Bill Salerno: Union Station and Ogden lose a friend

William J. "Bill" Salerno

Bill Salerno, Ogden architect and patron of the arts, died Monday, and we at Union Station will particularly miss him.

Bill only served a year on the Union Station Foundation's board of directors, but Foundation Executive Director Roberta Beverly said he was a long-time advocate, supporter and donor to the station.

"He was just committed to the station and the arts," she told me Thursday morning. "He went out and spoke for the station and advocated for the station and for the arts."

In addition to supporting the many artistic events that take place at the station, his own handiwork is all over the station. He did the architectural drawing for several projects at the station, including the Eccles Rail Center Plaza which houses our outdoor display of vintage rail engines. Roberta can't remember him every charging for that. When Warren's Model Train shop moved into new digs in the station, again he did the designs.

Bob Geier, former director of Union Station, said Bill was deeply involved in his community and saw his work as a way to build it up.

"Bill was always caring about the Ogden Community," Bob wrote.  "He was active in the Red Cross, Weber County Heritage Foundation, Ogden Union Station Foundation and the  Imagine Ballet as well as others. He was always available to help a good cause!  

Eccles Rail Center Plans

"Bill's office perched on the corner of Grant and 25th St. gave him some insight into  our community and he loved to share some of the stories at lunch usually at  Roosters or La Ferrovia about the humanity that flowed by."

Bob said Bill was especially devoted to his daughter, Marissa, and his wife.

"He loved his wife Tammy and spoke about her caring for the children in the classes  that she taught.  Tammy taught special education and that takes a very special  educator to handle some of those challenges.

"Tammy and Bill worked together to make a great home for Marissa and affording her every opportunity they could. They have succeeded in raising a lovely young lady  together.  

"Bill has his fingerprints all over the town, whether it was the Ogden City Public Works building or something as simple as a small home remodel.    He loved Ogden  and enjoyed the people.  I will miss seeing his light on in his office late at night as  he worked.  Bill had many friends in Ogden and he will be missed deeply both  professionally and as a friend."

You can read his obituary here (click).  Several prominent families and officials have already left tributes to him, and I'm sure more will follow.

We at Union Station are very grateful for his many gifts and services to the station and the community over the years. We will miss him.


Ogden needs more folks like him.    

Nothing Simple About Tuning Up A '26 Lincoln

Back in the day I had a 1975 VW Rabbit.

Real lemon. Among it's many, many problems was a worn shaft in the distributor that made the rotor wobble as it spun. It would have cost a grundle of money to replace the shaft, money I didn't have.

So the thing wobbled, which meant the ignition points didn't stay gapped properly, which meant they tended to wear out often.

I got very good at replacing ingnition points. Fortunately they only cost a couple dollars a set. Popping the top off the distributor, taking the old points out and putting new ones in, got to be automatic. Points that should have lasted 15,000 miles, easy, rarely went more than 2,000 or 3,000, but who cared?

Distributor of the '26 Lincoln showing
one set of points.

I could gap them by sight. In an all mechanical engine, no computers, no electronics, there was enough play in the system that precision didn't matter, especially since the shaft's wobble meant precision was impossible in the first place.

Rotor of the '26 Lincoln

I thought of this as I came into the Browning-Kimball Car Museum at Union Station this morning and found Steve Sherwood standing by our 1926 Lincoln, spare tire off, hood flaps up, table full of wrenches and other tools nearby.

This Lincoln is a gem. Silent film actor Ernest Torrence was its original owner, the Browning family bought it in its original unrestored condition and it has stayed that way ever since. It's got fewer than 50,000 actual miles on the odometer, and Steve didn't think it had ever been tuned up since the Brownings bought it.

It was backfiring a bit the last time he started it, he said, so he figured it was time.

The 1926 Lincoln is a far cry from my old Rabbit. It's a V-8 with a dual carb and dual distributor. That means there's two sets of points, one on each side of the distributor, and two electrical contacts that the spinning distributor hits. You could say the car really has two engines, sitting side-by-side, taking turns firing their cylinders.

