Date: May 10, 2000 Narrator: Fletcher, Mel Interviewer: Buckner, Anji Location: Fletcher Residence Transcriber: Buckner, Anji Date: August 31, 2000

Narrator: Fletcher, Mel Interviewer: Buckner, Anji

Date: May 10, 2000 Narrator: Fletcher, Mel Interviewer: Buckner, Anji Location: Fletcher residence Transcriber: Buckner, Anji Date: August 31, 2000

Subject: Park City/ Skiing

I: Today is May 10, and I am here with Mel Fletcher and we are going to talk about Mel’s experiences in Park City, in general and before we get started, Mel, I will just ask you for your consent to this tape recorded interview.

Mel: You have my consent.

I: Excellent. Let’s start with you telling me about your family in Park City – how they got here.

Mel: That’s repetition. Don’t we have that already?

I: Yeah, but I don’t have it on tape. I want to hear you tell me.

Mel: Okay. Well, I suppose my beginning in Park City started when my grandparents came from Europe and ended up in Park City. My grandmother was working in boarding houses and my grandfather was here for quite some time. He had come directly from Germany; he was a barber in Park City. At that time, there were probably eight barbers. I used to have a picture of eight of them standing together; all of them dressed in black; all of them with beards – except for two and they had mustaches. I lost that picture. Well, we had a frequency of visitors at our house and the picture turned up missing one time and we were never able to find out where it went. My grandfather died before I was born, as a result of fighting a fire. He was a Park City volunteer at that time. He died of Pneumonia. My grandmother had quiet a large house, and she started taking in some boarders, so that she could supplement what income she had after my grandfather died. She lived right on Swede Alley, near the top. The reason it was called Swede Alley was because there were five families of Swedes that lived on that ridge. Times were difficult. Lots of snow and it was a struggle to get around town. Miners had a difficult time getting to work. That’s why the city was built like it is, up into the canyons because they didn’t want to have to walk so far to work. People ask me – why

didn’t they build the city down here on the flat? The result was, they didn’t have to negotiate as much, in mileage to get to their sites, or their diggings as they called ‘em. I used to go over on my grandmother’s porch and overlooking the valley - why there were skiers, Norwegians and Swedes up on the hill – skiing - and they had a small jump. The reason I spent a lot of time at my grandmothers is because I went over and filled her coal buckets and also saw to it that she had adequate kindling wood so that she could have a fire. The fun time was always sliding on sleighs. Not very many of the kids had ski’s at that time. We did a lot of ice skating. There were frozen ponds that we used a lot.

I: Where were they?

Mel: They were down on the lower part of town. We used to do a lot of artificial – we used to spray it. We had a Junior Chamber of Commerce here in Park City, we used to turn the water loose on a big playground over back of the post office. But, the big difficulty we had in Park City was maintaining ice. You’d have a lot of snow and you’d always have to be shoveling before you ever skated.

I: There was a lot of work involved in playing.

Mel: Yes. Trying to recall some of the things that happened. I always went over to try to get my grandmother shoveled out. I recall going between two of the buildings one time and noticing the massive icicles that was there and I used to take that shortcut, through an alley, to my grandmothers, which was behind the Giacoma building and a bar. After I was over there for probably two or three hours, and I came back the same way, but the ice had all slid off the roof in the meantime, which was just a two hour differential. I thought, well, there is luck that exists in life and I’ve been lucky today, because I could have been under all that ice that slid off the roof. At that time, I became fully aware of the danger of ice, because ice-sickles did pose a difficult problem. I don’t know where I’m going from here?

[laughter]

I: Tell me about the snow.

Mel: Well, people today, say, “it seems like you had a lot more snow in the old days, compared to now.” We’re removing snow from our streets and removing the snow with snow blowers and also they’re using salt on the streets which has a tendency to melt the

snow. We have just as much snow now as they did in the old days, but we handle it differently. When I was working for the State road, we used to throw snow going quite fast, at about, thirty five miles an hour. We’d throw the snow clear out into the field about fifty feet away – with the speed we had. So, therefore, you didn’t build any snowbanks. You see these pictures of the snow, how it was stacked on both sides of main street and you can bet it was the result of a lot of shovels. A lot of people had to shovel their way in and out of their houses.

I: Would a plow come up Main Street? Didn’t the state plow Main Street?

