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Part III 100 Years at the Utah State Historical Society
Russ Mortensen gave Utah Historical Quarterly a facelift and promoted special issues.
* Continued from Part II
Emboldened by its success, Mortensen began producing additional special issues aimed at a popular audience In 1961, to commemorate the centennial of the Cotton Mission in southwestern Utah, he commissioned authors like Juanita Brooks and A. Karl Larson to produce an issue called Utah's Dixie: The Cotton Mission.96 For that extraordinarily scenic part of the state, a great deal of color seemed appropriate. Mortensen secured subsidies for the color from the mayor of St. George and the centennial committee in return for which he provided a detachable color supplement in the issue that they could use as a special handout for visitors.
Not all special issues were successful. A very large printing during the administration of Charles S Peterson commemorating the 1969 centennial of the driving of the Golden Spike was poorly merchandised, even though it was declared the official publication of the Golden Spike Commission, and languished for years in storage. After the Mortensen years few additional attempts were made to mount the immense marketing programs of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake and Cotton Mission issues. Nevertheless, the Mortensen marketing legacy remained alive, as special commemorative issues often featuring color covers, at least, continued to appear, and for many years every issue of the Quarterly was organized around a theme.97
The study and writing of Utah history broadened and matured greatly during the Mortensen years. Although the Society was a significant focal point for that flowering—from the popularity of the Kearns mansion, its increasingly professionalized staff, and its burgeoning library, manuscript, and archival collection—the University of Utah also made important contributions. During the presidency of A. Ray Olpin (1946-64) the university began developing into a genuine research institution with an adequate library and a faculty of research oriented Ph.D.s who attracted energetic and ambitious graduate students. Western specialists in the history department included C. Gregory Crampton, David E. Miller, Brigham D. Madsen, and others, all committed to producing factually accurate and objectively interpreted Utah history.
To take advantage of this rapidly increasing interest in Utah history, Mortensen decided to resurrect the Society's yearly meetings. On October 17, 1952, the annual dinner meetings were resumed in the form of a gathering at the Lion House Although it was not the "First Annual Meeting" as advertised, it did mark a fresh start, and the annual meeting tradition has continued unbroken since that date. The featured speaker, UC Berkeley agricultural historian John D Hicks, spoke on "The American Tradition of Democracy." Although the meeting was poorly attended, with about fifty people present, it was deemed enough of a success that the tradition continued.98
Following the Society's arrival at the Kearns mansion, the board began a bimonthly lecture series in conjunction with the board meeting. The lectures continued for a number of years. Meanwhile, the annual meetings were expanded to two-day affairs during Everett Cooley's directorship (1961-69) Beginning on a Friday, the meeting culminated in a Saturday evening banquet with a speaker. Cooley generated enthusiasm for an extended meeting by breaking it up into specialized sessions that included fields like folklore and eventually archaeology and historic preservation. The expanded annual meetings also provided a public forum for presenting awards for outstanding contributions to Utah history. A few of the awards generated controversy; the Society received considerable criticism in 1967 when it conferred the Fellow Award—its highest scholarly honor—upon Fawn McKay Brodie for her much-debated biography ofJoseph Smith. Other observers felt that the Society was demonstrating its independence from the influence of the LDS church and praised the award as a step in the Society's emerging professionalism.
During the early years of the extended annual meeting, John James remembered, "At times we've been worried that we wouldn't have a crowd. Sometimes at the last minute the girls would get all the phones going all day long calling people to plead with them to come and things like that." While the expanded annual meeting may have been a little premature, interest in Utah history soon caught up with it, and the annual meeting tradition has thrived.99
THE BEGINNING OF STATE ARCHIVES
Another major program begun under Mortensen and expanded under Cooley was the State Archives. Responsibility for official state records was clearly given to the Society in the legislation that made it a state institution in 1917: "It is hereby made custodian of all records, documents, relics and other material of historical value, which are now or hereafter may be in charge of any State, County, or other official ."10° Nevertheless, the Society had done little to assume that responsibility before Mortensen became director During the late 1930s the WPA Historical Records Survey had prepared inventories of most county archives, a necessary first step toward appraising and caring for those records deemed worthy of preservation. Following up on that in 1946, the Society sent letters to county recorders informing them not to destroy records and offering them assistance in inventorying and preserving them, but one has to wonder what kind of help, in those underfunded and understaffed days, the Society was actually in a position to provide. In fact the only action that occurred was that Cedar City historian William R Palmer was equipped with a primitive microfilm camera and sent around the state to film whatever county records he could identify as worth saving. His filming technique was inadequate, however, and much of the film was illegible.101
Shortly after Mortensen assumed office, he began to receive pressure from the secretary of state to begin some kind of archival program. In 1953 he wrote to each of the county records officers, informing them of their responsibility to preserve the records under their care, and announced that he would address their annual convention the following January and make professional archival services available to them. In one of his genuine triumphs as director, he convinced the parsimonious J. Bracken Lee to provide a deficit appropriation to hire a professional archivist, arguing successfully that a proper records management and archives program would actually save money by eliminating storage of nonessential records. The following summer, Everett L. Cooley was hired as the first state archivist.102
Cooley was born in WestJordan and educated at the University of Utah where he received bachelor's and master's degrees in history After a Mormon mission to Germany and Canada and three years in the navy, he earned a Ph.D. in history at the University of California, Berkeley. Cooley had been a runner-up when Mortensen was hired by the Historical Society, and it was at about that time that the two began a lifelong friendship. "Mortensen and I got along famously," he recalled. "Oh, I suppose there were one or two things we had disagreements on, but on the whole, we worked very well together, and he supported me one hundred percent on the archives programs. . . ."103 When Mortensen resigned in 1961 to assume the directorship of the University of Utah Press, Cooley replaced him at the helm of the Society and remained there until 1969. A born salesman and diplomat, but anchored by impeccable scholarly standards and visionary leadership, Cooley became a legendary figure in the fields of archives and manuscripts and rare books Not only did he create the Utah State Archives, but he also began the Society's first aggressive manuscript collecting program. In later years as director of Special Collections in the Marriott Library at the University of Utah, he spent the generous Marriott endowment efficiently and built one of the finest rare book and manuscript collections in the West
As state archivist, Cooley had his work cut out for him. A survey of state and local records seemed the necessary first step. Although the WPA had surveyed the county archives, it had left no indication of the condition of the records nor of the circumstances under which they were being stored, both factors that could easily have changed over twenty years anyway. What he found was very discouraging and alarming. State records in the Capitol had been thrown into available closets and rooms, sometimes without even being boxed; one governor's papers were loose sheets of paper scattered over the floor of a basement room County records were being destroyed randomly without authorization. Pigeons were roosting on some records in the Salt Lake City and County Building.104
Worse yet, as long as the Society was confined to cramped quarters in the State Capitol there was little Cooley could do to accession state records, for there was simply no place to put them; Cooley himself was forced to work in the Capitol rotunda while the legislature was in session. One county official from central Utah brought a truckload of records to the Capitol to turn over to the archives, but, after examining the available facilities, he simply drove back home without unloading the truck.
