ORAL HISTORY OF UTAH PEACE ACTIVISTS PROJECT

UTAH VALLEY UNIVERSITY OREM, UTAH

INTERVIEW WITH STEPHEN HOLBROOK

Interview Conducted by Kathryn French

10/26/2006 Salt Lake City, Utah

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Interviewee: Stephen Holbrook Interviewer: Kathryn French Date: October 26, 2006 Subject: Utah Peace Activists Place: Salt Lake City, Utah

KF: This is October 26, 2006, Kathy French interviewing Stephen Holbrook. Stephen, where did we end up last time? Of course I don’t remember exactly. United Front to End The War. We haven’t talked about MX missile days. I don’t think we’ve talked about post-Vietnam at all.

SH: No. I have a few more things to say about Vietnam and some of the other things that I think are worth talking about are the music, cultural aspects of the sixties and early seventies, as well as the assassinations, and our relationship or lack thereof with the police and FBI.

KF: You go ahead and start talking.

SH: The first large anti-war marches really came out of the University of Utah where I would say the predominately large number of people who came were from the University or who had some University association. Those were the moratoriums against the war in 1968 and 1969. The United Front To End The War was the predominant group that organized these marches. It kind of formed out of the marches. It wasn’t until… I believe it was the early seventies when the largest marches came from the capitol down to Pioneer Park. Those were around 5,000 people. But they were toward the end of the war, but after Nixon had broadened the war by invading Cambodia, and things like Kent State had taken place. A lot of things had really begun to anger people. I think it was in that context that what passed for extreme radicalism in Utah, with the Molotov cocktails in the ROTC building, and the burning down of the effectively empty multi-cultural center. But those things scared a lot of people, and it began to make some people afraid to be part of the movement. There always was a wide variety of groups involved. We’ve talked about the flower power kids— by that I mean the kids who were part of the cultural changes of the sixties in terms of music and dress. I would say that they didn’t have an ideological point of view. They didn’t like the war. Of course they wanted peace. You had a small group of pacifists. You had militants who might identify with a group called the Weathermen. Others who identified with political groups that we’ve mentioned before, the Progressive Labor Party, the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party. But the broad number of people were really just from average circumstances in Utah and did not have an ideological point of view. It was this group of people who made up the largest numbers. I believe we talked about the march on Social Hall Avenue where the TV stations were, and asking for time on the three stations because of the lack of conversation about the real issues as opposed to the nature of the marches.

KF: Which was amazing.

SH: During that period of time when the marches and various activities were taking place, several of us who were always part of the 50 group, but always took lead roles, maintained a relationship with the Salt Lake City Police Intelligence Division because we wanted to make sure that there were no incidents at the marches, that people were safe, the police knew where we were going. There was a guy by the name of Lieutenant Patrick who we particularly coordinated with. Harry Patrick later became a captain. I saw him not too long ago in a restaurant. We had a conversation. We would call them or go see them and say, “We’re going to have a march. This is where we’re Page 2 of 22

going to go. This is the number of people that we expect to see.” We tried to maintain some discipline ourselves, by having people wear arm bands who were march leaders, in order to avoid people being hurt, or agent provocateurs who were playing a double role, or something like that, going on. There was always an observation by the FBI but we had no real relationship with them. They were there to take pictures. We never saw them as our protectors. We always saw them as people who were trying to get something on us.

KF: Did they identify themselves?

SH: No. In those days it was actually pretty obvious who they were because it was almost a uniform that they wore, a certain kind of suit and a certain kind of shoes. Then of course when people were taking photos and you know that they’re not from the press. It was pretty obvious. Some of us had other interactions. We did have interactions with FBI where they came to ask us if we knew anything about certain events that took place. They were always courteous but they were not there for the purpose of protecting us, and that was very clear. As we know from uncovered history, both the Johnson and Nixon administrations had been seeking to prove or suggest that somehow we were all being manipulated by somebody. In fact, we knew who people were and what their point of view was. We had our little fights in these planning groups about the themes and exactly what would take place. There was not a conspiracy about who was there and whether we were being manipulated. The police in Salt Lake were actually quite good in protecting us. There was never a serious incident that I recall that was directly in our marches or something of that sort. There were a couple of things that happened along the way. One of which kind of had a lingering and dramatic story. One of our marches at the federal building, there was a fellow who showed up at the march with a picture. As I recall I believe he had Mao Tse-Tung and Stalin pictures. One on one side of his poster, and one on the other side of his sign.

KF: A student?

SH: I didn’t know who he was actually. Since I was always interested in public perception and the press coverage, I went over to him and said, “Look, you have every right to be here. You have every right to express your point of view. But the point of view you’re expressing doesn’t express what most of the people here feel, and it’s counterproductive to our purpose in being here.” So he took the sign down. Well about a week later he hijacked an airplane from Salt Lake. He wanted the jet to go to Hanoi in Vietnam, but the jet didn’t have that kind of range. So he ended up hijacking the plane to Havana, Cuba. I always felt slightly guilty because I thought maybe I had made him feel like he couldn’t express his point of view, so he took a more extreme measure. As I learned, later, this played out over several years. I learned that after he got there, he never did really approve of Cuban communism. His goal was somehow to be in Vietnam. There was no way to do that. Initially he was free in Cuba. Then because he was always creating some kind of problems, he ended up in jail. After he ended up locked up in Cuba his parents came to me, thinking that I had some kind of power to get to the Cubans. I didn’t know anybody in Cuba. But I did know Wayne Holly, the president of the Utah Communist Party, or the chairman I guess. I asked him if he had any ideas about how to approach the Cubans. This kid’s name was Mike Hansen. His parents wanted him to come and do time in the United States rather than be in what he regarded as a really lousy Cuban jail. Wayne gave me the name of somebody in their foreign ministry. I wrote a letter and I kind of gilded the lily a bit. I said I was a local socialist leader, and that this kid had come from a working class family. I sort of played all of the cards. And it was not too long after that that he was released, and he came back to the United States and served the Page 3 of 22

