Tom Phelps to celebrate 100 years

Although the numbers of centenarians across the country is low (less that .03% of the population), Caribou County is well-represented in the category.  On September 22, Soda Springs resident Tom Phelps will join that august company, although you wouldn’t guess it to talk with him.

Phelps, a long time resident of Soda Springs, is also one of the relatively few remaining World War Two veterans, having served during the war with the Navy.   If you do the math, you’ll realize that he is almost the youngest a WWII vet could be, having been signed in high school, and then leaving for Fort Douglas as soon as he graduated.  “I was the second smallest guy in boot camp.  I was just a kid when they drafted me,” he said.  Phelps served in the Pacific, and was involved with nineteen others on the Air Support Communication team, all of which survived the war despite being in nine intense battles.  “We went from island to island.  The Gilberts, Marianas, Enewetak, Guam, and others.” Besides being a veteran, and a font of Soda Springs history, Tom is also a husband and father.  The family will be starting to gather soon, as they plan to host a 100th birthday party for Tom on September 21 at the Hooper Church, to which the public is invited.

Two of Tom’s children—Terry and Lani—were visiting with when I sat down with him to talk about his upcoming landmark day.  “We want them here in case, you know, I tell any lies,” Phelps laughed.  

Right away, Tom said, “I’d have been president of the church, but President Nelson was born a week ahead of me.”  The president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Russell M. Nelson, recently turned 100 on September 9.

Phelps wasn’t born in Soda Springs, though he’s lived here longer than most people in town anyway.  “The reason I came to Soda Springs was that right after the war they discharged eight million servicemen.  And when they let them out in the market, you couldn’t get a job any place.  So I just started hitchhiking around and finally got to Salt Lake City.  No money, just trying to find a place to work.  Finally, I went up to Ogden from Salt Lake, and stayed there overnight.  I had twenty-five cents, and I didn’t spend it because I thought ‘boy, if I’m starving to death, that’ll sure help me.”

“The next day or two I went home, and on the way home a man from Zion’s construction company told me he had a crew up to Idaho, and if you’ll meet me here Monday you can ride with me and I’ll see if they’ll hire you.  I didn’t have anything else to do, and I didn’t have any money, and a weekend to go.  I thought well ‘I wonder if I’ve got any mail in Salt Lake, which was the general post office.  It turned out there was a letter in there, with a check for four dollars from the place I’d been working in Tooele.  I put that in my pocket, and I went to Idaho.”

“We ended up in Preston or Weston.  The crew there was just finishing up in Downey, and he introduced me up there.  We finished that job, painting elevators, and then we went all over this country.  We finally got to Soda Springs, and we had the contract to paint the elevators downtown, which were brand new at the time—the first time they were painted.  May, she became my wife but at the time she was working in the café there downtown and we got acquainted with each other—well, she got acquainted with me,” Phelps laughs.  “I was too bashful to be acquainted with anyone.  After a few days, our crew left Soda Springs and traveled all over the western states painting grain elevators, going from place to place and staying for a few days.”

“Finally, we had to come back to Soda Springs, and anyway I was happy to see May again, and continued to be acquainted.  And that happened for two years, where I would go and leave and go and leave.  She was a very good woman, and everyone really liked her.

The couple eventually married in 1948.  

Phelps worked at the Coppard’s garage on Main Street for ten years, which was near the Idaho Café, where May worked.  

“She liked the café work, and I was traveling all the time,” Phelps said.  “But after we got married, I’ve been here ever since.  I started building the house we’re in in 1950, and finished it in 1955.”  The site where the house currently stands was an old wooden house owned by May’s mother.  “She was kind enough to let us live here until we could get settled and start to build a house, and we’ve been here ever since.”

“It was interesting, I started building the house right after the war and it was hard to get materials.  I had to get things as I could, and we’ve replaced a lot of it since then.  It’s a lot more
comfortable now.”

Tom, Lani, Terry, and Debbie were born to the couple, and joined May’s children Norman, Kay and Neil, who have since passed away.  

“I worked in the Ford Garage for 10 years, and then started at the plant in Georgetown for about four years.  They shut that plant down and moved it out to Conda.  I helped tear it down and move it up there.”  

Ask him about most places and people in town from the last hundred years, and Tom likely has a story about it.  Coming into town right at the post-war boom put him in position to see a lot of changes in the last seventy-plus years.  He remembers Soda Springs as a town a bit rougher around the edges. 

“It used to be just a primitive old, wicked town actually.  In the 50s, Enders Hotel was here, and across the street from the tracks was a big mansion that eventually burned down.  Of course, the bars were going strong then, it was a big drinking town then, if you can believe it.  There were slot machines all around town, because it was also a big gambling town.”

“Hooper Springs used to be called Beer Springs.  When I got here, people used to talk about going to Hooper and getting ‘Hooper Water.’  The word was you could pour your whiskey on top of it and it would stay there.  Then you’d drink the whiskey and then the Hooper water. I’ve never tried it, but everybody talked about it.”

“Now that water’s calm, but it used to shoot three feet above ground.”

In addition, the townsite was a lot wilder and less developed.  “It was big sheep country.  You never see any sheep any more, but all east of town where they’re building up there that was devoted to the railroad and the sheep loading and corrals where they loaded them onto trains.  That’s to the north side of the tracks when you go over the overpass.  It was all those steam powered trains back then.”

Terry remembered when he was growing up, the same area (which is now the Pioneer Cedars subdivision) had Native American encampments throughout it.  “I remember I’d go out there and there were arrowheads all over,” Terry recalled.  

Lani remembered the family spending a lot of time together on weekends.  “We did a lot of picnicking,” Lani said.  “Then on Saturday when dad was done with work we’d go out to Lava and swim.  We’d go out to Formation springs.  We’d go in the caves and swim in the hot pools.  We’d climb over S Hill and down to Hooper.”

May (Call) Phelps brought another aspect to the Phelps’ experience of living in the area.  “May was born and raised in the Grays Lake area,” Terry remembered.  “We had a lot of family out there and we’d go see them quite a bit.  It was nice to be here in town, and the reason was that out there you didn’t have any running water or a bathroom—you had the outhouse.  Here in town though, we had running water and hot and cold.  The house was a good solid house, but there wasn’t heat upstairs, so the girls were mostly downstairs and us boys were upstairs. The phone out there was one that you cranked.  But the one in town was a regular rotary dial.”

“There were twenty phones in town when I worked in the garage.  There was a sheet on the wall for a while, and I knew all the numbers in town.  The phone office is still over there by Hooper,” Tom chimed in.

After some discussion, it was agreed that the families original phone number was 3678, for what it’s worth.

Some of Tom’s advice includes “you’ve got to get up every day”. Tom jokes that “I don’t plan to die, anyway.  I’m planning to be translated!”

In his time, Phelps lived through the stock market crash of 1929, when he remembers a teacher of his at the time losing all her money.  He saw the first airplane land in Fillmore, Utah in a grain field.  The pilot was trying to impress a girl.  Terry and Lani remember watching the moon landing with Tom on the old black and white television.  “We could hear what was going on, but we really couldn’t see anything,” Lani laughed.

“That’s the way it was,” Tom smiled.

The party will be held at the LDS Church on Hooper, Saturday September 21 from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.