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40 Years Later |
 Scenic view of Salt Lake City--Home of the 2002 Winter Olympic Games |
SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH
The old town surprised us:
It really is cosmopolitan now
By JOYCE KIEFER
for TheColumnists.com
When our son-in-law announced that he had accepted a faculty position at the University of Utah, my husband and I told him to get us tickets to the Olympics. With a free bed available, how could we miss the opportunity?
Bill and I lived in Salt Lake City the first two years of our marriage---1962-64. We wanted to see how our former hometown would be transformed into a cosmopolitan world venue. I remembered Salt Lake City as an overgrown small town, isolated from the rest of the country by the splendid Wasatch mountains on one side, the forbidding Salt Flats on the other, and most of all by an overpowering religion that created a universe of its own.
I was a Catholic raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. Nothing else could make me more of an outsider. I was told that no one bothered to evangelize Catholics because they seemed beyond help. And San Francisco was a suspect place, what with beatniks and its reputation for being a cosmopolitan city. Mormon church life was so tightly planned and centered upon itself that close friendship with "Gentiles," as non-Mormons were called, generally ruled itself out. I chuckle to think that my son-in-law, Rich, who is Jewish, has now become a Gentile.
Bill was happy to return to the mountains. He gladly left Lockheed Sunnyvale for Hercules Powder Company and the opportunity to learn the new art of computer programming. Bill had grown up near the Rockies of Colorado. Just looking at the Wasatch Range every day was enough for him. I found the mountains lovely and endlessly fascinating as they changed through the seasons, but ultimately hard and forbidding. I missed the gently rolling hills of California and a real ocean as opposed to a huge gray body of salt water that could support no life except for specialized algae and microscopic shrimp.
Salt Lake was unique in quirky ways. Bill worked with men with names like Lavoy, Rulon, Devoy. We heard rumors that the suburb of Bountiful was the secret capital of polygamy. We could have drinks at a restaurant if we brought our own liquor in a paper bag--like winos or kids at a frat party. With alcohol and caffeine beverages verboten, we drank punch at weddings that I swear was watered up Jell-O. Only recently I learned from my Gentile son-in-law that Salt Lake is the Jell-O capital of the U.S.
Like almost everyone we followed sports. The radio broadcast the scores of church league games. We rooted for our local LDS ward (Latter Day Saints--the Mormons). Whenever Bill's alma mater, Regis College of Denver, played Utah teams in basketball, we eagerly sought out the games. Never in our wildest dreams did we think that sports would almost succeed in transforming our strange little city into a world class metropolis, complete with shopping mall trendiness.
Almost succeed but not quite.
Thank God.
The day we arrived for the Olympics our daughter, Julie, drove us to the University of Utah stadium where the opening and closing ceremonies take place. She and Rich live fairly close to the campus. I expected every house in town to sport a big American flag, like the small towns in Indiana we saw on a visit right after Sept. 11. But no. Ditto on Olympic flags. Would the average citizens of Salt Lake pass on their moment to reach out to the world and say "we ARE America" or at least leave the porch light on in welcome?
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That evening we learned exactly how they would accomplished this: They left up their Christmas decorations.
Flood-lit reindeer grazed; Christmas tree shapes done in lights graced various windows; even the wall around the Temple was hung with boughs of evergreens. Flags made out of red, white and blue fairy lights hung from front porches near the stadium.
I think the people who lived in Salt Lake when we were there would have done the same.
But my daughter's generation is changing the look and feel of the city as they determine what trendy means--what will attract those who come here because the snow is of Olympic quality. It seems as if she and Rich brought Seattle with them when they left the University of Washington, their previous academic venue. Starbucks coffee houses have sprouted up. So have small casual chic restaurants and bright little shops that sell expensive soap and fancy snacks.
Such restaurants and shops have taken over Park City, which was a decaying mining town in our time. Down the center of the main street people stood in an hours-long line to purchase those must-have U.S.A. team berets at the Roots store. The small Victorian houses that stud the surrounding slopes sell for Silicon Valley prices.
