Utah Centennial County History Series - Salt Lake County 1996

O n e century after settlement, the Salt Lake Valley claimed its identity as a crossroads with a new sense of entitlement. Both the availability of television and increased air travel brought the world closer, resulting in a new sense of sophistication. The arts, fertilized during the years of depression and war, now blossomed abundantly.

In the 1950s, education became a priority both for veterans and the children of the post-war "baby boom." In fact, when the Vietnam War escalated in the next decade, college enrollment ironically allowed many young men to evade the military draft.

So persuasive was the 1950s' national vision of family life, underwritten by a careening birth rate in Salt Lake County, that the ideal of a happy nuclear family predominated in the valley long after the decade ended. In certain respects, the model family that reigned in television's situation comedies, in magazine advertisements, and in the movies was the logical descendant of the agricultural family, a staple of western settlement. The agricultural family (and often the industrial family), however, had depended upon a flexible clan of rel-