In This Issue

The importance of the written word was reinforced once again during a recent visit to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture on The University of Mississippi campus in Oxford. Each spring the Center sponsors the Oxford Conference for the Book with readings, discussions, presentations, workshops, and lectures that examine and celebrate books and writing. For each conference a special souvenir poster and T-shirt are designed to capture the spirit and theme of the gathering. One past conference offered inspiration to readers and writers in recalling a sentence from the 1967 book North Toward Home in which the author Willie Morris reveals, “It took me years to understand that words are often as important as experience, because words make experience last.” It is certainly our goal through the pages of the Utah Historical Quarterly to “make experience last.”

This issue allows us to share the experiences of baseball players and fans in Utah Valley, miners and residents of a silver mining town in the northwest corner of the state, and participants in a hard-fought state election about how Utahns would be represented in their legislature. Also included is the story of one of America’s most famous Hollywood stars making a movie in southern Utah while health-threatening radiation carried by prevailing winds swept eastward from the atomic testing sites in nearby Nevada.

Tug of War contest at Vipont, Utah, July 4, 1921.

COURTESY DONALD WHITEHEAD

What would summer be without baseball? One might also ask what would life be like without baseball, without its traditions, its atmosphere ,its heroes, its words and expressions that are part of every day conversation, and, like life itself, its unpredictable length and outcome. Our first article recalls semi-pro baseball in Provo from 1913 to 1958 as it focuses on the Timps—a team named for Mount Timpanogos ,the majestic mountain that rises from the floor of Utah Valley.

The silver mining boom town of Vipont in the Goose Creek Mountains in the northwestern corner of Utah also had a baseball team whose rugged and primitive field was a distinct advantage to the home team. Given life in 1919 through the United States government price supports for silver, Vipont collapsed after those supports were withdrawn in 1923.All but forgotten,Vipont returns to life in the words and pictures of our second article.

Joe Nelson and Johnny Anton preparing voting booth for 1954 elections.

SALT LAKE TRIBUNE COLLECTION, UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Our third article illustrates the fundamental principle of democracy—the voice of the people in the decision-making process. In 1954 Utahns spoke through their votes in support of a redistricting plan to give more equal representation to residents of the state’s populous counties—a plan that was opposed by a number of prominent LDS leaders.

The 1950s was a decade dominated by the Cold War and the fear of communism .It was also the first full decade of the atomic age that saw the testing of atomic bombs in the Nevada desert where heaven-reaching mushroom clouds of fire and dust seemed to announce the imminent destruction of the planet. Though the explosions were viewed by many in southern Utah ,it was not the powerful exploding bombs that brought death, rather the unseen radiation that worked quietly but surely to bring disease and early death to unsuspecting victims. Was the movie hero John Wayne one of these victims? Our fourth article offers an answer.