Mel: No. Well, we’re talking now, clear back in the twenties. Say, for instance, when I went to school. That would have been nineteen twenty four, when I used to walk to Washington school to go to school. I went to the Washington school for five years, then I went up to the Jefferson school which is way up the head of Main Street by the Catholic church, for one grade and then I went back down to the Lincoln School which was down in the Woodside Avenue. Then, from the eighth grade out of the Lincoln school, I went directly into the High school. It was a new high school in nineteen twenty nine. I graduated out of that school in nineteen thirty seven. In the early days in Park City we hear many stories about how the miners were hearing noises in the mines, of course, a lot of these noises were not from ghosts and not from spiritual things, it was from the cracking of the timbers and the dropping of the rock. If they heard voices, they probably drank a lot the night before, and probably had a little bit of booz still in their belly’s. Life, itself, in the early twenties, was a lot of fun. Where I lived, there were two railroad trains that come in. There was the D and RG, which came out of Salt Lake City and the Union Pacific which came out of Ogden. Both of those lines were quite busy with taking and bringing the materials that they used in the mines and also the grocery stores. There were big box cars that come in with food and canned goods. Sand and coal. They also imported their coal from Coalville and also from Carbon county. The reason why a lot of the mountains were denuded with timber, because people were using wood and this caused a few snowslides. There wasn’t anything to hold the snow on the steep slopes of the mountains. Getting back to the snow and the way we handled it – a lot of times, the trails that were made, we all just used to follow just like little Indians and animals. One person that was at the head of the trail, like in going to school, if you’d get a little tired of breaking trail why somebody would pick up and the next would get a rest, a lot of time the snow was clear to your knees. All these kids saying, oh

yeah, grandpa we know all about your tales of wading in the deep snow and we’re getting tired of it. But, it was a way of life and the only way you could get around. There were beautiful stores in Park City and I hear many tales about how our shacks and our homes are nothing but pine boards and very easily rolled over with the wind, well, that’s not true because we had a home that was built of lath and plaster. There were a lot of rooms. We lived in a duplex and there were two chimney’s in the house, you could put, actually two stoves. You hear the stories of how the homes were nothing but shacks. But, there were some beautiful homes, in that time, in the nineteen twenties. There were huge buildings made out of brick on Main Street. All of the homes, like the Hurley home and all of the homes on Woodside and Park Avenue, they were built well. They weren’t exactly shacks. That used to make my mother so mad when people would call us to talk about the miner shack. The shacks that existed were the ones that were around the mines because they had some buildings that [it] wasn’t necessary to make them winter proof. My father was a paper hanger and also a painter. In his paper hanging, if they did have wooden walls, they put linen on the walls so the paper would adhere and they’d have nice wall papered homes. A lot of the homes were plastered walls and in very excellent shape and kept tidy. And that period furniture was good furniture. We always had telephone service, plumbing. Our first indoor plumbing that I can remember was around nineteen twenty five, when we first got our flush toilet. Prior to that, many people had it ahead of us. When you get the toilet facilities, you also had to have a sewer line and it wasn’t until, probably 1905 before they started making any sewer lines in the town. It’s difficult for me to talk about anything [before] – five years after I was born, which would be 1923 and thereafter. I can remember very vividly, things that were happening in Park City. Like, our Jailhouse for instance. That lower window that you see in the so-called dungeon- if there was anybody in there, they used to be able to talk to you. A lot of times they’d call us over to the window and, of course, as little kids we’d kind of be a little afraid of them, but they were always asking us, “hey buddy, do you think you could find any cigarette butts out there?” We’d manage to gather up a few cigarette butts and hand it to them with a lot of thanks. The building I remember most was the Blythe Fargo Building – which burned down in a fire. When that fire was in it’s full rage, the cans were going off, we figured it was ammunition, but the heat from the fire was breaking open the cans which made loud explosions and popping noise. The heat from that fire broke a lot of windows across the street, in the – there was a restaurant across the street at that time. It was a Chinese, New York Cafe place and also a furniture store next to it.

I: How old were you when that fire occurred?

Mel: I was about eleven. When recalling Main Street, there were so many nice buildings and nice shops in the twenties. There were beautiful clothing stores. There was also theaters. The American Theater was in existence and so was the Orpheum at the bottom of Main Street. They’d have sometimes two shows at the same time, in Park City – with the old silent movies. The silent movies only cost ten cents, but if you didn’t have any money a lot of times you’d peek through. There was an extra door there on the Orpheum, the theater at the bottom of Main Street and we’d take turns looking through the peek hole watching. Buster Keeting movies and Fatty Arbuckle. Tom Mix. Tim Maynard. But those silent movies were a great entertainment. My mother worked in the American theater and played for the movies. She had a script that she’d follow so that she’d know what was going to happen soon, so that if the horses were coming she could do the “clippity clop” with blocks so it would give people the impression that horses were running. She played the villain music when the villain was sneaking up on a fair young maiden. She’d play happy music when the bride and groom were getting married. She had all kinds of gadgets to pull. Train whistle when a train was coming around the track. And, there’s another source of my entertainment- the fact that the trains were coming in behind my house. The Union Pacific and then the D and RG was just below. I used to go over there and watch the people come off the train, watch them switch cars and watch them go on a railing switch that was used to go to the old highline. Union Pacific used to go up Deer Valley and they had a switchback in Deer Valley and the train would go back up and clear on the top of Rossi Hill, back in where the ore buckets would bring the ore in from the mill into the Ontario Loading Station. They had a mill at the top of the King. They would crush the ore with the steel balls inside of this huge thing that looked like a big keg and it would smash all the ore up and then it would go to the jig tables. When they got through it went into bins as refined ore. Then, from the bins it would go into the ore buckets. The ore buckets would then come down off of the mountain and dump it in the railroad cars. That was one of the kind of pleasure we had – was having the ore buckets come into the station and watch them. At night, they used to do all their shipping. When they filled their bins and then the railroad cars; they’d do all their shipping at night. You could hear the buckets that went over the top of the towers. There were two cables on this system. One of them pulled the buckets and the wheels ran on top of another cable. The cable on the top that the wheels were on was stationary and the other one that was fastened to the buckets would move. There was a little tongue on the bottom of the

