Miriam B. Murphy History Blazer May 1996 Fifty years ago a Salt Lake City schoolteacher, Marguerite Ivins Wilson, studied the rhymes Utah children wrote in their classmates’ autograph books. She concluded that the rhymes reflected “both the spirit of the age in which they have been produced and the attitudes of the children” who wrote them. The material she studied …
Helen Hofmann Bertagnole—“Utah’s Queen of Swing”
W. Paul Reeve History Blazer, September 1995 In August 1938, “Utah’s Queen of Swing,” Helen Hofmann Bertagnole, added a third Utah state golf title to her string of victories, prompting one local sportswriter to declare her “the greatest woman golfer ever to wander the Utah fairways.” Less than a decade later her exploits on the golf course as well as …
Uinta Basin Group Trekked to the 1933 World’s Fair
Miriam B. Murphy History Blazer September 1995 In December 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, eighty-seven Uinta Basin residents made plans to attend the 1933 World’s Fair, Century of Progress, in Chicago. They were Future Farmers of America members from the Toyack Chapter, Central Union High School, Roosevelt, Utah, and their goal was nothing less than the longest …
“Alphabet” Agencies in Utah County
Richard Neitzel Holzapfel History of Utah County When Roosevelt took office in March 1933, the first of his New Deal programs, the Federal Emergency Relief Act of 1933 (FERA), was approved on 12 May. Although the act extended federal participation in relief for two more years, it changed the nature of the funding from loans to direct grants to the …
Philo T. Farnsworth’s Invention
Martha Sonntag Bradley History of Beaver County Born and raised in Beaver, Philo T. Farnsworth won his first national contest by age thirteen after the family moved to Franklin, Idaho, a year earlier. The contest, sponsored by Science and Invention magazine, highlighted his invention—a thief-proof lock. At age sixteen he drew a design for his high school chemistry teacher, Justin …
New Deal Agencies Built 233 Buildings in Utah
Becky Bartholomew History Blazer, June 1996 The Great Depression hit Utah even harder than most other states. From 1932 to 1940 Utah’s unemployment rate averaged twenty-five percent. In 1933 it reached thirty-three percent. Only three other states suffered more severely. Because of this, federal relief efforts were especially intensive in Utah. Soon the state ranked ninth among the then forty-eight …
Artist John Held, Jr. Created Cultural Icons, 1920s
History Blazer, July 1995 In American Cultural mythology the 1920s conjure up images of bathtub gin, raccoon coats, and tall, impossibly thin, short-skirted “flappers.” F. Scott Fitzgerald nicknamed the period “the Jazz Age” and wrote novels that chronicled the lifestyles of the young and fun-loving. Many of the period’s most enduring visual images were created by one of Utah’s most …
Strawberry Valley Was Utah’s First Federal Reclamation Project
Jeffrey D. Nichols History Blazer, May 1995 From the earliest years of the nation, American public policy has generally recognized agriculture as the best possible use for land. Thomas Jefferson’s veneration of the independent, virtuous “yeoman farmer” was shared by most of his countrymen. Policies such as the Northwest Ordinances, which established the method for surveying and selling public land, …
Marie Ogden Led Spiritual Group in San Juan County
W. Paul Reese History Blazer, April 1995 In September 1933 a band of religious settlers led by Marie Ogden chose Dry Valley, about fifteen miles north of Monticello, as the headquarters for their spiritual community. Shortly after arriving, Ogden purchased the county’s only newspaper, the San Juan Record, which she continued publishing. The only change in its format was the …
A Labor Inspector During the Great Depression
Barney L. Flanagan Historical Quarterly 54 Summer 1986 When you go to a road worker who is swinging along, whistling blithely while toting a ninety-six-pound bag of portland cement in each hand, and say to him, “Sorry, buddy, but you can’t work here,” you have to have a pretty good reason. When he tosses each bag onto a waist-high pile …