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.