The Standard-Examiner's Morgue Lives On At WSU

I know it's not nice to speak ill of the dead, but I'd really like a chance to smack Randy Hatch, and whoever else is responsible for this mess, upside the head.

And I really liked Randy. Still do.

A microfilm cassette

I doubt Randy, who died not long ago, made the decision by himself, and no doubt money was involved. Plus everyone shared an unfounded faith in technology that too many of us still suffer from.

Because when Randy, the then-publisher and editor of the Standard-Examiner, decided, in the mid-1980s, to do away with the company's "antiquated" clip file system of old news stories, he unwittingly condemned several decades of my town's news history to death.

Or, to be more accurate, inaccessibility, which may be worse.

I mean, the stories are sitting right there, in glittering black and white. On 16mm microfilm, in a special weird square proprietary cassette nobody else makes, the special reader for which is probably gracing the shelf of some thrift store, somewhere. Maybe. Landfill, more likely.

And those stories are indexed, of course, on computer files created in long-dead software, migrated from three or four different types of storage disc and finally stored on a single computer at the S-E newsroom which, I am betting, got tossed out years ago.

We've got scores of these things

Which sucks. The microfilm was used from the mid-1980s until the early 2000s, when a computer database was created. About three years ago the S-E changed computers databases again, tried to migrate the archive, failed, so that disappeared as well.  Reporters I talk to, now, grumble a lot about this, but the computer gods are evil and implacable gods, and here we are. I suppose someone can scan the film in, and make it searchable, but that takes money and who has that?

Meanwhile, that old system lives on. Good as ever.

At this point, may I say: God Bless Donna Bingham.

Donna was the S-E's librarian from about 1945  until 2000 when she retired. Every day on the job Donna would take half a dozen copies of the days paper, carefully snip out each of the local stories (being careful to match jumps), as well as any national stories with local import, and stick them all in equally carefully indexed file folders, stamping each story with that day's date.

She was building what newspaper folk used to fondly called the morgue. Thousands of dead stories,

A photo of Donna in the 1950s.

all preserved.

Stories about what? Everything that was in the paper, which means everything. Crime, illness, politics, businesses, the odd and the mundane. Over the years, Donna filed away hundreds of thousands of stories about thousands of subjects in a LOT of file folders.

I did some back-of-the-napkin math today. One banker's box of those file folders contains, roughly 175 file folders.

Just the news stories from 1933, when the S-E apparently started collecting these files, until 1980, fill 36 banker's storage boxes. That means 6,300 file folders. If you guess each one contains 40 clipped stories, that's a quarter million stories, each one clipped, read, dated, indexed and attached to a little paper glued tab.

They don't make people like Donna any more. She was always quiet, always dedicated. She married a fly-boy during World War II, he got shot down, and she spent the rest of her life building that library at the S-E.

She knew those files, too. If you asked for one she'd get a thoughtful look, go dig, and produce it. It might take her five minutes, it might take her two days, but she'd find it.

Time marches on. While I worked at the paper the management decided, first, to do away with Donna's tedious clip work and replace it, instead, with a slick new microfilm system keyed to a computer. This was in the 1980s when computers were hot stuff, the wave of the future.

The pages of the newspaper were filmed, then Donna and a helper would go through the film and type the story information into a computer file, which created a database of index numbers. Clap the film cassette into a special reader, type in the index
number, push the button, and your story magically appeared on the screen.

Very slick, for the 1980s. Donna's clip files, filling huge racks, were pushed aside. As the years passed, they fell into disuse. When the newspaper moved to BDO they were boxed up haphazardly, re-racked haphazardly, re-boxed haphazardly and finally stored in a dungeon-like room.

You know, of course, what happened to the 1980s computers and their software. As I said above, the indexes were migrated, but that only goes so far. Did anyone have time to re-enter all the data to new software?

Of course not. The reader for all that microfilm got old, then got replaced with something simpler that needed an adaptor, and God only knows where even that is now.

The S-E is hardly alone. NASA has had to dig through junk yards for machines that can read stored magnetic tape from early Voyager satellites. Even original tapes of moon landings are hard to read.

Time marches on, as they say, but those clip files Donna created had one good quality: They didn't go away. As any museum curator will tell you, paper lasts. Good paper lasts longer, and these are just newsprint, but they were still there, still readable. Whenever a new editor or publisher came to the S-E I'd be first in line at the reception, talking about those files' value for research, their place in history.

I also talked with Sarah Singh, curator of the Weber State University Special Collections, who started talking to S-E executives about donating those files, now moldering away, to WSU.

It took a bunch of time -- corporations never move quickly -- but last December the S-E finally found a way to donate all the files, now stored safely in WSU's archive.

Sarah took everything: clip files, negative files, picture files. All of it.

