Late in the evening of Jan. 3, 1950, Park City’s volunteer firefighters were summoned by the haunting wail of the whistle at City Hall. Fire had broken broke out at the Saint Mary of the Assumption Catholic Church at the top of Park Avenue.

Battling 18-below-zero temperatures, they managed to keep the fire from spreading to nearby buildings. However, flames soon broke through the roof of the church, engulfing the entire structure.

“Historical Church Destroyed,” The Park Record declared in its next issue.

Duane Hunt, then the bishop of the Salt Lake City diocese that includes Park City, had misgivings about rebuilding the church. A strike had recently shut down three of Park City’s major mines, including the Silver King. About 700 men were out of work. He could see Park City becoming just another abandoned mining camp.

But the Silver King’s 35-year-old chief engineer disagreed. Jim Ivers — whose grandfather had once donated $10,000 toward the construction of the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City — argued that this was the wrong time to deprive the struggling mining families of a place of worship.

Bishop Hunt eventually relented.

“He said, ‘I’ll authorize the church if you take charge,’” Ivers told me in a 1997 interview. “So … we got together a crew, and we hired out miners who were out on strike, hired them for a dollar an hour.”

The church’s stone walls survived the fire. The pews, charred but intact, were encased in a big block of ice. The crew first capped the walls with concrete, keeping it warm with heat channeled from the parish house next door.

In the meantime, in his office in the Silver King boardinghouse, Ivers designed a set of steel scissor trusses to support the new roof.

“We got this steel company out of Salt Lake to build them at cost,” he said.

With no money to hire a crane, they used a pneumatic hoist from the Silver King to drag the trusses into position. Al Carter, a carpenter at the Silver King, led the crew building the new roof.

“As soon as they got the roof up, we turned the heat up again, melted that ice real fast,” Ivers said. “So, yeah, the pews that are there are the same pews that were there then.”

The Jan. 30 issue of Newsweek magazine included a story on the church’s resurrection. Utah correspondent Jack Goodman described a scene in which striking miners of various Christian denominations were working side by side with members of mine management. Sympathetic Newsweek readers contributed $1,200 which, Ivers recalled, was more than the insurance money.

On June 25, 1950, Bishop Hunt drove up from Salt Lake City to dedicate the resurrected church. But Ivers was not around to enjoy it. With the mines closed down, he and his family had moved on, to an iron-mining operation in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

By the time Ivers returned to Park City in the early 1960s, the old mining camp had begun its renaissance as a destination ski resort. In 1965 he was named president of United Park City Mines, overseeing not only the remaining underground operations but also the new Treasure Mountains (now Park City Mountain) resort.

During his five-year tenure, he began looking for a buyer for the resort, a search that ultimately led to Royal Street Corporation of New Orleans.

As that renaissance brought new people to the area, Park City’s churches outgrew their small chapels on Park Avenue and began to build spacious new houses of worship at the edge of town.

When St. Mary’s started planning a new church, Ivers again played a leading role. It began with a chance encounter with Bishop Joseph Federal, Duane Hunt’s successor. Bishop Federal asked Ivers if he would help find a couple of acres for the new building.

“I said, ‘Well, bishop, I’ll do better than that. I’ll give you some.’ So I made the commitment to give them a couple of acres,” he said.

That land was on the corner of S.R. 224 and White Pine Canyon Road, not far from his house. As the plans developed, that couple of acres grew to eight. An elegant new structure was completed in August 1997. This time, when the church was dedicated, Ivers was around to enjoy it.

Ivers was also still around when a statue of him — representing Park City’s mining legacy — was unveiled on Main Street two years later. He died in May 2000.

The simple stone church at the top of Park Avenue isn’t used much anymore. But those steel trusses still stand as a quiet reminder of a time when miners and managers set aside their differences in an act of faith.

Be sure to check out the museum website for our upcoming lectures and tours!

David Hampshire is a Park City Museum researcher.

The post Way We Were: The patron of Saint Mary’s appeared first on Park Record.

Chances are you know the photo. Taken in 1932, it shows Summit County Sheriff Eph Adamson and Patrolman Sam Billings standing behind Billings’ Harley-Davidson motorcycle in front of the sheriff’s office at 509 Main Street. But the crowning touch is the pit bull perched on the seat of the motorcycle and posing – yes, posing – for the camera.

That iconic photo was the work of J.E. Jenkins, better known as Pop Jenks. In the early years of the 20^th century Pop ran a photo studio on Main Street before getting into the restaurant business.

Sometime in the winter of 1986-87 I learned that Pop’s daughter, Thelma Uriarte, had an impressive collection of her father’s photographs. I approached Thelma where she worked, at First Security Bank (now Chase Bank) on Park Avenue, to see if she would be willing to share some of his photos with the Park City Museum.

She invited me to the home in Highland Estates that she shared with her husband, Leon Uriarte, a former mayor of Park City. And, one memorable Sunday afternoon, she hauled out a black trunk containing hundreds of pieces of her father’s work.

I was flabbergasted. There were decades worth of prints and negatives going back to about 1915. People standing on a mountain of snow on Main Street. The medical staff in front of the Miners Hospital at its old location on Nelson Hill. The Silver King Coalition Building loading train cars with ore from the mine. A mid-1930s panorama of Main Street taken from Rossie Hill. The Park City High School band led by legendary band director Byron Jones marching up Main Street in full regalia.