In time things got better. Cooley worked out records disposition schedules and authorized county records officers to manage their own archives, including regular disposal of noncurrent records upon authorization from the State Records Committee (the attorney general, state auditor, and director of the Society). Limited space became available in the basement of the Capitol for records storage (although it had been used by the wildlife department for storage of animal pelts and was almost unbearably smelly). A budget was provided to begin a microfilming program. When the Society moved into the mansion, space in the basement there supplemented the space in the Capitol, and a regular program of accessioning records was possible.
State Archives ceased to be a part of the Historical Society's program in 1968 as a result of recommendations made by the so-called Little Hoover Commission of 1965. Historically, the movement to reorganize state governments had its roots in the Progressive Era as muckraking journalists convinced reformers to clean up governmental corruption, and as governments became dramatically more complex when they undertook social welfare programs. Conservatives, skeptical of such expanded government programs, naturally led the way in reorganizing and trimming government in the interests of economy and efficiency, and Utah government reorganization was first attempted by Governor Charles R. Mabey in 1921. Subsequent reorganizations were accomplished in 1933, 1935, and 1941.105
It was under the Democrat Calvin L. Rampton, however, that the most massive reorganization of Utah government took place Senate Bill 20, passed by the legislature on March 25, 1965, created a Commission on the Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, chaired by Joseph Rosenblatt and unofficially known as the Little Hoover Commission The commission retained a private consulting firm from Chicago—Boos, Allen and Hamilton—which had performed similar investigations in Alaska and elsewhere. Addressing leaders of the Utah State Public Employees Association, Rosenblatt painted a chilling picture of a state government that had become unmanageably bloated, a bureaucracy with no less than 156 separate agencies within which the governor had to make appointments to over 526 positions "Through this process [of multiplication of new state agencies]," Rosenblatt asserted, "little empires are built, special interests are served and all at the public's general expense—and the example is given which encourages other special interests to demand still other separate agencies that they can call their own."106
Cooley, director of the Society by that time, remembers receiving only the most perfunctory examination from the Little Hoover investigators and believes that their minds were already made up regarding the Society. Failing perhaps to understand that it was in fact a state agency, they had decided to divorce the archives from what they assumed was a private organization and to place it with the Department of General Services. The Society itself, which had to this point been an independent agency (and thus presumably one of Rosenblatt's "little empires") was placed within the Department of Development Services and given responsibility for administration of historic sites but provided with no additional funding.
In an undated response to the commission's recommendations, Cooley bowed to the inevitable reorganization but requested certain modifications. Arguing that the Society was having enough trouble maintaining the Kearns mansion within its present budget and that assuming responsibility for other historic sites would simply be impossible, he won permission to allow the Daughters of Utah Pioneers to continue administering such sites with money provided as part of the Society's appropriation. Less successfully, he protested that the Society would be an administrative orphan in the Department of Development Services with such economically oriented agencies as Tourism and Publicity, the Fair Board, the Aviation Board, and Industrial Development Instead, he recommended establishment of a Department of Cultural Affairs to include the Historical Society, the Institute of Fine Arts, the State Library, and the Law Library.107
Well intentioned though it was, it would be difficult to regard the work of the Little Hoover Commission as anything but disastrous from the Historical Society's perspective. In the short run, as Cooley caustically observed, the Society's expenses went up: "One unexpected increase [in expenses] came from a change in telephone service, as a result of the Little Hoover Commission recommendation. Thus, the Society phone bill jumped from $96.00 per month to $152.00. The Society can't stand any more of this Hoover Commission improvement." In the long run, chronic financial struggle was the result. Removal of the archives meant that the Society had lost the one easily demonstrable and financially justifiable service to state government. Henceforward, directors would face the unenviable prospect of seeking funding from thrifty and practical-minded legislators who found it all too easy to choose between new prisons and highways or maintaining a museum of historical artifacts and a collection of rare books and manuscripts, especially when the latter enterprises were often seen as duplicating programs of the DUP and the LDS church.
It was perhaps at that point that a sort of heroic fatalism began to set in as an ethos at the Historical Society. "We are the Deseret Industries of the manuscripts business," photograph curator Carolyn Stevens-Jones laughed in 1979, and the phrase caught on. Long used to making do with second-hand discarded document boxes from State Archives and hand-me-down shelving from State Surplus, staff members well knew that hard work and creative rationing of resources would have to make up for perennially inadequate funding. With it all, that sense of backing a worthy but perpetually lost cause, of bravely raising the tattered sails of a sinking ship, bred a proprietary pride, a courageous commitment in the Society staff that transcended the status of mere employee.
The Mortensen years ended in two episodes that drew into focus the inherent tension between the ancient elitism of the Society and its emerging professionalism. The catalyst of that tension in both cases was Nicholas G. Morgan, Sr. He had rendered invaluable service in engineering the acquisition of the Kearns mansion, but he expected the Society in return to become something of a monument to him
The professionalization of the Society during the Mortensen years did not come without some pain. Although Juanita Brooks had been able to convince the board that the Society needed an academically trained historian at the helm, not all board members understood the direction the new captain would navigate. That it would lead to rough waters for some of the older hands was almost inevitable. As often happens, this crisis began with an apparently trivial incident.
THE LONE CEDAR TREE CONTROVERSY
As late as the 1950s, in the midst of the grassy strip that runs down the middle of Sixth East in Salt Lake City,just south of the Third South intersection, stood the stump of an old juniper tree ("cedar" in Utah parlance). At one point a legend had begun to grow about the tree— that it had been the only substantial tree on the valley floor at the time of the arrival of the Mormon pioneers in 1847. As such, it had served as a landmark, and presumably a benchmark as well, to measure the settlers' progress toward civilization as their tree-lined streets began to emerge. With the passage of time, the tree achieved a symbolic significance as a link between the modern and pioneer worlds.