rest of his time in a U.S. federal penitentiary. It was a side show that had nothing to do essentially with what most of us were doing. I just somehow got roped in or agreed to help do something about it. I believe the last major march was the one in which we went from the state capitol down to Pioneer Park. We had Robert Scheer who was later a writer for the Los Angeles Times and at that time was editor of Ramparts Magazine. We had an entertainer by the name of Country Joe McDonald from Country Joe and the Fish who came and sang his famous Vietnam song. However, this 5,000 group got all of about three inches, one column in the Tribune. Any time you have 5,000 come together for a political event in Utah that is bigger than most people would tend to recall at a Republican or Democratic State Convention. We were outraged that that was the sum total of coverage. As we had all begun to think about lots of different issues, if you would go back to that particular march, you would find that the signage in the march was now talking about environment and women’s rights. By this time there were Vietnam Vets who had returned from Vietnam who had organized themselves. Ethel Hale had certainly educated me regarding the local media and ownership. So what a group of us, I believe that there were 17 or 18 of us, decided to do was to go do a sit-in at the Salt Lake Tribune. As we usually did with these kinds of events, we made sure that the press was called the moment we arrived. There were people who were assigned to do that. We knew what the law was and that somebody was prepared to bail us out of jail and what have you. But we weren’t particularly interested in being in jail, but we were trying to draw attention. We had some fairly elaborate handouts about the interlocking relationship of the local media and its relationship to the LDS Church. I’m not sure that issue in and of itself had much to do with the particular grievance, which was that the Tribune didn’t cover the march very well, but we utilized that occasion. The Tribune, because the other press all showed up within moments, was sort of forced to cover the event :15 themselves so they didn’t look self-serving. They sort of overdid it to look good. They basically did… I think it was pretty close to two pages of Holbrook-Gallivan conversation. Gallivan being the publisher of the Salt Lake Tribune, and he and I having a discussion about some of the issues and whether or not we were going to leave and whether or not he was going to call the police. Later I have been acquainted with him since. He’s actually been helpful on some things that I’ve been involved with and we’ve been friendly. It was a very civil conversation but it included things like he was inviting us to go down to a boardroom called the Pioneer Room, I believe, to have our conversation. We said, “No, we want to do it in front of the workers.” We were using some of the lingo of the times about working classes being involved. Some of which was somewhat ironic, because so many of the people who were in the leadership of the anti-war movement and who were civil rights workers were upper middle class kids that had really essentially nothing to do with the working class as such. It was the kind of thing we were exploring at the time, fairness in society and so forth. I have to laugh at some of this stuff now— not the underlying issue of the war or civil rights or even some of the political issues, but some of our self-righteous presumptuousness about our rightness. I think that we were correct, and time proved on both issues that we were correct. But sometimes you can get a little caught up in your own rhetoric and your own ideas. After the war began to wind down, which was when the troops started to be withdrawn and the Congress basically wasn’t going to pay for any more Americans to be there, and we were still sending supplies, people began to look for other things to do. One of the first things that happened that I was involved with, quite a few people wanted somebody to run for the Salt Lake City Commission. It was a different form of government at that time than now. We didn’t have a mayor and council members, we had a mayor who was part of a small commission, and each person had a department or several departments. I ran, bringing a good number of anti-war people together, to be part of that campaign. I did win in the primary. I lost in the general election. Looking back I’m sure I lost because if you look at the pictures my hair was Page 4 of 22

completely wild and unruly and off-putting, I’m sure, to middle class people. If you read the brochures we talked about taxing the church and such things. It wasn’t really a campaign designed to win an election as much as to create issues, which is much of what we were concerned about, to talk about issues. But going through that experience, I learned quite a bit about running for office, and I had some experiences after that, actually, before I was a member of the legislature in which I got involved with issues and took the legislature on bus tours of dilapidated housing and went back and helped get Utah’s first long term housing bill passed.

KF: How did you get the legislators to go with you?

SH: We wrote them a letter. We offered free lunch and provided buses. I think there were several legislators who probably invited other legislators to come join them. Then once we brought them down we had box lunches and took them through housing. We had handouts and people who were knowledgeable about the problem. That encouraged me to then run for the legislature, which I did in 1974 and took office in 1975 and served three two-year terms. One of the things that happened when I was first part of the legislature was that I was part of the majority. The Democrats had a majority at that particular time in the and the Senate. The majority leader, Millie Oberhansley Bernard called me in within the first week or so of the legislative session and read to me from a report of the state liquor police an account of my having been involved in a demonstration. It was very clear that she was doing this to intimidate me, to make sure that I went along with them, and that I was docile, and that they had this information. There was nothing shocking about any of this to me. I just thought it was kind of funny. But what the report was, Spiro Agnew the then vice president had come into town several years earlier during a campaign, and they had a $100 plate dinner, which by today’s standards isn’t very much money for these kinds of things. But we put on a 50 cent a plate dinner to sort of counter, and it received a lot of national publicity at the time. When he was coming into town quite a number of us had pickets as he would cross the North Temple viaduct as I recall. For some reason the governor had assigned the state liquor police to monitor our demonstration. What they had to do with this, and why they were monitoring us at all I had no idea. It was very clear that they thought they were putting me in my place saying, “We know everything about you.” I thought, “I know everything about me already, so you don’t need to tell me any of this.” When I ran for office I had had so much publicity, both in civil rights and in anti-Vietnam organizing that it was sort of inconceivable to think that somehow everybody didn’t know all of this and somehow this could be used to intimidate me. But in any event, that was my greeting in the legislature. Fortunately I’ve always tried to be a bridge between various people, and I’ve generally speaking been pretty mild mannered in my personal communications and contacts. That enabled me over the six years to basically do a major reform of the youth correction system in the state, and to develop and pass the Committee for Consumer Services legislation, which still today represents the public before the Public Service Commission on utility rate matters. Those were two of the things. Actually I had a funny experience. This was, I believe, in my first few weeks, too. I had proposed a bottle bill in which people would have to pay five cents for a can or a bottle when they went to the store. Then to make sure they got recycled, they’d get their money back when they brought it back to the store. It could be turned in for cash. That was an environmental (bill), to save energy and production of these items, as well as to clean up trash from the sides of the roads. Both the union and management at U.S. Steel— which later became Geneva and now has become defunct— were against this, because they made a lot of cans. Why I don’t know. I don’t think it really had much effect on them. Other states did things like that, and it didn’t really affect them. It doesn’t really matter where they get their material, recycled or from old cars or whatever. Page 5 of 22

KF; It’s actually much less expensive to make it from recycled.

SH: Anyway they were against it. Again Millie Oberhansley Bernard, the majority leader called me into her office and she said, “Now we’re bringing your bill up. We’re going to pass it. Don’t say anything.” What had happened was there is a procedure in the legislature where you can substitute the language. You can use the same title and the same bill number, but you can completely change the language. What they did was they took out all of the bottle return bill language and put in an anti-littering law. I don’t remember what the fine was $25 or $30. Now when you go around the state and you see signs that say, “Fine for littering,” I’m the father of Utah’s anti-littering law, by accident. I’m the inadvertent father because the legislative leadership decided to support the union and the management of U.S. Steel, which was a big deal in those days, that particular business. So they changed the language and passed the bill, and I couldn’t do anything about it because they had the votes. I learned a lot the first session. People that I thought were really being nice to me, I didn’t know were lobbyists until later. I really didn’t. It’s more obvious now. Lobbying has become a big business. During this same period as I became a member of the legislature, the fruition of some of the ideas that grew out of my involvement with public awareness and media began to gel into the development of what has become KRCL 91 FM. A couple of things made me want to do that. One was that I very specifically remember the live coverage of a march in Berkeley was (broadcast by) the Pacifica station down there. That was the first time that I had become much aware of that kind of public radio or community supported radio. The second thing was just the whole experience of media being a filter, which according to who was writing it and what the interests were, could adjust or limit or in some way tailor the message that you wanted to put out, which really left most of us out who were trying to do new things…. If you wanted to really make a clear statement about something, the only thing you could do was to write a leaflet. You can’t get lots of people… you can’t get the tens of thousands of people… in the community by standing on the street corner handing out leaflets. It became clear to me that one of the answers to having more open media and places where other voices could be heard, was to develop some media that people who had a point of view from minority, peace, liberal left, environment and women’s issues and what have you, could have a place to do that. So I began to explore during this whole period of time what it would take to actually do that. I went to Los Angeles to look at community stations, talked to a guy who created stations, by the name of Lorenzo Milam up in Seattle. I spent a lot of time with another guy who was the fund raiser for the Pacifica station in Los Angeles. His name was Phil Watson. He was one of these people who really understood fund raising. While I’d raised some money to buy publicity for the anti-war movement it was in the hundreds and few thousands of dollars, not in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. And something that I learned over time and over many years now… I’ve raised millions of dollars for various things that I’ve been involved with… I learned that it’s about the same amount of work to raise $500,000 as $50,000 as $5,000. It’s a question of the list that you’re working from and finding the right people who have the interest that you have. It’s a little more complex than that.

