In the 400 block of Main Street in Park City there is a modest pocket park where the Oak Saloon once stood. In a corner of the park you’ll find the bronze statue of a miner, lamp in his right hand, examining what appears to be a section of drill core.

The statue is a tribute to all those who worked — and sometimes gave their lives — underground for more than a century, prying silver, lead and zinc from veins in the rock; veins that supplied the lifeblood of Park City.

The man who agreed, reluctantly, to model for sculptor Peter Fillerup in the summer of 1999 was not your typical Park City miner. James Ivers III, known as Jim, spent most of his career working above ground. But you would have been hard-pressed to find anyone who better represented the city’s mining heritage. You could say it was in his blood.

To understand Jim, you have to go back two generations to the early 1880s, when his grandfather, the first James Ivers, went to work as a blacksmith for the old Daly Mine. James Ivers I later opened a stable on Main Street (where the Egyptian Theatre now stands) and won the contract to haul ore via horse and wagon straight down Woodside Gulch from the new Silver King Mine. It was a harrowing way to make a living.

“My dad tells me that he [James Ivers I] would lose about a team [of horses] a week coming down that steep grade,” Jim once told me.

James Ivers I saved enough money — with the help of his wife, Bridget — to buy a substantial interest in the Silver King. He went on to serve on the mine’s board of directors, on the Park City Council, and in the Utah Legislature.

His son, James Ivers II, learned mining from the underground up, mucking and drilling in a couple of small mines in Idaho and Nevada. He succeeded his father on the board of directors of the Silver King and went on to serve as the mine’s president and general manager. He and his wife Grace had nine children, including Jim.

At age 14, Jim delivered food and supplies by horse and wagon to men staking mine claims in the mountains above Park City. By age 16, he was working in the Silver King Mine’s company store on Main Street. At age 18, he was helping to set timbers in the mine. When he was 31, he was the Silver King’s chief engineer. And by age 50, he was president of United Park City Mines (UPCM), guiding the fortunes of Park City’s major mines and UPCM’s new Treasure Mountains (now Park City Mountain) resort.

Jim was an altruistic, modest, soft-spoken man with an astounding knowledge of the Silver King, and mining in general. I first learned to appreciate him in the spring of 1987, when he gave me a tour of the Silver King Mine’s boardinghouse (now the Mid-Mountain Lodge) — which was threatened with demolition — showing me where he had worked as the mine’s chief engineer 40 years earlier. Later that year the building was moved up the mountain to a spot near the Pioneer chairlift, where it remains today as a rest stop for skiers.

I later learned that his passion for mining had also taken him other places: to graduate school at Columbia University; to the M.A. Hanna Company in Michigan’s iron-ore district; and to Washington, D.C., where he served as a mining consultant to the Department of the Interior during the Eisenhower administration.

I also learned, though not from Jim, that during World War II he had used his engineering background as an officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps, supervising the reconstruction of damaged Spitfire fighter planes in Great Britain, Africa and Europe. His many decorations included the Legion of Merit.

In his later years, after stepping down from United Park City Mines in 1969, Jim returned to his career as a mining consultant. But every summer you would find him — if you could find him — in the wilds of central Idaho, pursuing what his family called his “personal holy grail” at the Lost Packer Mine, a small family-owned gold-and-copper mine in the Challis National Forest.  

I asked his son, James Ivers IV, if the mine was a labor of love.

“A labor of optimism,” he replied.

“In the more than 30 years he spent chasing this dream, he imparted his wisdom, his love of tradition, boundless generosity, and a true passion for the endeavor to countless people who either worked or visited the remote mountain property,” his family wrote in his obituary in May 2000.

Among the beneficiaries of Jim’s boundless generosity were several generations of parishioners at Park City’s Saint Mary of the Assumption Catholic Church. Look for that story in next week’s Way We Were installment.

David Hampshire is a Park City Museum researcher.

The post Way We Were: He stands for generations of miners appeared first on Park Record.

In the early days, author Raye Ringholz once wrote, the Snyderville Basin was so beautiful that they called it a park.

“Unharnessed trout creeks gushed from snowpack down to a glossy meadow alive with kingfishers, prairie falcons, grouse, and sandhill cranes nesting among the willows and native grasses,” Ringolz waxed poetic in a 1995 article for Park City Lodestar magazine.

When pioneer explorer Parley P. Pratt ventured into the basin in the summer of 1848, he described it as “a beautiful meadow or park … comprising some three or four thousand acres of excellent land, clothed with grass and interspersed with wild flax and strawberry vines.”

But Pratt had an agenda. “Altogether it was the most desirable and convenient place for stock farms I ever saw,” he continued, “plentiful in grass, watered as Eden and sufficiently timbered to supply hundreds of families.”

And the families came.

“The forests shrank,” Ringholz wrote, “the bottomlands became grainfields and pastures for cattle, and a wood-and-brick town filled the mouth of the canyon.” The settlers built fences, roads and railroad tracks, drained wetlands, and turned pristine creeks into irrigation ditches.

About a century later, in 1957, Salt Lake City businessman Leland S. Swaner bought 990 acres of bottomlands and adjacent hillsides around Kimball Junction and named it the Spring Creek Black Angus Ranch. A few years later the construction of Interstate 80 slashed through his property.