To preserve and commemorate that significance of the tree, on July 24, 1933, the Daughters of Utah Pioneers erected a peristyle—several columns supporting a decorative roof—around the tree, and installed an interpretive plaque. The text of the plaque was a classic of filiopietistic sentiment:
The glaring typographical error cast eternally in bronze is of course the least of the plaque's deficiencies to a historian, for the whole text has about it a strong scent of the improbable. As Mortensen later had occasion to point out, it is botanically unreasonable, in view of the stands of box elder and cottonwood trees along modern stream banks, that only one lone juniper would have existed there in 1847. Why would loggers, in particular, have used the place for their rendezvous—to sight in their saws to avoid missing their ultimate quarry in the canyons? And if the tree had indeed been a conspicuous landmark visible all over the valley, it would seem a poor hideaway for trysting lovers. Nevertheless, the legend, enshrined in peristyle and bronze (the title of the plaque was "The Cedar Tree Shrine"), became enthroned in pioneer mythology.
Sometime before 10:45 P.M. on the night of Sunday, September 21, 1958, vandals sawed off the tree, unwittingly touching off a controversy between the mythmakers and the historians, between the Daughters of Utah Pioneers and Russ Mortensen, and almost costing the latter his job Before filing his story for Monday afternoon's edition, a Deseret News reporter naturally sought comments from the city's two most visible custodians of local history, Kate B. Carter of the DUP, and Mortensen of the Utah State Historical Society. Carter's reaction was predictable: "The Utah Daughters have fought hard for the preservation of these old relics. Then vandals come along and tear down our good work. It's very discouraging."108
Mortensen's reaction could not have been more different. As he later recalled, he had not yet learned of the act when the reporter telephoned. His initial comment was that he "hated to see vandalism at any time." Then the reporter took a daring tack:
As it came out in the paper, the acerbic Mortensen had had even more to say than that. The tree was "a historical fraud," he had said and added, "I'm not shedding any tears over its loss. . . . It's only an old dead stump with little historical value." The reporter had his story, and Mortensen had ajob-threatening crisis.109
The News fanned the flames in an editorial later in the week. Quoting the prayer of Mormon Apostle George F. Richards at the dedication of the plaque, which he had said somehow symbolized the willingness of the pioneers "to suffer, even to die, for the accomplishment of holy purposes," the editor added that the tree "represented kindness, shelter, hospitality—all given freely and withheld from none, redmen or white." It was, surely, a heavy burden to hang upon the branches of a solitary juniper, but it served the editor's purpose of denigrating "some historians" who "scoff at the legend, calling the story a hoax, and [now quoting Mortensen directly, in case his readers had mistaken his target] the tree only an old dead stump with no historical significance."110
Things grew ugly the next day as George R. Hill, a relative of LDS President David O. McKay, took up the cudgels in a letter to the editor. "I am alarmed," Hill warned, "over what might be happening to other pioneer relics at the Utah State Historical Society in the custodianship of a man with so little 'feel' for the historic value and preservation of our pioneer relics that he could label the old cedar tree which the vandals cut down as a 'historical fraud'. ... " Mortensen's statement that he was shedding no tears over the tree seemed to Hill to imply the condoning of vandalism. He continued in a darker vein: "Well might the DUP look into the matter of proper preservation of historical relics and documents in the Historical Society archives, lest some of these be also given the same snap judgment of 'historical frauds' and 'of little historical value,' and be destroyed without anybody knowing about it."111
It was not Hill, however, whom Mortensen had primarily to worry about, but Kate Carter, president of the DUP, and her influence on public opinion and ultimately upon the Board of Control of the Historical Society to whom Mortensen had to answer The formidable Carter, as he well knew, was not a woman with whom to trifle. In the words of Charles S. Peterson, she "governed the 300,000 members of the DUP with a firmness that would have done Brigham Young proud."112 She was, as Mortensen later recalled, "the most powerful woman in Utah, and she was going to have my hide." Clearly, it was time to seek an accommodation, and he got on the phone. "Kate," he said, "what do you mean about that being 'a sacred thing'? You know good and well that every one of the creeks . . . flowing out of the . . . Wasatch Mountains, . . . every one of them by the very nature of things were [sic] lined with cottonwoods and box elders. And there was a whole section of the county that was all cottonwood. What do you mean, it was the only tree?"
Her response was baffling. "She said there's a plaque on that thing that says it and the man who said it was George F. Richards, an apostle of the Lord. And if an apostle of the Lord says it's so, it's so." "Kate," Mortensen said, "you've abdicated any brains you ever had."
"We didn't talk anymore for a quite awhile," he recalled.113
They both talked to the Deseret News, though. "I think a monument to the only tree in the valley is a phony," Mortensen declared, while Carter as stubbornly stuck to her guns: the tree "could be seen clearly from the mouth of Emigration Canyon, and was a meeting place for the first pioneers."114 The irascible pair had reached an impasse.
A much more serious consequence for Mortensen, as he had feared, was Carter's influence over others, including even the Board of Control of the Historical Society. Exactly one week after the vandalism incident, Leland H. Creer, president of the board, and vicepresident Nicholas Morgan issued a public statement censuring Mortensen. "The wanton destruction of the 'Lone Cedar Tree' . . . should be deplored and held in contempt by all thinking people who have any sentimental regard for our worthy pioneers," the statement said in part. "We also deeply regret the unfortunate comments made by our director which appear to have been interpreted as condoning this regretable [sic] deed."115
The board met the following week, October 4, and the purpose of the meeting was clear to Mortensen: "They were going to throw me to the wolves. . . . they were going to fire me." A clash between Creer and Morgan on one side and Mortensen on the other was probably inevitable. Creer, professor of western history and long-time head of the history department at the University of Utah, had written The Founding of an Empire: The Exploration and Colonization of Utah, 1776-1856, in 1947.116 Although the book had a certain importance as a pioneering synthesis of early Utah history, it fell significantly short of the scholarly standards that Mortensen was trying to promote through the Society. "Creer was never an iconoclast," a former student observed in an immense understatement.117 In fact, The Founding of an Empire was just about the most celebratory account of Mormon history one could imagine. Furthermore, its narrative was clogged with large blocks of uninterpreted quotations from the sources and factual inaccuracies like his well-known geographic gaffe in having the Jordan River emptying into Utah Lake instead of draining it.118 Creer in fact became a center of opposition to the emerging professionalism in Utah history. When the Society proposed to undertake publication of the Hosea Stout autobiography and journals, Creer registered his opposition, stating in a board meeting that they "are not a significant contribution to history and, therefore, are not worthy of this much attention." When friends of Dale Morgan sought to get the U. to grant him an honorary degree, Creer, as head of the history department, vetoed the project, calling Morgan a mere "dilettante."119 Mortensen, who was not only willing but eager to challenge unfounded Mormon pieties, was not going to find much of a friend in Leland Creer.
