HENRY ALBERT LOY

...About the Loy fishing trucks. The one on the left is an International K6. Dad (Henry Albert Loy) bought it in the middle of WWII. His business was deemed a food producer and so qualified over some severe rationing. The center truck was Bill's. It is 1 1/2 ton Ford. The right truck was a 10 wheel International 2 ton truck and would haul 12 tons of fish. They were used to haul fish (carp) primarily from Utah Lake and fish (chubs) from Strawberry Reservoir to trout hatcheries in Buhl or Twin Falls Idaho. The fish were used mainly for trout feed. We would sell it for 2 1/2 cents in Idaho. We also sold some fish in Los Angeles and San Francisco to the Jewish communities there. We would sell if for 30 cents a pound. We would ship about 1000# of fish on the train to California weekly, but near Yom Kippur we would drive trucks with 6 or 7 tons of fish on them, increasing our market by about a factor of five. (Fish is traditionally eaten at the close of the Yom Kippur fast.) The car off to the side is mine, it was a Pontiac, cream top with a green bottom that Dad bought to replace my car that got wrecked when I was in Japan (during the Korean War). The car in the picture with the trucks got wrecked when I was driving around the lake one day and someone ran into me. I replaced it with the light blue, white roofed Pontiac that I drove when I was courting LaRene. Story by Henry Leland Loy March 4, 2015

Henry Albert Loy was involved in a shotgun accident in his late teens while hunting on the shores of Utah Lake. The shotgun was accidently discharged destroying a bone in his lower arm. When he registered for the lst World War on June 5, 1917, his injury was noted on his registration card. The damaged arm did not seem to slow him down much. He was employed as a pipefitter at the Pacific States Cast Iron Pipe company near Springville, Utah. He was then employed by the Cherry Hill Dairy, Lake View, Utah. He supplemented his income by harvesting sea shells from the shores of Utah Lake and selling them to chicken farmers to provide calcium to their chickens. He next followed his family’s commercial fishing business on Utah Lake. He followed this pretty much the rest of his life, climatic conditions permitting. The lake water level varied from a few feet during drought conditions to over 12 feet when the rain returned. During the first drought he encountered he worked as a dredge operator to cut a channel from the lake water to pumps that supplied water to Salt Lake County. When normal rain fall returned and lake levels reached normal levels he had his own commercial fishing outfit using seins 400 yards long and 8-12 feet deep depending on the weather cycle. The main market for his fish (carp) was for food that he shipped to Los Angeles and local peddlers sold them locally in Utah County. The smaller fish were sold for mink feed, chicken feed, and fish feed in trout hatcheries. Later in his life he trucked fish (8-12 tons per load) to trout hatcheries along the Snake River in Idaho, and trucked the higher priced fish to Los Angeles to fish markets. During the peak demand season he sent as many as 3 truck loads (about six tons per load) per week to Los Angeles. Utah Lake again “dried up” and he moved his operations to American Falls Reservoir primarily on the Blackfoot Indian Reservation. Over the next several years the drought was broken and he returned to Utah Lake and things went well until at the beginning of the 2nd World War the government as part of the war effort built Geneva Steel Plant below Orem, Utah. This made it difficult for him to hire a crew and so when his eldest son was drafted he closed down his fishinAg operation, and went to work as a mill wright on the new steel mill construction. Henry tried that for a while, and decided that he preferred being his own boss. He started up his fishing operation with the aid of his elder son and hired local farmers during the winter. Near the end of the war his elder son was drafted and during the summers, he and his younger son, about 14 years old, became a 4 man fishing crew. Henry was 3 ½ men of the crew and his son the other ½ man. One of the most demanding tasks on a fishing crew is turning the windlass that pulled the net along. This windlass device was a stepped drum with a 12” diameter section and a 5“ diameter section, with a 30” handle to turn the drum which had the rope wound around it. He would turn the handle with the right hand and take up the rope with the left hand. Normally a 2 man operation. A windlass on each end of the net would pull the net along. Fortunately for the son Henry had recently designed a windlass powered by a small Briggs and Straton gasoline engine. Unfortunately for Henry such equipment was hard to come by because of shortages due to the war. So it was one man doing two men’s work against a boy and a gasoline engine. After the war the elder son came home and things returned to normal. The elder son worked with his father for several years and then began his own business and followed in his father’s footsteps for many years. The younger son, remembering how hard he had worked to be a ½ man, elected to attend university. Written by Henry Leland Loy