In 1978, with the local population booming, Swaner applied for a zone change to build a subdivision, Spring Creek, on a portion of his remaining land north of I-80.

“What we generally have in mind doing is developing the land we can’t ranch,” he told The Park Record. Other developments sprang up around the basin.

“Houses and condominiums intruded on the hilltops, clung to the mountainsides, clustered in the ravines and crept, subdivision by subdivision, into the valley meadows, threatening the last vestiges of a park,” Ringholz wrote.

By 1989, local residents were becoming alarmed. Led by Myles Rademan, Park City’s public affairs director, they met in living rooms around the city and surrounding neighborhoods. They shared one concern: the need to preserve open space.

“We all realized it’s going to disappear very fast here,” Park Meadows resident Chuck Klingenstein told Ringholz.

In 1990, Klingenstein and others banded together to form the Summit Land Trust Association, which later became the Utah Open Lands Conservation Association, with Wendy Fisher as its executive director. The group started working on conservation projects as far away as southern Utah. Then came the chance to focus its energy on an important project closer to home.

When Spring Creek developer Leland Swaner died in September 1992 after a remarkable career as a businessman and public servant, his wife, Paula, started looking for ways to honor him.

“Mom wanted to do something in his memory — a preservation of some kind,” her son, landscape architect Sumner Swaner, said in 1993.

Sumner, who had worked as a ranch hand on the property as a teenager, suggested they consider conserving a 190-acre portion of the Black Angus Ranch near Kimball Junction where his father had once envisioned building about 300 homes.

“Leland had always been a determined property-rights advocate and … had questioned the practicality of donating land for conservation easements,” Ringholz wrote. “Sumner was convinced otherwise.”

By this time Summit County was requiring developers to set aside a percentage of their projects as open space. Typically, this meant creating a landscaped common area inside each development. But Sumner proposed that the Swaner family band together with other Snyderville-area developers and Utah Open Lands to create several hundred acres of common area, protected by conservation easements, adjoining their properties.

But this wouldn’t be your garden-variety park. Sumner envisioned restoring the land as much as possible to its natural state, much of it wetlands in the years before Parley P. Pratt spread the gospel to legions of newcomers.

“The environmental design background of Sumner Swaner … was crucial to seeing the wetland values as a whole instead of parts of individual properties,” Wendy Fisher of Utah Open Lands wrote in a 1996 guest editorial in The Park Record. “Additionally, in memory of her late husband, Paula Swaner recognized the value of donating her property within the basin, foregoing tremendous development potential.”

It was an ambitious plan. Sumner Swaner and Wendy Fisher still had to win the trust of surrounding property owners, Summit County politicians, federal agencies and the general public.

Look for the rest of the story in next Wednesday’s Park Record.

There are still a few tickets for the Glenwood Cemetery Tribute Event scheduled for Saturday in the afternoon time slot! For an afternoon ticket, go here. If you have any questions, contact Diane Knispel at education@parkcityhistory.org or 435-574-9554. 

David Hampshire is a Park City Museum researcher.

The post Way We Were: An oasis among the developments appeared first on Park Record.

In 2019, former Park Record Editor Teri Orr wrote a column reminiscing about her arrival in Park City, two children in tow, 40 years earlier.

“We moved to town in March [1979] and on the Park City Golf Course that very first weekend was a snow-sculpture contest with the most incredible vignettes — made in one day and completely out of nothing but snow,” Teri wrote. “There were Viking ships and fairy tale scenes and dragons and sea-creatures and gingerbread-looking houses and charging wild horses in a pack and a giant rabbit with a giant carrot. The contest, I learned, had been going on for a few years. … My kids — who were understandably sad at leaving behind … their school and friends — were suddenly smitten by the coolest place we had moved to.”

They had stumbled into what was then one of Park City’s most popular rites of spring.

The first mention of a snow-sculpture contest in the pages of The Park Record appeared in December 1966 when the Park City Chamber of Commerce announced plans for a three-day winter carnival to be called, you can’t make this up: Snow-a-go-go.

The chamber’s ambitious agenda also called for about 15 other activities, including a skijoring exhibition, a garter-making contest, and even a stretch-pants competition. By 1971, the sculpture contest had become an annual event.

Held in late February or early March, when winter’s accumulated snow had started to soften, the event soon exploded in popularity. In 1980 it attracted 120 entries and an estimated 10,000 spectators who wandered the golf course watching sculptors create magical figures using piles of the white stuff and their fertile imaginations.

Entries were judged on creativity, difficulty, originality and quality. A little whimsy didn’t hurt. In 1976 Bill Allen won first prize for a bar scene showing a man with a voluptuous woman perched on each knee while a forlorn male companion looked on, alone. A sculpture in 1981 showed a haggard man dragging a sled loaded with several grinning canines. In 1982 a man in a rowboat delivering an enormous light bulb to a lighthouse won second prize. Another entry that year paid tribute to the iconic Silver King Coalition Building that had burned the previous July.

Comic-strip favorite Garfield the Cat made more than one appearance over the years.