Nicholas Morgan, for his part, was not only a protector of Mormon pieties but an opportunist, as Mortensen called him, as well, who was attempting to make the Society his monument. Clearly, if the director of the Society were to become known as an impious renegade, it would tarnish the Morgan image. With Creer as his ally, Morgan was quite willing to capitulate to public pressure and to crucify the director, as Mortensen put it, on the lone cedar tree.
It was perhaps the most heated board meeting in the history of the Society, because Mortensen had his dedicated backers "It was so sensitive," Mortensen reminisced, "that I decided that the way to survive this thing was to keep my big mouth shut, so I never said anything. Never opened my mouth at any one time." The minutes disagree. "Dr. Mortensen stated his position in the 'cedar tree' episode," the secretary noted, "in support of which he quoted at some length from the newspaper files of the library, going back as early as 1919." It was evidently at that point that Mortensen began to hold his peace and to let his backers, Juanita Brooks and William McCrea, make his case. They served him well "As it turned out, I didn't have to [say anything]," Mortensen continued, "because when Juanita would run out of breath, William McCrea, who was the general manager of Amalgamated Sugar Company in Ogden, would take [it] on. When he would run out of breath, Juanita would take it back. She said, 'What kind of a board was it that wouldn't support the person they hired?' The upshot of it was, they decided maybe they were a little premature. I survived." The minutes concur: "After considerable discussion [something of an understatement, it would seem], Mr. [George F] Egan made the motion that the Director's report be accepted. Motion seconded and passed unanimously." Everett Cooley, who was present at the meeting, remembers that Morgan and Creer were considerably "chastened" by the tongue lashings handed out by Brooks and McCrea and evidently thought it best simply to recede into the unanimity of the board vote rather than register a meaningless protest.120
Mortensen was understandably stung that Creer and Morgan had indicted him in public but exonerated him only in private, behind the closed doors of the board meeting. Although his career would later take on much larger dimensions, as chief historian for the National Park Service and president of the American Association for State and Local History, that was all in the future; at present, he was a Utah historian. "Any claim to fame I had started in Salt Lake City," he observed So having been "run up the yardarm in the church newspaper [so that] everybody in Salt Lake—Jew[s], Gentiles, Mormons, and everybody—knew that I was a godless character" was a serious professional stigma. According to Cooley, the thanklessness of having to deal with administrators who opposed his professional standards began to discourage Mortensen, and he started looking for another position. 121
In the end, of all his accusers, only Kate Carter made appropriate amends, and even that occurred only obliquely and after a period of mellowed emotions. Sometime after 1961, when Mortensen had left the Society to become director of the University of Utah Press, Carter invited him to her office for a cup of coffee (an Icelander by ancestry, coffee was deeply rooted in her culture, and she took her church's prohibition of it with a grain of salt). "Although she could not apologize for 'skinning me alive,'" Mortensen recalled, she could invite him to address the annual meeting of the DUP at the Hotel Utah during the April conference of the Mormon church. It took a good deal to fluster the skeptical Mortensen, but Carter was equal to it. Her introduction of him was "the most effusive introduction you ever heard in your life," and when he concluded, she informed the audience that "you've heard from somebody who knows more about Utah history than anybody on earth."
"What do you think that was?" Mortensen's wife asked him after the banquet. "It was an apology before God and all the world."
A decade later, the hard-boiled Mortensen's memory of her comments "still makes me blush," he said "We were close friends forever after," he added, and when called upon to write her obituary, Mortensen could refer to her as "a great and noble lady."122
It would be tempting to point to the cedar tree controversy as a watershed event in the Society's history, for a professional historian remained at the helm, never again was objective history frontally challenged within the Society, and professionalization of the organization continued rapidly. While all that is true, it would be a mistake to claim that Mortensen's yeasty insistence upon historical fact had leavened the loaf of the general public's understanding of history. In 1960 the Central Company of the Daughters of Utah Pioneers erected a second plaque at the site of the cedar tree "Although willows grew along the banks of the streams," it proclaims, "a Lone Cedar Tree near this spot became Utah's first famous landmark Someone in a moment of thoughtlessness cut it down, leaving only the stump which is a part of this monument 'In the glory of my prime I was the pioneer's friend.'" And even in the enlightened year of 1991, students of the M. Lynn Bennion School planted a young Rocky Mountain juniper a few feet to the north of the Lone Cedar Tree monument, commemorating its felled predecessor. Fact may be stranger than fiction, but fiction seems more enduring.