buckets so that when they came into the ore station, the loading station, that tongue would follow a track that would turn the bucket upside down so it would dump ore in the chutes. Workers didn’t have to have any physical contact with the buckets, when dumping. It was a complete string that would go around and around. The cars were continually coming in and going out. It was fun just to be over around the loading station to watch them move the cars. They used to move the cars by having a big bar and two men could move the car with the bar between the track and the wheel. If the cars were out of position where they got the ore from the chute they could move it with the bars. I can vividly remember some of them that needed to move the man would get on the back of the car – there was this big brake wheel on top of the back of the car which they’d put a huge pick handle in, to crank the brakes down. A lot of times we’d go out on the railroad tracks and take a fifty penny nail and put it on the railroad track and let the wheels run over them and as a result we'd have a flattened piece of nice shiny steel and we’d make rings out of ‘em. By bending them around a piece of rod that was round.

I: Was it loud?

Mel: Yes, very loud.

I: Did you have a hard time sleeping at night?

Mel: No, you get used to it. It’s a marvelous thing that the mind has – you just ignore some of the sounds. Of course, this wasn’t consistent. A lot of the times when they were shipping they made the most noise. But, we made friends with all the trainmen that come in. This big ice house there - they had the ice under the saw dust and they’d come out and wash the ice off and then put it in the great big box cars so they could make a return trip and go back to Coalville – where they picked up a lot of produce. One of the things about Park City was that we did have a big enough population that we had quite a demand for fresh foods. We used to have a lot of peddlers coming in from the valley’s of Provo and selling us Apples and peaches – whatever was in season. But, the peddlers were a great deal of fun. Not stealing, but we’d finally cajole them into giving us some.

I: Would the peddlers come to your house?

Mel: Yes, they would. They’d go up and down the streets pulling their wagons with horses.

I: So, you’d see them coming and run out?

Mel: Go out in the street. One of the unique things we had too was a milk wagon. The Mills’ had a milk wagon and they’d go around and deliver milk to all of the homes. One of the jobs that I had at one time was taking the bottles of milk up and setting it down – and they came in big quart bottles with cardboard caps on top of the bottle – and then bringing the empty bottles back down because we always exchanged the bottles. Our only pay was lunch. Generally the Mills’ brothers would always buy us lunch, so we’d always get a chance to go to the Chinese place – the King Farlow - the Chinese place and the Senate was another café. But, in the twenties, there was a lot of bootlegging going on.

END SIDE A TAPE 1

BEGIN SIDE B TAPE 2

Mel: … people that were drinking at the dances. They couldn’t take their bottle inside to dance. So, we’d find out where they’d hide their bottle a lot of times. We’d cause a lot of fights because we’d move their bottle from one place to another. Then, the next morning, after the parties were all over, early Sunday morning, we used to go out and pick the whisky flasks because we could sell them back to the bootlegger. Take ‘em back to the bars and sell the bottles.

I: Get some money for that.

Mel: Yes, needless to say, there were a lot of stills in the mountains, where they’re making some of their own booze.

I: Did you know where they were?

Mel: Well, we did, but we certainly didn’t tell about them. They were a good source of revenue. But, when you did get pretty close to any of those places there was always somebody to tell you not to – you better turn around and go back. Most of them were in the mountains. We found one pipe that was runnin’ down a stream and we went down to see where it was going. We found out in a real big hurry – there’s a great big man

standing down there – “where are you kids goin?” Well, we were wondering where this pipe is going. He says, “well, it’s none of your business. So, how about taking a trip the other direction.” [laughter.]

I: And you did.

Mel: Oh, yes. Without a doubt, we went the other direction.

I: Did you ever catch a ride on the railroad, behind your house, when it was leaving town or anything?