The contest was open to individuals and groups. For some Utah families, entering the contest became an annual affair. Most contestants came from out of town. However, Park City artist John Helton’s bison sculpture was a popular favorite in 1989.

The contest would begin about 8:30 a.m. and end about 3 p.m. Sculptors used implements typically found in garden sheds and kitchen cabinets. Coca-Cola, the lead sponsor, provided the prize money.

So what happened to the snow-sculpture contest?

Snow conditions could be an issue, forcing cancellation of the event three times — in 1986, 1988 and 1995. And even on the best of days the sculptures were ephemeral, soon dripping and drooping in the rays of the afternoon sun.

By the mid-1990s, the number of entries had dwindled to as few as 16. Over the years the contest moved from the golf course to the high school baseball field and finally to City Park. Coverage in The Park Record retreated to the back pages. The last contest was held in 1998.

In a nostalgic editorial in January 2009, Park Record Editor Nan Noaker recalled the “good old days” when the town would look for almost any excuse to throw a party.

“After the [Olympic] Games, though, it seems that Parkites were too busy trying to keep up with their newfound popularity, especially during the hectic ski season, to let their hair down. Winter carnivals, snow-sculpture contests, and other lighthearted events fell by the wayside,” Nan wrote.

“In the meantime, while Park City may have seemed like a vacation paradise to visitors, locals for the most part kept their shoulders to the grindstone, like a hostess too busy to enjoy her own party.”

Then Park City Museum is hosting a lecture titled “The Oregon Trail,” given by Dorian DeMaio on Wednesday, March 12, from 5-6 p.m. at their Education and Collections Center located at 2079 Sidewinder Drive.

David Hampshire is a Park City Museum researcher.

The post Way We Were: Snow sculpture as performance art appeared first on Park Record.

The words were not his. But it was his responsibility, for about half a century, to make sure they appeared in print exactly the way they were written.

With just an eighth-grade education, he mastered the Linotype, an ingenious conglomeration of chains and pulleys, turning typed or handwritten articles into columns of “body copy” for The Park Record.

Wilfred “Lynx” Langford was just 15 when Editor/Publisher Sam Raddon put him on the payroll in August 1917. The oldest of seven children, Lynx had dropped out of school to help support the family after his father’s lungs were attacked by silicosis.

“I started in there sweeping floors, running errands, things like that,” Lynx told me in a 1985 interview. “They used to call you the printer’s devil.”

His salary? “Three dollars a week,” he said and laughed. “And it was no five-day week. You went to work Monday morning and quit Saturday night.”

Lynx was a quick study. By the early 1920s he had mastered the 90 keys on the Linotype keyboard, assuming arguably the most difficult job in the newspaper’s back shop.

If the Linotype operator was on his game, his work went unrecognized. But a careless blunder could draw Sam Raddon’s fury. There was the time in July 1933 when the paper described a promising vein of ore in the Mayflower Mine as “20 to 25 feet wide.” It wasn’t true.

“This should have read TWO TO TWO AND A HALF FEET WIDE!” Raddon howled the following week. “This mistake … had the effect of The Record falsely trying to boost a local mining property — something it always studiously tries to avoid.”                

In spite of the demands of the job, Lynx found time for play. He was a regular in the softball leagues, hiked the mountains, and skied using a unique form of uphill transportation adopted decades later by the Skier Subway.

In winter, Lynx and friends would grab their wooden skis and head up Empire Canyon to the mouth of the Judge Mine tunnel.

“On Sundays they would have a man train [instead of an ore train] go in with repairmen,” he said. He and his friends would catch a ride 6,600 feet into the mountain.

“Then they would hoist us up the Daly-Judge shaft,” surfacing near the upper end of Deer Valley’s present Empire Express chairlift. “We’d have lunch there, then ski down through the mountains to Park City.”

In September 1926, Lynx married Madeline Cunningham. They celebrated the arrival of a baby boy at the Miners Hospital the following June. A daughter followed in 1930 and a second son in 1934.

In January 1948, Sam Raddon, The Park Record editor and publisher for almost 64 years, died at age 89. His son LaPage “Lee” Raddon assumed the reins of the paper.

However, just eight years later, in January 1956, LaPage died of a heart attack at age 54, leaving the paper in the hands of his widow, Maie Raddon, Lynx, and one other employee.

“Joe Street and I ran the paper from the time Lee died until April [1956], when Mrs. Raddon decided to sell it,” Lynx said. “We didn’t have any experience outside of mechanical work. But people used to write stuff down or telephone it in.”

The new owners of The Park Record were Louise and H.C. “Mac” McConaughy, who already produced two other area weekly papers out of a print shop in Morgan.

“They come up one Sunday with a big truck to move the Linotype out to Morgan,” Lynx said.

“[Mac] McConaughy was short of help, so he said, ‘You want a job?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’ So I went to Morgan Monday morning with the same old Linotype and I worked in Morgan for [another] 20 years.” Lynx moved his family to Morgan, but kept his Park City house, which still stands today at 602 Park Ave.

In Morgan, Lynx was the McConaughys’ strongest link with Park City. “I could … listen for hours [to] the stories he tells of his still much-loved hometown [of] Park City,” Louise McConaughy wrote in 1966.

