Tooele, Touch Typing

An unidentified woman with an Underwood typewriter, ca. 1918.

Library of Congress

Tooele, Touch Typing, and the Catholic Saint Marguerite-Marie Alacoque

BY EMMA LOUISE PENROD

In the fall of 2013, not long after I had accepted a new job with the local newspaper, I had a direct encounter with one of Tooele’s many historical mysteries. As the Tooele Transcript-Bulletin’s newly appointed religion reporter, I set out to acquaint myself with the various religious congregations and denominations in the area, beginning with an article about our local Catholic population. I happened to begin this new assignment in September, a few weeks before the local Saint Marguerite Catholic Church would celebrate the feast of their parish’s patron and namesake saint, Saint Marguerite-Marie Alacoque. I thought I would write a feature article about Saint Marguerite, using the interview and research process as a means to learn more about the Catholic Church in general and the local Catholic community in particular.

As the local parish’s current pastor, the Reverend Samuel Dinsdale, taught me about Saint Marguerite, it struck me that the Tooele parish’s choice of namesake seemed unusual. Saint Marguerite was a seventeenth-century French nun, and Tooele is not exactly a bastion of French influence. 1 The History of Tooele County lists large groups of immigrants from England, Italy, Ireland, and Greece, with a few other families from various other countries—but France is not among them. 2 Saint Marguerite was popular among Irish immigrants in the late 1800s and early 1900s, providing a possible connection, but Dinsdale was skeptical of this theory. 3 If Irish immigrants in Tooele had named the church for their favorite saint, why had they not used her Anglicized name, Margaret Mary, which was far more common? The French spelling was so unusual, Dinsdale said, that he had actually called regional authorities to verify the church’s name when he was first assigned to the area. They confirmed it: the name of the church was Saint Marguerite Catholic Church—spelled the French way—but no one knew why. 4

Dissatisfied with this answer, I dug into the Tooele Transcript-Bulletin’s archives. The newspaper was originally founded in 1894 and purchased by James Dunn in 1898; the Dunn family has maintained ownership ever since. 5 The company, in cooperation with other historians and the University of Utah, has preserved copies of the twice-weekly newspaper from 1894 to the present day, with the exception of issues that were destroyed in a fire in 1932. 6 One article led to the next, and before long I began to piece together the story of how the Tooele parish received its name. According to the newspapers of the day, Tooele named its Catholic church for a young Irish girl who died in Michigan just a few months prior to the church’s 1910 groundbreaking.

This fact alone is not outside Catholic norms. According to Gary Topping, archivist for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City, there is no specific rule that says a parish must or must not be named for a certain individual. 7 And there is certainly precedent: Monsignor Jerome Stoffel, for example, named the chapel in Logan for Saint Jerome. 8

But this is where our story becomes more intriguing—Marguerite McGurrin had never set foot in Tooele. She is connected to this desert town through her uncle, the famous stenographer Frank McGurrin, who evidently helped fund the construction of the parish’s original church building.

Like many Utah communities, Tooele was settled by Mormon pioneers, and so lacked any sizable Catholic population during most of the town’s early years. The Reverend Louis J. Fries, author of One Hundred and Fifty Years of Catholicity in Utah, estimated that there were no Catholics residing in Tooele until 1907. 9 However, thanks to the rapid growth of outlying mining communities such as Ophir and Mercur, Tooeleans had a large number of Catholic neighbors as early as the 1870s.

The Reverend Patrick Walsh, one of the first Catholic priests in Utah and the pastor who built and oversaw Utah’s first Catholic church, periodically visited Catholics in a mining camp south of Tooele as early as October 1871. 10 The Catholic population at the camp was highly transient, so Walsh visited according to the community’s needs at the time, and no permanent church was established for the camp.

Walsh made a more regular habit of conducting Mass in Ophir, one of the most prosperous mining towns of its day. 11 After an initial visit in 1872, Walsh celebrated Mass in Ophir on a monthly basis from 1874 until 1878, the year most of Ophir’s major mines were abandoned. The Ophir congregation had no dedicated church building; rather, the congregation met in a small hall. 12

In 1873, Bishop Lawrence Scanlan became the pastor of Salt Lake City’s church of Saint Mary Magdalene, and soon after he was assigned responsibility for all Catholics living in Utah’s outlying areas as well. 13 During his first year of this assignment, Scanlan visited Mercur, another prosperous mining town in Tooele’s vicinity. A sparse Catholic population resided in Mercur in 1894, when Scanlan returned to organize regular worship services for the community. Four years later, Mercur’s pastor, the Reverend A. V. Keenan, solicited donations for the construction of a dedicated church building. The success of his efforts led to the construction of Tooele County’s first Catholic church in 1904. 14