That encounter led to an offer by Diane Balaban, the director of the Kimball Art Center (then on the corner of Park and Heber Avenues), to host an exhibit of his work in the center’s main gallery.

Pop Jenks often used large-format cameras, with negatives as large as 8 by 10 inches. The museum contracted with a Salt Lake City studio equipped to handle those huge negatives and enlarge them to make oversize prints. The detail in the photos was stunning.

The exhibit opened on Sept. 4, 1987, attracting people who may not have set foot in the building since it was Kimball’s Garage back in the 1930s. “The exhibit was a huge success with people who remember Park City [of that era],” The Park Record reported on Sept. 10.

Yes, the exhibit included that photo of Adamson, Billings, the motorcycle, and the pit bull. “Pop should have gotten a picture of Billings learning to ride that thing [the Harley],” John Murnin told the paper. “I remember watching him trying it out in Swede Alley. He was weaving all over.”

Thelma agreed to donate her father’s works to the museum, with the stipulation that he receive credit for photos that appeared in public. The museum also published a limited-edition soft-cover book dedicated to Jenkins and his work, with text by John Kinch and design by Don and Cha Cha Weller.

However, Thelma wasn’t thrilled with how everything worked out. She started to see copies of his work displayed in publications, on t-shirts, and in local stores, often without any credit to the photographer. From time to time I would run into her around town and she’d give me an earful.

Twenty-five years went by. The book went out of print. About 10 years ago, in a weak moment, I told Sandra Morrison, then the museum’s executive director, that I would write the text for a new biography of Pop Jenks, to be illustrated with his photos. I confess that I was motivated, in part, by a desire to make amends to Thelma.

In researching the book, I had three major sources: John Kinch’s original text, The Park Record archives (which by then were online), and Thelma, who was in her early 90s. For me, the highlights of that project were my conversations with Thelma, who could recall details of her family life going back to her childhood, and Katie Mullaly, whose book design provided a stunning platform for Pop’s photographs.

When the book, “Park City’s Pop,” was published, the museum scheduled a book signing for Feb. 2, 2018. Although Thelma was spending her winters in Arizona at that time, she booked a flight back to Utah to attend the event. I thought, judging by the number of copies of the book that she reserved to give to friends and relatives, that she was happy with the result. And I’d like to think that we finally honored her father in the way she intended.

As you may already know, Thelma died on March 9 at the age of 101. She touched many lives, including mine, wherever she went.

David Hampshire is a Park City Museum researcher.

The post Way We Were: Sharing her Pop with Park City appeared first on Park Record.

Otto Carpenter is best known as one of the founders of Snow Park, the old mom-and-pop ski area at the base of what is now Deer Valley. These days you can find chairlifts there named for him and his partner, Bob Burns.

But Otto’s most enduring legacy may be a modest one-story building off the beaten path at 1361 Woodside Avenue in Park City, as Steve Leatham wrote about in a “Way We Were” article four years ago.

In 1976, looking for a meeting place for Park City’s senior citizens, Otto and Bob Burns approached the Union Pacific Railroad about acquiring a mothballed train depot that had once served the small Wasatch County community of Keetley (later flooded by the Jordanelle Reservoir). They were told, “If you can move it, you can have it.”

Burns and Carpenter then cajoled the Park City Council into giving them a 99-year lease at $1 a year on a valuable piece of city property not far from the base of what was then the Park City Resort.

“We know the ground is worth a lot of money, but we feel our senior citizens are every bit as important as the resort,” Otto told the council in May 1976. “It’s a road you’ll all have to walk someday.”

That October, in a three-truck convoy, the 2,400-square-foot depot mounted on 52 wheels was nudged 15 miles from Keetley onto its new foundation on Woodside Avenue. For the next 14 months, Otto and friends devoted countless hours to converting the old depot into the new Park City Senior Center.

“He [Otto] has worked for over a year, and I don’t think there have been many days that he hasn’t spent time in this building,” Violet Terry, then president of the Park City Senior Citizens, said when the new center was dedicated in January 1978.

Negotiating that lease wasn’t the first time that Otto had challenged City government, and it wouldn’t be the last. He often spoke up for many of Park City’s mining-era survivors who felt victimized by ballooning property taxes, isolated by the exodus of essential services from Main Street and alienated by city officials representing “outside interests” who allowed “skyscrapers” in Old Town but told you what kind of shingles you could put on your roof.

“They’re driving us out is what they’re doing,” Otto fumed at a City Council meeting in September 1982 when a proposed development threatened — in his opinion, at least — to drive up municipal water rates. “We have an interest in this town and we shouldn’t be shoved around all this time. Us old timers have gotten the shaft long enough.”

A witness of the shoestring city budgets of the 1950s, Otto often railed against what he saw as outrageous expenditures by later city officials. “Why did the city manager give the telephone company one hundred thousand dollars to move the lines that had only a short time ago been installed?” he asked in a letter to the editor in October 1981. “What kind of a money tree do we have …?”

In another letter to the editor, Otto tangled with cross-country skier Jim Miller after Miller used his column in the (Park City) Newspaper to grumble about snowmobiles.