In March 1967 Lynx’s duties changed when the McConaughys bought a rudimentary computerized system to set columns of type for their newspapers. The Linotype was relegated to specialty print jobs.   

Then, in September 1976, the McConaughys, struggling financially, sold their three newspapers to Richard and Susan Buys, the owners of the Wasatch Wave, and production was moved to Heber City. The old Linotype was scrapped and Lynx was out of a job for the first time since 1917. He lived another year in Morgan, then moved to Salt Lake City, where he died in 1988.

A lot of water has gone down Poison Creek since 1976, and the Park Record has changed hands several times. But Lynx’s 59 years of service to the paper remains second only to the legendary Sam Raddon.

David Hampshire is a Park City Museum researcher.

The post Way We Were: Lynx Langford, a typesetting maestro appeared first on Park Record.

In the summer of 2015, my two brothers and I made a pilgrimage to the tiny town of Saguache, Colorado.

The object of our obsession? The town’s weekly paper, The Saguache Crescent, was said to be the last newspaper in the United States to use a Linotype machine to set columns of body copy for every issue.

Until the mid-1880s, every newspaper in the country composed lines of type the old-fashioned way, one l-e-t-t-e-r at a time. Then, after years of trial and error, Ottmar Mergenthaler, a German immigrant clockmaker, revolutionized the industry with an ingenious machine. In the hands of a skilled operator, it could set type as fast as four or five people working by hand.

In the first half of the 20^th century, the sound of that machine — the Mergenthaler Linotype — was the heartbeat of almost every newspaper backshop in the United States. Large daily papers had banks of them, whirring and clanking as they spat out slugs of lead type.

However, by the mid-1960s, the advent of computerized typesetting had begun to make Linotypes obsolete. Mergenthaler produced its last machine in 1971.

Dean Coombs, the owner/publisher/editor/typesetter/printer/mechanic of The Saguache Crescent, graciously dropped everything to give us a tour of his shop, demonstrating his 1920s-era Linotype and an antique sheet-fed flatbed press that he still used to print the paper. It was a magical morning.

At the time of this writing, Coombs is still at the keyboard, still prodding his century-old Linotype into action with the help of parts salvaged from a backup machine.

Basically, a Linotype works like this: A metal magazine at the top of the machine holds about 1,500 brass molds known as matrices. Hollowed out in each matrix is a letter of the alphabet (in a range of styles and sizes).

When the Linotype operator hits a key, the machine chooses the corresponding matrix from the magazine and carries it down an inclined belt to an assembler. When a complete line of type (including blanks for spaces between the words) has been assembled in that way, it moves to a frame where molten lead is injected into the matrices.

Each cooled lead slug then joins other slugs in a receiving galley to form a column of type, while the matrices are returned to their designated places in the magazine.

Sound complicated? It is. A Linotype keyboard has 90 keys. Each machine has thousands of moving parts, stands about 6 feet tall and weighs as much as a car.

By the early 1900s even small-town weeklies were investing in Linotype machines. Park Record Editor and Publisher Sam Raddon took the plunge in 1909, buying a Linotype Junior model.

It was not a success. Within a month Junior had suffered the first of a series of breakdowns, forcing the paper to return to setting type by hand. Replacement parts had to be ordered by telegram from San Francisco. FedEx or Amazon delivery was not an option.

“From the day of its installation … it was a source of worry, trouble and expense. It caused more cuss words and sleepless nights than is possible to remember,” Raddon ranted six years later. “This abortion of a typesetting machine at last … was reduced to junk and relegated to the trash pile.”

Nevertheless, Raddon didn’t give up on the technology. By January 1914 he had replaced Junior with the Standard Model K Linotype and was soon singing its praises.

“From then on our type-setting troubles vanished as if by magic,” he wrote in 1915. “For a solid year the machine has been in operation, without the semblance of trouble of any character.”

The Model K apparently served The Park Record well until September 1926, when Raddon announced that he was upgrading to the Linotype No. 14.

“This new machine is a thing of beauty to look at,” he gushed, “and simply wonderful in its operation.” As it turned out, No. 14 would remain in the newspaper’s repertoire for half a century.

Of course, every Linotype was only as good as its operator, as Raddon learned in September 1912, when regular operator Joe Shanley left town.

“If The Record is not up to its usual standard this week, blame not the management nor the mechanical department of the paper, but concentrate your wrath on incompetent and irresponsible linotype operators,” Raddon growled the following May.

Fortunately, Shanley returned a few weeks later and Raddon covered his bases by sending his son LaPage to Linotype school. Then, in the early 1920s, Wilfred “Lynx” Langford began his 55-year rule on the Park Record Linotype. Next week’s “Way We Were” will be devoted to Lynx and his mastery over the machine.

Tickets are still available for our annual Glenwood Cemetery Tribute event (this Saturday), so be sure to contact Diane Knispel at 435-574-9554 to reserve your spot now.

David Hampshire is a Park City Museum researcher.

The post Way We Were: The Park Record’s magical typesetting machine appeared first on Park Record.

It wasn’t a tourist magnet like, say, the Alamo (now the No Name Saloon). Most visitors walked right past its understated entrance. Yet for a few years in the last century, the Down Under was the local gathering place for Parkites of all persuasions.

