Post-Christmas blahs? Union Station has the cure

Day after Christmas always finds me a bit tired, but in a good way.

All the excitement and bustle leaves one's ears full and mind overwhelmed. Clearing up the dirty dishes, mounds of wrappings and piles of unsorted gifts provides a bit of busy-work, but then what?

I came down to Union Station. We are open regular hours the rest of the week, and all next week except New Year's Day. The exhibits aren't going anywhere, the volunteers (God love them) need things to do, why not?

$5 and you can spend the whole day wandering. Find a better deal anywhere, I dare you. You can pick up that Union Station Christmas tree ornament you've always wanted at the same time.

The Christmas tree in the grand lobby is still up with a huge electric train circling it. Kids love those things. And speaking of things kids love, I saw a couple volunteers sitting in the Browning Kimball Classic Car museum, surrounded by all that glorious gleaming chrome and polished paint.

The art gallery has amazing stuff on show.

If you want to buy something for your friend, the Gift Shop at the Station has a 35 percent off sale on all Christmas stuff, and lots of other fun stuff besides. I'm not too sure about the Mysterio "predict your baby's future" t-shirts, but they still have tea towels, candy, cards and much else.

The volunteer in the Utah Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum said she'd had a lovely quiet Christmas. Her kids are splattered all over the country, so it was just her and her husband, "but my Christmas was perfect, I got my chainsaw upgraded.

"You probably want to know what that's about, don't you?"

I said I did. It seems that, for her birthday, her husband bought her a smaller chainsaw to deal with tree stumps around their property. That was fine, but there's a lot of cut down trees, and a lot more trees and hedges and such on their property and on their church's property, that were too much for the little one.

"So he bought me a professional one," she said.

Nice guy? Sure. "We buy each other practical gifts for Christmas and birthdays," she said, "but then some days, for no reason at all, he'll go into a store and buy me something like this," and showed me a blaze of gems and gold around her finger.

Fun "Eureka!" moment in the museum library

Marie Haney's dad, James Packer, is sitting to the left
of the guy with the sign.

So I'm sitting here pondering old pictures of Ogden when I hear Lee Witten, chief archivist at Union Station's library, yell "Eureka" or words to that effect.

"Just don't go running through town without your clothes," I said. (Archimedes supposedly did that when he first made the shouting of eureka famous).

Archimedes discovered how to weigh a gold crown. Lee's discovery was no less exciting, for those of us who do this stuff.

Marie Haney, Washington Terrace, donated a bunch of old images her family had of the Lucin Cutoff to Union Station's archive recently. Her dad, James Packer, Cache County, had worked on the cutoff in 1945, as evidenced by a picture of Jack in a group with a bunch of other men, one of whom was holding a sign saying that day was his birthday.

Workers drill on Cutoff

Among the amazingly cool pictures was a small snapshot of another bridge. Marie told Lee she thought that might be the Lucin Cutoff as well, but it didn't look right to Lee, so he started digging.

Sure enough, a week later, he hit the jackpot. He'd put a question about the bridge up on a web site called www.bridgehunter.com, and someone said it looked like the Victoria Bridge in Montreal, Canada.

A couple of clicks brought Lee to a web site of the bridge that shows an almost identical shot.

How cool is that?





No clue when Marie's dad took the shot, or why. Stuff shows up in family collections all the time, but this shows the value of never tossing anything out, even if you don't know what it is. A little bit of  hunting around can reveal surprises. There are web sites out there where people can help you find just about anything. I mean, a web site dedicated to mysterious bridges...who knew?

So thank you, Marie Haney, and cheers to Lee for a fun discovery.

Effie Hopkins' buried treasure emerges for a sad 50th anniversary

One of the two boxes

Effie Hopkins was a farmer's wife who lived in North Ogden with her husband, Nephi, in the 1930s on up.

Farm life was busy, but not all the time. There was no TV in the 30s, and she filled her spare time by clipping stuff out of the newspaper.

She clipped lots of stuff: Recipes, movie stars pictures, sewing tips, cartoons, stories about British royalty, movie ads, big news of the day and wedding, engagement and obituary notices without number.

She even -- this puzzles me -- clipped out the names of movie stars. Just their names. There are handfuls of this confetti.

She save every bit of it in two big steel boxes.

Nephi died in 1963, Effie died two years later, and their son and daughter, Donald and Virgie, died in 1986 and 1999 respectively.

Nephi's and Effie's obituaries don't mention any close family except their children. Neither Donald nor Virgie left any survivors. So when friends, or their church, or whoever, cleaned out Virgie's home (I am guessing) they found Effie's news clips collection in its two very large steel boxes, stuffed to the brim.

Apparently the people doing the cleaning didn't have the heart to toss all that stuff and didn't have the energy to sift through it either. What to do?

1039 Ogden Policeman murdered

Give it to the archive at Union Station! It is entirely possible they read one or more of the many columns I wrote over the years urging people to do just that.

Talk about hoist on your own petard.

When I started volunteering at Union Station's library earlier this year I found these two very large boxes, stuck in a store room. Nobody had time to sort them, there isn't even a good record of who gave them or when. But there they were.

I peeked inside one and found whole editions of very interesting newspapers -- the 1945 train collision on the viaduct was sitting on top -- was enchanted, and took the job on.

For the last two months I've been sorting. There's a huge amount of dreck -- who needs movie star stories? -- but just enough gems to make every day a successful treasure hunt. There's lot of interesting local news stories and articles of local history that both the Salt Lake Tribune and Standard-Examiner wrote. There are many many stories about Pioneer Days in the 1930s and 1940s.

Pioneer Days 1934

I even found the front page from the July 24, 1934, Pioneer Days celebration. That was the first one under Mayor Harm Peery, a landmark day in Ogden history.

I found the Tribune announcing the death, in Alaska, of Will Rogers. There's World War II news of local boys killed.

I'm almost done. Today I discovered that Effie saved the best for last.

Near the bottom of the second box, I found the complete 8-day set of Standard-Examiners of the Kennedy Assassination.

Wow. And talk about timely. We're just 7 days away from the anniversary.

They were on the bottom, folded over once, stacked up. The papers on top of them included a lot of coverage of the Kennedys doing society stuff, Kennedy getting sworn in, Kennedy standing up to the Russians over Cuban missiles, and so on.  Those guys were the first celebrity political leaders.