“We Utahns like our snowmobiling as well as skiing,” Otto shot back. “If there isn’t room enough for both and these cross-country skiers are afraid of noise, maybe they should go to Colorado or Russia where there isn’t any.”

Otto died in October 1996 at age 92 in the home he built on Norfolk Avenue. He may have mellowed in his final years, but I doubt it.

Meanwhile, there are signs that Park City’s senior citizens have outgrown their beloved gathering place of 46 years. As the Park Record reported last November, representatives of the city’s “silver tsunami” have been working with local government on plans for a larger facility to be built on the same property.

And the century-old Keetley train depot? Well, it may be looking for a new home once again.

The Park City Museum’s next lecture, given by Matt Melville, is on April 17 from 5 to 6 p.m. and covers early prominent Parkite Henry Shields. It will take place at the Museum’s Education and Collections Center at 2079 Sidewinder Drive.

The post Way We Were: Otto Carpenter built more than Snow Park appeared first on Park Record.

On Aug. 10, 1923, this item appeared in The Park Record:

“At the L.D.S hospital, Salt Lake, Thursday, August 2nd, a fine baby girl was born to Mr. and Mrs. J.E. Jenkins. Mother and babe doing nicely — and will be coming home next week.”

At that time J.E. Jenkins was best known in Park City for his wizardry with a pool cue and for his store that advertised radios and “new and slightly used phonographs.” In later years he was better known for his artistry with a camera and for his restaurants that sold homemade ice cream, hamburgers, and “baked goods [that] are the best you will find anywhere.” By then everyone knew him as Pop Jenks.

And his “fine baby girl”? Well, today everyone knows her as Thelma Uriarte. And she is celebrating her 100th birthday.

To people who lived in Park City at least 30 years ago, Thelma needs no introduction. In the 1950s she ran Pop Jenks’ Lunch at the north end of town. In the 1960s she owned a share of the Egyptian Theatre. In the 1970s her husband, Leon Uriarte, served a term as mayor of Park City. In the 1980s she worked as a teller in the local branch of First Security Bank. For many years she was active in local golf and bowling leagues.

I met Thelma in 1986 when I was working for the Park City Museum and heard that she had a large collection of her father’s photographs and negatives. That led to an exhibit of his work at the Kimball Art Center in the fall of 1987 and ultimately to a 2017 biography, “Park City’s Pop,” featuring many of his iconic photographs. In working with Thelma on both of those projects, I came to love her spunk, her candor, and her phenomenal memory.

Some of Thelma’s earliest memories involve life at 430 Main Street, which housed her father’s phonograph store, a photography darkroom, and the family’s living quarters.

In 1932 her father took a series of classic photos of Sheriff Eph Adamson and Patrolman Sam Billings posing on Main Street with Billings’ Harley-Davidson. The crowning touch is a pit bull perched on the seat of the motorcycle. The dog’s name was Dodo and he officially belonged to Thelma.

“There was no dog leash law then,” she told me. “So he was the dog about town, I suppose, but he was sure my buddy. I’d dress him up in doll clothes and put him in a buggy and wheel him around.”

By then Park City, like the rest of the country, was in the throes of the Depression. No one was buying expensive radios and phonographs.

“It got really bad,” Thelma said. “I can remember my mother yelling down the steps to my dad, ‘We get to eat tonight. We just sold something.'”

Ironically, it was the death of his wife’s parents in 1932 that kept them in business. With money from her inheritance, they remodeled the store to sell something everyone needed — food and drink.

“The most up-to-date drink and candy counter and booths is the ‘Sugar Bowl,’ opened by Joe Jenkins,” The Park Record reported. Before long the Sugar Bowl had become Pop Jenks’ Confectionery.

Thelma and her older sister, Laura, helped in the family business. “He was still doing photos then, and I’d work in the darkroom with him,” Thelma said. “I was 9 years old, helping him, when they started the confectionery.” She said her father often used the front windows to display his latest black-and-white photos, some hand-tinted in color by his wife, Marjorie.

In April 1937 Pop bought the Little Chicago lunchroom at the intersection of S.R. 224 and U.S. 40 (now Kearns Boulevard). It became known variously as Lower Pop Jenks, Jenks’ Café, and Pop Jenks’ Lunch. While Marjorie ran the confectionery, Pop ran the lunchroom.

Thelma continued to work in the family businesses after her graduation from high school in 1941 and her marriage to Frank Dorka in December 1942. However, when Frank’s unit in the U.S. Army Reserves was assigned to a base in Arizona, Thelma went with him. They returned after World War II to manage the confectionery, then moved down to the lunchroom. (Frank and Thelma later divorced.)

Among those who worked for Thelma was Mary Lou Wheelwright (now Mary Lou Toly), who went on to start the Red Banjo — now Park City’s oldest restaurant — in 1962. Mary Lou remains one of Thelma’s closest friends.

In 1970 Thelma married Leon Uriarte. They lived in Highland Estates until 1992, when they started to divide their time between homes in Salt Lake City and Mesa, Arizona. Leon died in 2013.

Today Thelma lives year-round in Salt Lake City but is celebrating her birthday at Mary Lou’s Red Banjo in Park City with her son, Frank Dorka, his family, and about 150 of her closest friends.

Happy birthday, Thelma!

The post Way We Were: Happy Birthday, Thelma appeared first on Park Record.