:30 But basically the amount of work is about the same. The development of the radio station went through a lot of different phases. But essentially to have a radio station you had to have a frequency available; a radio engineering search; I had to develop a board of directors; I had to come up with evidence of at least three years of funding for the effort; obviously a location for the tower site as well as studios. Each of these things were separate kinds of things and had to be dealt with. I had the help of Paul Wharton and Ethel Hale on the legal side of this, putting together Page 6 of 22

the FCC application. I focused on raising the money, developing programming, the locations, the board, and that sort of thing. But they were very good in helping me do the FCC work. As it turned out we had to do it twice because there was something called the CB radio craze CB radios, were sort of a lame predecessor to the Internet in terms of people communicating with each other, in which people by the hundreds of thousands were speaking with each other by radio around the country. It put such a crush of applications before the FCC that they couldn’t handle it. By the time this freeze got over, we had to resubmit. I really had to go back to all my funding sources and do everything once again because everything had a time line on it. In this effort I called on a lot of people that I had met doing all these things over the years. I got free radio equipment from Bonneville International, the LDS Church media conglomerate. And a free tower site from KSL, another LDS Church media outlet. That came out of the initial conversations with KSL back when I was negotiating to get free time for the anti-war movement, as well as at least a peripheral relationship with Gordon B. Hinckley who then was a general authority of the LDS Church, but of course today is the LDS president and prophet. I emphasized our interest in getting minority points of view on the air, but particular minority voices, African Americans, Hispanics, what have you, which was a little bit more of our emphasis at the beginning. Over time Hispanic radio developed on its own with other independent voices and there wasn’t as much need for it on KRCL. That has happened with other things, music that were not heard but now are heard everywhere. Things change. But going through the process I also went to Westminster College. We were looking for some kind of a more stable partner. We basically came up with an arrangement where Westminster was going to have a third of the people on the board and we were going to be located there, and they were going to have some programming on the station. But Mountain Fuel Supply, the successor of which is Questar Gas, went to them and said, “We want you to kill this project, because we’re afraid that Steve Holbrook is going to use this radio station to attack the utility companies.”

KF; Because you had already…

SH: Passed the Committee Consumer Services legislation. They basically dumped us. A woman by the name of Diane Orr and her husband Mike Urmann, who owned something called the Blue Mouse Theater at that time, which was an alternative arts theater down below a counter-cultural alternative shop called the Cosmic Aeroplane. They owned the building. So they said that we could use the second floor. Bonneville finally called one weekend and said, “You can have the equipment from a studio in San Francisco that we own, KRON FM but you’ve got to pick it up this weekend.” I had no idea how. I knew nothing about equipment. I’m not an engineering person, but I got a guy from Los Angeles (Don Wilson) to go up and disassemble it and put it on a moving van and brought up here. There were lots of things that came along. After we got on the air, we were initially broadcasting 12 hours a day. We sort of knew what we were doing, but we sort of didn’t know what we were doing. We were on very limited funds. We were already holding our first on-air fund-raisers. One of the great stories, this was at a time before we had fully developed our own fund-raising skills. People were calling in live on the air saying, “I will give two hand made vases that I’ve made if someone will give a donation of $25.” Then someone else would call and say, “I want those vases. I’ll donate $25.” One guy called in live on the air and said, “I’m an attorney and I’m offering a no-fault divorce for $100.” A little while later another guy calls up and says, “I’m interested in that no-fault divorce. Let me go talk to the old lady and we’ll call you back.” So he called back later and said, “We’ve decided to go for it.” Let’s say it lacked professionalism in our early broadcast time. One day we had a guy who had been on talk radio. He was doing a program and it became very clear that he was inebriated, Page 7 of 22 slurring his speech. We didn’t know what to do. We didn’t want to walk in the studio and say, “You can’t do this.” We just literally pulled the plug from another room. There were a lot of little situations that we were walking through and trying to figure out. One of the things that happened was that we were able to get some money from the CETA program. It was a federal training program for minorities. Donna Land who is the current general station manager of KRCL came in as a trainee on that program. She has been there now 27 years, and eventually became the station manager. She’s a Native American. There is a lot of history, lots of different people. The station eventually became 24 hours, which is a lot of volunteers to keep going. It’s been in four different locations. It finally got a home of its own instead of paying rent. I was really there the first three years in the first and second studio and stayed on the board for a number of years. Now I’m an honorary board member and never go. Things are great. They don’t need me. A few years ago I did get involved when they wanted to build a new studio. I took them down to see the folks at the George and Dolores Dore Eccles foundation. Lon Watson, who is a great guy, got really interested. He was one of the trustees. Basically with their money and other Eccles Foundations money (he) found most of the money to build what is now KRCL’s home. Every once in a while they roll me out at some event and say, “Here’s the founder.” But the thing is that it has really remained much of what it was intended to, which is a place for people from the peace movement, women’s right, environment, various types of music that were not played as much in those particular times, with things like reggae, blues, salsa, blue grass, new age, jazz, later industrial rock. But a lot of things that were not being aired on the general commercial media. There has always been political expression on KRCL where people could get three minutes of a public service announcement that was played and replayed about an event they were doing. The thing that is important for me is that that has given people an opportunity to have feedback about themselves, about their community, about things that they were doing that were important to them, and many times important to me too. I almost feel like I created KRCL for myself, but it has met the needs of lots of other people, too. One of the emotional motivations that I had at the time was that lots of people would leave Salt Lake because they felt like there wasn’t enough of a peer group to be part of. I think that it has played a role, whether it be cultural events, musical events, political events, where people can grow and become larger and become aware of each other, and not feel isolated, and feel comfortable enough to live in and make change in this community. After all, San Francisco doesn’t need any more progressives or alternate life-style folks. One quote I have always liked from Jesus, when Jesus was criticized for working among what were called “the unrighteous.” He said, “What need have I to be amongst the righteous?” In other words, what’s the point of talking to yourself and people who already have the same point of view. But let’s face it, it can be a lot of work, and it can be frustrating. But if you want to make change you need to go where the change needs to take place. That’s the short KRCL story.

The way in which the peace movement played out for me later on, and I’ve always had a concern and interest in poverty, putting together the Salt Lake Community Shelter and Resource center was again a function of revisiting many of these people in the power structure who I first met when I was the local radical, but with whom I always maintained a good personal relationship. They were never the enemy in a personal way. It was possible, and included the LDS Church, the mayor’s office and the police chief’s office, and numerous other community groups in putting the shelter together.

I would say that the thing that I spent the last 15 years until two years ago doing, that in a way most carried some of the attitudes of the peace movement, particularly Gandhi, has been the Coalition for Utah’s Future and later it’s subsidiary Envision Utah. I say that because of the Page 8 of 22

techniques that we used of bringing stake holders together. In other words we would say what a problem is, but we wouldn’t say what the solution is. We would bring all the stake holders together. One of the things for me was, what do you do, how do you make progress in a time in which you can’t march for everything. It’s not always effective and it’s not always the way to get things done. You can’t be angry all of the time. So the question is, “How do you make things happen?”