I pulled out one paper from 1935 broadcasting the murder of an Ogden Police officer,  Joseph H. Quigley, and the next a paper from Nov. 28, 1963, talking about the aftermath of the Kennedy Assassination.

The Nov. 27, and 26, and on.  All the way to the 22nd?

Yup. Complete.

Newspapers from eight days that shook all our lives

I'm pretty sure there's nothing rare about these -- saving newspapers of historic events is common. I have a Nov. 22, 1963 edition already that I bought for $10.

But it is still fun to find them. Here we are, coming up on the anniversary of that horrible day, and these newspapers, hidden away so very long, find their way to the light again.

Effie saved those papers because I'm sure that, like everyone else, she was  horrified and saddened by these events. The unifying power of horrible sorrow swept the nation. People felt a need to preserve that feeling so their children and grandchildren would know, would experience, what their ancestors had been through.

I wish we knew more about Effie. I'd love to find someone, anyone, who knew her.

But at least, through this pile of papers and clips, her name won't go away forever.

She's part of Union Station's permanent collection now, her name tied forever with dozens of news events, historic people, sewing tips, and a lot of very interesting and yummy recipes.

And President John F. Kennedy.

Pretty good company.

Reality Bites: Joe Ritchie is out, rising tax reality is in

A couple of things from today's news, neither cause for joy, at least to me.

FIRST -- A fond farewell and thanks to Joe Ritchie, Roy's now out-going mayor, defeated yesterday by Willard Cragun.

You know you've been around a long time, perhaps too long, when you are seeing the same faces over and over again in different jobs. I first met Joe Ritchie when he was Ogden's Chief of Police. He was a good guy, a straight shooter, perhaps not always as correct in his speech as he ought to have been, which if memory serves is why he got fired from his job a couple of years after I started, back in 1978.

My memory is notoriously spotty, so the facts of the situation are slippery to me, but I do have a clear memory that Joe got a raw deal from the city manager who was running the town back then.

"Say it ain't so, Joe," I told him then.

Joe went on to serve on the Weber County Commission, where I covered him again in my role as County government reporter. He was, again, a blunt guy who did things, and folks who do things are easy to attack, so I had to see him defeated for reelection in the 90s, sometime, I forget when.

Now after two terms he's out as Mayor of Roy. Well, they say, change is good, maybe time is catching up to Joe just as it did to me. I see a lot of Facebook posts on Cragun's page cheering the coming change, and I hope it's for the better.  I don't live in Roy and haven't followed its politics closely, but I hope folks cheering Cragun remember that Joe was a good guy who did things. Doing things is a great way to make enemies, and it's always easy to hope the new guy will do things better still.

Interestingly, Cragun was on the Roy City Council back in the early 90s when I was covering Roy City government. He's a good guy, I hope he does well. I also hope he remembers that it's easy to campaign on promises that life will be better with him on the job, but when you actually get the job reality has a nasty habit of stepping in and there you are, pissing folks off again.

Speaking of pissing folks off:

SECOND -- Interesting story in today's Standard (click) about Gov. Gary Herbert warning that Utah will have to raise its gasoline tax to pay for road repairs and construction.

Roads are expensive toys to build and maintain, and Utah has been on a binge of road building the last 20 years. Maintenance costs are rising just to keep the roads we have now in shape, but Herbert warns that billions more will be needed to build new highways that UDOT seems to think we need.

A hike in the gasoline tax is the most regressive of taxes around, and I'm sure Herbert, which an eye to Utah's "No New Taxes Ever!" Tea Party fanatics, is uneasy admitting that Utah may need to raise it.

Why is it regressive? The poor work marginal jobs, minimum wage or slightly better, and tend to drive older cars that get poorer mileage. They need to drive more, delivering children to day care, working multiple jobs. Gasoline is a larger part of their budget than most. They don't have the option of riding a bicycle, and even mass transit is hard because of the extra time it takes.

Raising the gasoline tax will be ironic, too.

The Tea Party-driven GOP's effort to cut federal spending means less money for transportation and it is federal money that has build all those long expensive roads through Utah's empty spaces. With federal spending declining -- and Herbert says this is a real possibility in a very few years -- the Tea Party/GOP chant from the 2012 election that "We built that ourselves" may come true in Utah in a very expensive way.

Something has to replace the federal funds that now pay for our roads, Herbert says, and the story quotes the US Chamber of Commerce that states in general could lose 25 percent of their transportation funding. In Utah, which has low population and big spaces, I bet it's more.

And, no, cutting the taxes we pay the fed will not replace what we have to pay for new road taxes. Those tax cuts favor the rich, while this gasoline tax will smack the poor.

Ogden Mayor Mike Caldwell has one alternative, riding his bicycle to work (click) next year, and I cheer his decision and will try to do the same. Bicycles are cheaper than cars to buy and maintain, but our roads still have a way to go before a lot of folks will be comfortable using them to commute.

Mass transit, and alternative transportation, are one way to mitigate the rising costs of the common transportation infrastructure we all have to pay for. Utah gets a lot more serious about mass transit and making our roads bicycle friendly, most Utahns are going to be stuck in their cars, paying ever higher taxes to build expensive roads that will, in turn, be more expensive to maintain.

Who books it in short shorts? Miss Ogden!

The other day Union Station's library got a call from someone asking if the Osmonds had entertained at the Miss Ogden pageant in 1958 or thereabouts.

The caller's brother, apparently, was involved in one of the pageants, but you know how memories are. He was sure the pageant was in the Weber High School and pretty sure it featured the kids as a barbershop quartet. Could we confirm?

1959 contest entrants

The only way I could think to confirm that was to go to the microfilm files at the Weber County Library which, thankfully, are searchable on-line. I figured I could find a news story about the pageant which would mention, in passing, "entertainment was done by those cute Osmond kids everyone loves."

Couldn't find it. Some years the news stories listed the entertainment, some years they did not. When they did it was just the name of a group, such as "The Villagers," a quartet from the University of Utah which was on stage in 1962.

Interestingly, the Junior Chamber of Commerce made quite the hoo-ha of these pageants. Some years there was even a parade down Washington Boulevard, and they sold tickets to watch the competition. Local businesses donated prizes from their wares. The way these women are discussed -- "gals" and "young lovelies" are the sorts of terms you see a lot -- makes one cringe today, but that was life.