History of Tooele County attributes the arrival of Tooele City’s first notable Catholic population to the construction of the International Smelter. 15 A coalition of mines in Bingham Canyon began seriously exploring Tooele for the site of a smelter in late 1907, and a series of events involving litigation, pollution controls, and smelter closures led to the expedited construction of the International Smelter in Pine Canyon. 16 The construction brought a flood of immigrants to Tooele. Though the smelter is known locally for the large number of Greeks, Italians, and other southern Europeans who came to work at the plant, many of the company’s earliest hires were Irish—and most, if not all, of them were devout in their Catholic or Protestant faiths. 17

Around 1910, Scanlan agreed to include Tooele on a route he traveled once a month to hold Mass for Salt Lake City’s outlying Catholic communities. 18 Frank McGurrin first appeared in Tooele at roughly the same time. Taken from the perspective of Tooele’s history, McGurrin is a mysterious character. He was born in Michigan, went on to study law, and was admitted to the bar in 1884. 19 However, it does not appear that he ever actively practiced law. Instead, he followed his passions for shorthand and typewriting, and in 1886 he landed a job as a court stenographer in Salt Lake City. 20

About a year after taking the position in Salt Lake City, McGurrin issued his famous challenge to fellow stenographers in the industry’s trade press: he proposed to meet all challengers in any U.S. city west of Chicago, and there engage in a sort of typewriting race. 21 He offered a winner’s purse of more than one hundred dollars and soon had contestants responding to his challenge. 22 News of the contest began to circulate in other trade journals and throughout the popular press. 23 By the time McGurrin squared off with his top competitor in Cincinnati for a grand prize of five hundred dollars, the contest had become something of a national event.

Typewriter keys, photographed by Ralph Steiner, 1920.

Library of Congress

Because the rules of the contest allowed typists to compete on the instrument of their choice, the popular press depicted the contest as the final test between two of the top typewriter brands of the day: the Remington with its QWERTY-style keyboard, which McGurrin favored, and the Caligraph his rival, Louis Traub, favored. 24 Unlike the Remington, the Caligraph had a double keyboard with a full set of capital and lower-case letters, which made for twice as many keys. 25 Proponents of the Caligraph argued that the double keyboard eliminated the need for a shift key, allowing the typist to produce one letter per stroke and, in theory, resulting in greater typewriting speeds. And at first, the Caligraph appeared superior, with Caligraph-trained typists boasting the fastest-known typing speeds. 26

The cornerstone ceremony for St. Marguerite Catholic Church, Tooele, April 13, 1910.

USHS

In addition to crediting the superiority of the Remington design, the newspaper reports noted that “Mr. McGurrin in copying did not look at his instrument at all, and his fingers flew over the keyboard with the precision of blind Tom at a piano.” 29 Traub was likewise a touch-typist capable of typing on unmarked keyboards, but he used an eight-finger method then favored by Caligraph users. 30 McGurrin not only helped popularize the QWERTY keyboard format we use today, but as he continued competing in well-publicized typing competitions and came to be known as the world’s fastest typist, he popularized modern touch typing as well. 31

But in 1888, McGurrin won his fateful contest, typing at an average speed of ninety-seven words per minute. Newspaper coverage attributed the win as much to the Remington design as to McGurrin’s skill as a typist, and as McGurrin continued to improve and hold demonstrations throughout the nation, the popularity of the Remington continued to grow. 27 Conventional wisdom holds that the hype created by McGurrin’s success ultimately made QWERTY the dominant keyboard layout, but the debate whether McGurrin’s speed was the conquest of man or machine continues to this day. 28

McGurrin would later explain that he actually taught himself to type by touch after his employer teased him about his typewriting capabilities. 32 McGurrin learned to operate a typewriter while working as a clerk for D. E. Corbitt around 1878 in Grand Rapids. He and his employer developed something of a contest to see who could type faster on the device, and eventually McGurrin reached the point that he could consistently outdo his employer. Corbitt, out of frustration, claimed that he had seen a girl at another office taking notes without looking at the typewriter keys. Stymied, McGurrin resolved that he could teach himself to do whatever a girl could do—and in the process adapted his method to include typing with all ten fingers, rather than just two or three. McGurrin later learned that Corbitt invented the story about the female typist to “get the conceit” out of him. 33

Inside the original St. Marguerite church building, which was replaced in the 1970s. November 1910.