The Down Under “was like everybody’s living room. It was where all the locals went,” former bartender Karen Arenskov recalled in a 1990 interview with The Park Record. “It was great for somebody new coming to town because you met everybody there.”

When she started bartending, it didn’t matter that she didn’t know the ingredients for every drink because the regulars would tell her.

In 1976, Lloyd Stevens and Richard Ringwood, owners of the Claimjumper (formerly the New Park) Hotel, turned the basement space into a private club, allowing them to serve liquor by the drink to club “members.” (Forgive me for skipping over Utah’s weird liquor laws here. That’s a whole other story.) The new club, which had the same food menu as the upstairs restaurant, would be called “Down Under the Claimjumper.”

“A surprising number of people are finding the food so superb that the establishment has developed a large group of regulars in no time at all,” The Park Record reported in March 1976.

It had indeed. Before long the Down Under — as it came to be known — could have rivaled the fictional “Cheers” bar for its devoted cast of characters.

It has been more than 40 years since Karen Arenskov mixed a drink at the Down Under. Her last name is now Warren, and she went on to a career in the computer industry. But she still thinks of those years as the best time of her life.

So does fellow bartender Debbie Hansen, who credits her Down Under experience with launching a 50-year career in the food-service business, managing restaurants in Park City and Reno, Nevada.

“It was much better than, like, a ‘Cheers’ bar, because we were just all family,” Debbie recalled during a recent Zoom conversation with me and Karen. “It wasn’t even work.”

The two old friends were known then as the Kamikaze Queens, a nickname that Karen traces to the preferred drink of the members of the Park City and ParkWest Ski Patrols.

“They were crazy guys, just crazy,” she said. “They would have gone to all the other bars first, but they’d end up at the [Claim]Jumper at, like, midnight. And then they … would order 40 kamikazes at last call. … A lot of people ordered two drinks at last call to have so they could sit there. But there’d be, like, five or six of them and they’d order 40!”

On top of that, she said, they would also order kamikazes for the bartenders. “So I think that’s where [the nickname] started.” (She said those were the days before drinking on the job was forbidden.)

Not only can Karen and Debbie recite the names of the regulars from those years, they can also tell you what they drank. Richard Scott? Scotch and soda. David Fleisher? Vodka soda. Jerry Hanley? Scotch and water. Ernie “The Bread Man” Scow? Budweiser.

 “At 4 o’clock we would open the bar and we would see our regular guests come in,” Debbie said. “And by the time they got to the bar, we’d have their drinks sitting at the bar. We never had to ask anybody what they were drinking.”

If a visitor stumbled in wearing a tie, he only did it once. “One of the girls would just go up and go, ‘Hi,’ and snip the bottom of the tie off,” Karen said. “We had ties [hanging] down from all the Christmas lights” (which stayed up year-round).

Debbie said there was enough business to keep three bartenders busy until last call, and then some. “Even though we had our posted closing time, we never really closed,” she laughed.

“It was the knock-three-times [code] on the door after we threw everybody out,” Karen explained. “If you knew the right knock, we’d let you back in.”

Debbie and Karen would tell the guests, “Your secret’s safe with us.” But let’s just say there are things they are willing to divulge. Look for more in next week’s Way We Were.

David Hampshire is a Park City Museum researcher.

The post Way We Were: The locals’ spot appeared first on Park Record.

In 1946, Otto Carpenter and Bob Burns opened Snow Park, Park City’s first alpine ski area.

In 1963, when Treasure Mountains (now Park City Mountain) burst onto the scene, Carpenter embraced the competition.

“It’s going to help the skiing industry for all of us,” he told The Park Record that year.

So in the fall of 1985, when I questioned Otto Carpenter about the impending opening of the new Town Lift a few blocks from his home, I expected his eyes to light up.

My mistake.

“To me it’s the biggest goof that Park City ever pulled off,” he growled. “What good is it going to do? Where’s the parking going to be? It’s the most unintelligent thing I’ve ever seen. And it’s not going to help Main Street.”

Otto Carpenter was never shy about expressing his opinions.

Born in Kamas, Utah, in 1904, Otto moved to Park City in the early 1930s, hoping to earn enough money to pay his way through college. As it turned out, his higher education came in the shafts and tunnels of the local mines.

“I never got a college degree, and as far as I know I never missed anything,” he told me.

In 1935, during a visit to Salt Lake City, Otto met young LaRue Hunter. They married in 1940.

“I told my wife, ‘I’m not going to move you into one of those old [miners’] shacks. I’m going to build you a house.'”

It was a gallant gesture. But he didn’t get much encouragement from the local bank manager.

“He said, ‘I don’t recommend you build a home in Park City because it’s never going to amount to anything,'” Otto recalled.

He went ahead anyway. He managed to buy a piece of property on Norfolk Avenue, once occupied by the Lincoln School, and designed a five-room frame home. In the spring of 1941, according to The Park Record, he applied for the “first permit for building a new home [in Park City] in some time.”

For the wood, he and his brother-in-law went into the mountains to cut down their own trees. A local sawmill turned the logs into finished lumber. Then Otto built the house, demonstrating that the family name was more than just a label.