One thing that struck me was how the photographers sent to get a picture for the pageant handled what had to be an annual and rather tedious chore. Yeah, they're pretty girls, but you can't just shoot a pretty girl, she has to be doing something.

Doing what? Practicing to be in the pageant, which meant practicing to walk without looking like a dork, which meant, year after year, taking a picture of a girl balancing a book on her head.

Balance those books! From 1955.

I remember seeing advice that the way to practice posture was to walk with a book on your head, it made a good visual, so several years that's what the photographer went for. Same photographer? No clue. In the late 50s the Standard-Examiner contracted with a local photography studio to do its photography, so they shooters were trained to do a more commercial-type shot right off the bat.

Posed pictures like that were starting to be avoided when I hired on at the paper in 1978, but they were still a staple of the "Women's" Page (yes the paper still had one) which is where stuff like this ran.

Speaking of fashions, check out the shorts on those ladies. In 1958 the song "Flying Purple People Eater" came out and at one point the chorus talks about "we wear short-shorts," and this was it was referring to.

World Best French Toast

So I'm interviewing Gene Nopper, one of the volunteers down at Union Station, about his career working at Union Station's laundry building in the 1950s, how he worked in the commissary as well, helping provision the many passenger trains and so forth, and learned many interesting things.

Gene's a great guy. His dad saw the original Union Station burn down in 1923, worked at the new one in 1924, Gene worked there in the baggage room as well as the laundry and commissary shop. He saw the place when it was booming, the industrial center of Ogden.

Ate some good food then, too.

The interviews are for oral histories that we're doing on conjunction with Weber State University. The idea is, get the past down from witnesses while they're still here. While it's fun to ask about the big stuff, what's interesting is the small details of life you pick up.

Such as, on the passenger trains in the dining car they cooked with what we now would call fireplace logs, and charcoal. The logs burned and kept the ovens hot, and the charcoal was to grill stuff. I would have thought electric, on a train, or maybe steam somehow, but wood and charcoal?

He was there, he loaded the cars.

Anyway, what was interesting was that he said he also rode as a passenger and ate on the trains and said the Union Pacific served the world's best French toast.

Most French toast is egg-milk soaked in bread and grilled, right? Mine is. Probably so is yours.

Gene said they used plain old white Wonder bread on the UP, but after soaking it in batter it was deep-fried.

Deep fried? Submerged in grease?

Yup.

"It was sure good," he said. "People loved it."

We've Been Framed at Union Station

A couple weeks ago I told you about how Derek Henderson volunteered to rip all the wood off an old caboose at Union Station.

Derek's team and I and another friend or two spend a fun day ripping the old caboose apart. Derek and his team spent the next week collecting the wood and ripping the rest off that car which, I hasten to add, was a lot better built than any of us expected.

Derek wanted to make the wood into picture frames. Today he brought some samples by. They'll be sold in the Union Station gift shop and wherever else he can think of. Have to admit, they're pretty spiffy.

We're still working to get the steel from the caboose salvaged and hope to sell or trade the trucks -- wheels and suspension -- to another railroad museum in exchange for whatever we can get.

Point is, a trashed and burned junkheap of a caboose that was mostly a motel for transients is being repurposed, bit by bit, as art.

The Effie Hopkins "Heart Attack Waiting to Happen" Post-War cookbook

As I told you recently, I'm going through a huge pile of newspaper clippings donated to Union Station's library by the family of Effie Hopkins, a farm wife from North Ogden, whose interests were very broad.

Movie stars, local weddings and funerals, cartoons, random news events and sewing and cooking advice filled two large steel boxes. As I go through these things I am finding some real treasures, mirrors of the time if not actually valuable.

Last time I mentioned a gasoline ration book. This time it's a recipe for a bacon-wrapped oyster roll.

A couple of things about the 1940s.

People then didn't eat nearly as much meat as we do today. Even before the war, dead animal was not as common on the dinner table as it is now, especially for the lower income types.

Most food was home-made, so it was better for you. Pork, not beef, was the more common meat on American tables. Fast food meant the chicken was outrunning you as you tried to chop off its head.

And when people cooked, they flavored darn near everything with bacon.

Also, in 1945, the nation was still in the throes of wartime rationing. I'm finding a lot of recipes that stress they save on sugar or fats, both of which were rationed. There's recipes for foods designed to survive being mailed to troops overseas.

And there's recipes designed to really throw caution to the wind when you do manage to score.

Like this one.

The Oct. 17, 1945 article from the Salt Lake Tribune is headlined "Bacon and Oysters Make a Super Dish."

Reflecting the wartime rationing, the article says "a pound of bacon still is something to lock up in the wall safe with grandmother's diamond neckless. A totally useless bit of information is that it rates six red points per pound because only an FBI agent can ferret out a pound these days. But over the horizon happy days will come again and there's no law against imagining."

Red points are ration points. You exchanged points to buy the meat, and getting points was a chore. So, in that context, this recipe is more than imagining. It's downright decadent.

To make the stuffing you mix one pint of Blue Point oysters, chopped, with 3 cups bread crumbs, 1/2 teaspoon thyme, 2 tsp. salt, 1/4 tsp nutmeg, dash of pepper, 1 tsp scraped onion, and 2 eggs slightly beaten.

Spread your pound of bacon out on waxed paper in a solid sheet, spoon the stuffing mix, roll up and bake at 375 degrees for an hour until the bacon is brown. Garnish with tomato quarters and parsley and serve.

After dinner, notify EMTs that everyone is in danger of a heart attack.

But I bet it tastes good.

"Don't mess with 25th Street?" Wow, have we come a long way

Love this story in today's S-E (click) about a couple of shoplifters who got busted by the owners of Sock Monkey'n Around antiques and the KoKoMo Lounge.

Picture of Cindy Simone, cops and perps in today's S-E

I tend to agree with the cops that a citizens' arrest is a dicey thing, but on the other hand we've cut back funding for police protection so far that the cops can't really respond to these things like this rapidly, if at all, leaving an open field for petty crime.

Unchecked crime of any sort is the last thing 25th Street needs. When I moved to town 35 years ago I'd drive down the Two Bit Street and girls on the sidewalk would wave to me. I was able, almost, to think that their attentions were because I was so good looking and not because they rented by the hour.