Mel: No. No. We had enough brains to not get under the wheels or get around the railroad cars. Like, some of these people say they used to catch rides on the buckets, but that was almost an impossibility because the arms and the buckets were out so far that it was really difficult to get in the buckets when they are running. It might be possible if they were stationery, when they’re stopped that you could go over and get into a bucket and ride it. And, a lot of the people that worked in the mill, in the machine shop, used to ride a bucket up. But, most of the time they were quite stationery to get on it, but they’d get on it at the end of the line – didn’t try to get on while it was moving. The towers, had to keep a straight line. They had the tall towers in the valleys and they had to reduce the towers – the size – as they went over the top of the peaks and there was a tower up there that was only probably about twenty feet high.

[pause for ringing phone]

A lot of times some of the fella’s would get a hold of the buckets and swing on them. Just with their fingers. Hang on to the bucket and go over to the next hill and drop off. It was too dog-gone dangerous because you never knew what you were going to fall in to when you let go. The only time I ever knew that to happen was the one year and one of the fella’s got hurt, so after that, kids no longer did it. We used to climb the towers quite often, when the buckets weren’t running . A lot of barns around us where the horses were coming in. They used to bring an ore team down behind us down the road that went between the depot and livery stable, which was the Kimball Barn. It went clear down to a loading station behind the Gasparac house – where the hotel is. Now, they had a huge scaffold that the horses would pull the ore wagons up and then they had holes in the floor of this big station and the horses would

go over the top and pull the wagons in position and then they’d pull boards out and then they’d have to hand pick – the wagons were sloped to the inside of the wagon and there were boards on the bottom about four foot long that they could pull out and let the ore drop into the cars underneath. That was used many, many years. The buckets were not the only source of loading it into the cars. They used to use wagons, teams of horses – sometimes six horses and they’d bring it all the way down from the King, from the Silver King. I remember when it was real slippery they used to lock the wheels on the wagons so it didn’t slide – take the strain off of the horses from trying to hold the wagon back. A lot of times they’d lose it and I think there were two occasion where they tipped the wagon over and dumped it right there at the head of Main Street – where there used to be a little street. Chandler’s Meat Market was there at the head of the store. As you turn around Main Street, there’s a big hole there, just off to the left, used to be a Meat market there. It’s amazing the buildings that are gone now that used to be up there. A huge building the Swede Hall, was up on the road that goes from the top of Main Street up at an angle and it intersects with Marsac. There’s houses at the top of this street – you can look down into the canyon. There used to be a huge building there – Swede Hall. As you go by it today, you’ll marvel that they even had a building there. They didn’t tear that building down until the fifties. I think it was gone when I came back in 1952 from the Korean War.

I: Did it stay as Swede’s Hall until then?

Mel: Yes. It wasn’t used very often. All they used it for was dances. It had a bar on the first floor, but it was just used for cleaning supplies and whatever they needed for taking care of the building. Evidently, it was a real neat place in the early nineteen hundreds. They had a lot of dances. Their big high entertainment in Park City was a dance and you’d have sometimes, five dances going on at the same time. Main Street was fun – to go store to store, walk the streets, watching the gutter for coins. There was always water running down the gutters. That was one advantage that they did have – it kept the street clean. Contrary to what they think about a mining town as being dirty, surprisingly, Park City was a clean town. The sidewalks were always swept. The store owners would come out and wash the sidewalks down. Even in the early twenties we had paved streets – on Main Street, and then there was a sidewalk completely down Park Avenue. From the Catholic Church all the way down to the lower end of town.

[Pause]

I: Okay, so, we’ll continue. Tell me about what made Park City such a neat and lively place?

Mel: Well, Park City had a real good education system. We had excellent schools and excellent teachers. Teachers that run a mighty good classroom. We didn’t fool around in a classroom. We had to learn, and we had some teachers that taught us well. We, like I say, there was, one – two three, four steps that you had to take to get your education. I will say this, that many of the Supreme Court Judges – or people that went out of here that went on to college and went into great occupations – professional occupations, and it was a result of their bringing up and schooling that they received in Park City and in the colleges. Many judges came out of Park City. It’s surprising that if you go back in our graduation book and start reading some of the pages they were graduating in 1919 and all through the early twenties and on through the early thirties – you’ll recognize the names as being in very prominent positions, in Park City, in Salt Lake City, in government. We had many people that went to work at the State Capitol. Byron Jones and George Barben, had important positions in the state government. The marvelous thing was, that we here in Park City, weren’t very far from Salt Lake City. We had the best of being here in the mountains, a nice little clean town and then we had the opportunity to be not so far from Salt Lake City. We could enjoy all the good shows and amenities that Salt Lake City had to offer us. I used to go down Ice Skating at Hygeia, an artificial ice rink – every Thursday I used to skate. People would ask me, “You come all the way down here to ice skate from Park City?” One lady asked me that question and I said, “where do you live?” She said, Sandy. I said, “well, I’m gonna come down to skate at Salt Lake - give me your phone number and I’ll call you and we’ll meet at the ice rink. So, I was there with my skates on, when she showed up. But, needless to say, I didn’t have any stop lights. There was one stop light going down twenty first south to get to the Sugarhouse ice rink. She had to drive on the south end of town. She had a lot of stop lights. The first thing she said to me was, “you sped.” I said, no I didn’t sped. I kept the speed limit. I was trying to demonstrate to her that we weren’t completely out in the boon docks as far as she thought. I asked her, “have you ever been to Park City?” She said, “no.” I said, well you gotta go up there some time. Skiing really brought the people into Park City – and I used to be one of the advocates of trying to get people in to Park City to ski at Snow Park.