Otto loved the outdoors. He was an avid hunter and fisherman, but his true passion was skiing. He was one of the first ski jumpers at Ecker Hill in what is now Pinebrook.

Chances are you’ve already heard the story of Snow Park: how Otto and his good friend Bob Burns built a mom-and-pop ski area on the lower slopes of what is now Deer Valley, starting with an old bull wheel scrounged from the mines.

“We built the lift towers from the timber that was on the hill,” he said. “We built the wheels for the cables to run over.” The power for one of the lifts came from an old Ford Model A engine.

The base lodge was a crude lunchroom heated with a wood stove. But LaRue’s cooking drew rave reviews.

“[The] Carpenter food counter serves what may be the largest, most succulent two-bit hamburger in the West,” a New York Times reporter once drooled. Otto and LaRue’s six children were among a generation of local kids who learned to ski at Snow Park.

“Otto was a friend to several young kids,” said renowned sculptor Ed Fraughton, who worked at Snow Park while growing up in Park City. “I almost felt like part of his family.”

Otto insisted that the opening of Treasure Mountains “didn’t hurt me at all.” However, he was forced to close Snow Park in 1969, he said, after United Park City Mines, the owner of the underlying land, refused to renew his lease.

But Otto didn’t just ride off into the sunset. Far from it. Look for the rest of this Otto biography next week.

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.

David Hampshire is a Park City Museum researcher.

The post Way We Were: The man behind Snow Park appeared first on Park Record.

The Park Record

The Park Record ran the story without a headline on Oct. 17, 1963. It was buried on the third page.

"Treasure Mountains recreation center at Park City, Utah’s new year-round resort, will open its first facilities in December," the story began, "and no one could be happier about this news than the President of the United States."

A photograph with the story showed President John F. Kennedy and Utah Sen. Frank E. Moss studying what appears to be an artist’s rendition of the base area of Park City’s new tourist attraction. The photo may have been taken during a visit that Kennedy made to Salt Lake City the previous month.

"The President expressed satisfaction that it was a $1,232,000 loan from the Area Redevelopment Administration, a Kennedy administration program, that helped financially to launch the new Park City resort development," the story continued.

According to The Park Record, the project’s developer, United Park City Mines, was confident that the new resort would be "comparable in appeal" to Sun Valley and Aspen.

On Dec. 21, 1963, Treasure Mountains – now Park City Mountain Resort – welcomed its first customers. But the man whose program had provided the seed money for the new resort wasn’t alive to celebrate it. He had been assassinated less than a month before the grand opening.

The story of Kennedy’s role in the creation of the resort – which included a White House luncheon for Jack Gallivan of the Salt Lake Tribune, H.C. McConaughy of The Park Record and other Utah newspaper publishers – is now a celebrated part of the history of Park City’s renaissance. But Kennedy’s campaign for the White House wasn’t universally viewed as good for the mining town’s struggling economy, which was still heavily dependent on the production of lead, zinc and silver.

"Senator Bennett Says Kennedy Policies Could End Utah Mining," a Park Record headline shouted days before the November 1960 General Election. The Park Record, whose publisher was an unabashed supporter of Richard Nixon, faithfully reported a speech by Utah Sen. Wallace Bennett at the Memorial Building (now the home of Park City Live) in which he accused Kennedy of consistently opposing depletion tax deductions for mining.

Domestic production of lead and zinc had been in trouble since the late 1940s, when prices started to drop on national markets. In the first nine months of 1949, Park City mines laid off 875 workers. Many would never collect local paychecks again.

In March 1954, the Summit County Commission wrote an open letter to Utah’s congressional delegation that painted a grim picture of life in the old mining camp. Enrollment in the public schools had dropped from 1,052 to 449 in the previous 12 years, the letter said. More than 200 properties had been sold to the county for back taxes in 1953 alone. The commissioners blamed an influx of foreign metals and asked for a revamping of the tariff structure to protect domestic industries "rather than to enrich foreign producers."

In Washington, it was a familiar refrain. Every president from Harry Truman to Lyndon Johnson was asked to shore up the domestic lead-zinc industry, either by imposing tariffs on imports, supporting domestic production, or both. But nothing they did could satisfy their critics or turn the industry around.

In December 1962, S.K. Droubay, vice president and general manager of United Park City Mines (UPCM), lamenting the Kennedy administration’s lack of support for domestic lead-zinc mines, announced the company was planning to lay off another 100 workers the following January. "This is the last of an operating crew that once numbered 2,000," he told the assistant secretary of the Interior at a meeting in Denver.

But by then Droubay and other mining company officials were looking at other ways to pump money into their ailing underground operations. The new bonanza, they had decided, was recreation. They envisioned a four-season resort with facilities for skiing, horseback riding and golf. To finance the new resort, they applied for a low-interest loan from the federal Area Redevelopment Administration (ARA), which had been created by Congress and signed into law by Kennedy on May 1, 1961, as a way to bolster the economies of depressed areas.

The underlying rationale for the ARA was to help distressed communities make the transition from one economic state to another. The ARA identified development areas by looking at local income and unemployment statistics, along with other characteristics.