I hardly knew downtown Salt Lake. Crowds of people bobbed along the sidewalks. Smash Mouth played at the open air medal ceremony. Shills hustled tickets on every corner. A six months old shopping mall called The Gateway, located behind the Union train station, creates the same kind of shopping fantasy found in upscale malls anywhere in the country. No practical frugality here.
Shuttle buses came from all over the U.S. to help move the crowds around--MARTA from Atlanta, RTA from Cleveland ("Cleveland Rocks," said the destination sign), a bus from St. Louis. The San Francisco Muni had the most grime, no doubt from its drive across the Salt Flats. After observing the crowds I figured that one run on the Muni in SF would turn up more racially diverse people than two weeks of international Olympics in Utah. Occasionally I heard another language spoken. Somehow I'd expected that "crossroads of the world" feel that you get on the streets of Paris. Just this once. Some things never change.
But one convenient change, along with L.A.-style freeways, is a system of trails in the side canyons of the Wasatch Mountains. Our favorite place was narrow little Millcreek Canyon. I recall how delighted I was to find brilliantly red maple trees there in the fall. This time Bill and I, Julie and Rich, and his parents (also visiting from the Bay Area) strapped on snow shoes and went trekking up the canyon which was filled with pillowy snow. On the way back the men took a less traveled path and met a moose.
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Early one morning all of us drove up the wide Parley's Canyon highway to Utah Olympic Park to watch Brian Martin, a friend of Rich and his parents, participate in the two-man luge. This was the big event for us. The previous night we watched Slovakia and France vie for 13th place in men's ice hockey.
When we arrived in the pre-dawn darkness, the air crackled with excitement. People streamed from their cars into shuttle buses to ride up the mountain or poured onto the trail to walk the Olympic mile up to the luge run. Spotlights softly lit a huge banner of a downhill skier. Bill and I used to take Sunday drives up Parley's Canyon and around the mountain area at the top. This time I was panting up the icy trail, vaguely thankful for hand and foot warmers, wondering if the pin promised to the first 2,000 finishers was worth it.
Then I stopped and looked east. The mountain range was backlit by the orange sky of sunrise. Suddenly this scene, not the altitude, took my breath away and returned it with renewed energy. We joined about 50 of Brian's friends who came from the Bay Area to cheer he and his team mate Mark Grimmette to a silver medal. A young French-speaking boy came up to me and gestured that he wanted to trade for the pin I won for hiking up to the luge run. Would Brian trade his silver medal? Certainly not! Bill offered his pin instead.
Julie had a pin that she wouldn't trade: The five Olympic rings, one with the male symbol and the others with the female one. It said Utah Olympics and signified polygamy. Later on I noticed a signboard over a club advertising "Jerry Jensen and the Jack Mormons." Albertsons Supermarket featured six-packs of Mormon Polygamy Porter. I never saw that kind of humor out in the open before.
At the end of our 4-day visit I felt a connectedness and a pride in our former home town. It did well with the Olympics, especially through the warm friendliness shown by the ubiquitous yellow and black jacketed volunteer crowd controllers. Our relationship with Salt Lake City has spanned two generations, starting with our first child, Jane, who was born there and extending to our youngest, who chooses it as her home.
As academics, Julie--a post doctoral scholar--and her husband are part of a university community that is typically diverse and nonreligious, a microcosm of the culture beyond Utah. I think they, like the Olympics, will make Salt Lake more like the average American city. But the Mormons have tenacious conviction and a sense of history, as displayed in the opening ceremonies. "This is the place," their motto goes, and the city will always be theirs in spirit. May it keep its unique distinctiveness--as long as I can just visit.
© 2002 by Joyce Kiefer.
Photos of Millcreek Canyon and Utah Olympic Park are
© 2002 by Bill and Joyce Kiefer.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Joyce Flores Kiefer studied journalism with several members of
TheColumnists.com editorial staff at San Jose State University
and worked on the campus daily newspaper with the likes of Ron
Miller, Gerald Nachman, Elias Castillo and Michael Johnson. Joyce
is now an event
planner for the Center for Professional Development at Stanford
University. She
enjoys the outdoors and still writes the occasional article or
column.
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