:45 The thing that I found with stake holder involvement, facilitation, basically saying, “Everybody has something to offer. Everybody has something to bring to the table.” That then really created a base of work. I certainly didn’t invent stake holder involvement or facilitation, but I did see it as an extension of some of the ideas of Gandhi and the peace movement. So it became a way to make a number of changes in health care access. The State Office of Child Care was developed because of that kind of an approach. Envision Utah itself was developed and all of its techniques that it’s still using as it goes from community to community helping people plan for the future, basically uses the stake holder involvement. A developer sits down with an environmentalist and a city official and a church leader and a house wife and everybody, all the people who are part of a community. And they each bring something. They each have knowledge that the other one doesn’t have, and they each have something to contribute in the discussion. One of the other things that I’ve found, and it may be true with other issues: if you think in longer terms, it’s easier to bring people together than if you focus on today’s adversarial relationship. And we found this with Envision Utah. We very specifically did not get involved with the Legacy Highway issue because it was already polarized. But we found that when you got people to think 20 years out there was a great commonality of what people wanted to see happen. I think that that could be true with many other issues. If you can get past… find ways of characterizing your choices that go beyond the immediate polarization… that it does provide opportunities for making progress. Progress is very American concept. The very idea of progress

[tape interrupted]

SH: The General Electric commercial in which I think the theme was, “Progress is our product.” I mean social progress. I don’t mean technological progress. One of the interesting things about the United States is the idea that people believe there is such a thing as progress. We have to analyze whether or not the things you do really create progress or whether or not it’s just more of the same in a new form. The other thing is that Americans tend not to be ideological. Our politics have become polarized as if we were, more recently. But I think that most Americans are very pragmatic.

[tape interrupted]

SH: I was saying that I think Americans are non-ideological as a whole. Certainly there are Americans who have ideologies. The current war in Iraq is based on an ideology, a belief that somehow the United States would gain by creating a certain kind of government in the Middle East. It was based from a group of neo-conservatives within the Bush administration. I found some of these same kind of people in the anti-war movement, who filter all of their decisions through a point of view. Rather than looking strictly at what is the problem, and then being willing to try lots of different things, and let the things that don’t work fall by the wayside, and the things that do work… to amplify them. I look at Franklin Roosevelt, and that’s the kind of thing that he did. He had an alphabet soup of programs to try to deal with the Great Depression, basically stating Page 9 of 22

publically that some of them would work, some of them wouldn’t and they’d try them all and see what made a difference. I think the same is true when you’re dealing with poverty, or peace or any other issue that if you can keep an open mind. You have your objective. You have what your end goal is, peace or lack of poverty or whatever. But how you get there, and what the methodology is or what really works, what doesn’t work, I think that always has to be left open to what works. And in that sense, the lack of ideology, the pragmatism, is the great American “ism” rather than ideology of one kind or another in America.

[tape interrupted]

KF: You’re a political philosopher.

SH: Maybe.

KF: Maybe philosophy isn’t really founded in pragmatics.

SH: It might be a philosophy of doing business, a philosophy of making change.

KF: And so state legislature and starting the radio station. Were those two at the same time?

SH: Getting the station organized was going on at the same time I was in the legislature. It was the reason that I didn’t run for a fourth term because the station was going to go on the air December 3, 1979 and so I didn’t. It was just too much to contemplate doing a campaign in September, October, November and try to get the station on air in December.

KF; So for a few years you were pretty consumed with the radio station.

SH: I was.

KF: How about when the MX Missile stuff happened?

SH: The first awareness I had of the MX Missile possibility was when then state senator Frances Farley who had been my campaign manager when I ran for the city commission and had become a very good friend and then had also managed my campaign for the legislature, but had subsequently become a state senator. She and her husband and a friend, Chad Dobson, and I were going up to Sundance for a fund-raiser. As I recall, John Denver, the folk singer was singing for a fund-raiser for Wayne Owens who was going to be the Democratic candidate for United States senator. On the way up Frances told us about this incredible briefing that she’d had by… I guess it was people from the federal government… about their desire to base the MX Missile across several hundred valleys of Western Utah and Nevada, all the way between Salt Lake City and Reno, Nevada. The MX Missile as a missile had been discussed publically before, but not a basing mode of the sort. No one had any idea that someone wanted to put hundreds of these between Salt lake City and Reno with little trains pulling them around going in numerous tunnels to hide in at night so the Soviet’s wouldn’t know which tunnel they were in. Frances was incredulous. She had never heard of anything as bizarre sounding as this. She was horrified because the rest of the people on this panel were sort of, “This is what’s going to happen and it will be good for the economy.” Well, the discussion that we had going up to Sundance was, “Who can stop this?” I would say that the main thing I ever had to do with the MX Missile being Page 10 of 22

stopped was this conversation. While I had a few peripheral engagements after that, I said, “There’s only one institution that is powerful enough to have an impact on this and that’s the LDS Church in terms of our community. You’ve got to educate the LDS Church.” Frances and Chad then proceeded for many many months, and may have even been several years— I’ve forgotten the time line exactly— to bring former deputy directors of the CIA and retired admirals and other experts to brief the public affairs committee of the LDS Church. So they got a real education on the potential meaning. This was at a time when as the facts became known about the MX, even the governor , Governor Matheson— who later came out against MX— was for it, and people like Jake Garn, who was United States senator, were for it. Very clearly the most important thing that happened in turning around the MX Missile was the fact that the LDS Church came out against it. They had status in the new Republican administration with Reagan, because of their connection. Reagan certainly knew the Mormons in the West, and there were lots of Mormons in California. Even Jake Garn had to abruptly change his position because the LDS Church came out against it. They came out against it on some very interesting grounds. They were certainly aware of all the technical problems, that there was not enough cement in the entire intermountain west to build all of this without basically stopping other construction. They knew things like that. They were briefed on all of the political and technical problems. But what they basically said was, “We feel that it is not a symbol of the kind of mission that we have of bringing the gospel of peace to the world, to have 200 valleys filled with missiles between Reno, Nevada and Salt Lake City.” They basically took what you might call a religious moral stand against the MX Missile. It basically was the thing that killed it in the Reagan administration. It had not been proposed by Reagan but rather in the Carter administration. There were lots of other people doing lots of other things. Stan Holmes was running the MX Center providing a lot of information, bringing some of the Protestant groups to the fore. Ed Firmage was doing some speaking on the subject, but I personally credit the work that Frances Farley and Chad Dobson did, educating the LDS Church to what the MX missile really meant, to basically killing that system. I believe that the absurdity of MX, and the publicity about the absurdity of MX, actually helped create a peace movement in the United States— that while Reagan would never admit that he was influenced by it, in fact, Chad went back to Massachusetts and began organizing. I believe it was a nuclear power plant that was going to be built. I’ve forgotten the name of the plant, but eventually it had a lot of people from the peace movement in it. A lot of these same people, people like Mike Moby from SANE, nationally, came out during this period too. I met a lot of those folks. They then were very interested in what was going on in Utah, and it became a good place to both provide and to get information. I’m convinced that if the absurdity of it, being able to explain this very strange thing of having little train tracks in 200 valleys and I forget how many little tunnels to pull the train into in each of these valleys and running the little train around the tracks every night with a missile on it, how absurd the build up of the two sides the Soviets and the United States had become. 1:00 It was something that had gone amuck. And I think that the absurdity of it really helped promote… helped people realize we can’t just let things go. After that, Reagan met with the premier of the Soviet Union in Gorbachev. They began to talk not only about reducing the number of missiles, but they started talking about total demobilization. In the end that was not done, but they were beginning to think new thoughts about that sort of thing. I think that these things connect. The Reaganites would say they were never influenced by the peace movement but I don’t believe that.