[pause]

I: Let’s talk about schools – the first school that you went to was the Washington – Tell me about that school, what you remember.

Mel: Okay. Well, Washington School, wasn’t too far away. It wasn’t far away in the summer, but it was a “long” way in the winter to walk up that hill. But, it was fun coming back down – we could slide on our feet. At that time, there was no snow removal in the streets, everything was packed down, roads were packed down because the horses were pulling sleighs with coal and delivering all kinds of things. The fun occurred during recess when we used to go out on the side hills and slide down on cardboard and go back up, do it again.

I: Did you have a playground?

Mel: Playground was the street at the Washington School. In an alleyway that went out of the school and on down into Main Street – we used to slide down. That was the recreation part of it. In school, we had desks that were nailed to boards, they were actually one by fours – and a series of desks were screwed down to boards – so there was probably a series of about six of them. You were generally sitting behind someone (unless you were first) and our little ink wells were there, but you’re seated in a row. The reason they did this is so they wouldn’t have to move the seats individually, they could slide them aside so they could sweep and mop the floors. They weren’t permanently screwed into the floors because the school actually was used for plays and this type of thing and they could move the desks out and even pile them on top of each other – up to the sides so you had all this surface to play in or have little dances or plays. I remember the one teacher that was, principal of the Washington. She had a yard stick and anybody that wasn’t paying attention would get just a little tap on the shoulder, that’s all you needed from Mrs. Hagar was a tap on the shoulder and you’d start paying attention. She run a real good school. Five grades there. Five separate teachers.

I: How many kids were in your class?

Mel: About twenty. After the Washington School – I went from there up to the Jefferson. That was quite a long hike up Park Avenue. Clear up across from the church there it was a three story building – a lot of classrooms. Six grades there. I’d have to go down from the Jefferson to the Lincoln to get my seventh and eighth grades then. Lincoln school was the original high school. It didn’t have a gymnasium.

I remember, when they built the Elks Hall, they made a dance floor and their purpose was to build a big enough area where they could have dances and also use it as a gymnasium because at that time, Park City didn’t have a gymnasium. They put baskets at both ends of it, and I remember a lot of high school boys would change at the school, where they’d have to shower and they’d have to run up, all the way to the Elk’s Hall – in Basketball suits and their gym shoes. After they got through playing basketball, or practicing they had to run all the way back to the school, to get their clothes on. We had some good teachers; excellent teachers. We had a man by the name of R.R. Bell, a math teacher, and you learned math – the hard way, because if you didn’t get any problems correct, you had to do it again. He run his classes with a stern hand. If you failed, you failed and you’d stay, you’d come back the next year. If you failed the sixth grade, you’re went back to the sixth grade again, until you got a passing grade.

I: What about the high school?

Mel: Well, the new high school was built in 1929. My brother graduated from there in 1930. It was an excellent building. They had a beautiful gymnasium and classrooms and I don’t know if I’ve made the statement about the ghost situation. People call this as a ghost town, it always makes me angry, and it made my mother angry. Because how could it possibly be a ghost town some jerk wrote a book of the ghost towns of Utah and included Park City as a ghost town. He was an idiot. There’s no time this town got below fifteen hundred population. True, there was a time in the fifties when some places were boarded up. They couldn’t make much money because the mines were down – they weren’t making any money. Then is when we became a bedroom community. We were driving from Park City to Salt Lake City and Provo. Some of them were even going to Bingham. Many of the miners went to Bingham to work and some of them even went to Wyoming. But, they still retained their homes in Park City. The traffic you’d see going out, at that time, to go to work, was full of carloads of people that were going to Salt Lake and many of them went to work at the State Capitol. Some of them went to work in the Salt Lake County Building. At that time, we had people down there that helped the situation. The governor at that time was J. Bracken Lee. He was from Price and very sympathetic with the mining people. Anybody that needed a job or wanted a job in Salt Lake City, Jay Bracken Lee would try and get them a job. As a result, we had people working in Salt Lake County offices, many of them in the State Capitol and many of them went to work at the Chicago Bridge and Iron. There were also two or three mining manufacturer’s that people went to work for and mining clothing stores.

