Oh My Heck Yeah Utah
One post about the state we have grown to love every day of the work week.
M W F should hopefully intrigue and entice you.
T H may have the opposite effect...
One post about the state we have grown to love every day of the work week.
M W F should hopefully intrigue and entice you.
T H may have the opposite effect...
Today’s Old School Utahn is Simon Bamberger (1846-1926), Utah’s fourth governor, first non-Mormon governor, first Democrat governor, and first (and so far only) Jewish governor.
Born in Germany, he immigrated to the US at 14 and settled in Utah in his 20s. After running a hotel in Ogden and running several other business ventures, he ran for state senate and was very successful, and became governor in 1917. During his time in office, unionization was officially legalized and high school attendance became mandatory. He also called a legislative session specifically for the ratification of the 19th amendment. He only served one term, and in 1921 retired to his businesses for five years before his death.
I really freaking do. I had a hard time tracking it down in audio or video format so you could witness the horror for yourself if you were unfamiliar with it, but have a wikipedia link for your edification. Trust me when I say that it sounds like an ad for Utah, if we were a large, soulless corporation. Apparently it wasn’t our state song until 2003. Prior to that, our state song was “Utah We Love Thee”, which sadly, I have never heard, but it can’t be any worse than what we currently have.
I personally think we should wait to see if Sufjan Stevens ever gets to us in his fifty states project, and just choose something off of that to replace “Utah: This is the Place”.
Alex
Today’s Old School Utahn is John D. Fitzgerald (1906-1988), a Utahn by birth who went on to write the Great Brain series. For those who did not spend part of their childhoods freakishly devoted to this series, it’s basically the story of a Catholic family in a mostly-Mormon Southern Utah in the (or at least this was the impression that I gathered from the books) early 1900s, the middle child of which basically swindles someone out of something outrageous in every story. (They’re better than they sound, okay?) I’ve read all of them at some point in my life, and just thinking about them makes me want to go to my grandma’s house and find all my copies.
Did anyone else read the Great Brain series as a kid, or am I alone in the world?
That old schoolhouse/church (I’ve been told it is both…) is about 10-15 minutes up the road from my parent’s house, on the way to the Cottonwood Canyons (skiing, hiking, rock climbing) so we would pass it all the time while I was a kid. I have always loved it and have dreamt of owning it and fixing it up into a beautiful house for me and my loved one. *sigh*
One night in HS after musical practice and dealing with some shit, I drove up to it, parked across the street, jumped the fence, and simply walked around it. Damn I was rebellious…!
This is some interesting history on it and the Granite community that it was for:
http://www.granitecommunitycouncil.org/history.php
Slowtrain has new store shirts! If you are unfamiliar with Slowtrain, it is the best music shop in Utah. The most friendly owners and staff and just a down to earth heaven. Check it out immediately!
A much shorter post today, to make up for my “you guys, check out my great-great-great-grandma, wasn’t she totally cool you guys?!” blather of Tuesday.
If you live in or near Salt Lake City and have never been to Gilgal Garden, I demand that you go immediately. Or at your next convenience (I’m feeling charitable). Because Gilgal Garden is, to me at least, one of the most quintessentially Utahn places in existence. Where else are you going to find a sphinx statue with Joseph Smith’s head, or any of the other weird/awesome things there? Answer: nowhere. Go see it.
Alex
I would be completely fine calling myself a Utahn, but only with more concrete proof than “We went to another expert - Susan Hermance, assistant copy chief at the Deseret News. It’s Utahns, she said. Why? “That’s just the way we’ve always done it. It’s easier to pronounce. Utahans is a mouthful.” I feel that is the majority of how things roll in Utah. “That word has too many syllables, so lets take one or two out.” ex. moun-an for mountain, cran for crayon. Also, what makes Susan Hermance such an expert? Hmmmm?
And Deseret News, don’t be ripping Esquire apart, they are a classy magazine.
I personally think that Utahan is more appealing to the eye on paper. An H followed by an N with no vowel between them is just dirty.
As soon as I’d decided that my Tuesdays here were going to be Old School Utahn Tuesdays, I immediately knew who my first entry would have to be on: Emeline Grover Rich.
Emeline (also spelled “Emmeline”, depending on which sources you consult) Grover Rich is my great-great-great grandmother. As a child, she was one of the main people my grandmother (the family historian) told me stories about. However, unlike the stories she would tell me about my male ancestors, these stories were rarely detailed, since there’s not really much that we know for sure about Emeline Grover. She was born in 1831 in upstate New York, married Charles C. Rich at the age 16 in 1846 and was the fifth of his six wives. Emeline was a well-known midwife (she even went to a medical college at one point, and taught there for a few years until it closed) and it’s said she could perform basic dentistry. She died in 1917 in Paris, Idaho.
This Is The Place park near Salt Lake City (essentially a tourist trap for visiting Mormons) has a house that Emeline shared with one of Rich’s other wives for a few years on its grounds. You can actually walk inside it and see the kitchen that she cooked in, the room she slept in, the cradle she rocked one of her 8 children in. But if you ask one of the tour guides who lived here, all they’ll tell you is her name and whose wife she was.
All in all, there’s really not that much information available on Emeline that would allow anyone to write about her extensively. Compared to many of her male contemporaries, or the wives of more famous LDS church leaders of the time, there’s very little written material available on her. Though excerpts from her diary can be found online, they’ve never been quite enough for me. I’ve always wished I could sit down with a biography on her, the way that I can with many of my male Mormon pioneer ancestors (biographies of early LDS church leaders are something of a cottage industry among people interested in Mormon genealogy).
I plan to continue to research Emeline further in the future. For now, I often feel lucky to know the little I do about her, and remember what my cousin Peter once said about Emeline (yeah, we’re the kind of kids who sit around talking about dead pioneers. You got a problem?) when we were talking about her once: “Emeline Grover was kind of a badass.”