The clip files start about 1933 and go until about 1987. This is treasure beyond worth, but of course there are problems. As I said above, the files were moved several times, boxed and unboxed, then boxed again, by people who didn't pay close attention to the alphabet. Sometimes if feels as if the files have been shuffled, no rhyme or reason.

So the first job is just to get them in order, but this, in a way, is fun. I'm spending a day a week just sorting the boxes, then sorting the files, getting them in order again so researches can access Donna's handiwork. Donna's system was simple -- pre-1980, then post-1980, and there was some overlap during the microfilm period.

Why do these files matter, when it is possible to create a computer database? After all, some sites -- the Utah Digital Newspapers site run by the University of Utah is one -- scan whole pages and make them word-searchable. Who needs paper files?

Because it costs a lot of money to create that database. Plus, when you search that database for, let's say, Ogden Mayor Harm Peery, you will get a whole list of links to the stories. Each link must be clicked on, loaded, then looked at to see if it is the item you want.

Over. And over. And over. From 1933 until he died in the early 1960s, The S-E ran more than 900 stories on Ogden's cowboy mayor. Yes, I counted them.

That's a lot of clicking, and reading, and saying "no, not that one," and doing it again.

Or you can open one of Donna's folders on Harm, of which there are about 15.  You can scan dozens of headlines at once.

And you have dozens of subject headings in front of you at once. If you can't find the one you want,  you find one you like.

Today I was working on the "T" section and found "Tabernacle," which covers the LDS Church's

tabernacle in Ogden.

Stories I had never seen before included four about the history, and demolition, of the "Pioneer" tabernacle, built in the 19th Century and torn down in 1971. Interestingly, in May of that year, the S-E ran a story about the building's history and construction. Then, in September, are three images showing its demolition.

Sad, but that's history in Ogden, and it's all preserved in rows and rows of boxes containing rows and rows of musty news clips.

Thank you, Donna. And thank you Randy, and your successors, for at least having the good sense to preserve these. In an era when other papers are dumping their legacies in the shredder, that was a gift worth noting.

For me, it means hours buried in many, many stories of Ogden's past, all of them fascinating, if disorganized. But that will take only time to repair.

I like to think of it as job security. Plus plenty of material for this blog, eh?

How A Reporter And A State Senator Killed The MX Missile In Utah

The headline is clickbait, I admit it.

Nothing is ever simple. Many parts go into everything. National and international considerations were part of the MX "Peacekeeper" missile's life, and death.

Still, at one point in time our government DID want to base the thing in Utah, building thousands of miles of massively expensive concrete highways to nowhere for it. It might have happened, too, except that the silliness of that idea -- thousands of miles of highway nowhere -- did finally get pointed out. Politicians finally had to admit it was silly. The LDS church even had to admit, finally, that it was silly.

So the part played by that reporter, and that state senator, are easy to overlook, but were critical. Sometimes the tiny pebble that overturns the cart remains unseen, but still that cart is tipped.

The MX missile was a 1970s attempt to prevent nuclear war by building more and better missiles. If you are unclear on why that was a thing, go rent "Dr. Strangelove" and have a look. Missiles and mine shaft gaps: All play their part.

The idea was that the US would base those missiles above ground, in Utah and Nevada. They'd be put on trailers and hauled around on from one shelter to the next, playing hide-and-seek with Russian spy satellites. A vastly more full description of the thing can be found here (click.)

Since memories are short, and stuff that happened last year is ancient history, not a lot of folks remember this. I found a file on the MX missile while working at Weber State University's Special Collections library recently.

The library has acquired the Standard-Examiner's complete clip files, the paper files cut out and pasted carefully into file folders. I have the job of doing the initial sort on them--putting them back into alphabetical order after decades of bad storage and neglectful filing by careless reporters (myself included.)

Handling the thousands of file folders full of clips, it is impossible not to look inside and be fascinated. Newspapers are history in the making, and their morgue files were repositories of decades of fascinating stories, day by day, as they happened. When I checked out the file folder for the MX, a lot of memories came flooding back.

In many ways, the news coverage paralleled any major defense  program: Environmental impact is pondered, economic impact is cheered, people say it will be good or bad based, mostly, on whether it will be good or bad for them. Tiny towns in the middle of nowhere cheered the idea of massive construction crew coming to town.

And the military did its best to make it look good. It weighed heavily on the idea that the basing system would only cover 25 square miles. This is where Sen. Frances Farley, a democrat from Salt Lake City, comes into the story. And a reporter.

Sen. Farley was an amazing woman who had that very uncommon thing called "common sense." She also had a calculator, and when she was at one of the public hearings about the MX missile basing system she took that calculator out.

The idea was that the missiles would be in shelters dotted all over the Great Basin between Nevada and Utah. When the Air Force talked about 25 square miles, it was only talking about the 2.5 acres around each of the shelters, not the 4000-plus shelters it would build on 200 loops in the middle of the desert, nor the 5,000 miles of concrete highways connecting those loops.

