(1917 – 2004) Faithful recorder of Utah’s rich ethnic heritage, whose historical works made it impossible to ignore the complexities of Utah’s past and present.
Ivy Baker Priest
She served as Treasurer of the U.S. during Eisenhower’s two terms. Born in Kimberly, Piute County, on September 7, 1905, to Clara Fernley and Orange D. Baker, Ivy grew up in Bingham where her father worked as a miner and her mother ran a boarding house. As a senior at Bingham High School Ivy captained the debate team, worked on …
Ada Williams Quinn
She founded a clothing factory in Ogden and ran for governor in 1940. Born on December 13, 1878, in Peterson, Morgan County, to Joshua and Hannah Martha Green Williams, Ada attended school in Morgan County and then earned a teaching certificate from the University of Utah. She taught school in both Morgan County and Ogden. She married Edward N. Quinn, …
Calvin Rampton
(1913–2007) A three-term Democratic governor from 1965 to 1977, Rampton launched economic development programs through business-government partnerships that were the foundation for the present-day economic health in Utah. He was the first governor to seriously include minorities in his administration and launched an aggressive building program on higher education campuses.
Alma Richards
Alma Richards Was Utah’s First Olympic Gold Medalist W. Paul Reese History Blazer, February 1995 Alma Richards, a lanky, unassuming Parowan, Utah, farm boy seemed an unlikely competitor in the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden. Fellow athletes, while aboard a ship sailing to the games, amused themselves by prodding the “raw youngster” on his hick upbringing. Richards made it to …
Harold Wallace Ross
The founder of The New Yorker grew up in Salt Lake City. Harold Ross, creator and editor of America’s most sophisticated magazine, The New Yorker, was known for his strong personality and his unsophisticated dress and manners. Some claimed that Ross was a literary hoax, because a man who looked and acted like Harold Ross could not be the editor …
Everett Ruess
Gibbs M. Smith Utah History Encyclopedia, 1994 Everett Ruess was born 28 March 1914 in Los Angeles, California. He was an artist and an eloquent proponent of wilderness, who disappeared in 1934 in the Escalante canyon areas of Utah. Ruess traveled on foot, leading a pack burro, in northern Arizona and southern Utah in the early 1930s. He wrote impassioned …
Arthur William Sampson
The first range ecologist, he was the father of range management. Arthur William Sampson’s list of “firsts” is impressive: first person in America to be called a range ecologist, first to promote deferred and rotational grazing strategies, first to develop usable concepts of indicator species and plant succession for evaluating range condition, first to write a college text on range …
Mattie Clark Sanford
This distinguished teacher and photographer had a zest for living. At age 10 Mattie Clark wanted to leave school to become a photographer. Instead she remained in school much of her life as both a student, receiving a master’s degree in zoology at age 59, and as a teacher for 45 years, retiring in 1944. Born October 30, 1878, in …
Wallace Stegner
(1909 – 1993) Best-selling author, major historical novelist, biographer and a Pulitzer Prize winner, who received most of his formal education in Utah.