The other crisis involving Morgan began on January 17, 1959, when he announced a plan that he promised would be the financial salvation of the Society. During his days as a mining speculator he had accumulated almost 10,000 acres of oil leases on state lands in southeastern Utah. These leases, he announced, he was giving to the Historical Society as the basis of a Morgan Endowment Fund that the Society was to use to purchase and equip an archives building, for fellowships for research and publication, for acquisition of historic sites, and other purposes consistent with the mission of the Society At the same time the Society library, to which he had donated his books, periodicals, maps, and photographs, was to be named theJohn Morgan Memorial Library, after his pioneer father.123 The donation appeared to be a godsend, a potentially lucrative and perpetual supplement to state appropriations that would allow the Society to undertake all kinds of worthwhile projects that the pragmatic state legislature might be reluctant to fund. Naming the library after the great benefactor's father seemed a small enough price to pay. For his part, Morgan claimed a handsome tax deduction for a charitable donation
The luster began to tarnish somewhat, though, in the fall, when Mortensen's financial report included an expenditure of $1,600 to maintain the leases while only $500 had been collected in drilling fees. The hope of the leaseholders, in this case the Historical Society, of course was that oil would be discovered on their property and they would share the profits with the oil company. So far that had not happened, and in the meantime the Society was having to delve into its already meager funding to make its lease payments.124
This intrusion of financial reality precipitated a division within the board, some agreeing with Mortensen that while the expenses were unanticipated and unwelcome, the opportunities were worth the risks, others supporting board president Joel E. Ricks, who questioned both the ethics and the legality of diverting state funds to oil speculation. The debate continued for several years, with Morgan the eternal booster perpetually forecasting the great bonanza just around the corner. Board member J. Grant Iverson, himself a lawyer, recognized the legal implications of the matter and induced the board to apply to the attorney general for an opinion, but the opinion turned out to be ambiguous and the debate continued.125
The longer the big bonanza lingered in the future, the more skepticism grew on the board. Morgan redoubled his optimism. "Mr. Morgan . . . said that one of the leases owned by the Society is now being drilled by a major company," the minutes report. "If that should come in, the future would be bright." But the board wavered, ceasing payments on expiring leases while continuing to hope for profitable activity on the others. Morgan shifted from optimism to bluster ("Everything the Board does not want, Brigham Young University would be happy to take.") and in fact picked up one of the expiring leases and donated it to BYU.126
A crisis developed in 1962 when the state presented the Society with an opportunity to agree to a unitization of its oil leases with other properties in the area. This meant that profits from any oil discovery would be shared among all leaseholders. Unitization would diminish the potential profits to the leaseholder of any particular property, but it offered the potential for holders of unprofitable leases to earn at least something. Morgan recommended that the Society accept unitization, and the agreement was signed.127
At that point Morgan asked for return to him of the Society's remaining leases. Unitization had changed the stakes; what had once been unprofitable leases, the burden of which Morgan had shifted to the Society, now had the potential of profit, and Morgan's altruism had reached its limit. Iverson, who by this time had seen through the scheme, convinced the board to retain the remaining leases, pointing out that they could hardly return them to Morgan anyway since he had received a large tax deduction for them. Thus rebuffed, Morgan haughtily resigned from the board. In a letter of resignation, he reminded the Society of his generosity in a self-righteous contrast of himself to Herbert S. Auerbach:
In addition, he pointed out, he had donated over one thousand photographs, his grand piano, and funds for various luncheons and banquets.128
The Morgan resignation was a big enough scandal that Cooley, director at the time, and Iverson, chairman of the board, were asked by Governor George D. Clyde for an explanation. When given the history of the oil leases, Clyde agreed that the Society had followed the only possible course of action. In time, Morgan's ire diminished. One percent of royalties on one of the Texaco leases was in fact given to Morgan, and he began paying infrequent visits to the mansion. Although the Society refused to help in his abortive attempt to create a historical museum at Pioneer Square, and Morgan in turn withheld his support from the Society's attempt to save the Wasatch Tabernacle in Heber City from destruction, Cooley granted an exception to the Society's policy on use of the mansion and allowed Morgan to celebrate his eightieth birthday there. By 1965 Morgan "seemed to have forgotten his pique with the Society," Cooley observed.129
As noted above, Mortensen's problems with Creer and Morgan took their toll on him. Besides, he was coming to feel that he had made his contribution to the Society and was beginning to look for new challenges and opportunities "One day," Dorothy Mortensen remembers, "he [Mortensen] was going up to the U. . . . and I remember Marge Ward looking out the window and he was plowing on, walking fast Marge said, 'He just needs [new] fields to conquer He's getting bored.'" In conversations with university president A. Ray Olpin, Mortensen had expressed some caustic criticisms of the university press. "If you're going to have a university press," he had said, "it shouldn't be just a printing plant, to print programs and brochures. It should be a press." Perhaps to his surprise, Olpin called his bluff: "[If] you know that much about it, why don't you do it"?130 It was a job offer Mortensen could not refuse. He left the Society in the summer of 1961, recommending Everett Cooley as his replacement. Cooley had resigned as state archivist to teach the 1960-61 school year at Utah State University, but when offered Mortensen's job, he accepted.131
THE INNOVATIVE COOLEY YEARS
Although, as we have seen, the Cooley years (1961-69) were marred by the Little Hoover Commission's reorganization of state government, separating State Archives from the Society and placing the Society in a department with few similar agencies, it was otherwise a period of continued maturation as the creative and energetic Cooley consolidated and built upon Mortensen's achievements. One conspicuous accomplishment was a major redesign of Utah Historical Quarterly. Cooley had observed that some of the most successful state historical societies, like those of Wisconsin and Missouri, were attracting members through publication of colorful, large-format magazines with popular appeal While the Quarterly in no way compromised its scholarly standards, changing from the 6-by-9 format to the present 7 1/4 by 10 3/8" with ever more frequent use of color covers brought the magazine up to modern standards.
Closely tied to the Society's public image was the initiation of a Statehood Day celebration Cooley was disappointed that the state had never capitalized on the symbolic importance of the January 4 anniversary and thought the Society could use the occasion to advance the general interest in history. In a meeting on November 2, 1962, with board members Glen Snarr and Jack Goodman, Cooley planned the first such celebration for January 4, 1963, with speeches at the State Capitol followed by a reception at the mansion. They further recommended "that in the future an annual Statehood Day lecture be held in the evening and make it an event of some importance." 132 The tradition caught on, and in subsequent years Statehood Day, often rotated to locations outside Salt Lake City, became a historical celebration second in importance only to the Society's annual meeting and proved an effective way of instilling pride and historical awareness throughout the state.
When Cooley had resigned as state archivist, he engineered the hiring of microfilm expert T. Harold Jacobsen as his successor. Upon his return to the Society, he determined to improve the archives even further by drafting a new public records law in the interest of strengthening the records management program and centralizing state records administration under the leadership of the archives. The law was passed on February 6, 1963.
Another tradition, the historical trek, got off to a hilarious and hazardous start during the Cooley years. The appearance in 1959 of University of Utah history professor David E. Miller's Hole-in-the-Rock: An Epic in the Colonization of the Great American West133 generated an immense interest in that legendary exploit in Mormon pioneering. The eighty wagonloads of settlers who journeyed in the winter of 1879-80 from Escalante to Bluff across some of the most formidable terrain in the West left a legacy of resourcefulness and endurance rarely equaled in history, and Miller's thorough research and vivid prose brought their venture into colorful relief When he gave a lecture on the subject at the Historical Society, a perhaps naive suggestion that Miller lead a Society-sponsored field trip from Escalante to the Hole-in-the-Rock (a steep declivity in the west wall of Glen Canyon through which the pioneer road reached a crossing of the Colorado River) drew an enthusiastic response. By the scheduled departure date of May 17, 1963, almost 250 people had signed up. 134
Under the best of circumstances, it was a large undertaking with perilous potential As it happened, almost everything went wrong When Cooley arrived at the bus station in Salt Lake City at 6:30, he found most of the passengers ready but none of the buses. The first hour was wasted trying to locate three trekkers from Brigham City only to learn that they had driven on to Bryce Canyon When the buses arrived, a state senator got onto the wrong bus and refused to move. One woman got locked in a restroom at the station and could only be released by tearing the door down with a sledge hammer and crowbar. At the lunch stop in Richfield, it became apparent that no one had bothered to make reservations at the restaurant.