What would it look like? The S-E did publish a map:

But when the Air Force is going on and on about a mere 25 square miles, well, who cares about 25 square miles.

Peter Gillins who was, back them Associated Press Bureau Chief, said he was sitting in a hearing on all this and happened to be sitting next to Sen. Farley, who had her calculator. He said Farley took our her calculator, punched in some numbers on roads and shelters and so forth, and showed the result to Gillins.

"This is insane," she said to him, or something similar.

"Stand up and tell them that," Pete said he told her. So she did. And she did again, and again.
In Nov. of 1979 she spoke to the Sierra Club in Ogden, and reporter Bob Anderson, at the S-E, did a great job of reporting her outrage at how idiotic the proposal was.

While there were "only" 200 loops for the missiles to be driven around, she said, there would be 4,600 shelters for them, each on its own 2.5 acres of fenced land.

There would be 5000 miles of road connecting them -- that's enough highway to go from New York to California and back again. While that might mean some temporary jobs during construction, she said, it would be a boom-and-bust deal, with maybe a few thousand permanent jobs.

Speaking of booms: One of the calculations in building this was that, if the Soviet Union ever tried to attack the MX system, it would be forced to attack ALL those 4,500 shelters in hopes of getting all of them. Ponder 4,600 nuclear bombs, all going off, within 500 miles of Salt Lake City.

At what cost? Estimates were $30 billion, in 1979, or more than $100 billion in today's money. I remember seeing promotional pictures of those highways out in the desert, showing a cyclist pedaling along one, the alleged civilian benefit of the things, but what cyclist is going to drive 100 miles to nowhere to nowhere on circles of highway in the middle of nowhere?

"When the Air Force tells you about 25 square miles being fenced, they're not telling you of 20,000 or 25,000 square miles to be fenced," she told the Sierra Club. "Those highways go to no place. What are they going to do, put a Holiday Inn at every loop for the tourist business?"

Utah politicians, upon studying the thing, started grumbling and asking more questions. Congress balked at the cost, and eventually the whole thing was put in missile silos instead.

There are those who say the LDS Church, in a statement issued in June of 1981, killed the racetrack system as far as Utah and Nevada are concerned. The statement (here: CLICK)  discusses environmental and cost concerns, but it also gave Utah's lawmakers much-needed backing to oppose the thing.

But hard facts help. A thinking state senator and her calculator helped put them into play.

A suicide story's snapshot of a life in Ogden

Newspapers don’t publish stores about suicides any more, the thinking being that it is a private affair and the family has enough trouble. When I worked at the Standard-Examiner, starting in 1978, the policy was to ignore them unless they were public.

Even obituaries, which at that time were staff-written, did not mention them unless you knew the
code: Obituaries for suicides said they died “of injuries,” and nothing more.

But it was not always so. As I was sorting out the old files of news clips from the Standard-Examiner now stored at Weber State University, I came across four full file folders, from 1933 to the late 60s, with dozens of stories of suicides.

It’s a tragic collection — people found hanged, shot, suffocated, sitting in cars, all the various ways. When a man named “W. I. Isherwood” decided to let a Southern Pacific cut his head off, the event got 5 inches of copy, complete with details.

So, tragedy aplenty in this collection, but one story went a bit farther, giving us a look into one of the characters of Ogden, those random folks who make a public contribution to the city being interesting, more human.

The story goes beyond mere details. Perhaps the reporter, feeling a big guilty about not doing a story the guy deserved when he was alive, felt it would be a nice tribute after he was gone, no matter what the circumstances.

John Thomas Vaughan was 54 in 1936. He was born in England, but lived in Ogden for 47 years. The story reporting his death, which ran Dec. 4, 1936, says he was one of the oldest taxi drivers in Ogden. He hung around Union Station, making his living during the summer by taking tourists for tours.

“Ride around the city, up Ogden Canyon and back to your train” was his pitch as he greeted tourists  who were wondering how to kill time between trains.

He like to tell stories of those tourists, like the ones who asked him to take them to the airport, then go on an airplane ride with them. “A keen judge of human nature, he was reported recently to have refused a ride to Luther Jones, now under death sentence in Nevada for murder.”

Lucky for him. Jones, according to a web site called “Murderpedia” was a bad sort: A resident of the Montana state prison, he was released, traveled to Utah in October of 1936,  forced a tax driver to take him to Montello, Nev., stole the cab,  held up three other men and ended up killing one. He was executed in January of 1937.

The S-E story says Vaughan’s normal custom was to work during the summer tourist season in Ogden, then take his cab for a vacation during the winter. The previous winter he had toured the southern states and Mexico.

But things got hard. The story doesn’t say what the specific problem was, but it says he was “despondent over ill health.” Police said he had crawled into bed, put a shotgun against his chest and pulled the trigger.