More Dogs on Main

I’m not one for observing dates and anniversaries, and they normally pass by without notice. But in the course of this last week, I kind of tripped over one of those big anniversaries. It was 30 years ago this week that I started my first job in Park City. Although I had been in and around Park City as a casual observer and mediocre skier for years, it was in January of 1982 that I started work at City Hall as city attorney.

The city council and city manager at the time felt like they needed somebody in house. Prior to that, the city attorney had been a part-time, contract attorney, or more accurately, a collection of people working on different things who never talked to each other or coordinated their efforts. I was willing to work cheap because I had little by way of relevant experience and was so miserable in the job I had in Salt Lake that really anything that would get me out of there was acceptable.

For the first few months, I commuted in a 1976 VW bus. The heater in the old air-cooled VWs was mostly a red plastic knob on the dash that, as far as anybody could tell, was not connected to anything. I had to carry an ice scraper on the dash to scrape the ice off the inside of the windshield while grinding up Parleys in second gear. A couple of months of that and I moved to Park City.

My first office was in the Marsac Building, which was still set up as an elementary school. Most offices were full classrooms, with plywood cubicles made by the public-works department. The blackboards and penmanship charts were still on the wall, and coat hooks lined the hallways. Given the sensitivity of legal matters, I was assigned a private office, which was really a storage room. The restroom was located directly above, and the plumbing noise made it impossible to carry on a conversation in the office. The day-care center downstairs added its own clamor.

They then partitioned off a part of the former fire-truck garage in City Hall on Main Street, and I moved down there. It was a nice little office except for the fact that there was no heat. In the dead of winter, it took the electric space heater (from Art’s Hardware) until about 10:30 to get it warm enough that the electric typewriter would work. There was a jail cell in one corner (used as a storage closet then) and a bathroom in the other corner. The idea of an office with a private bathroom seemed very prestigious to me until I realized that there was nothing private about it. My office was more or less the hallway to the only toilet in the building that didn’t freeze on a cold morning.

The library was in the space next door. It wasn’t much of a library, and served mostly as a place to sit down and wait for your laundry in the Laundromat across the street. They had to shut off the plumbing in the library in the winter, so the librarians sent anybody who needed to use the bathroom next door, through my office, to use that one.

The office was so small that, if I had somebody in there for a meeting, we all had to stand up and move chairs so one of several pregnant women from the finance department upstairs could make her way to the bathroom. Any really sensitive meetings moved to the Main Street Deli, which was much more private.

The city finally remodeled the Marsac Building, and everybody moved up there into comparatively normal accommodations. For a couple of months I had a whole classroom to myself, aside from the contractors who were storing materials in there, and the pipe-threading machine. I remember meeting with a lawyer from Chicago who was in town threatening to sue us back to the Stone Age. He was wearing the most expensive suit I think I have ever seen. As we sat around the picnic table that was the conference table in my office, the plumbers were trying to thread a very long piece of pipe. We were in the way, and both of us finally ended up helping to hold one end of the pipe while they threaded the other end.

I’m not sure how the legal wrangling went, but I think the lawyer flew back to Chicago to advise his client that Park City was not worth suing. Clearly there could be nothing to recover from a place where the city attorney doubled as a pipefitter.

Thirty years has gone by in the blink of an eye. What a long, strange (and wonderful) trip it’s been.

Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column for 25 years.