Now Two-Bit street is as family friendly as Disneyland. My son runs a business there. I ride my bicycle down it to get to work at Union Station. I take my grandchildren there. So can you.

But letting people get away with even small crimes threatens that. The "broken window" theory of crime is that if you allow one broken window on an abandoned building, pretty soon they're all broken. This stuff needs to be nipped in the bud.

So when these guys robbed CJ's store, on tape, and the police professed to not be able to find them, Cindy Simone at the Kokomo and CJ Bovee in the antique store decided they'd had enough. They, like all the business owners on 25th Street, are local, they've worked hard to build their business, they don't want to give all that up because of a couple of twits.

They had video of the guys, social media had been all over the deal, when the perps (love this cop talk!) were sighted again they called the cops, yes, but also took action.

Next thing the guys knew they were zip-tied to lawn chairs on the sidewalk.

Good for Cindy and CJ. 25th Street is our street in our city, guys like this should learn to behave or get out.

Nuggets Amid Dreck and the stories they tell

There are people who clip stuff out of newspapers just because that stuff is neat, and one such was a member of the Hopkins Family that lived in North Ogden in the 1920s through at least the 1950s.

Oh brother, did they ever. I'm guessing it was Effie Hopkins, wife of Nephi Hopkins, a farmer in North Ogden.

Mrs. Hopkins wielded a mean pair of scissors. We're talking about a cubic yard, no kidding, of news clippings, most from the Standard-Examiner. There's some whole papers, but heaps and heaps of clips.

Obituaries, social notes, wedding notes, interesting news stories about President Roosevelt and his dog Falla, and more and more.

A lot of the clips are dreck, to be honest, but some are gems. The Japanese have surrendered and the EXTRA that the Standard put out that day is here -- a treasure if ever there was one.

The clips filled two steel boxes that, I am guessing, the family discovered sitting in a storage room after Effie or one of her descendants died, didn't have the heart to toss, and so donated them to Union Station's archive. They may have seen one of the several columns I did in the S-E pleading with people not to toss old papers of any sort.

Now I get to sort through this stuff. Talk about hoist on my own petard.

So I'm digging, tossing out stray comics (would you believe there was a time Dagwood Bumstead was not obsessed with food?), knitting and crochet patterns, movie star pictures and so on. This lady saved everything.

There's also a fair number of old letters, brochures and so forth. There's a postal card from the local Selective Service board to a young male member of the family asking him to call which, I am guessing, was greeted with great joy.

So today I'm fishing through and I find what you see pictured here: A World War II Gasoline ration book.

Ah, yes, those fond old days when wars meant shared sacrifice and people were told to economize because we had a war to pay for. Interesting historical note: The US was a major oil producer during WWII and actually had lots of gasoline. What it didn't have was rubber, so the government rationed gasoline to keep tires from wearing out.

Clever, huh?

This little book was issued to Nephi Hopkins, Box 324, North Ogden on April 1, 1944. He drove a 1930 Ford.

I'd heard of these but never seen one, being a post-war baby boomer, so I walked into the other room to show my find to Slim Jolley, another volunteer up here.

"Oh, that brings back memories," she said, and it did.

Slim was born in 1937, and so lived through all the rationing and stuff as a child, including occasional shortages.

"I used to tell my mother that that was OK, I didn't mind we didn't have any meat because I didn't like it," she said. Meat, too, was rationed, along with flour, sugar and many other staples. To this day Slim is not fond of meat.

She said she and her parents were visiting family in 1941, "and I was sitting on the ice cream freezer and I told my parents I had to go to the bathroom, so they said go ahead.

"I went inside and my Uncle was there and he had one of those big radios and he was sitting with his ear up to it, listening to it, and Walter Winchell was on, and you know how he was so dramatic.  He was talking about some place called Pearl Harbor and that it had been bombed.

"So I went back outside and asked my father 'Where's Pearl Harbor?' and he said, "Hawaii. Why?"

"And I said 'Walter Winchell just said it's been bombed.'  They had no idea."

Can you imagine the moment? I got shivers listening to her tell that story.

THAT'S A BIG OOPS.


I also found this story from Dec. 21, 1951, about a woman who made a very different wartime discovery.

Apparently Agnes Sasser, of Atlanta, was notified in May of 1951 that her first husband, Pfc. Walter Dixon, was missing in action and presumed dead during the Korean War. Agnes didn't spend a lot of time mourning, or had already warmed up her engines while Walter was off fighting, because she married Pfc. William Sasser in September.

Come December, the War Department tells her that her first husband, Walter Dixon, isn't dead after all, but is a POW.

Wouldn't you like to know how that worked out? So would I, and the clip may be here somewhere.

ps: Sarah Langsdon, at Weber State University Special Collections, found the follow-up article. Wify dumped the new guy. Click to read:

A blast from Ogden's Evil Evil but really fun past

In 1995 I interviewed Reuel Miller, who was then 96, for a story about Ogden's really evil, awful, illegal and massively fun past.

I'm doing a walking tour of 25th Street for the Sociology Club at WSU this afternoon and dug it out for tidbits to share. Here's the whole story. The text program, for some reason, didn't retrieve the punctuation, but it's all pretty clear.

And, no, I am NOT going to explain about the lady and the donkey.