Every July the Oakley Rodeo attracts hundreds of professional contestants and thousands of spectators to a four-day event in Summit County.

Ernie’s Rodeo wasn’t anything like that. It was for amateurs only, held in a makeshift arena near Kimball Junction, usually spur of the moment. Some county folks called it “Park City’s Hippie Rodeo.”

Everyone knew Ernie Scow as the Bread Man. In the early 1960s, he bought the Wonder Bread distributorship for Wasatch and Summit counties and, for the next 35 years, his bread truck was a de facto welcome wagon.

“Kids knew him — they’d hang on the back of his truck and he’d toss them Twinkies or cupcakes,” his friend Lew Sadleir told The Park Record in 2000.

In 1975, Ernie bought a few acres of horse property on the north side of I-80 to give his kids a place to ride. A year later he launched the first of his now-legendary rodeos. He would rustle up some “stock” from a local rancher and go from there.

“Ernie and his crew made it up as they went along. They would be only a few hours away from putting on a rodeo and they wouldn’t have livestock, chutes, or an arena,” Park Record columnist Jay Meehan wrote in 2003. “The arena and chutes that they threw together had the strength-to-weight ratios of a china shop. Animals mixed freely with spectators — who mixed more than freely with each other. It was all part of Ernie’s alchemy. The Bread Man delivered!”

The closest that Ernie’s Rodeos came to respectability occurred in May 1979 when Park City hosted a convention of the American Society of Travel Agents. “The schemers at the Park City Chamber of Commerce and Utah Travel Council (came up) with a unique participatory experience for the visiting delegates,” Meehan wrote in 1990.

The key word here is “participatory.” The visiting “cowfolk” were organized into competing teams and practices were held before the rodeo. Meehan was told the team representing Hawaii showed up for practice in Hawaiian shirts, white pants, and flip-flops.

“Naturally … the Hawaiians emerged victorious,” Meehan wrote. Among those attending the awards ceremony was Utah Gov. Scott Matheson.

By June 1980, Ernie’s Rodeos were being billed as Bar Wars, a contest between teams representing Park City’s various drinking establishments. At that time Bonnie Bedford (now Bonnie Park) worked for the Chamber of Commerce, which also fielded a team.

Bonnie told me she had no plans to compete until another member of the Chamber team got cold feet and, well, you could say she got roped into it. She fortified herself with a shot of Jack Daniel’s, covered her bare legs with scrubs borrowed from local veterinarian Buzz Marden and entered the women’s calf-riding competition.

Unfortunately, the “calves” that were supposed to weigh “only” 500 pounds were more like 800. “They were young bulls,” said Ernie’s wife Joanne, affectionately known as The General. As about 500 people watched from the stands, Bonnie burst out of the chute smiling but ended up biting the dust. Nevertheless, she stayed on long enough to win first prize.

That day volunteer rodeo clown Wayne “Put Put” Putman came perilously close to being punctured by a rampaging bull. Fortunately, the animal’s horn lodged not in Put Put’s ample midriff but in an inner tube he had donned for the occasion. “If he hadn’t had that inner tube around him, he would have been dead,” The General said.

Ernie held his last rodeo in 1984. By 1985 demolition derbies had become the main attraction at Ernie’s. The one common denominator was that people would still party ’til the cows came home. Ernie also used his arena for fundraisers and was a faithful supporter of many local organizations.

In 2000 the Scows sold the property to Mike Cornu, owner of the adjacent Red Barn Nursery. Ernie died in 2003.

“I was always in awe of Ernie’s stamina, love of people and ability to organize a great party,” Kathy Whalen Jones recalled in a letter to the editor. “While most young gals’ prince charming is young, handsome and riding a white horse, mine was a middle-aged squeeze-stealing sweetheart in a rusty bread truck.”

Main Street walking tours and Glenwood Cemeteries led by the Park City Museum begin on June 26 and June 27, respectively. Sign up for the Main Street tours by calling or visiting the Museum’s front desk. Sign up for the Glenwood tours on parkcityhistory.org.

The post Way We Were: Ernie’s spur-of-the-moment rodeos appeared first on Park Record.

On May 26, 1983, 40 years ago this week, The Newspaper, a brash upstart weekly that gave The Park Record a run for its money, published its final edition.

Cheeky, glib, and irreverent, it was famous for its double-entendre headlines, its off-the-wall columns, its “interviews” with dogs and potholes, and its April Fools issues. It was staffed by a group of young newcomers whose common bonds were a love of skiing and a dearth of journalism experience. For the better part of a decade, The Newspaper gave Parkites an alternative view of the universe.

New arrivals, lured to Park City after the opening of Treasure Mountains (now Park City Mountain resort) in 1963, often found they had little in common with the staid old Park Record. (In July 1971, for example, the 91-year-old paper ran a photo of six shaggy-haired residents with this caption: “Believe it or not, only two of these citizens … are girls.”)

In 1973, the new arrivals included Steve Dering, a University of Maryland economics graduate whose eclectic resume included waiting tables and working as a systems analyst for the National Security Agency. Dering heard that a couple of guys were thinking about starting a competing newspaper and went to see the would-be publishers, Don Prescott and Jan Peterson.

“I needed a job,” Dering recalled in a 2005 interview. “I’d been here for two months and I was about out of money. So I told them I was the editor of my high school paper and I wrote sports for my college paper.”