In the fall of 1961, the Utah Department of Employment Security recommended that Summit County be formally designated a redevelopment area, citing county jobless rates as high as 13.6 percent in the previous four years. In January 1962, The Park Record was notified that the ARA had added Summit County to its list of eligible areas.

Summit County organized a development committee with Droubay as its chairman. The Park City Land and Recreation Development Co., formed by UPCM and several partners, asked the ARA for a 25-year low-interest loan.

In the summer of 1962, while the ARA application languished in Washington, Jack Gallivan of the Salt Lake Tribune got a lunch invitation from the White House. Gallivan was asked to assemble a team of Utah newspapermen to meet with Kennedy in Washington. Among those chosen for the team was McConaughy of The Park Record, then president of the Utah State Press Association.

"Saturday morning I got the wire," McConaughy wrote in a tongue-in-cheek column, The Ant’s Eye View, on Aug. 9, 1962. "JFK needs my help. He must exchange views with me on various problems. He wants me to be his guest Friday noon at the White House for luncheon. So I’m going."

In that column, McConaughy also revealed that he had promised his wife he’d steal a gold demitasse spoon from the White House.

Photos of the Aug. 10 luncheon show McConaughy sitting at Kennedy’s right. Gallivan is facing the president from the other side of the table.

"When the meal was over, the president said, ‘What can I do for you?’" Gallivan told interviewer Larry Warren years later. "I was spokesman for the group, and I said, ‘Well, we have an application in for an Area Redevelopment Administration loan that is going to revive the city of Park City.’"

Kennedy "instructed his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, to check on the status of the application," McConaughy reported in the Aug. 16 issue of The Park Record.

the end of August, the loan had been approved.

And, yes, McConaughy confessed in his column, he had lived up to his vow to steal a spoon.

In a September 1962 interview, Droubay told The Park Record that "we are working very hard to keep up our ore reserves and our mining crew, in the face of low metal prices. We hope that the recreation project will afford us funds with which to fight our mining battle." To match the 25-year 4-percent loan from the ARA, UPCM and its partners agreed to put up another $660,000.

At 9 a.m. on Saturday, Dec. 21, 1963, while the country was still mourning the loss of its president, Park City Mayor Will Sullivan cut the ribbon to mark the official opening of the new resort.

As it turned out, UPCM struggled to make money in the resort business. "They didn’t have the expertise (and) I don’t think that they had the heart to make much more of it than they did," said Phil Jones, who joined the resort in its second year as a ski instructor and rose through the ranks to become president and general manager.

In 1971 the mining company sold the business to a new company, Greater Park City Corp., headed by New Orleans businessman Edgar Stern, but retained title to the property underlying much of the resort. The ownership of the resort changed twice more in the following 22 years.

This December the resort that UPCM started with Kennedy’s help will celebrate its 50th anniversary. However, the mining company’s decision to retain the title to the ground ultimately led to a legal dispute that has cast a cloud over the future ownership of the resort.

Background for this story came from The Park Record’s digital files (http://digitalnewspapers.org ); a history of the ADA published by MIT (http://povertyinamerica.mit.edu/products/publications/ ); "From the Ground Up: The History of Mining in Utah," edited by Colleen Whitley; "Park City, Mountain of Treasure," a history of Park City Mountain Resort, written by Larry Warren; and Warren’s video history of Park City, "Silver & Snow, The Park City Story."

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Last winter, while most other local residents were anticipating the next snowfall, Meghan Hicks was getting ready for the Sahara.

No, that didn’t mean going to the tanning salon. It meant preparing herself, mind and body, to compete in the Marathon des Sables, a seven-day, 150-mile footrace in April in southern Morocco where the temperatures sometimes exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

As if those conditions aren’t demanding enough, the rules call for you to carry on your back enough food and clothing to last the whole race. It’s the kind of race that – no surprise here – has prompted some observers to create a special category for it.

"Some media outlets have called this race the toughest footrace on Earth, but I’m not sure I’d go quite that far," Hicks said in typical understatement in an article posted on runnersworld.com. The article was a first-person account of the race entitled "How I Won the Marathon des Sables."

Yep. Hicks not only survived the race but, in a field of more than a thousand runners, was the fastest woman and the 17th fastest overall finisher. In her fourth appearance in the race, it was her first win but her third top-five finish.

The word Sahara may conjure up images of nothing but blowing sand, but Hicks said the annual race (this was the 28th year) is held in varied terrain near the Atlas Mountains.

"Where this race takes place, there’s everything," she said in an interview with The Park Record. "There are rocks, there are little mountains, there are dried-up lake beds, there are big sand dunes, little sand dunes, dried up washes. In this part of the Sahara there’s everything."

So Park City in winter is the place to train for these conditions?

"I just run, basically," she said with a smile. "I run through whatever weather. And believe or not, running on snow actually feels a lot like running on sand."

To mimic the conditions in Morocco, she also rented a cabin in Moab to train for six weeks last winter. But some conditions were hard to simulate.

"There’s a lot more rock in Moab than there is in Morocco, and obviously it was cold down there. It was not warm when I was training."

Getting ready for the heat, she said, included visits to the sauna at the health club, taking hot-yoga classes, and going to Morocco two weeks before the race.