KF: What was Chad’s last name?

SH: Chad Dobson. Page 11 of 22

KF: He went back to Massachusetts?

SH: He went back to Massachusetts and worked on this big anti-nuclear campaign. Then he went to Washington and he’s worked for several OXFAM and the Bank Center which monitors the World Bank for its environmental and social impacts groups since that time. In fact he runs a national office. I have to think of what the name of it is. He runs the Washington office and travels the world. He knows the story of what he and Frances did. Frances has since passed away. Stan Holmes and I gave Stan some information for a guy at BYU in the last year or so, did a paper that we thought was a more accurate depiction of what had gone on than one that Ed Firmage had done which we regarded as very self-serving and inaccurate.

KF: A doctoral paper?

SH: I don’t know.

KF: When we leave today I would love to have his number. It’s so interesting to hear about the intersection from the Church when every once in the while they speak out.

SH: The thing in Utah is many people say they wish the church wouldn’t get involved in politics, but it depends what. If we want them to do something we want them to do, we want them to do it. If it’s something we don’t want to do, we don’t want them to speak out.

KF: And most churches do speak out.

SH: The civil rights movement would not have existed without Reverend Martin Luther King and the Southern Black Baptist ministers.

KF: Would you like to go back to that? You had mentioned music and culture. Do you want to go back to that?

SH: The 1960s were a time of tremendous ferment that is almost hard to imagine in today’s social climate, how much change was taking place. But for those of us who had gone to high school in the 1950s and graduated, in my case, in 1960. I was actually five or six years older than most of the people that I identified with later on in Utah than the younger groups who were part of what I regard as the sixties. But I am around the same age as the Beatles and Joan Baez and people who did have an impact on the sixties but were a little older than many of the people in Utah. One of the things that were happening in Utah, was that because Utah is geographically located in a natural place to stop if you’re a musical group, because if you’re going east to Denver or some other place, there is a big distance between California and those places. So it’s a natural place to stop and hold a concert. So Utah had a lot more exposure to a lot of the music that was new and creative and happening in those times, the Rolling Stones, the Big Brother and the Holding Company, Janice Joplin, who was the lead singer, and numerous other groups, Jefferson Airplane, would come initially to a ballroom at Lagoon, the amusement park. They no longer utilize that up there. But at a place called the Terrace Ballroom in down town Salt Lake. As the counter culture was taking off it included music, certainly a lot of experimentation with drugs. I would say that some people were naive about drugs and some people were educated about them. But the kind of drugs that I’m talking about were the drugs that… Author Aldous Huxley wrote a book called The Page 12 of 22

Doors of Perception, which is the story of the use of mescaline, which is somewhat similar to LSD, and what are called magic mushrooms and so forth…and of course marijuana… People were experimenting with marijuana in this period of time. Marijuana was not widely discussed. I think I’d heard the name and I associated it with Mexicans. That’s something that they did, whatever it was. But as cultural influences from the psychedelic music that came out of the second stage of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and lots of other groups came, lots of people began experimenting with those things. Later on it was my observation that in the earlier stages there were people who were very serious about this. It was something that they did very deliberately, that they learned. If you read Aldous Huxley he talks about the things that you should do if you’re going to do this sort of thing. You should be with someone that you trust. You should be in a certain kind of environment. It was not thought of as a party drug. It was not something that you put in the punch and everybody has a great time. It was thought of as something that people do to open themselves up to things that they couldn’t otherwise see. There were other currents along at the same time that suggested you could do the same thing, whether it was through yoga and meditation or other kinds of alternative disciplines. There is a place called the Esalen Institute down in Big Sur that had a lot of these kinds of programs where people would come to learn how to open their minds up, as it were. I think that because the children of the people who got educated because of money from the GI bill and after World War II, and they raised their families in relative comfort, that the children were well educated, well taken care of, secure group of people, and at some point they were bored. They were bored with the suburb and materialism. They were bored with the isolation of the suburb, and they were looking for something else. At the same time this was going on you had this tremendous political ferment going on with the civil rights movement, with riots in the cities, our major political heroes being assassinated, John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X. These kinds of things, whether it be demonstrations or riots in the city, basically the evening news, every night, this was a time when everybody watched one of the three channels. Basically they were full of social ferment, and the radio waves began to be full of the music, and people, of course, were buying the discs of this same music. Each thing feeding on the other. The music spoke about the political things that were taking place. The opening up, seeing the world in a new way. I’ll give you an example of the kind of thing that I mean. When I tried LSD it was not actually illegal. I got some stuff that was made by Sandoz Pharmaceuticals. I did it with a returned missionary friend of mine from BYU. He later got in trouble because they told too many people. He got kicked out of school. The experience that I had was that things that were man made, visually were ugly when I took the LSD. Things that were natural seemed to have life to them and were warm and reinforcing. And because I did it in the context of being with someone that you trust, being someplace that is safe, I didn’t have any bad experiences. Other people who maybe did it other ways did. And as we have learned later, everybody’s chemically different and some people may have had bad experiences. But I think it’s not unlike the kind of thing that Native Americans experience with peyote. I think that there was an awakening of the importance of the natural world in many people. Whereas much of what we had seen as progress had to do with technology and human creations. I think that it actually had a role, at least in some people’s case, of opening them up to the natural world and perhaps even having some small role in the creation of environmentalism as a movement. Because that which is living takes on such a different and moving feel to it in that experience. Some people can get the same experiences with meditation and yoga.

KF: I’m looking at your art to see if I see some of that outdoor living stuff in it.

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SH: Probably. There might be a live concert from a national group in Salt Lake one night, who have some kind of radical message or radical music or political message or cultural message. There might be an anti-war organizing event the next night. There might be an event on television the next night of an assassination or a riot or something. There was such a ferment and such a circle of things going on. Let’s just say that life was enlivened and quickened and was moving very quickly in that period of time. If some of it was horrifying and some of it was exhilarating, it was never boring. While some people went in one direction or another, what they called hippies, sometimes moved to the country and became apolitical. Other people became radical but took it too far and lost public confidence. Other people learned how to do things and moved into the mainstream of political movement. Some went on to be creative in, whether it be poetry or music or what have you. Each generation have their own experience. The World War II generation are called the Greatest Generation. I’m sure you’d have to include going through the Great Depression and the tremendous threat that Fascism and Nazism was and surviving that and moving on and building a new world. I’m not going to dispute that they’re the greatest generation. I think that we were the beneficiaries of that, and that it enabled us to open our minds and ourselves to civil rights and the rights of African Americans and Hispanics and to musics that we had not heard before and had not even been aware of. I think that there are a lot of things about today’s world that we take for granted. 1:15 The tremendous influence that black culture has had on the Anglo culture, just the music, jazz, rock and roll, blues, which are predominant now, were not then. When I was growing up in Salt Lake the most you would ever hear of black music would be Nat King Cole. He was an African American. Or in my mother’s generation, the Ink Spots.

