Robert E. Thayer, Salt Lake City, Utah: an interview by Becky B. Lloyd, December 3, 2002: Saving the legacy tape no. 552 and 553

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ROBERT TH YER R , 2002 BEC: Then you said Roosevelt Junior High and East High ch ol. Wa your father able to maintain employment throughout the Great Depression? It sound lik he did. ROB: Oh, yes. He was in the railroad, stayed with the railroad until right during the War, and during the War he and one of my mother's relatives started up a restaurant that the relative's father had owned, and he went to work there, and was in the restaurant business for the rest of his career, and he never retired. He quit after about six months before he passed away. He was very active. My mother died a year-and-a-half after I got back from the service and she was only fifty. She died of a heart attack. BEC: ROB: BEC: ROB: I was going to say, she must have been pretty young, and she was. She was just fifty years old when she died. That's too bad. Did you know she had heart problems or was that-? All her life. In fact, I was an only child and the doctor at that time, they tell me, told them no more children; you can't take it. BEC: Is that right? ROB: She had, they used to call it St. Vitas' Dance, but now I think it's some kind of a fever, and that left her heart impaired. But she was a great woman. BEC: That's unfortunate her life ended so soon. ROB: Yeah. But she saw me. I got home in August, then went back out again, and came back in September, and she died the following April. So she did see me after I come home from the service because I was gone the biggest part of four years in the service. 3