But, yet they come back and call Park City their home. They had homes here, nice homes. I like to emphasize that Park City wasn’t as shabby a community as people want to depict it. People took care of their homes; they painted their houses. I know because my dad was a painter; a sign painter and a house painter, and a paper hanger. And, as a youth, I was always stirring the paint and doing the scraping and the putty. When you paint a house, putt was used to fill in all the nail holes and cracks and the painter then does a nice, smooth beautiful job. Fortunately, my dad taught me how to paint. I never became a house painter because I had enough of it, just helping him. Stirring the paint was a hard job. They used to use white lead in paste form in a five gallon bucket and you had a work out mixing the paint and getting it the way he wanted it for the house.

I: During that time period – when Park City was written up as a ghost town – what were some of the things that were going on and what did it look like to possibly make someone think that it could be a ghost town?

Mel: Well, a lot of times there wasn’t many people moving around because they were all going to Salt Lake. If you’d get up in the morning, you’d see them getting up and going to their various jobs. People had left and didn’t want the building destroyed or harmed in any way because they knew they were always coming back again. Once the mines got started again, it just got back to the normal population we had. People looking for houses and places to rent. There was a man who was interviewed and he said he came up here on a Motorcycle and drove sixty miles an hour up Main Street because there wasn’t anybody there. Well, he did that early in the morning (7 am) before people were up and moving. I still have that article. I kept it. Maybe I should let you read it sometime and you’ll know – what my reflections are – that going sixty miles an hour up Main Street. Like I say, you can do the same thing right now in this town – as viable as it is – if you get up at five o’clock in the morning, sometimes you could look up the street and you wont see anybody moving or any traffic. Because people aren’t up at that time. I went to the Post Office today and there were only two cars parked at the Post Office. So, it was a ghost town? But, you don’t see any bars with one of the hinges on the doors off.

END SIDE B TAPE 1

BEGIN SIDE A TAPE 2

I: So, you never did see any tumbleweed blowing down the street?

Mel: [chuckles] No. No. I think that this maybe also snowballed and picked up by Realtors that have come in to town and started selling property and started getting some houses in here so there were places for the ghosts to live, I guess.

I: Tell me about some of the Celebrations that would take place in Park City.

Mel: Labor Day was the biggest holiday that Park City had.

I: What did we call it?

Mel: We called it Labor Day (Miner’s Day). This is when the mines and the miner’s shine because they always used to have some tug of war contests. They used to have drilling contests and mucking contests and they’d have a lot of dances and things for kids. They’d always have a ball game. In fact, at one time, they brought in a Ferris Wheel – kind of a little circus type thing. I remember also, I don’t remember what the game was called, but they had a huge ball that was eight feet in diameter made out of leather. The mines would have teams of six men and they’d get on top of the ball and they’d roll the ball back and forth, but they had to try to roll it to one end of the field or the other. They’d start in the middle and start rolling the ball and pulling men off from around the ball. Some of them would get on top. It was quite a scene to see. I think they only did that about two or three years and it was – right where the golf course is – which is a field.

I: The city golf course.

Mel: Yes. The road went directly to the Spiro tunnel and the Hurley Barn. When they built the golf course they took the road out and moved it down where it is now. Around the driving range and back toward the Spiro Tunnel dump. Incidentally, that line I think was the city boundary. You can see it go up the fence line. Notice up on the hill – you’ll see a straight line going up the hill behind the Armstrong Barn – right up to the top of the ridge.

I: What about the fourth of July?

Mel: Oh, another thing I want to mention about Labor Day was that they used to have a tug of war. They had fourteen inch boards, twelve feet long and they’d have one of them on each side of a line six feet from each other. They had slats nailed across the boards.

They’d have six men that made a team of six on each side. The one man on the far end was about the biggest man they could possibly get to have this tug of war. They’d get rope that was about one inch in diameter and they’d tie a little flag on the rope and they’d put it right square in the middle of the two teams. They had a mark on the board, if the flag was pulled back over this, then that was the team that won. They would sit down and get their feet on the slats and as soon as everybody got on their rope into position and were braced good. The rear man who takes up the slack in the rope would have the rope around his back – as the teams started pulling and as they gained a little bit, he took up the slack on the rope. I think they had to move two feet to win. But, this thing would waver, once they put strain on it, this flag would go one way, then it’d come back, then it would go back again, then it would go back the other way. I’ve seen them do this for fifteen solid minutes. That’s strain, fifteen minutes before one of them finally got a good pull on it and went over the line. The teams were the Silver King and the Judge. All of the mines had baseball teams. Then, they’d have their annual parade – they’d parade up the street. They had mucking – a hand mucking contest, not the machine, a hand mucking contest from one box to the other. They’d have a greased pole for kids to climb. A five dollar bill tied to the top of the pole. A chicken chase – they’d turn chickens lose. Not a chicken chase, but a chicken scramble. They’d take all these chickens and dump them out in the middle of a circle and let the kids go after them and chase them down until they got one. They could keep the chicken. Greased pig. They’d grease a pig and turn it lose and kids would try to catch the greased pig. They’d have a ball game. Really a festive day – a full day. Then, they’d top it off by having a barbecue. They’d have sandwiches and little stands all over the place – they’d top it off with a big dance at night.