Steve has to polish the points, "and the manual says you can't use sandpaper, you have to use an oiled stone," he said, just like honing a knife blade. That means he had to take each set of points completely apart, polish the point faces, and reassemble them.


Turning over the engine so you can set the gap is no simple matter. On my old rabbit I just pushed the belt on the shaft around until the point was on top of the distributor shaft's cam. On the Lincoln, Steve had to turn the engine crank below the radiator, first opening up priming cups on each cylinder to reduce the compression. The cups are there to allow extra fuel to be added to the cylinders manually in cold weather, but also make turning over the engine a lot easier.

Once he gets the distributor all put back together he's got to set the timing, pulling up floorboards in the passenger area so he can see the mark on the flywheel. The whole thing has to be set precisely, with both sides of the engine coordinated exactly, or the engine won't work.

It's a real pain, to be honest, but Steve loves it because he loves the car and all it means for history. He will spend hours pondering the thing.

Me, I'm glad my current car doesn't need any of that. I was never much of a backyard mechanic. My old Rabbit made me one, but I was not sorry to see it go.

The current run of computer-run engines, which barely need a glance from me every 10,000 miles or so, suit me just fine.

Lost Korea As Cool As A Lost Van Gogh

I told the lovely Dr. Carla Trentelman that one of the biggest discoveries I'm making while digging through Union Station's archives is how easy it is for stuff to get lost even in a museum.

"I really understand how a long lost work by Van Gogh or Michelangelo or Titian can turn up sitting on a museum shelf," I told her. "It's right there all the time but nobody knows it."

We've all seen the "Raiders of the Lost Arc" film where the Arc of the Covenant gets buried in an anonymous government warehouse. On a smaller scale, that is what is happening in every museum in the world. At least, every museum that doesn't have a world-class anal retentive indexing system installed. Stuff gets misfiled, or not indexed in sufficient detail. People die or retire and new filing systems are put into place that skip stuff. Nobody has time to really look, closely, at everything on every shelf.

Union Station's archive is pretty small -- rows of shelves jammed into a room the size of a small living room. One guy, Lee Witten, has done his best to organize and catalog things, but he's a volunteer like everyone else here and hasn't got time for the sort of detail that would reveal that lost VanGogh, so to speak.

I mean, he'd spot a real VanGogh, obviously, especially if it were among the thousands of feet of super-8 movie film of trains he's spent the last several months going through, but a propaganda leaflet from the Korean War?

He didn't know it was here.

I'm trying to learn the collection here. Lee's indexing is vast, with thousand of entries in our database, but that would rot my brain to go through one by one.

So I'm just pulling boxes off the shelf at random to see what's there.

Last week it was a collection of old valentines from Ruth Myers Schrider. I mentioned in that blog (click) that there was also some stuff from Korea, and this week I looked at that.

Tom Myers was Ruth's brother perhaps?  He spent some time as a civilian working for the American military occupation force in Korea beginning in 1947. Korea was divided between north and south after WWII ended, the US, Japan and others countries still had armed forces there while the politics of deciding how the country would be governed got sorted out. That sorting led to the Korean War.

What a trove of stuff Myers left.

In a way it's cool because it's so ordinary: There are books of a "Getting to Know Korea" nature given to soldiers serving there so they would know how to behave in a strange culture.

"Koreans will not bear any assumption of superiority on the art of any men on grounds of race, creed or color," one book says. "They themselves are without any of these prejudices on any of these counts."

Avoid the women, it says. "The limitations imposed by the length of duty tour in Korea precludes most Americans becoming sufficient familiar with the social customs" to avoid committing a major breach of etiquette.

In fact, "sexual relations, regardless of how inspired, other than through the lowest form of prostitutes, is deemed by Koreans to be classed as an act of rape," and will get both man and woman in serious trouble.

There's fun items of every day life: A bar list from the Dai Iti Hotel in Tokyo which served drinks for 20 cents or so, collections of post cards showing typical Korean life and culture, a menu from the American-run hotel of some sort for Thanksgiving showing a typical turkey dinner with all the trimmings.

Interesting, the menu claims it is the "famous Cho-Kwang Hotel on Skidrow Alley" in Seoul.