KF: Diana Washington.

SH: I don’t know that I heard Diana Washington in the fifties. But that all changed. And you can listen to any radio station. I would say 80% of all music that is played has some roots in the African American experience. After all Elvis Presley didn’t really invent rock and roll, he simply was the first famous white person to popularize black music.

KF: And then you mentioned assassinations that you wanted to talk about. And I do want to remind you, you can stop when you’re tired.

SH: I was in the University of Utah union building when John Kennedy was assassinated. I knew that it was in Texas. My first thought, because there had been so much antipathy towards John Kennedy from the extreme right, the John Birch Society and so forth, was that they must have had something to do with it. I don’t believe they did in historical fact. I think that there became a feeling that “the somebody, the establishment, the counter-counter-culture, the somebody” is doing all of our leaders in. I think if you actually look at most of these situations, that the real murderers tend to be disgruntled individuals who are in one way or another on the outs with society, but have some single issue, but were not really orchestrated. Some would dispute that, but that’s my view, is that they in fact were isolated events. But the effect was that some of the real leaders of our time were taken out of our leadership and other people came into the leadership. Lyndon Johnson was actually able to do some wonderful things with civil rights because of John Kennedy’s assassination, and in effect used the momentum of that as well as some of the things that were going on. Plus he had a Southern background. That’s one situation in which you could say that there was some improvement in society, the anti-poverty programs, his own eventual realization that the Vietnam War was not going to be won in the way that he had Page 14 of 22

thought it was. Martin Luther King’s loss however… there really has not been anybody who you could say was a national leader who could step into his boots. There wasn’t a somebody else. He is one of those unique characters, and when he’s gone, he’s gone. But if you take an historical perspective, you kind of wonder what would have happened. How can you be Martin Luther King forever? How can you always put on a new act? How can you make a new step? How can you keep up that energy? How can you keep people’s attention? In a way you almost have to look at his martyrdom as a way of freezing him and his history into the American consciousness. I’m sure we would not have a Martin Luther King holiday had it not been for his assassination. If he were still living, I’m sure there would not be a Martin Luther King holiday. And so there would not be a symbolic recognition of the contribution of African Americans enshrined in our holiday system. In one sense leaders were taken, and you could even say the same thing about people who were not assassinated, but who died young. Janice Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. There is something to be said for once you’ve done the biggest thing that you can do and you keep trying to do something, sometimes you can become a mimic of yourself. And in a sense you could look at people like that as it may be that they are bigger in death than they were in life. Not so much what they had been to that point, but in trying to be that on an indefinite basis and do something better and bigger each time. Robert Kennedy’s death on the other hand I think had a definite impact on major public policy. Particularly regarding the Vietnam War. There’s no doubt in my mind he would have been elected president when Hubert Humphrey could not be elected against Nixon. That happening really prolonged the Vietnam War, because Nixon, while he came in claiming that he had a secret plan for peace, the secret plan was not obvious.

KF: It remains secret.

SH: It remained secret and it took another five years to get through that experience. I think you have to look at it. While one would never choose to have someone assassinated in order to make them a historical figure, if you look back, in fact that’s what it has done. Who knows what Robert Kennedy would have done as President, other than the Vietnam War. But I would say that definitely hurt history. I think the assassinations probably also had the effect of making a lot of people give up, a lot of people become cynical that they could do anything. In that sense I think some of the activism on the part of some individuals was lost. On the other hand, most of the people that you and I have talked about, or that we haven’t talked about who were active in particularly the anti-Vietnam War movement, have all continued to be active in one way or another, doing some kind of social justice. I think of Kathy Collard who was a partner of Bruce Plenk’s at one time. Kathy has practiced as an attorney, and I’m sure she made a lot of money. She had a very important impact in the community by suing Salt Lake County to force them to build a mental health unit in the Salt Lake County jail and to provide mental health services. She did that sort of thing several times. She would be one of those that I would say definitely came from an upper middle class home, put on the appearance of radicalism during the Vietnam War, as I did to a certain extent, and Bruce Plenk and others, but in fact came from upwardly mobile families that were successful. When we got through that period and she finished law school, I’m sure she’s done well financially, but she continued to do useful things when the opportunity presented itself, as did someone like Bruce Plenk with his work with poverty and legal health. Jeff Fox certainly did both as a legislator and running Crossroads Urban Center for a number of years as executive director. I think that you can find a lot of people… Chad Dobson certainly did that… Frances Farley did that… Most of the people that I know who took these things seriously, particularly the political people. It would be hard for me to pin down what happened to some of the cultural types. Some people definitely lost themselves in drugs and took them not to be a Page 15 of 22

learning experience, but something you do. If once is good, 20 times is better, they thought. In fact it became debilitating to some people. That certainly happened. Someone asked me not too long ago in an interview whether the sixties were a time of great innovation or of great self- indulgence, where you’re basically entertaining yourself. I said, “Really all of the above.” There were millions of people involved. Lots of people went in different courses. Some people basically fell out from the situation, were injured by it. Others grew from it, just like any experience. You certainly have to say (of) people who served in World War II, some came back damaged forever because of it; and others came back, because they had to do brave and noble things, greatly stronger because of it. I think the same is true of the sixties generation. Really the sixties ran from I would say John Kennedy’s assassination in about 1963 to the end of the Vietnam War in the seventies. If you want to look at it as a social political movement, the term “sixties” to me fits that time frame.

KF: What has your response been to the Iraq War?

SH: I was very concerned that we were getting engaged in a war of choice. I have always grown up on the idea that the United States doesn’t get involved unless we have a direct self interest, where we have a real interest that you can identify or that we have been attacked. I’ve dabbled with pacifism, but I’ve never chosen to be a pacifist. I do think that even though war to me is the great failure of human kind, that it’s difficult to say that self-defense isn’t necessary and sometimes important to do. Sometimes you can do it the way Gandhi did it with peaceful activism in India. I doubt very much that the Jews could have done that and gotten away with it in Nazi Germany and used that kind of tactic. Who knows. It’s hard to know. In any event, whoever is the recipient of your activism has to have some sense of morality themselves, whoever it is that you’re trying to influence— otherwise you’re wasting your time—or that they can be influenced by others who do have a sense of morality. I was not very excited about it. I certainly thought that Saddam Hussein was not a good leader, but the world has quite a number of people who aren’t people that I think should be somebody’s leader. I thought it was a mistake. I think the reason that we have not seen the kind of social ferment that we saw around the Vietnam War is: one, because we don’t have a draft; two, that there has been such widespread opposition to the war in establishment circles, whether it be media or political, that people haven’t had the sense of alienation, that my voice is not being heard. I think those are two reasons. But I think the same basic mistakes were made as Vietnam. People who knew nothing about the history of Vietnam took us into Vietnam. People who knew nothing about the history of Iraq took us into Iraq. And we’re suffering the consequences of that arrogance and ignorance in both cases. I think it’s hard to say. Vietnam is okay now, and we’re friendly with Vietnam. I think it’s ironic really in a way that that’s taken place. Who knows what would happen in Iraq. Sometimes I think having done what we’ve done in Iraq, we owe something. But what that is at this point I find hard to pin down.

What it is that we can do to help them set things right, we’re almost in a you can’t leave and you can’t stay situation. I’m inclined to think that the only way to really deal with the situation is to engage all of the countries in the area in some kind of a peace discussion in order to avoid a much wider conflict that could easily come with an all out civil war in Iraq.

