Item Detail
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Roberts, Josephine Redd
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1902-1995
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MSS OH 34
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Oral History
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Josephine Redd Roberts was born on September 12, 1902 in Bluff, Utah to Wayne Hardison Redd and Caroline Nielson. She lived with her family in Bluff until age seven when they moved to Blanding as one of the first families to settle the land. At the age of 14, Josephine moved to La Sal where she helped Emily Wood, or 'Aunt Emma' as she was commonly called, cook at the Charlie Redd Ranch for one summer. Josephine then moved back to Blanding where she attended school. Sometime later she attended Brigham Young University and the University of Utah. Although Josephine was not qualified to teach school, she was hired to teach domestic science for one year to seventh and eighth graders in La Sal because of a scarcity of teachers. While teaching, she met Rex M. Roberts, the principal of the school, whom she married on August 25, 1921 in Salt Lake City. They then moved to Blanding where they both taught school for one year until they moved to Bountiful where Rex left his teaching career to enter the pharmaceutical profession. Shortly after Rex received his pharmaceutical credentials, they moved to Santa Barbara, California where Rex practiced pharmacy with the Owl Drug Company. Josephine bore four children in total. She was widowed by Rex's death on February 18, 1990, and just five years later on August 30, 1995, Josephine passed away.
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This collection includes an oral history tape (30 minutes in length) and a transcript (7 pages in length) that consists of an interview between Josephine Redd Roberts and Greg Maynard on July 24, 1973 as part of the Charles Redd Oral History Project conducted by the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University in collaboration with Utah State University. The oral history is mainly autobiographical in nature. Josephine recounts her experiences as a school teacher in La Sal and Blanding. She describes how primitive the schoolhouses were, having only two to three rooms with three teachers teaching children from the first through the eighth grades. During the interview, she looks back on her teaching career and regretfully says, 'I could have understood a little more the financial circumstances of those kids that I taught. I could have done a lot better than I did if I had understood their circumstances. [Many of them] were really poor.' Besides describing her teaching career, Josephine describes her associates like Emily Wood as an organizer and a hard worker, while she describes her cousin Charlie Redd as having a 'dynamic personality,' so much that his ranch was 'the [social] hub of everything,' although Josephine does not remember having much of a social life during the summer that she worked on his ranch.
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