Skidrow Alley? One smells one's chain being jerked, especially since the "hotel" staff are all US military personnel.

Lots of pictures, of course. Some scraps of Korean money. The bar list has some sort of crude map drawn on it.

All very mundane, but that's the point. Mundane items of daily life are precisely what don't, normally, get saved over the ages. These show slices of life of a Korean before a terrible war tore through that peninsula in the early 1950s.

Wrong Turn: More and more expensive roads

I got home from the clean air protest in Salt Lake on Saturday (yes, I took FrontRunner), had a hot toddy and good nights rest and awoke to find the Sunday paper full of the news of a brand spanking spiffy new road in Davis County.

Three miles (click) long, it cost $70 million to build, but as we know, cost is no object with building roads in Utah. The normally fiscally conservative Utahns who hate teacher unions because they demands living wages for educators, decry waste from programs that feed the poor, and generally want pennies pinched en masse, have no problem blowing $70 million on a stretch of asphalt a piddling 3 miles long that will probably need resurfacing in ten years, or less and won't return a dime of revenue to anyone.

Rant: Why is it politicians scream that things like FrontRunner need a "subsidy" to operate, but never talk about the subsidy that roads require? Sure, roads enable commerce, but so do trains. OK, I know: Roads are built by contractors who make campaign donations, and roads make sure those contractors have  years and years of maintenance work to do, too. Jobs for all!

That's why roads don't need "subsidies." They just need millions of dollars in repairs every year. Trains? Not so much. Rails don't develop chuckholes.

This same rant applies to Amtrak, by the way. Congress makes all of us pay billions every year for highways for car drivers to use, and governments on all levels massively subsidize airports and air traffic control (Salt Lake City puts $50 million a year into running Salt Lake International), but passenger rail traffic is derided for it's massive "subsidy."

<Rant mode> <Exit>

No clue how many folks driving that spiffy new road in Davis complained about the bad air they were driving through as they took their kids to the doctor or asthma clinic. Ten percent of Utahns have asthma, so some certainly did.

The sad thing about the story is that it praises former Clearfield Mayor Neldon Hamblin for his foresight in planning the road, and working for it, when what he did was plan and push for what is essentially, as we are starting to see, dead technology.

No, seriously. Oil, despite the current apparent boom in drilling in the US, is an 8-track tape energy source. The Wasatch Front, as we can see any day the sun shines on all that air pollution, is being literally choked by cars. And cars themselves, at least those powered by internal combustion engines, are old school, slowly being replaced. Sure electric cars have their issues, but those issues are being solved.

I still say, if employers in Utah had any brains they'd be pushing for alternatives for their workers to using cars. Cars are expensive, forcing employees to demand better pay and getting grumpy when they don't get it. If employees could avoid using their cars to get to work every day, they'd have more money to spend on fun stuff and be happier. When I was working at the Standard my car was my single largest living expense, costing upwards of $100 a month.

Nothing against Hamblin, but if he'd really had foresight 25 years ago, he'd have pushed for more developments around his city that were planned to work better around mass transit, and more mass transit, not more roads. Housing projects clustered around transit stops, for example, and
bicycle and walking paths so folks could get to those transit stops more easily and naturally.

A more promising story is the one about Clearfield's current mayor and council working to build a $120 million development adjacent to the city's FrontRunner stop. (click) The idea is to have housing and businesses adjacent to the FrontRunner, both to let folks get to the train easily, and to attract folks from other cities who want to get to the shopping by train.

Which is exactly what sponsors of mass transit promised it would do.

A development near the train also won't need any $70 million roads to get to it. If the planner and builders have proper foresight, they'll figure out a way for people to walk.

Historical and darn cute Valentines

With Valentine's Day only weeks away, I thought it would be fun to peek into one of the more interesting collections I've found in Union Station's archive: The Ruth Myers Valentines.

I'm still trying to figure out more who Ruth is, or was.  She was Ruth Myers Shrider, who married D.O. Schrider and died in 1942, according to the note on the box. Her husband died in 1955, and I'm guessing the family donated all the old stuff just so they didn't have the pain of throwing it away.