Finally arriving at Bryce Canyon Lodge, opened specially for their evening accommodations, the trekkers began to have some good luck for a change. Registration went well, and the prearranged evening meal was excellent. Then things went sour again. A microphone brought in for Miller's lecture would not work, so one of the Society's employees led some group singing until it could be fixed. Miller's speech was too long, and the second half of the program had to be canceled. Cooley got little sleep, having been awakened in the middle of the night to dissuade a trekker from making improper advances to one of the Society's female staffers.
The next day began at 5:15 with reveille sounded by a bus air horn. Breakfast was served in two shifts, and the first shift set off for Escalante and Dance Hall Rock where they were to be transferred to locally provided trucks for the last and roughest part of the journey. The vehicles turned out to be manure-encrusted, stock trucks, and one of the trekkers became ill. At the Hole-in-the-Rock about forty people made the arduous descent to the river, including one heavy elderly woman who ignored advice, suffered sunstroke, and had to be carried back to the top. When the first buses returned to Dance Hall Rock where the caterers provided a real chuckwagon meal, the hungry trekkers ate most of the food, leaving little more than celery and carrot sticks for the last group to arrive. One second shifter choked on a carrot which had to be removed (in those pre-Heimlich maneuver days) by a nurse and doctor who were fortunately in the group
The greatest disaster was yet to come. Upon their return to Bryce at 10 P.M., the party discovered that, in the confusion of rescuing the sunstroke victim at the Hole-in-the-Rock, they had left one of the trekkers behind! It was too late to do any searching until morning, but Cooley (after at least two telephone calls to determine which county held jurisdiction in the area) arranged a sheriff's rescue party for the morning. Luckily, the elderly absentee was found, wandering down the road in the wrong direction, little the worse for the wear.
The return trip contained little excitement beyond a blowout on one of the buses and a delay in Panguitch while a filling station attendant could be extricated from Sunday church services to refill the diesel tanks. Amazingly, not only did the Society suffer no serious publicity setbacks as a result of the trip, but members turned out to be enthusiastic about the experience. Upon his return to the office on May 20, Cooley's diary records that he was "on the telephone all morning thanking people who participated on the Trek Reaction from trekkers very favorable." The minutes at the end of the quarter noted that "the Society did get considerable attention drawn to the trek because of this episode [of the abandoned party member] However, as a result of the generally favorable publicity many people have inquired when and where the next trek will take place as they want to go along." The chairman of the Publicity Committee added, tentatively, that the quarter had been "a very active one; one in which the Society has made new friends, and it is hoped no enemies." 135 Though Cooley led only one more trek, a much safer venture retracing the Donner party route of 1846 from Fort Bridger to This Is the Place Monument, stopping to install, in cooperation with the National Forest director, a plaque christening Kletting Peak in the Uinta Mountains in honor of conservationist-architect Richard K. A. Kletting, the trek became a frequent part of the Society's programs.
Historic preservation, which began during the Cooley years, was one of the revolutions of that transforming decade, the 1960s. Most of the revolutionary developments of the 1960s can be seen as a revolt against the materialistic values of the generation that came of age during the Great Depression and World War II. For that generation, which had triumphed over the greatest economic catastrophe and the most demonic dictators in modern history, the possibilities of progress seemed unlimited and were defined mostly in materialistic terms, as science and technology brought America to its highest prosperity and position of power. They had dammed the Columbia and Colorado rivers, rolled up their sleeves and created immense defense industries that ended the depression and made America the "arsenal of democracy," and finished the greatest war in history with two stunning demonstrations of scientific superiority, the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.
The hollowness of that materialism became apparent during the 1960s, however, as the civil rights and women's movements pointed out that progress and democracy did not extend to millions of Americans and as weapons of mass destruction devastated helpless peasant villages in Vietnam. The earlier generation's faith in science and technology was thrown back in its face as electronics powered a music of rebellion and scientific research produced mind-bending drugs like LSD.
The historic preservation movement was a much more sober rebellion than the ones occurring among the drugged-out hippies and draft-card-burning war resistors, but it was equally inexorable and more permanent. Alarmed by the cultural insensitivity of fast-buck developers who could bulldoze a unique and elegant Victorian mansion and replace it with a sterile glass and steel skyscraper, a fast food franchise, or a parking lot, preservationists began arguing that we were sacrificing priceless parts of our past in the interests of a rootless and standardized future. "Should we tear down the White House or the Statue of Liberty just because they are old?" asked baseball fan Philip J Lowry in a passionate and eloquent plea for preservation of Tiger Stadium in Detroit. "Should the Tigers be allowed to tear down Tiger Stadium just because it is old? The Tigers' answer is yes. The Tigers' answer is wrong. Not everything in this world needs to be modernized, refurbished, renovated, updated, and then bulldozed to make way for progress." Roger Angell picked up the theme, calling attention to the historical and emotional affiliations that attach to any venerable structure: "A thousand small relationships, patterns, histories, attachments, pleasures, and moments are what we draw from this game, and that is why we truly worry about it. . . . Not everyone feels this way of course, but who among us feels none of this?"136 It was a powerful argument but a difficult one that pitched history, aesthetics, and other subtle points against brute utilitarianism, and preservationists were to lose as many battles as they won in their struggle to expand the American conscience.
As elsewhere, it took a series of architectural catastrophes to galvanize the historic preservation movement in Utah.137 During the early 1960s the ethos of progress led to the destruction of several architectural treasures in Salt Lake City, including the Weir/Cosgriff mansion at 523 East South Temple and the Dooly Building, designed by Louis Sullivan, at Second South and West Temple. Other historic structures faced the wrecking ball: the Washington County Courthouse in St George; the masterful joinery of the Edwin Thatcher Wolverton mill in the Henry Mountains, and the Wasatch Stake Tabernacle in Heber City. Although preservation efforts were mounted in all three instances, it was the confrontation between the Utah State Historical Society and local officials of the Mormon church in Heber City over the Wasatch Tabernacle that led to the creation of the Utah Heritage Foundation and the organized preservation movement in the state.