USHS

After some time, McGurrin’s interest in typing began to fade—newspaper coverage from 1894 suggests he may have fallen out of local political favor and consequently lost his job with the Salt Lake court—and he turned his attention to business and banking. 34 He worked for many years for the Salt Lake Security and Trust Company, eventually becoming the company’s president. He later became president of the Commercial Bank of Tooele as well. 35 In 1915, McGurrin retired and moved from Utah to California, where he took up golf and acquired a large collection of trophies. 36 He died there in 1933. 37

Beyond the 1915 mention that he had headed a bank in Tooele, there is little other evidence to connect McGurrin to the area. However, routine newspaper items such as marriage announcements and obituaries easily establish that the McGurrin family was actively involved with the Catholic Church wherever they happened to reside. 38 Newspaper coverage also suggests that McGurrin himself was acquainted with Bishop Scanlan. The two frequently encountered each other at various social events, and on at least one occasion, Scanlan oversaw a typewriting contest side-by-side with McGurrin. 39 McGurrin had volunteered to teach children in an orphanage how to operate typewriters by touch, and he concluded the course with a typewriting contest.

Given that Scanlan and McGurrin ran in the same circles, it isn’t too far-fetched to suggest that McGurrin learned of the plight of Catholics in Tooele—who desired to have a church of their own but evidently did not have the funds to construct one—in relatively short order. 40 If he were the president of the local bank at the time, and if he happened to have some spare cash on hand and a disposition for charity, then it makes sense that McGurrin might have felt inclined to donate toward a church’s construction.

Reports from the Intermountain Catholic suggest that this is exactly what happened, although they leave out a good deal of the back story and explanation. In May 1910, just a few short weeks after the Tooele community began to lay the foundation for a church, McGurrin himself presented the cornerstone during an elaborate ceremony. 41 The parish was named “Saint Marguerite’s Catholic Church” that day, at McGurrin’s request, in honor of his seventeen-year-old niece. 42

As best I can tell, Marguerite McGurrin never visited Tooele herself. She lived with her family in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and passed away November 5, 1909, after an extended illness. 43 Though there is little known about her, her father, Charles McGurrin, was also a world-renowned stenographer. 44 Charles and Frank were evidently very close as brothers and often traveled across the country to visit one another. 45 Later articles about the construction of Saint Marguerite Catholic Church suggest that perhaps both Frank and Charles contributed to the financing of the building. 46

Sometimes, truth really is stranger than fiction. Were it not for the newspaper articles that provide evidence to the contrary, one could easily find some tenuous connection between Tooele, Catholic Irish-American immigrants, and Saint Marguerite. There was not only a sizable contingent of Irish Catholics in the area at the time, but several early parish leaders also had Irish heritage. 47 After Scanlan—who was Irish himself—personally dedicated the building, some time passed before the parish had a permanently assigned priest. 48 Then, in about 1915, the Reverend James O’Grady was appointed to oversee the parish. 49 Many others followed, including the Reverend Frederick Murphy (1917), the Reverend H. Connery (1918), the Reverend Morgan O’Brien (1922), and the Reverend William Kennedy (1925). 50 Regardless of the reason behind the name, the wealth of Irish influence within Tooele’s parish suggests that Saint Marguerite was a fitting patron, just as the parallels between Saint Marguerite’s life and Marguerite McGurrin make the namesake parish a fitting memorial to the McGurrins’ beloved daughter and niece.

Like Marguerite McGurrin, Saint Marguerite-Marie Alacoque was born to a well-off, well-respected family—only several centuries earlier, in L’Hautecour, France. 51 Alacoque fell ill as a child. Paralysis confined her to bed for four years and toward the end of her illness, she had a vision of the Virgin Mary and vowed to devote her life to religious service.

Alacoque’s father passed away while she was still a child, and the family member to whom her father’s estate fell refused to return it to the girl’s mother, which left the family destitute for a number of years. 52 During this time, Alacoque had recurring visions of Jesus Christ. Later, after the family’s return to high society, Alacoque had another vision in which Christ reminded her that she had vowed to dedicate herself to her religion. With that, she entered a Sisters of the Visitation convent in 1671. 53 She continued to have visions of Christ, who instructed her to teach others of his love and compassion for all mankind.

At first the Catholic Church denounced Alacoque and her visions, and both lay people and church leaders persecuted her for much of her life. Local animosity ended when a newly elected superior chose Alacoque as her assistant; still, her teachings would not be accepted until seventy-five years after her death in 1690. The Catholic Church officially recognized her as a saint in 1864. 54

Marguerite-Marie Alacoque remains a popular figure among Catholics in Tooele. To this day, the festival held in her honor by the Tooele parish each fall is well attended by the local parishioners and many non-Catholics alike. 55 She taught her pupils to be especially faithful in observing Mass on the first Friday of each month, and her first Friday Mass continues to be the most well-attended Mass in Tooele, second only to Christmas and Easter. 56

Outside the original church building, November 1910.