HE LIVED THE OGDEN MOST PEOPLE TRIED TO IGNORE
 news
 by
By CHARLES F. TRENTELMAN
Standard-Examiner staff
      OGDEN   He saw the Ogden
Lyceum Theater's act with the lady
and the donkey and that's all we're
going to tell you about that story,
this being a family newspaper.
     Which is OK. Reuel Miller has
lots more.
     He could outwalk the first car he
saw in Ogden, dug the first irriga
tion ditch in his neighborhood and
helped make sure graft got collected
properly from 25th Street bootleg
gers as a  special policeman  for
Mayor Harman Peery.
     Or so he says.
     He even knows why there used to
be little cans of pea gravel on the
sidewalk on 25th Street, and we
know you've been wondering about
that.
     Miller, who turned 96 in Febru
ary, lived a life that parallels Ogden
in the first 100 years of Utah's
statehood, and his stories certainly
have the depth, color and detail of
truth. Also, there's few left to con
tradict him.
      Those years weigh Miller down.
He still gets out into the garden
and he still makes wine every fall.
But his hands shake, his eyes are
going and he tends to totter a bit
when he walks.
     He's disgusted by the whole pro
cess. Ask him if he wants to make
100 and his answer is a quick
 Lord, I hope not!
      I hate getting old,  he says often.
 I'm so clumsy,  and he says it
with the attitude of one irritated
with a tool that just won't work
right anymore.
     That tool worked just fine for a
very long time. He was born Feb.
22, 1899, on a farm in Plain City.
He had his arm stomped by a
horse, went to school a total of two
weeks, built several of the houses in
his neighborhood on 16th Street
and painted much of Ogden at one
time or another.
     If the body is aging, though, the
memory of all it went through isn't.
 I've got the damndest memory; I
can see it all now,  he said.
    There's plenty to remember. He
was right in the middle of Ogden's
last big blast, the 30s and 40s, when
prostitution, gambling and liquor
were easily found commodities on
25th Street, the police looked the
other way and the mayor said he
liked it that way.
     Miller helped make the town
what it was. It was in the mid-
1930s when he got a job with some
thing called the American Detective
Association.
     The American Detective Associa
tion had an interesting line of busi
ness, he said. In addition to the
usual stuff   an ad from the peri
od offers  Legitimate Detective Ser
vices,  and Miller said they did
follow cheating wives   it sold
signs to the bars in town that said
 This establishment protected by
the American Detective Associa
tion.  
     The signs cost $50 at a time when
50 cents would buy lunch. If you
think there was something fishy go
ing on, you're right.
     Those bars were breaking the law.
Utah, after Prohibition, had set up
state liquor stores and bars were
only supposed to sell beer. Ogden's
Mayor Harman Peery felt the local
bars should be allowed to sell li
quor anyway, and many of them
did so.
     Miller said the sign meant that
the bars wouldn't get raided by
state police trying to stop the sale
of hard liquor. The American De
tective Agency had connections, he
said. It knew when raids were com
ing, and would warn the bar own
ers when it was time to clean up
their acts.
      I sold to all the bootleggers,  he
said.  They grabbed it fast.
     It was a great deal. The bootleg
gers could get their valuable booze
out of the way. If agents seized the
place and shut it down anyway,
there was no problem: The fixtures
would be auctioned and  we'd go
to the auction and out-bid every
one,  Miller said.
      The next day they'd open up
again just like normal.
     If the police really needed to ar
rest someone, the agency provided
them with a victim, a well compen
sated guy who didn't mind sitting
in a cell while the real bar owners
went about their business.
      That's what we done. A little
crookedness, but we took care of
our people.
     One place he went to sell his
signs, he said, was Mayor Peery's
office.
     Peery, mayor of Ogden from 1934
to 1939 and several times again lat
er, didn't publicly support the graft
and corruption in Ogden, but he
did say he thought the state's liquor
laws were wrong and was often in
dispute with the state over them.
He was also an old family friend of
Miller's, his mother having bought
20 acres of land from him years be
fore.
      He opened the door; I come in
there and he wanted to know what
I wanted,  Miller said. Miller told
him about the signs and what they
did,  and he says I want to buy
that. I want that on my buildings.  
      The next day, he said, Peery
called Miller back to his office.  He
walked over to me, stretched out
his hand to me, pulled out my coat
and pinned a badge on me,  he
said, making him a  special police
man.  
     His duties were simple. Miller
said Peery's administration allowed
gambling and the sale of liquor in
exchange for  fees.  Those fees
were collected by the police, and it
was Miller's job to make sure the
collectors were being honest.
     Typically, he said, he'd station
himself outside the bar when the
collector he was following would go
in.
       He'd go in the bootleg joint and
he'd come in and pat his coat pock
et and they'd give him a cigar,  he
said.  He'd pat his jacket pockets
and they'd give him one of those
Chinese match boxes, and he'd go
out and take money out of it and
put it in a folder.
     It was Miller's job to see how
much was collected.  I couldn't
touch them, but I had to put every
thing down on paper and hand it in
to Harman Peery every night,  he
said.
     Another duty was to collect the
bad checks that people gave
madams and bootleggers from time
to time.
     One check, he said, was from a
farmer out near Tremonton who'd
had quite the party at one of the
houses on the street and his $200
check bounced. Miller said he
drove out to the man's farm and
found the man more than happy to
make the check good, just as long
as Miller would stay far away from
the farm, and the farmer's wife.
     Which he did. No need in causing
trouble.
      For all the graft that went on at
the time, Miller has nothing but
positive things to say about Mayor
Peery. He took his percentage, he
said, but that's all.  To my way of
thinking he's the finest mayor that
ever hit this bitching city,  he said.
     What about those buckets of pea
gravel on 25th Street?
     Easy, he said. If a man was
looking for a little female compan
ionship in one of the  rooming
houses  on the street, but was ner
vous about going inside, he'd take a
few pieces of gravel out of the can
and toss it at the second floor win
dows. If the occupant was avail
able, she's open the window and
ask him up.
      After quitting Peery's employ and
that of the American Detective
Agency he went to work as a paint
er around town. His life settled
down to a lot of wheeling and deal
ing of property on 16th Street, and
he made as much money doing that
as he did painting houses.
     One thing that he still laughs
about is the time he came down
with lead poisoning from the paint
and nearly died. The doctor gave
him only months to live, he said.
     So, said Miller, he took to drink
ing wine on a pretty regular basis.
What the heck, right?
     Well, three months later his
symptoms disappeared, leaving the
doctor flummoxed and Miller feel
ing pretty cocky. The doctor later
died, but Miller still keeps track of
him.
      I'm still here and the doctor's
still dead,  he said.

Union Station is Going Google Virtual

Google photographer Marcel De Lima

Ultra cool stuff at the station today. It is being photographed by Google so people anywhere in the world can take a virtual tour of the museums.

Union Station is the cultural hub of Ogden, so this makes perfect sense. Google Earth will let visitors from around the world not only wander around Ogden's streets, but go inside Union Station and take a look around.

The process is surprisingly simple.

Wednesday morning Google Photographer Marcel De Lima visited each museum, and the grand hall, with a normal digital SLR camera sporting an 8 mm lens.

That is a fisheye lens capable of shooting an arc of 180 degrees, or half of an entire room in one shot. He has to stand back or he'll get a picture of his shoes.