When church officials announced plans to raze the old tabernacle and to replace it with a more modern structure, they turned a deaf ear to preservationists' pleas to leave the old building alone and to build its modern replacement elsewhere. The preservationists turned naturally to the Historical Society for help. Although preservation of historic sites was specifically enumerated among the Society's responsibilities in its 1917 legislation, the Society had never had funds or staff to do much about that responsibility. In 1964 the director and board of the Society decided to begin its preservation program by saving the Wasatch Tabernacle. The effort immediately ran into daunting obstacles In the first place, the Society had no funds for the effort and was prohibited by Governor Calvin L. Rampton from lobbying the state legislature to get such funding Also, the LDS stake president in Heber City was a powerful political figure who threatened to use his position politically against the Society if it persisted in its preservation effort Although its status as a state agency was an advantage in some ways, it stymied the Society in this case.
The result was creation of the Utah Heritage Foundation, a privately funded preservation organization sponsored by, but separate from, the Historical Society. At a planning meeting at the Society on January 17, 1966, the Heritage Foundation was mapped out by Cooley, David Bigler, Garn Hatch—who was leading the Wasatch Tabernacle fight—and several architects and prominent citizens In a stroke of political genius, Cooley convinced First Lady Lucybeth Rampton to become the foundation's honorary chairperson. Not wanting to be seen as an opponent of historic preservation, the LDS church itself allowed the foundation to use the historic Assembly Hall on Temple Square for its organizational meeting on April 12, 1966. Mrs. Rampton gave a stirring appeal for preservation of Utah sites, the organization's Articles of Incorporation were approved, a Board of Directors was formed from some of the most prominent leaders in the community, and advisory committees created in several areas of specialty The result provided not only sufficient political pressure to preserve the Wasatch Tabernacle but also an enduring organization that has been a powerful force in Utah cultural life.
The Heritage Foundation went right to work. Realizing that any effective preservation program had to begin with a survey of the sites worth preserving, it applied to the Historic American Building Survey (HABS) of the National Park Service for a team to survey Utah sites. HABS provided a grant of $5,000, matched by private funds in the state, and a survey of seventeen important Utah buildings was conducted. The survey was extended during a second year and supplemented by a Historic American Engineering Record Survey that included such sites as the Lucin Cutoff and the Olmstead power plant in lower Provo Canyon. The Junior League of Salt Lake City was enlisted to survey the historic Avenues District of the city. Although the Heritage Foundation, and indeed the preservation movement as a whole, has had its failures—most discouragingly the Coalville Stake Tabernacle, which was torn down in 1971—it has been an important force in promoting historical consciousness One of its best achievements has been an increasingly cooperative stance by the LDS church, the single greatest possessor of historic structures in the state
The Cooley years at the Society, then, were a time of great progress in several areas and of increasing influence and respect for the organization They were also frustrating for the talented, creative, and ambitious director, who often found his plans stymied by political limitations or parsimonious funding. When he was approached with an offer to develop the Special Collections program at the new Marriott Library at the University of Utah, he quickly accepted it. "The salary was much better, the facilities were new, and the resources considerably better than we had to work with at the Society;" he recalled, "I just felt it was time to move on." The million dollar subsidy given the library by J. Willard Marriott obviously opened up possibilities never dreamed of at the Historical Society: Cooley's first big rare book purchase, for example, was a single volume costing six thousand dollars—three times the annual book budget at the Society.138
HISTORIC PRESERVATION BRINGS FEDERAL FUNDING
The brief administration of Charles S. Peterson (1969-71) was nevertheless an important period in the history of the Society, as programs begun by Mortensen and Cooley were extended and enriched, and new developments emerged. For one thing, historic preservation began to benefit from ever-increasing federal grants under the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. In October 1969, for example, a Utah Historic and Cultural Sites Review Board was created to approve nominations to both the National and State Registers of Historic Places The preservation program was financed by a handsome state appropriation of $12,500 and a federal grant of $6,500, and the ambitious Melvin T. Smith, who had been hired as preservation officer in 1969, announced an application for the following year for $25,000 in federal funds for a historic sites survey and an additional $250,000 for preservation of such sites.139 This was generous funding indeed and contrasted happily with the lean budgets of the years following the Little Hoover Commission.
The staff expanded significantly during the Peterson years, beginning with the Smith hiring and the establishment of a historic preservation section at the Society That was followed by the addition of Glen M. Leonard, a 1970 Ph.D. from the University of Utah, who was hired initially under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to study and strengthen local history programs in the state. Upon conclusion of that project, Leonard became the first managing editor of the Utah Historical Quarterly under the director and assumed responsibility for the publications program. Allan Kent Powell, a graduate student at the University, was hired as a lowly mail clerk but worked as well on a grant-funded history of the Methodist church in Utah He alsojoined Peterson and David Atkinson (another U. graduate student) to work with BYU graduate student John Yurtinus on a study of the route of the Mormon Battalion from Fort Leavenworth to Santa Fe. Eventually Powell worked with the local chapters program and historic preservation Helene Crane and Helen Mathison joined the office staff, and in November 1970 Martha R. Stewart, formerly a librarian with the Salt Lake Public Library, became reference librarian at the Society. 140
One of the best of Peterson's hirees was Miriam B. Murphy, a multi-talented writer, poet, artist, and journalist who had graduated in English from the University of Utah where she had served as editor of the Daily Utah Chronicle. She sought her fortune in advertising in San Francisco and New York City but eventually returned home. Peterson hired her in September 1970 to edit O. N. Malmquist's history of the Salt Lake Tribune, which the Society published with a subsidy from the newspaper. 141 Murphy's talents as an editor and writer became apparent during that project, and Peterson found money to add her to the staff permanently. Although never head of the publications program, she has been an indispensable force behind it, creating Beehive History, an annual historical magazine for school children, and bewitching everything that has appeared in the Quarterly and the Society's other publications with her literary magic during her long tenure.
Although Cooley's superb diplomatic skills had enabled him to work effectively with people from all backgrounds, it was Peterson's great talent for working with common, especially rural, people, that significantly democratized the Society's programs during his tenure Peterson had grown up in rural Snowflake, Arizona, one of the Mormon colonies along the Little Colorado River. After earning a degree in animal husbandry, he shifted to history and taught at the College of Eastern Utah while completing his graduate work At the Society, he exhibited great skill in bringing Utah history to the common people. He accomplished this in two ways. First, he extended the local chapters program begun by Cooley so that interested people in the Utah hinterlands could have their own historical organizations affiliated with and supported by the central Society in Salt Lake City Second, he also worked to include simple buildings associated with common people in the National and State Historic Registers.