“Was that true?” he was asked.

“No,” he said.

He still got a job as the reporter, answering to editor Kerry Bolton. But it involved more than just researching and writing stories. It included laying out the paper at the printer in Roy (near Ogden), waiting for it to be printed, then driving home with the finished product.

“Then I had to deliver it,” Dering said. “And inevitably it would be noon when I got to The Cozy [Tavern], which was the big miners’ hangout. And you could hear the din of conversation … until I walked in with the newspaper. And [then] you could hear a pin drop. And every time: ‘Goddamn hippie newspaper.'”

That paper was the Park City Coalition. It lasted a little more than a year.

“So then Prescott ran out of money,” Dering said. “I mean, we literally had to go around to the [newspaper] coin boxes and collect the coins to pay the vendors.”

When the Coalition folded, one of those left holding the bag was the printer, J. Howard Stahle. In an attempt to recoup some of his losses, Stahle considered buying the Coalition, but Dering persuaded him to start a new paper instead. It was the summer of 1975.

“I was [to be] the editor and part owner,” Dering said. “I was 25% and Howard was 75%.”

Searching for help with the new publication, Dering approached Greg Schirf, who had hitchhiked from Milwaukee to Park City in the spring of 1974. By 1975 he was building houses for his older brother, contractor Skip Schirf.

Greg remembers that he was on the roof of a new house when Dering drove up and offered him a job as a reporter/photographer. “And I was, like, ‘Yeah!’ And I … took my construction belt off and dropped it right there on the job and climbed down the ladder and said, ‘I’m outta here.'”

“True story,” Dering said.

For the new publication, they chose the most generic name possible, Dering said, “because there were two papers [in town] and if someone said, ‘We’ll go out and get the newspaper [the choice would be simple].’ Anyway, that’s how it became The Newspaper.”

The first issue hit the stands in September 1975.

That November, city voters elected a new mayor and three new members to the City Council. In a four-person race for mayor, the winner was Leon Uriarte with 376 votes. Among the new council members was Steve Dering.

Already on the city council was Jan Wilking, whom Dering had met while covering the city for the Coalition. Wilking, a native of Casper, Wyoming, and a Montana State graduate in architecture, had moved to Park City in 1970.

On March 31, 1976, The Newspaper ran a front-page article revealing that Wilking had plans to build a 17-story shopping/greyhound-racing complex on King Road above Park City’s Old Town.

It wasn’t quite April First, but it was close enough. Interspersed with legitimate news items in that issue were other articles of questionable provenance. One announced that Howard Hughes was staying in town. In another, Schirf interviewed a group of aliens from outer space. In a third, the paper reported that Utah was bracing for an invasion of killer armadillos. Thus began The Newspaper’s annual April Fools tradition.

That summer Dering approached Howard Stahle, the printer, about selling his 75% interest in The Newspaper to Wilking, Schirf, and Hank Louis, a 25-year-old USC graduate who had recently moved to Park City from Costa Rica. Stahle sold his interest for about $15,000. Wilking was to serve as the paper’s business manager and Louis signed up to write a stream-of-consciousness column, “Hankerings.”

“That summer that we took over the paper, we had sold lots of ads [on credit],” Wilking recalled. “And everyone would say, ‘Don’t worry, because in winter we’ll pay you.’ And so people owed us a lot of money.”

“Well, that was the year it didn’t snow until January,” he went on. “No one could pay us.”

What little money they collected went to pay Schirf and the office staff, leaving the other owners to depend on “trade-outs” with their cash-strapped advertisers.

“I didn’t have any money,” Dering said. “I had to eat out every night, because we had a trade-out at all the restaurants. … But we couldn’t trade out for gas and we couldn’t trade out for groceries.”

With snowmaking still in its infancy, skiers were staring at bare ground. Then, on Sunday, Jan. 2, 1977, it finally started to snow. By Jan. 5 enough had fallen for the Park City resort to open some of its upper slopes to skiers. It was, of course, front-page news that week.

The Park Record reported the event in an effusive 540-word article. But The Newspaper told the story in a very different way. That week, other than the masthead, its front page contained only two words. In huge block letters floating in an ocean of white space it said, “GONE SKIING.”

Of course, having Wilking and Dering on the city council worked to The Newspaper’s advantage. Among other stories, it helped them to scoop The Park Record on the plans for a new local ski resort to be known as Deer Valley, Schirf told me.

It was onto this scene that another newcomer, Bettina Moench, stumbled during the summer of 1977. She was working for a landscaping company, laying sod and mowing lawns, when she spotted an ad for a typesetter in The Newspaper classifieds.

At that time, typesetting involved using special equipment to input stories and headlines onto photo-sensitive paper, which then had to be developed. “I thought it was typing, and I could type really well,” she recalled in 2005. She said Wilking gave her the job, handed her a manual for the typesetting machine, told her to practice for awhile, and left town for the weekend.

“Being the dutiful person that I am – that doesn’t want to disappoint – I spent the whole weekend completely screwing up,” she said.

Nevertheless, that job opened a new world for Moench. She started taking journalism classes at the University of Utah and soon began to write her own articles.

By this time, Greg Schirf and Hank Louis were no longer writing for the paper and had sold their shares to Dering and Wilking. (Schirf later started Utah’s first microbrewery, Wasatch Brewery. Louis became a highly respected local architect whose designs include the Wasatch Brew Pub on Main Street.)