Each time he sets the camera up he takes 12 pictures in a circle. You may ask "Why so many if the lens sees so much?"

What the camera sees

Those 12 images provide a lot of overlap so a computer program can create a 360-degree view of the room that you can scroll around seamlessly, wandering up and down and around. You can get closer to stuff, or farther away, all at the touch of a computer mouse.

You can see how it works if you go to http://maps.google.com and type "Ogden" into the search box. That takes you to an overhead view of Ogden. On the left is a scale to zoom down closer with a picture of a little man at the top. Click on that little man and drag him down onto the map -- you'll suddenly be looking at a street view of wherever you put that guy.  I put him at the corner of 25th and Grant and could scan all around to the municipal park, Imaging Depot or looking down towards Union Station. You can even walk down the street.

Union Station Business Manager Tracy Ehrig (right) with
Standard-Examiner Reporter Shane Farver, Photographer
Dillon Brown, and Google photographer Marcel De Lima

This is terrific publicity for Union Station and Ogden and I hope it lets folks know how cool it is to visit the city.

De Lima said the virtual tour will be available on-line in about a week, but it's already working. As I was leaving Standard-Examiner Reporter Mitch Shaw and Photographer Dillon Brown were walking in to do a story for tomorrow's paper.

Mitch is a good reporter, nice to see him again giving Union Station  some much-needed publicity in four counties of Utah.

From there the rest of the world is just a mouse click away.

Enforce fed drug laws, but not fed gun laws? Our sheriffs confuse me.

Interesting article in the paper Monday about how the police are opposed to making marijuana legal because, as we all know, drugs are bad.

Yes, really, they are. Not being snarky there.

The sheriffs of Davis and Weber counties are quoted as being opposed to the federal government's stand declining to interfer in states that have made MJ legal. They say drugs bring about all sorts of crime and evil, although a lot of the crime (robberies for money, for example) comes about precisely because drugs ARE illegal, a point they never like to admit, just like they don't relate crime and other problems caused by alcohol to the legalization of alcohol.

But that's not what interests me here. What interests me is that these two sheriffs are suddenly gangbusters for law enforcement by the federal government. They're really angry that the US Attorney General has told states which legalized marijuana that he would not challenge their laws.

These are the same two local sheriffs who, not too long ago, told the federal government it could take a flying leap at the moon if it tried to pass any sort of federal gun law because guns are protected by the constitution and Utah's not going to let the feds tell it what to do, no way no how.

Sheriff Thompson in Weber County even wrote stuff on his blog criticizing me for (click) criticizing his stand, in my blog, but really, if you are going to demand the feds enforce federal laws, should you get to pick and choose?

The drug laws the fed isn't enforcing don't impact Utah, because Utah hasn't legalized marijuana. Other states have and, hey, what about state's rights?

When they were criticizing federal gun laws, our fine sheriffs (click) made much of Utah's right to decide for Utah and said the feds should respect that. Well, Colorado decided for Colorado, the feds are respecting it, what's your beef?

More to the point, it is pretty clear to everyone that the war on drugs has been won, by drugs. I would think the sheriff's would welcome a chance to quit fighting a losing battle.

After 25 or more years, more people are in prison than ever before for drugs, more police are spending billions of dollars for anti-drug gear than ever before, and more drugs are coming over the border than ever before. Whole industries have been built around supplying prisons to house everyone.

Meanwhile, around $15 billion a year in American money flows south to buy drugs, a pretty strong indication that Americans want the drugs that are illegal and are willing to vote with their dollars.

Yes, drug addiction is evil. The billions we spend fighting drugs should be spent on treatment and prevention -- call Weber or Davis mental health to see how underfunded their drug programs are. The money all flows to enforcement, buying swat teams and huge RV-mobile command centers and other fun toys, not prevention.

Would making drugs legal cause a boom of abuse, gang rape in the streets and all other sorts of tragedy? Probably not. California seems to have de facto legalization with all those "clinics" selling medical marijuana, but none of those other horrors.

When alcohol was made legal again (thanks to Utah!) after Prohibition, use did go up, but abuse stayed about the same. People who wanted to get drunk had no problem finding booze during Prohibition. People who only wanted a casual drink with dinner at home now and then were the ones who went without, but they weren't the problem in the first place.

Legalize drugs, you'd see people wonder what the fuss was about, but that's where prevention money comes in, and treatment. Those things work. The nation has cut tobacco use through education and treatment, and tobacco is one of the most addictive substances on the planet.

 Legalize marijuana, the hard core addicts would keep on getting what they're getting now, only instead of jail they might get treatment. And our sheriffs could concentrate on other crimes that need solving.

No on Syria

I see a lot of debate on this Syria thing, and only post here because I have a need to collect all my thoughts on it in one place.

Those thoughts come down to this: No. Don't do it.

Why?

A lot of folks say we should, citing the many people killed by the Syrian poison gas, the many others killed in the Civil War, the depravity of the Syrian president, and on and on.

Guess what? They're all right. All that stuff is horrible, disgusting, tragic, an abomination, someone should DO something.

Why should we be the ones to do something?

Mostly, because we can, apparently. The US has this massive military, this huge amount of power, this amazingly high standard of always doing the RIGHT THING because we are good and wonderful and everything the world ought to be and should want to be. Not doing something sends a message that bad people can do anything they want, so what they'll do next, of course, is nuke Israel or San Francisco, it's going to happen any second if we don't do something now.

OK, I just moved into cynical snark territory.

My response to those who say the US should do something about the human tragedy in Syria is to ask "what about Congo?"

Congo, the former Belgian Congo, has been broiled by civil war ever since Belgium left the country, it elected a president, the CIA overthrew that president and put a tame dictator in place, and civil war set in, pretty much ever since. More than 5 million --MILLION -- have died since 1998, thousands per month.

And the United States, beacon of light, guardian of peace and love, has done precisely nothing. Ah what the heck, they're black and don't have oil.

Yes oil. Sorry to sound cynical again, but the war in Syria is all about oil, the middle east, oil, Israel, oil, Saudi Arabia's hatred of Iran, and oil.

You didn't really think it was about the suffering Syrians, did you?

