  (SJHC photo)
            Wozniak remembers hiring Indian ponies for $1 a day. They would give the Indians 50 cents and say, "Half day!" Then they would keep them all day and turn them loose until all of the Indians came into the camp wanting their money. Wozniak and Keele also recalled giving new enrollees a pail of fake letters and making them wait up on top of the barracks for the mail plane. Sometimes they stayed all night, rain or shine! Other pranks included stealing the foreman's shoes, throwing new recruits in a cold shower, or swimming in the reservoir that held Blanding's drinking water.
 
After breakfast the CCC enrollees headed out in trucks to work on projects. In the CCC camp located near Moab, enrollees worked on flood control projects at Pack Creek and built a road across
 
Dry Valley reservoir built by  
CCC boys in 1935.  (Donna Wozniak photo) 
 
Wind Whistle CCC project in Dry Valley.  (Donna Wozniak photo)
the La Sal mountains. Further southwest, CCC men built a string of troughs at Windwhistle and road and fences of the Blue Mountain. CCC enrollees poisoned prairie dogs and reseeded areas to stop erosion, and in the Blanding camp they graveled Main Street and built a road across Recapture. Others worked further south on an impressive fence line at Bluff Bench, or headed out from a spike camp in Mexican Hat and built a fence at Lime Ridge. More projects included improving timber, building water tanks, corrals, or working on reservoirs in Bull Hollow, White Mesa, or Verdure with horses and slip scrapers. At the time, enrollees on the Indian Reservation worked on trails and dams in their area. (Compiled from oral interviews done for the Blue Mountain Shadows Oral History Project, June through August 1987 in the San Juan County and Provo areas.)
 
One of the 200 CCC boys who was stationed at the Blanding camp.  (Donna Wozniak photo)
 
A CCC Enrollee a Day Kept Depression Away continued

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Last Updated July 22, 1997 by Janet Wilcox