He was aided in both of these by preservation officer Melvin T Smith and Kent Powell, both of whom came from rural or working-class backgrounds similar to his own. Powell, especially, the son of an eastern Utah coal miner who had studied under Peterson at the College of Eastern Utah, proved adept at winning the trust and cooperation of common people Although he would eventually complete his Ph.D. at the University of Utah and compile a record of research and publication that places him in the front rank of Utah historians, he could also "roll a corn cob around with his toe while talking with an old farmer," as Peterson vividly put it.
* To be continued in Part IV.
NOTES
96 29 (July 1961); Dorothy Mortensen interview, p 20.
97 Miriam B Murphy interview with the author, November 21, 1996 Some themes, she admitted, were a bit far-fetched, and director Max Evans urged their discontinuance except in special cases.
98 Board Minutes, October 17, 1952; Everett Cooley, interview with the author, December 10, 1996.
99 Board Minutes, May 19, 1956; January 11, 1958; John James interview, p. 39.
100 State of Utah, Biennial Report of the State Historical Society of Utah, 1917-1918, p. 15.
101 Board Minutes, August 27, 1946; Everett Cooley interview with the author.
102 Board Minutes, March 28 and October 23, 1953; Jun e 5, 1954; Everett Cooley interview with the author.
103 Everett Cooley interview with Eric Redd, pp 1-2.
104 The discussion that follows on the founding of the State Archives comes from the Dorothy Mortensen and Everett Cooley interviews with the author.
105 Utah Foundation, Background and Philosophy of the Reorganization Movement in Utah and the United States (Salt Lake City: Utah Foundation, 1966).
106 Joseph Rosenblatt, Speech to Leadership Conference of Utah State Public Employees Association, September 25, 1965, mimeograph copy, Utah State Historical Society Library, Salt Lake City.
107 Undated report in Society archives; Cooley to Gunn McKay, March 10, 1966, in Society archives.
108 Deseret News, September 22, 1958 The News considered this a major story, running it on the front page with photographs.
109 Ibid.; A. Russell Mortensen, interview with Levi Peterson, September 9, 1985, p. 26; Dorothy Mortensen, interview with the author, October 9, 1996.
110 Deseret News, September 25, 1958.
111 Ibid., September 26, 1958.
112 The quotation is from a deleted portion of Peterson's "Speaking for the Past," which he has generously made available to the author.
113 A R Mortensen interview, pp 27-28.
114 Ibid., September 23, 1958 It should be noted that Carter did not quite have even the DUP entirely on her side in this matter One DUP member called Mortensen to inform him that her understanding of the tree was that it originally had been a signpost "located a half block south on the Mormon road into the city directing immigrants in the right direction It was moved to 6th East and dedicated as a symbol of the relative scarcity of timber in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake A R Mortensen interview, p 30.
115 Salt Lake Tribune, September 28, 1958.
116 Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1947.
117 Philip C Sturges, "In Memoriam: Leland H Creer," Utah Historical Quarterly 36 (1968): 196.
118 Creer, The Founding of an Empire, p 26, note 12.
119 Board Minutes, October 25, 1961. The "dilettante" story came to the author in conversations with Joh n James and Everett Cooley.
120 A R Mortensen interview, p 27; Board Minutes, October 4, 1958; Everett Cooley, interview with the author.
121 Everett Cooley, interview with the author To the end, though, Mortensen had his supporters among the general public as well as on the Board of Control of the Historical Society One, an employee of the State Road Commission, called Mortensen to ask to be considered an accessory after the fact in the tree cutting He said he had carried an axe in the trunk of his car for twenty years intending someday to do the deed himself but never mustered the courage A R Mortensen interview, p 27.
122 A R Mortensen, "In Memoriam: Kate B Carter, 1892-1976," Utah Historical Quarterly 44 (1976): 395-96 On the other hand, as Mortensen later observed, Carter had less than altruistic reasons as well for seeking an accommodation with him "The state-appropriated budget for the DUP was included in the Historical Society budget because it was inappropriate for the legislature to fund a private agency It was in the best interests of the DUP for Kate to be on good terms with me." A. R. Mortensen interview, pp. 29, 31. Although cooperation between the Society and the DUP was of course a good idea, Everett Cooley is certain that the DUP budget came through the secretary of state, not the Historical Society.
123 Board Minutes, January 17, 1959. Morgan's filial altruism eventually failed, and the bronze plaques (not installed) in the library today say "Nicholas G Morgan Library."
124 Board Minutes, November 13, 1959.
125 Ibid, January 30, 1960; May 7, 1960.
126 Ibid., January 30, 1960; April 15 and October 20, 1961.
127 Ibid., May 12, 1962.
128 The letter, dated Jun e 8, 1962, is included in the Board Minutes. This account also draws upon Everett Cooley, interview with the author.
129 Everett Cooley diaries, Jun e 13, July 28, an d August 2, 1962; March 6, Octobe r 26, and November 7, 1964; October 23, 1965.
130 Dorothy Mortensen interview with the author, pp. 30-31. Margery Ward was a Society staff member who became Everett Cooley's primary assistant on the Quarterly during his directorship and later served with him in a similar capacity at the Marriott Library Special Collections.
131 Board Minutes, April 20, 1960; June 21, 1961.
132 Cooley diaries, November 2, 1962.
133 Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1959.
134 This narrative of the Society's first trek is based on Cooley's diary, May 17, 1963.
135 Cooley diary, May 20, 1963; Board Minutes, September 17, 1963.
137 This account of the beginnings of the preservation movement and the creation of the Utah Heritage Foundation are based upon Everett L Cooley, "Origins of the Utah Heritage Foundation," Heritage: The Utah Heritage Foundation Newsletter 30 (January/February 1996): 1-5; and Everett L Cooley interview with the author.
138 Everet J Cooley interview with Eric Redd, p 9; Cooley interview with the author.
139 Utah State Historical Society Newsletter, vol 19, nos 4 and 5, and vol 20, no 1 Hereafter cited as Newsletter. The state historic register was created by executive order of Gov Calvin L Rampton on September 19, 1969.
140 Allan Kent Powell, interview with the author, October 15, 1996, pp. 2-4; Newsletter, vol. 21, no. 2.
141 O N Malmquist, The First 100 Years: A History of the Salt Lake Tribune, 1871-1971 (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1971. Newsletter, vol. 21, no. 2. Miriam B. Murphy interview with the author, November 21, 1996; Charles Peterson interview.