Disruptions of Syria could easily spread, as they already are, and since Syria is in the Middle East everything that happens there affects the price of oil. Since Middle East oil mostly goes to Europe and China (The US gets most of its oil from itself, Canada and Mexico) you could easily say "who cares?" but oil is a world commodity, its price is set globally, if the price of Saudi oil goes up, the price of the oil they pump in Wyoming and refine in Salt Lake City goes up.

So the Syrian civil war could hit home in Utah.

So, do something, right?

No. Listen.

Andrew Bacevich, a professor history and international relations, is a Vietnam Vet, father of a son killed in Iraq, and strong critic of the US considerable international effort to spread American values. He's written a lot of books explaining how the US has way exceeded its reach in maintaining a world-wide economic empire. Simply put, we're spending way more than we're getting back, and our efforts are being more and more futile as we discover that ideology is not something you can defeat on the battlefield, rendering our massive military pretty much useless.

You can bomb them back into the stoneage, but amid those stones they'll still hate you and come back to haunt you.

Bacevich summed the current situation up nicely on the Bill Moyers show:

 “If you think back to 1980,” Bacevich tells Donahue, “and just sort of tick off the number of military enterprises that we have been engaged in that part of the world, large and small, you know, Beirut, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia — and on and on, and ask yourself, ‘What have we got done? What have we achieved? Is the region becoming more stable? Is it becoming more Democratic? Are we enhancing America’s standing in the eyes of the people of the Islamic world?’ ‘The answers are, ‘No, no, and no.’ So why, Mr. President, do you think that initiating yet another war in this protracted enterprise is going to produce a different outcome?”

Which is pretty much where I'm at too -- all those arguments about the tragedy of Syria are correct -- it is a tragedy, but the real question is, what can we do about it THAT WILL ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING USEFUL?

Nothing. 

Both sides of the Syrian civil war dislike us. Even the "good" rebels, the ones supposedly not linked with Al Quida, will take our aid, and say nice things about us, but we have no idea how well they'll run Syria if they win, or whether -- as is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan -- they'll go back to hating us because we're allied with Israel because hating Israel, never forget, is the one thing absolutely everyone in the middle east agrees on, including our good allies in peace, Saudi Arabia. 

Remember, it was Saudi Arabians, spending Saudi Arabian money (earned by selling us oil) and preaching Saudi Arabian religious doctrine (Wahabism is very radical,  not all that far from the preachings of the Taliban) who hijacked those planes on 9-11.

So for all those reasons, and more, we need to sit this one out. Israel is perfectly capable of taking care of itself. We've sold billions of military hardware to Saudi Arabia, so it can take care of itself too. So can almost every other nation in the Middle East, which are all armed to the teeth with arms they've bought from us or Russia with oil money they make from us. 

And, as Mr. Bacevich so nicely says, our record of "fixing" stuff in the Middle East sucks, mostly because the Middle East needs to fix its own problems and hates anyone -- Russia, France, England, us -- who tries to do it for them.

Why? Mostly because they -- we -- are the ones who caused those problems in the first place.

History is preserved in its random junk

Floyd Jarvis was one of those quiet guys who, in his own small way, helped preserve one heck of a lot of the American railroad history.

He lived in a doublewide up on 12th Street by himself. A former railroad workers, whose father also worked on the railroads, the rails and all about them were his life.

How much nobody knew. After he died in 2009 he left his entire collection to Union Station. Members who went into his trailer said it was chock-full of books, movies, model railroad gear and so on.

A lot of his stuff was sold to raise funds, but a lot more was put into Union Station's collection: Books, slides, movies, stuff.

Fun stuff. Nothing was too small to attract his interest, apparently, and as a historic preservationist, this is critical.

I was looking for railroad schedules, of which Floyd had many, and came across another box labeled "Dining packets etc."

Dining packets?

Yeah, those little envelopes of plastic silverware, napkins and other stuff that you get on trains when you sit down to eat, or buy a hot dog in the canteen.

They don't sound important, but in historic preservation you never know what really is important. A 100 years from now nobody may ever know what a "spork" is, for example.

There are napkins here on which the railroad's name embossed on them, not the generic tissues used today. There are souvenir checkbook covers, brochures of Mt. Rainier and Old Faithful with the Union Pacific logo prominently displayed, Rio Grande paper napkins that almost feel like linen,and on and on.

Fun stuff.

The treasure of this particular box is a Pacific Northwest snack pack given to first class travelers by the nice folks at Amtrak on its "Pioneer" and "Empire Builder" trains. It would have been given to folks who paid extra for a sleeping car and looks pretty yummy.

There's a pack of salmon spread, an "Aplets Colets" snack bar, some roasted peanuts and a box of Venus brand stone ground wheat crackers.

No I am not going to taste these things. I can't see the expiration date but mid-70s is my guess. Is that spread packet's foil lid bulging a titch?

Yike!

But stuff like this, as I said, gives a hint at life back when trains were run by companies that didn't mind spending a little money to make the trip more pleasant and, incidentally, reinforce that railroad's name with that pleasant experience. They actually act as if they care whether you are comfortable.

Contrast that with the current flying experience, where they jam you in a seat two inches too small for your legs, toss a packet of peanut (there's supposed to be more than one in there?) at you and tell you to have a nice flight.

Use typewriters to (BAM!) write (ka-POW!) to your (kee-WHACK!) congressman

I just dropped a line to Sen. Mike Lee and used my typewriter to do it.

It felt good.

I'd read the story about his talk yesterday in Ogden in the Standard-Examiner (click) and was feeling a bit miffed, not at what he said, but at what he didn't say, which was considerable. He wants to defund the ACA, he claims he doesn't want to shut down the government while doing so, and yet it's clear he represents the far right wing of Congress that is just itching for another show-down, shut-down, run down of the government to get what they want.

He mentioned that he has an alternative to the ACA (sometimes called Obamacare) but his detailed description of that was apparently too complex to get put into the newspaper. I went to his web site to read it but he seems to have neglected to post it there, too.

Plenty of opportunities to say I don't like ACA. Not a hint of his alternative.

But what the heck, he says letters make a difference, I felt like writing him, so I got out the Olympia, fed it some dead squashed tree and banged away. Didn't even have to stop and start over -- when you type the words have to be formulated ahead of time, your whole thoughts organized, an old trick you learn as a journalist (so you can dictate a story, no kidding, over the phone) so the words flowed.