Then, on December 13, 1979, The Newspaper announced Dering would be leaving to join Deer Valley as its first marketing director and Moench would become the new editor.

“The change from editor Dering to editor Moench will mean a new look for The Newspaper,” reporter Conrad Elliott wrote. “But considering the history of the weekly and that Moench learned her craft from her predecessor, the paper will undoubtedly retain a portion of Dering’s character for some time to come.”

Elliott was right. There were changes. Gone, for instance, were the interviews with dogs and potholes. But the paper kept many other Dering innovations including the annual April Fools issue.

In July 1980, KPCW exploded onto the scene, turning local newsgathering on its head. The two weekly papers suddenly found themselves scrambling to provide readers with nuanced “second-day” coverage of news stories that KPCW had already broken.

In December 1981 Moench announced that she was stepping down after two years as editor. “I think about The Newspaper as being the singularly most fabulous job I ever had and absolutely the hardest job I’ve ever had,” she said later. Full disclosure: By that time I was a member of the editorial staff and moved into the editor’s chair.

About 16 months later, on a Sunday in the spring of 1983, diligent readers of the Salt Lake Tribune found a small UPI story on page 20A announcing the demise of a Park City institution.

“PARK CITY (UPI) – The Park Record, Utah’s oldest continuously published weekly newspaper, will print its final edition on May 26,” the story began.

No, this wasn’t a rewrite of a Newspaper April Fools joke. But there is a story behind it, of course.

The competing newspapers were facing an economic reality. The one surviving silver mine was on its last legs. Skiing supported the town for maybe six months of the year. Main Street was riddled with empty lots. In the 1980 census, Park City had a population of 2,839. Could the town support both papers?

 “We were making money, but it was extremely difficult and extremely marginal,” Park Record publisher Dick Buys told me in 2005.

The UPI story continued: “The 103-year-old Park Record and The Park City Newspaper have announced plans to merge and will print their first [joint] edition on June 2. The new newspaper will be called The News Record. … Park City Publishing Company, owner of The Park City Newspaper, will be the majority stockholder in the new company.”

Wilking, with input from his staff, initially settled on the name “News Record” to reflect the contribution of each paper. “This is a merger of the Park Record’s history and its relationship with older Park City, and the Park City Newspaper’s orientation to the new members of the community,” he told UPI.

However, Wilking and his staff didn’t anticipate people sounding the The Park Record’s death knell. Ultimately they elected to keep the traditional name, which meant the end of the line for The Newspaper.  But they abandoned The Park Record’s tabloid format in favor of The Newspaper’s larger broadsheet pages. Visually, the new Park Record looked more like the old Newspaper.

If you remember, 1983 was the year of the flooding in downtown Salt Lake City, when sandbags turned State Street sidewalks into the banks of an improvised river. There was also flooding in Park City that year, particularly along Daly Avenue, where Poison Creek jumped its banks, washing into nearby homes. That coincided with the June 2 issue, giving the staff plenty to write about.

Much more water has gone down Poison Creek since then. Two of the members listed in the 1983 “staff box” — Teri Orr and Nan Chalat Noaker — went on to serve terms as editor. A third, Rick Brough, went on to a career at KPCW. In December 1984 the paper’s offices moved from 419 Main Street to Prospector Square. And the paper has gone through several ownership changes in the past 40 years — but that’s another story.

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The simplified version of Recycle Utah is that Scott Becker launched Park City recycling in 1989. But that’s a bit like saying Thomas Edison invented the light bulb on the first try all by himself.

Before Becker there was Marianne Cone. In the fall of 1978, Cone, a graphic artist for The Newspaper (then a Park Record competitor), organized a meeting of local residents to discuss a community-supported recycling program. A year later she convinced the Park City Council to fund a modest wooden building for newspaper and aluminum cans. It opened in an empty lot east of the old Mount Air Market on Iron Horse Drive in May 1980.

Unfortunately, the city’s commitment didn’t include hauling things away. The newspapers soon spilled out and rains turned the overflow into a gummy mess. Residents gradually stopped using the facility. By August 1982 the building had been repurposed as a refreshment stand for a new bicycle motocross track.

“Recycling Center gets recycled,” said The Newspaper headline.

In 1987, the Park City Parks, Recreation and Beautification Board (better known as the Rec. Board) tried again. It installed a newspaper collection bin in the parking lot of the Top Stop gas station /convenience store. It was a modest success.

Sally Elliott, then Rec. Board chairperson, traces the origins of what is now Recycle Utah to a meeting called by Greg Schirf at his Wasatch Brew Pub in 1988. She recalls that other participants included Scott Becker, Tom Clyde, Barbara Sweeney Hughes, Paula McGee, Harry Reed and Jan Wilking.

“Scott Becker [then a Wasatch brewer] provided the passion and most of the hours and expertise,” Elliott says. “Tom Clyde [former city attorney] wrote the legal documents. The rest of us were mostly cheerleaders, and were called in for clean-up duty.”

In the spring of 1989, the newspaper bin was moved to a site behind Hardee’s (now Burger King) and the center also began collecting glass, plastic, and aluminum.