USHS

Despite his contributions to the community, Frank McGurrin has been largely forgotten in Tooele’s history and contemporary life. No streets or parks bear his name, nor does his mention surface in books on local history. But his niece, through her namesake church, has been quietly immortalized—perhaps just as McGurrin intended.

— Emma Penrod is a journalist and historian in Tooele, Utah. She covers religion, health, and the environment for the Tooele Transcript-Bulletin and does historical research in her free time. She is the author of Images of Rail: Tooele Valley Railroad.

1 Mary Bernard Doll, “St. Margaret Mary Alacoque,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton, 1910), http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09653a. htm.

2 Orrin P. Miller, History of Tooele County, vol. 2 (Tooele, UT: Tooele Transcript Bulletin, 1990), 87–88, 125–30.

3 David W. Miller, “Irish Catholicism and the Great Famine,” Journal of Social History 9, no. 1 (1975): 82.

4 Samuel Dinsdale, interview with the author, October 2013.

5 Mildred Mercer Allred and Orrin P. Miller, History of Tooele County, vol. 1 (Salt Lake City: Tooele Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1961), 104.

6 Allred and Miller, History of Tooele County, 1:107.

7 Gary Topping, e-mail message to the author, February 28, 2014.

8 Ibid.

9 Allred and Miller, History of Tooele County, 1:183.

10 “History of the Diocese,” Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City, accessed October 2, 2014, www.dioslc.org/history; Allred and Miller, History of Tooele County, 1:184.

11 Allred and Miller, History of Tooele County, 1:184.

12 Ibid.

13 “History of the Diocese.”

14 Allred and Miller, History of Tooele County, 1:184.

15 Ibid.

16 Tooele (UT) Transcript, December 20, 1907, November 20, 1908.

17 Orrin P. Miller, ed., Mining, Smelting and Railroading in Tooele County (Tooele, UT: Tooele County Historical Society, 1986), 80.

18 Allred, History of Tooele County, 1:184.

19 “Rites Held for Club Founder,” Oakland (CA) Tribune, August 19, 1933.

20 “Rites Held for Club Founder.”

21 F. E. McGurrin, “Still Another Challenge,” Typewriter Operator 1, no. 10 (1888): 51.

22 Franke E. McGurrin, “A Challenge for Speed,” Typewriter Operator 1, no. 11 (1888): 56.

23 “A Speed Challenge,” Cosmopolitan Shorthander 9, no. 5 (1888): 123.

24 “Typewriter Operators,” Cincinnati (OH) Commercial Gazette, July 26, 1888.

25 Darren Wershler-Henry, The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 234–35.

26 Ibid.

27 Frank Zarnowski, American Work-Sports: A History of Competitions for Cornhuskers, Lumberjacks, Firemen, and Others (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013), 120–21.

28 Ibid.

29 “Typewriter Operators.”

30 Zarnowski, American Work-Sports, 120–21.

31 “The Typewriting Trial,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 12, 1891.

32 Wyckoff, Seamans, and Benedict, The History of Touch Typewriting (New York: Guilbert Putnam, 1900), 6–10.

33 Ibid.

34 “Stenographers Examined,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 15, 1894; “Rites Held for Club Founder.”

35 “Rites Held for Club Founder.”

36 “Important Business Change Effects Local Capitalists,” Brigham City (UT) Box Elder News, July 15, 1915.

37 “Rites Held for Club Founder.”

38 Ibid.

39 “Children Make Records on Typewriters,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 27, 1899.

40 Allred and Miller, History of Tooele County, 1:184.

41 “Cornerstone is Laid,” Intermountain Catholic, May 19, 1910.

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid.

45 “City and Neighborhood,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 5, 1890.

46 “St. Marguerite Church Dedicated,” Intermountain Catholic, November 26, 1910.

47 Miller, History of Tooele County, 2:129.

48 W. Paul Reeve, “Father Lawrence Scanlan Established Catholic Church in Utah,” Utah History Blazer, September 1995; “St. Marguerite Church Dedicated”; Allred and Miller, History of Tooele County, 1:185.

49 Allred, History of Tooele County, 1:185. 50 Ibid.

51 Doll, “St. Margaret Mary Alacoque.”

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid.

54 F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

55 Dinsdale, interview. Saint Marguerite’s official feast day is observed on October 16, but the local parish usually celebrates its fall festival a little earlier, to avoid bad weather.

56 Doll, “St. Margaret Mary Alacoque”; Dinsdale, interview.