I: Where was the dance at?

Mel: Sometimes they’d have to have two. One of them was at the Elk’s Hall the other one was across the street in what they call the hundred foot hall, it was the IOOF building, a fraternal organization. It turned out to be Art’s Hardware store on Main Street. One of them that they allowed to tear down that shouldn’t have been torn down.

I: That was torn down in the seventies?

Mel: Yeah. That’s one of the oldest buildings there was on Main Street. A lot of them they let them tear down before they realized that it was the wrong thing to do.

I: What about the fourth of July?

Mel: Fourth of July. They would march in the parade and get their dimes up at the top of the street. Ten cents was a lot of money in the twenties. Little kids would have their little parade, bicycles, a lot of prizes. Prizes for racing – they’d race on Main Street. We used to have a water wagon that they used to fill full of water, it was pulled by an old truck. It used to sprinkle the ball field to get the dust down. Needless to say, they didn’t put enough to make it puddle, but it was enough to keep the dust down for a while. That was our hardest job as athletes was trying to get a good ball field and keep it raked. Every time we went down to play softball or baseball, we had to rake the field and a lot of times we’d be raking another rock up because they never did have very good top soil on the ball fields.

I: You had a few ball fields, didn’t ya?

Mel: We had some of them in Deer Valley at what they called, Smith Field, it’s that big wide acreage at the bottom of Deer Valley. It had three ball games going on at the same time. We used to have leagues, I know Pop Jenks used to buy sweatshirts – they had teams - and Coffee John, Morris Merrill Lumber. They bought their teams sweatshirts and hats. Like I say, they used to have, invariably two or three ball games. Everybody played ball. Momma’s, dad’s, the kids – they had their own little team. It was lots and lots of fun.

I: Tell me about the things you did with your little baseball diamond behind your house.

Mel: Oh, that was in between the tracks. In between the tracks and the poison ditch that went along the hill. We used to be out there just about every other night playing ball. It was difficult to play because of the location – we didn’t have enough room. The lumber yard used to be back there, Morris and Merril had a lumber yard and they tore it down and re-built the corner, where it is today. But, that was quite an area anyway. Everybody was playing out on the tracks or in between the tracks out there. We used to go down and build a little cabin down in the trees.

I: What else did you play in that area, besides baseball?

Mel: We used to play, in a small area behind the garages – on Park Avenue, that would be below Burnis Watts garage – there used to be some gray garages on the street there was a little area behind them, between one street and another. We used to do a lot of playing there. The fields were never ever big enough. We’d have to go down to the ball grounds

before we’d have enough room to play ball. All the way down where the WPA essentially made ground – where the Yarrow is now. From the Yarrow clear up beyond the parking lot – that was one big ball field. There were two screens. They had a screen up at the top one at the bottom and there was enough room to have three ball games going on at the same time. We used to play a lot of ball. Lots of softball. We had some state winning teams too. Fast pitch in softball. The Catholics had a league in Basketball. There was always a Park City team playing, Judge Memorial and some of the other teams in Salt Lake City. In basketball and baseball. What else?

I: What about golf? An interesting game of golf?

Mel: Yes. It was miniature. Miniature golf. And Clock golf. This was in thirty seven after I got out of school, around thirty seven or thirty eight. I was working at the Kimball Garage at the time, which is the Kimball Art Center now, it was the Kimball Garage then and we decided to make ourselves a tennis court. It was between one garage behind us and another building that used to be the old Morris and Merril building. We got the waste from the Spiro Tunnel dump down there and screened it so that we just ended up with a white chalky gravel type dirt, after we got through. We put it on the ground and then rolled it and made a tennis court. We had a good one too. We put holes in the ground and had a good net. We started playing tennis. We only continued that for a couple of weeks because it was chasing the balls all the time. If you let one get by ya, it was over in the railroad tracks or out in the ditch. So, one day, we got to thinking, what are we going to do with this if we don’t play tennis on it – it’s nice and smooth. Well, let’s put a cup in it and play some golf. The only way we could do it was to use this as the green. We put a tin cup right in the middle of the gravel and then we’d find different places to tee off from. That’s where the clock golf come from. I think they did that all over the country. Some areas where they didn’t have enough money to make a good green, they tee’d off at a grassy spot in various places just to the one green. Which was a white for us, because it was a white chalky soil. We’d tee off. One place we had to go over a garage and another one over the tracks, and all kinds of little difficulties that we had to make it work. We had a good putter. An excellent putter that I had gotten from a miniature golf we had before here, in town. I made clubs out of hard wood from the wagon tongues that existed. Used brake rods through the wood and used hose to make a handle. As a result we ended up with two clubs with different angles of faces on them so that we could drive or we could pitch. It worked out real well. We had a lot of fun over there. Lost a lot of balls, but we sure had a lot of fun.

