Melvin Westwood Oral History Interview

This interview features Melvin Westwood relating his family history. Westwood opens the interview with a description of Moab, Utah, where his family is from. He mentions the rough landscape and the industries that people took up in the area; mainly farming, livestock, and mining. His grandparents arrived in Moab in the 1880s and his family remained there through the early 20th century. His father, Neil Westwood, was born in 1898. Westwood relates that when his father was born, there were no bridges over the Colorado River, so his grandfather was employed as a ferryman at the time. His grandfather’s name was Richard Darwin Westwood, and he was born in 1863. Richard Westwood’s wife’s name was Martha Ann Wilcox. She was the daughter of original Mormon pioneers who settled in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847. Originally from central Utah, the couple established a homestead in the Moab area in 1890 at the urging of Wilcox’s brother’s family, who also lived in the area. Before moving to Moab, Richard Westwood had been a freight runner. Throughout his life in Moab, he was employed at various times as a farmer, a law officer, and a ferryman. He was shot and killed by prisoners in a jailbreak when Melvin Westwood was six years old.

Melvin Westwood’s mother’s maiden name was Blake, and her family came from Texas. Her father was Henry Allen Blake, born in 1869. He married Ida Barker, Westwood’s maternal grandmother, in the 1890s. They lived in Las Vegas, New Mexico until 1917, at which time they moved to Moab. The Blakes and the Westwoods became acquainted and eventually Ida Blake (Ida and Henry Blake’s daughter) married Neil Westwood (Martha and Richard Westwood’s son). Ida and Neil Westwood are Melvin Westwood’s parents. His mother was in ill health throughout much of his childhood so he and his siblings helped out around the farm and with the housework to take the load off of her since the doctor had told her she would not live if she had too much work to do. She survived and her health improved in later years.

Westwood continues from there to talk about his own childhood. He was born in 1923 at the coal camp in Hiawatha, Utah, where his father worked in the mines, and raised in Moab. He relates some of his childhood adventures and mishaps, and explains how his parents handled their children getting into trouble. He then talks about the effect of the Great Depression on his family. He notes that because his family was homesteading and was largely self-sufficient, they did not feel the effects of the economic crash immediately. Later on, two of his aunts and their children came to live on the family farm because they were not able to support their families in the city. Westwood admits that it was their hardship which brought home to him how severe the Depression was, since he had always thought of his city-dwelling relatives as better off than his own family and he had not seen the real reach of the Depression before that. The interview concludes with Westwood returning to the subject of his parents and praising them for their leniency in allowing their children to pursue whatever interests they chose and to study whatever they were interested in, leading to all nine children taking up different careers. He believes this practice is an important part of his family heritage and he strives to raise his own children and grandchildren the same way.

Melvin Westwood was born in Hiawatha, Utah in 1923. He studied botany and horticulture in college, and was a faculty member in the Oregon State University Horticulture Department and Agricultural Experiment Station from 1960 until his retirement in 1983.