In addition to old Valentines there are pictures and documents from T. E. Myers time in Korea during the Korean War, some railroad documents and pictures, and lots of other stuff. To be honest, I'm  just beginning to dig through the boxes.

This first one contains a lot of Valentines that Ruth apparently collected in the 1930s, although some seem addressed to her brothers or other siblings. Whatever.

What's really cool is just looking at the old designs -- the 30s styles of clothing, the way children are portrayed, the die-cut lace and movable elements of the cards. And, yes, the occasional politically incorrect one.

You can imagine going into the 5 and dime
and picking them out for a penny a piece, or whatever. Or perhaps one of those boxes of 30 that included one for the teacher.

Anyway, that's it -- spiffy old Valentines. I told Lee Witten, the archivist here, that we could probably get a fortune for these things on eBay, but obviously that won't be happening. They're history, they're culture, and they're here for as long as the walls stand.

Wear Your Official Utah State Face Mask!

OK, So Utah has a state flower (Sego Lily), a state cooking pot (Dutch oven) and a state rock, (coal). I still say coal is a mineral, not a rock, but this is the Legislature talking, so who cares?

And a state gun, of course, the Browning Automatic 1911.

So why not, these days, a state face mask? I propose the standard issue surgical mask, of which many brands exist. Some even prevent the spread of flu!

Everyone says "Oh, Utah's air has always had this problem," but I challenge you to find a copy of the Salt Lake Tribune, Deseret News or Standard-Examiner dated before 1970 containing an officially issued government warning not to breathe deeply outdoors.

Sure, there were days the air was bad -- we could see the smoke plume from the copper mine in Magna steadily filling the valley -- but nothing like today.

Nothing. Sorry, I was here, it is true.

Saturday I'm going (via mass transit) to this rally (click!) in SLC to demand the Legislature do something a bit more aggressive than just handing out bumper stickers urging folks to car pool. A recent plan to take measures that won't meet federal standards is a good place to start (click) but it should not stop there.

The Legislature is fond of saying that attacking industrial pollution scares away jobs and only deals with 10 percent of the problem. Nobody ever says how many jobs Utah's foul air scares away, California seems to have no trouble attracting jobs (click)  despite strict standards, and if we can take care of 10 percent of the problem, that's a good place to start.

Yes, car pooling would help, but spending more on mass transit and less on highways would would make mass transit more convenient and shift population patterns to a healthier method of getting around. If the car is an expensive hassle, and FrontRunner/Trax/bus can do the job, people will find a way.

The real trick will be breaking Utahns' habit of wanting to live in that quiet rural subdivision (which they rapidly make noisy and non-rural by crowding in) and live close to where they work so they burn less gasoline getting to their job. Sure, big city taxes and housing costs are higher, but what is the cost of replacing your car every three years? And filling your tank once or twice a week?

The cooking pot, lily and gun are all marketing symbols, meant to show what joys the state has to offer.

A state mask will be different, a way to tell our own residents, our own lawmakers and policy makers, what sort of state we are really building here.

If that sends a bad message, well, build differently.

Fun Railroad Stuff That Just Shows Up

Came into the Union Station archive this morning to find Chief Archivist Lee Witten almost drooling over a pile of old books, photos and railroad gear that he was lovingly sorting out on the table.

All of it was donated to the archives by Donna Forbes, Midvale, whose dad started as a telegrapher for the Union Pacific Railroad in 1942 and worked as a dispatcher and rules examiner until he retired in 1983.

He was a saver, even preserving the original flimsies for telegraph orders on his first day at work. His notebooks are filled with carefully handwritten notes on promotions and tests of guys working to be promoted to conductor, train orders and all sorts of other stuff.

There's a couple of telegraph keys and a practice key, complete with tapes of signals to be translated so he could build his speed or keep his skills honed. There's a nice pile of pictures of old steam engines.

Mr. Forbes worked in Las Vegas and then Salt Lake City. I'm guessing he died since then -- I will be talking to his daughter to get his full history -- and all his stuff is the sort of thing that gets tossed out by children or grandchildren unless they think, as Ms. Forbes did, that they should be preserved.

So she brought them to us and they will be saved, with extreme care and gratitude.