Backing up Becker was the Park City Conservation Association. Among its early board members were McGee, Anne Critchfield, Candy Erickson, Chris Erickson, Chris Larson, Mellie Pullman, Karri Walzer, and Shelley Weiss.

With the encouragement of Teri Orr, then editor of The Park Record, recycling stories popped up everywhere, including in Gary Weiss’s column, “Save the Earth.”

“I know. I know,” Weiss confessed in March 1990. “We’ve done 437,923 articles on recycling, and those in the last six months alone.”

The center moved at least twice before settling into its present location, a city-owned site at 1951 Woodbine Way, in 1996.

Following Becker were four other dynamic executive directors – Shelley Weiss (1990-1993), Mary Morrison (1993-1999), Insa Riepen (1999-2017), and Carolyn Wawra (2017-present) – each of whom expanded the scope of the organization.

The center began accepting hazardous waste and used electronics on designated days. It established the Good Wood Project to recycle used building materials. It started awards programs to recognize participating businesses and educators. It introduced a native-plant sale to encourage xeriscaping. It designed programs to reach students at every grade level in every school in the county. In 2004 it held its first Green Building Seminar to promote sustainable construction products and practices. It published a Green Book to explain local programs to new residents. It started a Green Drinks program to give people a chance to share ideas in an informal setting.

Meanwhile, several private companies began collecting recyclables at homes and businesses. Curbside recycling was eventually extended to all addresses in Park City, the Snyderville Basin, and the Kamas Valley.

Balancing the books has always been a challenge. Wawra says that the sale of recycled materials covers only a small fraction (currently about 10 percent) of the programs’ costs. In today’s market, after hauling costs, she says, the center actually loses money on plastics and glass. Another 20 percent comes from service contracts with Park City and Summit County.

And the final 70 percent? Well, she says that comes from grants, fundraisers, and donations. In other words, from people like you and me.

The Park City Museum is hosting a new traveling exhibition titled “Thrift Style” about efforts to reuse and recycle feed sacks for clothing and quilts during WWII when natural fibers (like cotton) were rationed. The exhibit is open from May 15 through August 16.

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Above Shoe Tree Park, just east of the Poison Creek Trail, an electrical box clings to a solitary pole in the middle of the creek. The box is empty, the meter long since removed, and there are no wires leading from the pole. What you see is the last visible reminder of a little community known as Easy Street.

There used to be a street there, of sorts, and its official name was Pacific Avenue. But no one ever called it that.

During the waning days of mining in Park City, Easy Street was the last refuge of people – often single men – who couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. It was, in the words of the late Park City historian Gary Kimball, “an unmaintained rut of a road that paralleled Poison Creek below Heber Avenue. Many old-timers and winos lived in shacks along the banks of the creek on Easy Street.

“I doubt there was one shack on Easy Street that had a refrigerator. Only a few of them had running water. Electricity usually consisted of a single bulb dangling from the ceiling, and the toilet was often an outhouse built over Poison Creek,” Kimball wrote.

“The area [now] referred to as Easy Street we called Bachelors’ Row, as that is what it was for many years,” Bea Kummer, another local historian, recalled in a 1979 Park Record column. Among the well-known characters who lived on Easy Street were Larry Bye, Santos Giauguitio, Bill Knox, and William Lake. For a brief period in the mid-1950s, the street also provided a home for Maurine Foster’s house of ill repute.

By the 1970s, Easy Street had attracted a new generation of residents looking for cheap housing as Park City turned to skiing. Among the newcomers were Gary Avise, Susan Prigge, Mitch Harrison, and Steve Lloyd.

However, by 1977 developer Edgar Stern had announced plans for a new ski resort in Deer Valley and the Utah Department of Transportation was surveying ground for a new highway to link Deer Valley with lower Park Avenue. Easy Street was in the way.

In the spring of 1979, Lloyd received a notice that his home had been condemned. Hearing this, Harrison went to City Hall to ask what other buildings were on the chopping block. “All of them,” he was told.

Lloyd and Harrison managed to find other places to live. But 70-year-old Bill Knox did not. In a letter to The Park Record in November 1979, Lloyd told readers that Knox had taken his own life.

“What does a 70-year-old person do, especially after living somewhere for a long period of time, when faced with eviction, and has nowhere to go because progress is bearing down on them?” Lloyd asked.

“My friend’s death signals the end of an era,” he wrote, “as with the destruction of Easy Street, the last of old Park [City] fades into the forgotten past.”

For more information on Easy Street and some of its colorful residents, watch for the upcoming publication of “Look Beyond the Sleeping Dogs: Portraits of a Vibrant Community in Park City’s ‘Ghost Town’ Era,” by Gary Kimball. A lifelong local resident, Kimball died in 2018. This book includes a number of previously unpublished stories about the author’s years growing up in Park City.

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In July 1978, less than a year after they opened the Alpine Slide, developers Wally Wright and John Prince approached the city about building another ride under Park City (Mountain) Resort’s Payday chairlift.

Think of it as the Alpine Slide on steroids.

Like the slide, it would use gravity for propulsion. But unlike the slide, the 3,000-foot ride would be mostly enclosed, with a 32-foot loop sending riders upside down where the lift passed under the gondola (since removed). And the individual cars would have no brakes. Prince described it as “a pure thrill ride.”

They called it “Down The Tube”.