KF: When was the last time you attended a peace rally or protest?

SH: It wasn’t Iraq.

Page 16 of 22

KF: Was it the first Gulf War?

SH: No. It wasn’t the Gulf War or Iraq. To be honest with you I’m kind of a perfectionist. If things are not done the right way I don’t want to be part of them. I had not seen even today any great need for a mass mobilization, because I think that the real problem is that the elections in effect have made the decisions for us. The last election was very much about Iraq, and Bush won that election, not by a lot, but he won it. So he had the mandate to do something. I think that demonstrations are something that you do when you are powerless or close to powerless. Op-ed pieces. Votes in Congress are what you do when you’re not powerless. I have not really felt like it. I actually supported the first Gulf War. I don’t support this war. I feel like my voice has been heard in all sorts of circles, the Senate, the Congress, the presidential candidates. So I’m not powerless. The other aspect is that I don’t particularly like the tone of Rocky Anderson. I don’t disagree. I probably agree with 90% of what he believes. I don’t like the way he does business. I don’t like the way he communicates with other people. I think that he has wasted his time as mayor. And much of what I’m talking about have to do with issues that relate to things that I’ve been knowledgeable about. He could have, as mayor, been very very helpful in moving regional public transportation along by using a different approach. An example of that, I know that he’s talked lots and lots about regional transportation, wanting regional public transportation. But when he had the opportunity with the Wasatch Front Regional Council, he gave a speech, alienated every mayor there, walked out of the room to do a press interview. The people who actually got the Wasatch Front to reverse its entire course and move away from building highways to move towards building public transportation were several other mayors.

[tape interrupted] [begin 2nd tape]

SH: Because Rocky had so polarized the mayors and county commissioners from the Wasatch Front Regional Council, the other two had to be very judicious in the way that they submitted their motions. Joanne Seguini and Mayor Bell basically turned the whole thing around because they had been very active with Envision Utah and had come to understand the importance of public transportation in creating a sustainable Wasatch Front. In a way they had to basically overcome his need to be right and to be strident. The kind of thing that Rocky could have done, he could have called every mayor in advance and spoken with them one to one and encouraged their support for something. But instead he prefers to give strident statements, be seen in the press and not do the hard work. I really don’t respect that. I have really not cared to be part of what he’s saying. Actually, if you really know about it, he’s not the one that organized the marches.

KF: He’s not at all. He was asked to speak.

SH: But the tone is always set by him because of him being who he is. I’m just not one to stand up in a speech and call people liars. It’s alienating to people that you want to reach. It’s fine to have a demonstration. I was really pleased that the last one was so well attended. But there is another element of me that’s a sort of “been there done that kind of thing.” I’m pretty engaged in the care of my 90 year old mother and have got an ill brother. I’ve got a friend here that’s undocumented from Mexico. I’m sort of engaged in more personal things. I’ve reached the point in my life where I might still be good for a few notable pieces, but it’s hard for me to get totally involved. I’m not one to give up my point of view to an unknown mob, as it were. What are they going to

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do? What are they going to say? I was actually very impressed with the last one. I saw some creative things going on. They had a pretty good turn out.

KF: I think I have three more questions. Two of them are about other people that I don’t have much information on. The last question for you is how is peace making and justice work different here in Utah than it might be elsewhere?

SH: Because of the predominance of the LDS Church there is a cultural fear of controversy. People tend to hold their punches. In a way I’m a product of that and I’ve learned to work between it, to sort of say what needs to be said but to find a way to say it and find a way to talk to the people who can help. But there are other parts of the country where the culture is much more open in a way, where people say what they think. People aren’t offended if you say something strong to them. They say something strong back. One of the things that happens in the legislature is that people don’t say anything, say in a committee room, or something like that, and then they go outside of the room and say all sorts of awful things. People in Utah, in the Mormon culture are not confrontational. That’s something that you have to work around in Utah. After all, the point is to win hearts and minds. The point is not purely to be right. I can be right in my own living room and not affect anybody else. But if I’m going to make a change I have to have an impact. Another thing I would say is the relative smallness of the state makes it more feasible to communicate with people in power if you choose to do that.

KF: There was another question for you that I forgot about. You mentioned when you were in the legislature Democrats were the majority. How did the change happen?

SH:: When I was in my second term, or the time I was running for my third term, which would have been about 1978, I noticed a big change in the younger people who were coming into the University Village which was part of my district, which was the student housing. They were much more conservative. I basically was able to win with them because I did so much service, helping them get fences or problems solved with their heating or lighting, even though it had nothing directly to do with my position. But I was able to keep their support. But they were asking a lot of questions about the Equal Rights Amendment, which I had voted for, and they were against. Abortion which had become a question. A kind of right winger that began to come up, in Utah anyway, that had a libertarian streak to them. But libertarian, I don’t mean the social libertarian part that lets people do what they want. Because they don’t want that. They definitely don’t want people to do what they want to. But in terms of economics and in terms of every man for himself, that kind of an attitude. That actually is quite a difference with the Mormon culture historically, which is more communitarian in its approach that we take care of everybody, nobody goes without, we think of the community first and ourselves second. I think that a new kind of libertarian conservatism came in. It particularly came in of course nationally with Reagan, but locally it started to come in earlier with Orrin Hatch and others. We had some the last two years of my term in the legislature. Actually my second term there was a slight Republican majority. I found either way, that slight Republican or Democrat (majority) were workable, because you could get good people from either side to join a good cause or to put down a stupid idea. But when it became so overwhelmingly, like two-thirds and one-third, they don’t have to listen, they don’t have to talk and communicate and most everything is being done behind closed doors where people don’t really hear what the discussion is. The public doesn’t. A minority of very conservative people basically have control over the more moderate Republicans. If they want to get anything done themselves, they have to go along in the secret caucus with those people. I Page 18 of 22

would say that it was generational. I think the generational change may have taken place because of the great success of the labor movement and the GI bill. In other words, people became so successful in this country that they had something to lose. Their idea of losing something was to hold it tight and to make sure that others didn’t get it, then that became a political statement in the new neo-conservatism. It’s kind of ironic. It shows you how something that you think is going to be good actually can turn into something different than what you think. People who did well because of the labor movement and because they got good educations, sometimes, maybe not their children but their children’s children, who had no sense of that history of the Great Depression or the struggle of what made it possible to have all of this, but simply had it. They had the money, they had the , they had the stuff. And they began to want to hold on to it. They began to see somebody else as being a threat to that. It began to be an ideology.

KF: That is very interesting. Thank you so much. I saw Ethel Hale today. She is so self effacing. She told me bits and pieces of personal events, but not her overall role. How do you see her fitting into all of this? What was she doing?

SH: One moment.

