Every now and then, events converge in ways that unexpectedly remind me why I love living here. This last weekend was one of those times. The collision of unrelated events, people and emotions had me spending the week almost crowing about what a great community this is. I grew up surrounded (perhaps smothered) by a huge extended family, with aunts and uncles, all four grandparents, siblings and their kids and grandkids spilling all over the place. There are other families who were friends going back multiple generations and still very much in the picture. If I get so much as a hangnail, there are people lined up trying to shove Jell-O salads into my fridge.
For most people in Park City, those connections are more remote. Most of my friends here are geographically distant from that pile of relatives. So the support group isn’t hardwired. It gets built on an ad hoc basis among friends and neighbors, co-workers and people you know, but don’t quite know how you know them. But in a crisis, they are there.
Saturday was the funeral for one of my closest friends for over 20 years. She died of a terrible brain disease that started taking her away, a little piece at a time, a long time ago. Her son lives in Salt Lake, the rest of her family is scattered. Saturday, the church was full of people who remembered her at her best. If she was more cognizant in death than she had been in her last years, it would have been a great comfort, or as she would have described it, a great party. At the cemetery, I glanced around and realized that I’ve been here long enough that I knew everybody whose headstone I could read.
Sunday evening was a happier occasion, a retirement party for a friend whose life’s work is a lasting legacy in Park City. I’d guess there were close to 250 people there, celebrating not just what our friend had built, but in a larger sense, celebrating what we all had built. It was a group of people who had a huge part in making Park City what it is today.
The night was full of stories about when the liquor store was inside Day’s Market on Main Street, and the shopping carts were basically child-sized to navigate the narrow aisles. The town’s business was conducted among the canned goods or at the Down Under at the Claim Jumper. There were stories of fires and floods and our utter amazement at developments like Deer Valley, which seemed unimaginable at the time. You used to be able to buy furnace repair parts at the Alpha-Beta grocery store, if Art’s Hardware didn’t have the part. There are things that didn’t work out as planned, and others that worked out better than imagined. Mostly there was a frenetic energy driving the place.
The people at the retirement party largely overlapped the audience at the funeral on Saturday. There was a sense of having done our part, of slowing down, and turning things over to another generation. The nature of the town drew us here at roughly the same time and age. My theory has always been that modern Park City was built by an eccentric group of very creative people who weren’t going to make it in the “real world.” By and large, we don’t do well in a world of suits and ties and established hierarchy. I knew on my very first day on the job in Salt Lake that working in the Salt Lake business world would crush the life out of me, and made plans for the escape to Park City. We all gravitated here because any opportunity you wanted was here for the taking. It was like settling the frontier a century before.
We’ve become a lot more conventional now. That’s a factor of size and stability. It’s harder to start a business on a shoestring, and the marketplace is maybe less tolerant of the quirkiness that used to define us. Expectations are a little different.
Thirty years have passed very quickly, and some of the changes still give me a bit of a jolt now and then. Friends have died and kids I knew in diapers are now running the show. But spending a weekend with the people who debated whether the streets of old town should be paved (before there even was a “new town”) was a wonderful thing. Park City is still about half a bubble out of plumb, and I hope it stays that way.
You’ve just got to feel good about a place where an elderly widow and a man in a kilt show up at the same party and have a lot of things in common to talk about.
Tom Clyde served as Park City attorney in the 1980s and is the author of “More Dogs On Main Street.” He has been a columnist at The Park Record for more than 20 years.