Fiberglass engineer Kay Ruggles designed the green tube to be assembled in half-pipe sections. Construction moved quickly. In early August 1978, Alpine Slide manager Pokey Richardson said the new ride could be open by Labor Day.

It wasn’t. The opening was delayed by “design problems” and “insurance obstacles,” reporter Nan Chalat (now Nan Noaker) told Park Record readers in July 1979 in a story titled “Down The Tube Up In The Air.” “The question around town … is, ‘Has Down The Tube, Inc. gone down the tube?'” Chalat wrote.

By then the ride already had been spoofed in the annual April Fools issue of The Newspaper, which later merged with the Park Record. The story told of a honeymooning Michigan couple, Bill and Holly Hox, who had been caught in a rainstorm while hiking at the resort in the summer of 1978. “The couple scurried into a section of the Down The Tube ride then under construction,” the paper reported. “Confined by the storm for several hours … the Hoxes continued their honeymoon in the Tube.”

The following March, the spoof story continued: The first verified Down The Tube baby was born in Kindofazoo, Michigan. A giggling Mrs. Hox supposedly told the paper that, when they were ready to expand the family, they would revisit The Tube. “Asked what precautions she will take once her family has reached sufficient size, Mrs. Hox replied, ‘I guess we’ll have the Tube tied,'” the story read.

Rumors flew around Park City that test riders had emerged from the tube with a variety of mutilations. There was even a story that a test dummy had lost its head. Wally Wright scoffed at those stories. “I think the only one hurt was a guy building it who bumped his head,” he told me in August 1980.

By then two years had passed and the ride still hadn’t carried a paying customer. Wright said they were working on installing braking systems, either on the individual cars or inside the Tube itself. For a story in The Newspaper, I photographed John Lamason testing a bathtub-like wheeled vehicle equipped with makeshift brakes.

After watching him hurtle through a section of the Tube, I asked him how it was. “Pretty scary,” he replied.

For a few more ski seasons, the unfinished Tube lurked under the snow beneath the Payday chairlift, an occasional green hump poking up through the powder, Park City’s own snowy Loch Ness Monster.

Ultimately, the ride turned out to be true to its name. In an interview with the Deseret News in the fall of 1983, John Prince confirmed what Parkites already knew: The project had been just a pipe dream.

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Forty years ago this week, on a Sunday afternoon, July 19, 1981, the Beach Boys were playing an outdoor concert at Park West, now The Canyons. After the concert, some in the crowd drifted into Park City. Among them were three men in their 20s and early 30s. They were not dressed for the cool evening temperatures.

Early the following morning the three men, looking for a place to crash, spotted the 85-foot-tall Silver King Coalition Building on Park Avenue. They climbed the chain-link fence and went inside. To stay warm, they built a fire on the building’s wooden floor.

At that time, the Coalition Building was the symbol of Park City. It was built in 1901 as the lower terminal of an aerial tramway to bring ore down from the Silver King Mine. The tram served faithfully until the mine closed in 1952. The building continued to tower over Park Avenue, then the main route into town, until now.

About 3 a.m. on July 20, the three men thought they heard someone coming and slipped out of the building. They took refuge in a nearby railroad car and went to sleep. They later testified that they believed their fire was out.

It wasn’t. About 4:30 a.m., nearby resident Mary Eley smelled smoke and spotted a cloud hanging in the air south of the Coalition Building. She alerted the dispatch office in Coalville. A few minutes later, the inside of the Eley home was illuminated as the flames burst through the Coalition Building’s roof.

Among the first on the scene was volunteer firefighter Jim White. “When I arrived at the fire, the building was completely engulfed in flames and the heat was incredible,” White said. “The roofs of seven or eight nearby houses were smoking and so were several cars parked along Park Avenue across from the building.”

Park City firefighters immediately alerted the nearby residents and trained their hoses on the homes. The intense heat melted the plastic bubble on one of the fire trucks and the windows in a nearby railroad car. A small car parked outside the chain-link fence was incinerated. One witness said the flames shot 200 feet into the air.

Clusters of stunned Parkites watched the pyre from a safe distance. Many were in tears.

Burnis Watts, whose Park Avenue home is now part of High West Distillery, grabbed his camera and took a series of spectacular photos. Mel Fletcher, a volunteer firefighter who lived across the street from Watts, trained a garden hose on the side of his house facing the flames.

Fletcher said he was surprised how quickly the flames spread. “If there had been a wind, the whole town would have been engulfed, there’s no doubt,” he said.

Fire crews from Heber, Kamas and Coalville also responded. By one count there were 10 pieces of equipment and about 50 firefighters. About 5:30 a.m. they directed their hoses on the burning building itself. By about 6 a.m. all that remained was a smoking skeleton of massive timbers that had supported the lower two floors of the building.

During the fire, security guard Dan Clark spotted the three men in the railroad car and alerted police. In a trial that November, the three men were convicted of reckless burning, a Class A misdemeanor.

In testimony at the trial, Park City detective Lloyd Evans revealed that one of the men had been wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the image of – you guessed it – the Coalition Building.

There was talk about building a replica of the building. It was just talk. However, four years later, another terminal went up on the site – the lower terminal of the Town Lift.

Relive the Coalition Fire with David, in his lecture on the subject, by visiting the Park City Museum YouTube Channel at tinyurl.com/PCMuseum.

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