And, as I said, it felt good. Typing this on my computer, the keys are mushy, they go (...pip!...) every time I hit one, taking no force whatsoever, no energy, no anger, no nothing.

(...pip!...)

Meh!

But with a typewriter, you burn calories!  You use force! You let the world know you're pissed!

Dear (BAM!) Senator Lee (Ke-WHACK!)

About your talk last night (Ka-POW!)

Sort of feels like the old Batman TV Show, eh? (click)

Great fun and, Sen. Lee promised to read it!  Maybe, with that kind of force, he'll get the (Ka-WAM!!) point.

His snailmail address is 316 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510.  Be sure to use proper postage.
Here's my letter. Click to see larger image:

Three Reasons I love dogs, hate people

There's a very true saying that "the more I learn about people, the more I like dogs."

I really love dogs. I really miss mine. And after reading this morning's news I really, REALLY miss him. Why?

-- This story (click) out of San Francisco that the State of Nevada has been dumping mental patients in San Francisco. Hundreds were given one-way tickets and told to dial 911 when they got there or simply told "good bye!"

Nevada authorities are harumping, saying this certainly isn't their POLICY, but the numbers argue otherwise.

-- This story (click) that three teens in Oklahoma were bored, so they decided to kill someone. A baseball player, an Australian kid here on a scholarship, was jogging by so one said "There's our target," and they got in their car and shot him. He's dead, the teens are in custody.

Words fail.

-- As predicted, Iraq (click) is returning to its sectarian civil war style, with waves of car bombings, neighborhoods walling up, strife intensifying and so on and so forth, precisely as a lot of us predicted. Hell, there were those of us who predicted it would end up this way before the invasion -- Sunni, Shia and Kurds, all hate each other, all forced to be in one country together, all held together only by brutal dictators or equally brutal military occupation. And we go in and try to spread democracy and happiness, with no plan at all how to do it.

What could go wrong? And yet you know there are folks who are going to say "Obama is at fault, he pulled us too soon."

Cripes.

-- While Hill Air Force Base employees are moaning about their flight line cafe being closed due to sequestration, 57,000 children across the nation, including 100 in Weber County, are being booted from Head Start.

This means 57,000 chances for kids to grow up in poverty, alone at home, while their parents struggle to get by on minimum wages jobs -- working poor are Head Start's target clients -- that will never pay them a living wage because there are folks in this country who actually think the minimum wage should be lower, not higher.

The kids will grow up somehow, right? Of course with minimal instruction and guidance early on, they could also end up the kind of kids who sit around, getting bored, and actually think that shooting some passing jogger for fun is a good idea.

But what the heck, if they live in Nevada maybe someone will give them a free ride to 'Frisco.

Here Rover! Time for a walk!

Blood on the loading dock: The UP delivers another trunk murder

One could be forgiven for thinking that Ogden's Union Station was, in the past, a particularly brutal place.

I mean, what's up with all the dead bodies in trunks? People were shipping them in.

As we saw in  a previous blog post (link) one showed up in 1913. That involved a mother who had killed her daughter in Salt Lake, shipped her to Ogden when she came to this city with her former husband, and then was discovered by train personnel who noticed hair poking out of the trunk and a bad odor.

One ought to be anyone's ration, but in 1924 it happened again.

On the morning of March 15, 1924, baggage handlers at Union Station were moving a trunk from the UP train out of Denver to its designated connection on the  Southern Pacific. 

They noticed blood on the hinges of the trunk and called the depot security agent, who notified two Ogden City detectives.

They opened the trunk, "and the interior presented a ghastly sight. The blood stained body was found, the knees against the chin and tied tightly with twine. Rugs were wrapped around the head and body."

It was the body of Mrs. Fred Janssen, wife of a former church janitor in Denver. The body was taken to Larkin Funeral home, located conveniently just up the street at 24th and Adams. There further examination was made.

"Several deep gashes, apparently cut with a sharp instrument, were found on the back of the head," the evening "Standard" reported that same day. "The other wounds made by a blunt instrument, were also found upon the head. Three deep cuts were upon the forehead and the arms and breast were bruised."

One clue was a linen handkerchief (men used those back then) containing the initial "F" that was found "thrust tightly into the woman's throat."

The trunk had been shipped to Weed, California, before being intercepted in Ogden. Officials wired to Denver for the shipping declarations and paperwork of the trunk. 

Police in Denver started tracing the trunk's history and discovered expressmen who had helped haul it to the station and checked it in. The man checking it in had given the name "John Smith," but the expressmen said they picked the trunk up at an apartment owned by Fred Janssen. In the apartment police found blood on the carpet, and the hunt was on.

Janssen was captured two days later in Pueblo, Colorado, and told a story of hiring a Mexican to kill his wife, saying he feared she was about to try to kill him.

Police weren't buying it, though, and questioned him for three hours in what sounds, from the newspaper account, like one of those "hot seat" interviews you see in old police movies. One suspect the Miranda warning was not employed, or even cared for.

As Tuesday's story said, "at the end of the three hours Janssen in tears finally declared ' Yes, I have not been telling the truth. I killed my wife and placed her body in the trunk and shipped it to California."

Janssen speculated that his wife was still alive when he put her body into the trunk, but Ogden medical officials "saw nothing to indicate the woman lived after she was placed in the trunk," and said the blow to her head with a hammer was enough to kill her.

Here's something that would never happen today: After his wife's body was moved to Denver, the still-in-custody Janssen was taken to the funeral home to look at her body.

He'd been sitting in his jail cell saying "Don't let them hang me, I  don't want to die like that. If I've got to die for killing Bella, I wish they would let me kill myself."

At the funeral home he admitted to killing her for her life insurance and savings. Then, the news story says, 'the last threads of the mystery were gathered up last night after Janssen demonstrated over his wife's casket how he had wielded the hammer over her last Thursday night in there home here while she knelt in prayer."

"As the lid of Mrs. Janssen's casket was slowly opened, he bag to sob. Then while police watched he showed them how he killed her.

"I hit her three--four times," he said. 'like this … '

He also bent down and kissed her, the news reports said. 

The stories in the Denver press said his attorney planned to plead insanity. 

Special thanks to Sally Tasker, who donated the above shown newspaper to the Union Station archive, and to Sock Monkying Around antique shop for its invaluable help.