[tape interrupted]

SH: I can best tell you about Ethel’s impact on my own life. I first met Ethel when I was active with the NAACP. I remember going over to her house after some of the meetings. She knew a lot about labor history, which I did not know. I had debated about current labor law when I was in high school, but I really didn’t know American labor history and I certainly didn’t know Utah labor history, because it’s not taught. At that time it was not taught in Utah history. I learned about . I learned about some Mormon history that I was unaware of; the Morrisite Massacre. There were a group of people who followed someone named Morris who had views at variance from Brigham Young. They left Salt Lake and created a community. I think it was in the mouth of Weber Canyon. They ended up being cannonaded by the militia which Brigham Young commanded. In any event, that’s a divergence I was simply not taught in Utah history. I was unaware of it. I met who was the first person in Utah, as far as I know, who was leading any kind of peace march against the Vietnam War. He ran a place for the homeless which is where I first was influenced regarding the issue of , which later came to fruition in a different way. He would come to her house sometimes. Then I used to go down. She may have gone, too, I can’t quite remember, down to the Joe Hill House, which is where he had people who didn’t have a place to stay, and he fed them and gave them a place to stay. Bruce would come and sing old Wobbly songs and so forth. Ammon would talk. I learned things like that. Then Ethel always had a very inquiring mind. She looked deeply into things, and she had lots of printed matter on various things of one kind or another, and libraries. There were lots of discussions. I’m not sure even today I could quite put my finger on… I don’t think I could describe a political philosophy of Ethel’s. I don’t know whether she is a socialist. I don’t know. I don’t think she is one who ever thought she should belong to groups. She has associated with people and groups, but she’s never been part of it then... where “I am a member of the Socialist Party” or “I am a member of the Communist Party,” or “I’m a Democrat.” I think she’s always had a concern for prisoners and tried to do things for individuals and picketed. She’s always had a concern for peace, minorities and the poor. She’s done that sort of thing. I’m sure we met in civil rights in someway but it could also have been around talk radio. Ethel was a contributor to talk radio. She was a participant in a group called the Liberal Women’s Group. Page 19 of 22

:15 Which men could go to, too. It grew out of KSXX radio, Utah’s first full talk radio station. There had been some talk programs on KSL. They were more like interview programs. People could call up and ask questions, whereas this was conversation. Even though the right wing has now become predominant in those kinds of medium around the country, at that particular point in Utah it was a major outlet for the anti-war and civil rights movements. I did a lot of organizing over KSXX radio in one way or another, either as an interviewed guest or paid advertising. That’s where Joe Redburn, who we talked about last time, who is in the picture, who did some of the MC-ing at our anti-war demonstrations. He was a talk radio show host. Then of course she and Paul were the perfect people to do the legal work, because they’re so precise and studious in the kinds of things… When they do anything, they research it very well and they do things very precisely. We had a very well put together FCC filing. Most people hire attorneys. Neither of them were attorneys at that time. Paul later went to law school and became an attorney. Basically they did the research, they found out what we had to do and put it in the form that would make it possible to do it. And then she has always been… her lifestyle doesn’t diverge from her point of view. She is a vegetarian, basically. She grows her own food. She grows interesting food. She gets interesting strains of one vegetable or another that you might never see in the grocery store. Her garden is really an interesting one. It’s built not for the things she’s growing, but for the birds that come through and other creatures and how they interrelate with each other. They drink water from a well underneath their house and water their garden with that same well. I would say that Ethel is an intellectual who has a very down to earth view of reality and her life experience is from a working person’s point of view. She worked until she couldn’t—She had some physical problems— including taxi driving. I’m sure she never would have taken a job that would require her to do something that in some way or another would contradict her point of view. Taxi driving would be one of those things, although you could say you make air pollution. It’s hard to be alive and not create pollution of one kind or another.

KF: Probably she was conscious of it. The other people that I have questions about.. I have heard a lot about a Utah county group of which Wayne Holly had been one. I had trouble finding them. He’s dead. His two sisters are dead. Ethel said perhaps his wife is alive, his widow. Do you know any contacts there. Or if not any contacts, can you just talk about them a little bit.

SH: After I had come back from being a civil rights worker in the south, I had been invited to speak then in Utah County to the Utah County Forum which turned out to be this group. I had not met them before and didn’t know anything about them. On my way down, Albert Fritz, who was the president of the NAACP, who was taking me down said, “You should know that the Utah County Forum are members of the Utah Communist Party.” I didn’t even know there was a Utah Community Party at this point in history. It was interesting for me to meet them. Later they were a small group within the anti-war movement. They were a small group when you have 5,000 people out. There were ten or twenty of them. They were not an important group in that respect. But they were always active. I’m sure they took on a lot of issues. I know that they had some relationship to the labor unions at some point. I don’t know the whole story. Ethel may know more of the story about what some of the labor union people went through who had associations with the Communist Party. I think Wayne Holly maybe have been called before Congress and harassed by the FBI. I have some vague recollection of hearing about that. I knew them after that a little bit. Every once in a while when I was putting together an ad campaign or something, maybe the campaign would cost $3,000 and I’d get $100 from them. You really should talk to Arch. I think he was the secretary of the CP for Utah.

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KF: I’ll go back to Archie about it.

SH: I don’t know if he acknowledges that. I assume he does. He was on the ballot.

KF: He never told me secretary.

SH: I had an interesting thing. I always knew who they were and what their point of view was. They were very “Mormony” people. They would bring toffee, make it and bring it to meetings. Wayne was an active Mormon as far as I know. He later had some problems with people wanting to excommunicate him. Hugh B. Brown in the first presidency apparently put a stop to it when he heard about it. Let’s say they were not part of the social ferment of the cultural change in the sixties. We always saw them as very conservative. But that had a lot to do with their social outlook, not their political outlook or their basic socialist or communist views, whatever they were. I’ve never had deep discussions with them. I knew that they called themselves Communists. Towards the end of the anti-war movement when people were talking about, “What do we do now? How do we turn this into doing something useful on other issues?” I remember getting up in a pretty large meeting of anti-war activists and saying that I thought the groups needed to be more public about who they were and what their point of view was. They shouldn’t be afraid anymore. They didn’t need to hide. Times had changed. I think their first reaction was that I was red baiting, because they were so used to living in a certain way that it sort of was like a challenge. But in fact, very shortly thereafter they put up a group and put their names on the ballot in Utah.

KF: In Utah County?

SH: No in the state of Utah, on the Utah ballot. They ran a Communist Party ticket.

KF: If there were 50 in the Forum, I should be able to find them.

SH: I don’t know if there were 50. When I say 50, I’m talking about the United Front To End The War as the core group of five thousand.

KF: And at least ten out of that.

SH: Not all ten came to those. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard that they had any more than 10 or 15 people at the most. There was a guy named Marcus Parr. I think he was part of the group. I’m not sure. I think he taught at Westminster. I’m sure he’s dead. I didn’t realize that Irma was dead. I knew that Uda was dead, but I didn’t know. Uda for a while lived in the house just past the big one here that’s being built. Not only were these communists Mormon, they ended up being pretty wealthy, because they owned a lot of land in Utah County. I guess they were successful farmers as well as engaged in some labor work, working for U.S. Steel or whoever. In a way there were a lot of contradictions. Working people but well off. Mormons, but as people they were always very nice.

KF: They must have had children.

SH: They did and I don’t know their names.

KF: Ethel didn’t know if they did. Page 21 of 22

SH: I’m sure Archie would know. I don’t know that the kids bought much into the politics. I don’t recall them ever being involved in the anti-war movement. But they would know something.

KF: Thank you. What else would you like to say?

SH: Power to the people. Right on. [laughs] I was never a communist, because I don’t believe in dictatorship of the proletariat, I’m more of a mixed economy person, regulated free enterprise and helping programs such as healthcare, programs, educational subsidies, etc.

[End of interview:26]

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