0:00 · Maggie

This is Maggie Larson with the Alder Creek Centennial Oral History Project. Today is April 14, 2026, and I'm sitting at the kitchen table of Mr. Harold Vickers out on Cedar Bench Road. Harold, thank you for having me.

0:16 · Harold

Well, you're welcome. Ruth would have had cookies out, but you're stuck with just me and the coffee.

0:21 · Maggie

The coffee is plenty. Let's start at the beginning. When did your family come to Alder Creek?

0:28 · Harold

My grandfather came out in 1927, one year after the town incorporated. He'd been dry farming wheat down by Holbrook and heard the Canal Company was selling shares up here. Eighty acres, and he put every last one of them into sugar beets almost right away, because Basin Sugar had just built the receiving station by the rail siding. That's what everybody called the beet dump.

0:54 · Maggie

Tell me about the beet dump. People keep mentioning it.

0:58 · Harold

Oh, the beet dump was the center of the world come October. You'd wait in line with your truck, sometimes two hours, and the fellows would take a tare sample, weigh you, and the beets went up the piler into these mountains, just white mountains of beets waiting on rail cars. As a boy, my job was to ride in the back and kick the stragglers off the tailgate. You knew every truck in that line and every man driving one.

1:27 · Maggie

What was harvest like when you were young?

1:29 · Harold

Hard. Everybody says that, but I mean it particular. Before the mechanical harvesters got good, you topped beets by hand with a knife that had a hook on the end. You'd hook the beet, lift it, top it, and drop it in the row. My hands would crack and bleed by the end of the first week, every year, like clockwork. We hired crews, too, families that came up every fall, and some of them stayed and settled. The Okamuras, June's folks, they started that way before they got their own ground.

2:02 · Maggie

When did things start to change?

2:05 · Harold

Two things: sprinklers and the contract. We leveled and ditched that farm for flood irrigation my whole young life, and then in 1968 or '69, my dad and I put in wheel lines, and suddenly the bench ground that never watered right was our best ground. Then, in 1981, Basin Sugar¹ didn't renew contracts for our district, said the freight didn't pencil. That was a blow. The beet dump closed. It was never quite the same town after, if you want my honest opinion. Beets were a crop that needed your neighbors. Barley you can do lonely.

2:48 · Maggie

Is there a harvest memory that stands out above the rest?

2:54 · Harold

The fall of 1974, after the canal breached that spring. Everybody was behind, everything was mud, and the Ostergard boy, Glen, he's the fire chief now, or was. He organized it, so we dug each other's beets in a big rotation, six farms as one crew. We finished the whole bench two days before the freeze. Ruth made a ham for 30 people. I've eaten in restaurants in Salt Lake City, and I never had a better meal than that one.

3:24 · Maggie

What do you want people to know a hundred years from now?

3:27 · Harold

That this ground didn't want to be farmed, and we talked it into it, and that was done by a whole town, not by any one man. You put that in your archive.

3:40 · Maggie

I will. Thank you, Harold.

3:42 · Harold

You bet. Now drink your coffee before it goes cold.