"In honesty, nothing can prepare you for 126 degrees," she said. "That is just hot."

That was the reported temperature during the fourth stage of the race, a 47-mile slog which the elite runners didn’t start until 11:30 a.m. Hicks said she ran for eight hours and 45 minutes that day, finishing an hour after dark.

"Actually, it worked out really nicely for me," she said. "Early in that very long day you could kind of go easy. And then, once it got cool, you could run hard. You could take advantage of that for speeding up at the end."

Besides drinking "tons of water," Hicks said she was constantly monitoring her body for signs of trouble.

"One of the signs that some of your bodily processes are shutting down is that, when you try to eat food, it doesn’t taste right. It just sits in your stomach."

Race officials also carefully monitor the athletes, she said. "During the hottest parts of the day, when you come into a water checkpoint, there’s a dozen medical personnel there." She said they engage athletes in conversation to see if they are coherent.

A veteran of many ultramarathon races, Hicks described the Marathon des Sables as "unequivocally the best setup I’ve seen in terms of keeping people safe. It’s amazing. It’s probably the only reason why my mom lets me go every year."

When reminded that she’s 34 years old, Hicks laughed. "Moms keep power over their kids for a long, long time."

A native of upstate New York, Hicks grew up mostly in Minnesota. She earned a bachelor’s degree in geology and a master’s in resource interpretation (non-traditional education practiced in natural places), a field that led to jobs at several national parks including Big Bend, Yellowstone and Yosemite.

While she was working in California, she said, her boyfriend, Bryon Powell, was developing a website, iRunFar.com, which publishes articles for and about trail runners and ultramarathon runners. As the site’s popularity grew, Hicks quit her national parks job to work as its senior editor, writing and editing articles and doing freelance jobs on the side. One of the articles she wrote was a feature on Utah cyclist Evan Hyde.

"That (job) left us basically location independent. We could live anywhere."

Powell, who is also an accomplished distance runner, had lived in Park City for a couple of summers, she said, so in 2010 they pulled up stakes and moved here.

If you’re up early some morning, you might find her running on the Wasatch Crest Trail ("That’s probably my favorite place to be around Park City") or on the Pinecone Trail, the new link between the Armstrong and Wasatch Crest trails.

"I live right here in Old Town, and so all the trails around Old Town are kind of like my home trails," she said. "They’re all great in their own ways and especially because you can literally go out your door and in five minutes be on a trail."

You can read day-by-day accounts of the Marathon des Sables race written by Meghan Hicks on iRunFar.com and runnersworld.com.

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If Cindy Bywater has her way, in future years this will be the event that kicks off the biking season in Park City.

Bywater is the underwriting and development director for Park City radio station KPCW. And she is also the driving force behind Saturday’s KPCW Cycling Festival, which is being billed as a celebration for lovers of all types of cycling, "fat tire, skinny tire and training wheels."

To be held in conjunction with Saturday’s Tour de Park City, the festival will be headquartered at The Yard at Bonanza Park. While the serious road cyclists are on their way to Evanston and back, the festival and its sponsors will be offering riding clinics, bike-maintenance seminars, and guided mountain-bike rides in the Park City area.

The day will begin at 7 a.m. with the start of the 157-mile Tour de Park City event at Richardson Flat. The road course will take riders through Coalville, Chalk Creek and Evanston before returning via the Mirror Lake Highway and Kamas. That will be followed by the start of other Tour de Park City events ranging from 15 to 100 miles.

Meanwhile, at 9 a.m., All Resort Express shuttles are scheduled to carry mountain bikes and their riders from The Yard to the Empire Lodge for the start of the first Festival event, the Mid-Mountain Ride, hosted by Jans and White Pine.

At 9:30 a.m., Cole Sport will hold a Bike Maintenance 101 clinic.

Rides and clinics will continue throughout the day. Bywater said there is no fee for any of the day’s events except the Tour de Park City.

Scheduled at 11 a.m. is the Fender Bender ride, which "might be the most popular ride," Bywater says. Participants on cruiser bikes will take a tour of town with strategic stops at Wasatch Brew Pub, the High West Distillery & Saloon, and Squatters Roadhouse Grill.

At noon the food station and "Libations Garden" are due to open at The Yard, and the first of three live bands, Lash Larue, will take the stage. Following at two-hour intervals will be the bands PatWa and Switchback. The Tour de Park City awards ceremony is due to start at 5 p.m. For a complete schedule of events go to kpcw.org

Bywater says that people can reserve places on the rides by sending an e-mail to cbywater@kpcw.or or calling her at 649-9004, ext. 305.

She describes this year’s event as a "pilot program" that is planned to grow into a three-day destination event during the last week of June next year.

She notes that other communities host events dedicated to a specific type of cycling Moab’s Fat Tire Festival, for example. But she knows of few events that cater to all aspects of the sport.

Bywater, who notes that KPCW has always enjoyed hosting community-outreach events, hopes this festival will become a major source of income for the station, which is expecting substantial losses in federal public funding.

"We need to make up close to a $100,000 deficit that we’ll be facing within two years," she said.

For more details on the radio station’s plans for the annual event, see the guest editorial by KPCW General Manager Larry Warren on page A-15.

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