At one time – a guy came in and made a miniature golf course, down on the area across from what was the D&RG Depot, where they have the Park City Bank now. Well, right across the street where the building is, that was where the Hale’s barn burned down. They cleaned all that area out, it was a big flat. He smoothed that off and he had miniature platforms that you’d have to go to the top of; he had little pipes that would go in and funnel the ball, chase the ball all around. If you’ve ever been to a miniature golf course, you’ll know exactly what he had in mind. They run that one full summer. The putter I got over there is from there [pointing to putter in the corner of room].

I: Did you have to pay?

Mel: Yes. Had to pay fifteen cents to play it. They’d furnish the putters. He had, I think twelve. Twelve could play at the same time.

I: How did you manage to keep one?

Mel: Oh, when he was selling them. I had been helping him a little bit around there so he just gave me one. He was selling them for fifty cents a piece. I should have bought them all.

I: Let’s backtrack – quite a bit – and tell me about your dad and how he came to town, and how he met your mom.

Mel: Well – Dad came to Park City because he had a contract. He had a contract with the Bull Durham company and that was to paint Red Bull signs on barns or buildings. He’d get commission. Normally dad would have to find a building that would be suitable so that the paint would show and also so the sign would be in the public line of sight and where it could serve the most purpose for advertising. He came to Park City and painted a sign on the building, which has turned out to be Mary Lou’s Pizza parlor, [Red Banjo] which was a bar before that. After he got through painting that one, he painted some more in the state of Utah and then he got up to Boise and he was painting bulls up there. He picked up a paper and read that they wanted a movie projectionist in Park City. He remembered Park City because he was there for three or four days. How neat it was, what a beautiful little town it was and also the fact that they had some fishing streams; he was an ardent fly fisherman. So, he decided to come back to Park City and apply for the job. He got the job running the projector. While he was running this for the old silent movies, my mother was

down in what we called the pit, and she was playing for the old silent movies. The result of this combination of him working the projector why they got quite well acquainted. She had gotten her musical education at the Catholic School. She called it the Sister school because the sisters run the school in an adjacent building to the church. She didn’t like dad at first, this was her comment to me, but afterwards it had become quite a romance and they did get married. So coming from Michigan and having this contract was a result [in] the marriage. That’s how he got here. And that’s what happened. As a result, five children were born. During the depression days, which was around nineteen twenty nine when things were bad for everybody in the whole country – he managed to take care of us by painting signs and my mother gave piano lessons on Saturdays. My dad was an excellent sign painter. He could do gold leaf, which is a very expensive way of making signs. He had to do that from the inside of the building, therefore, the letters had to be backwards. It was a very precise job not to waste the gold leaf because it was very expensive. He had to do it and do it right. I say that they got us through the depression there was a scarcity of money and barter was your only way of getting along. If you had something that you could do, you’d trade it with someone else. For instance, dad got groceries for painting signs on the grocery store or painting their homes or painting their buildings or paper hanging their homes. If we wanted any coal, we bartered. He painted a house and I know that for was the shoe maker. The shoe-maker up town. Then, he did a sign for a Chinese restaurant one time and then we were allowed to go, I think five different Sundays, we went up for Sunday dinner. All of us, as a family at the Chinese place because he painted signs to pay for it. There was no money, there was not much money exchanged. That was the time that we were hustling empty booze bottles and selling them back. I made my show money. I chopped kindling wood and sold it to the widows and sold it to the girls of ill repute. There’s a misconception there too about the Red Light District in Park City. You’d hardly ever see the ladies that worked there. They were not allowed to be in town, at the bars, you’d never see them. They were transported up from Salt Lake. Mother Urban as they called her was married to a gentleman and she had a wooden leg. She lived at the top of the street, but it was a well run situation in Park City because it would give some relief to the miner’s on their pay days and they were isolated far enough out of the town that they were away from the city and it didn’t bother anybody. There were no rapes.

I: Would you see Mother Urban around town?

Mel: Very seldom. Just when she got in her car, she’d stop at the service station for gas or she’d stop by to get a driver to bring her car back to the garage to wash it. That was one of my jobs – to bring the car back. As a kid, I used to sell them kindling wood, which was good pay. Excellent pay. Any of them that I had seen or got a look at were nice looking ladies – very pleasant to be around. In fact, I think a lot of coeds made their way through college that way. So, it was a business and I say that –

END OF SIDE A TAPE 2

BEGIN SIDE B TAPE 2

I: It was a benefit to the miners.

Mel: For the city itself. Absolutely it was because being there where it was they weren’t based in the city. They never, ever came to town. They never associated with anyone and they were there for a reason and they were transported in and out. They’d call in for groceries and their groceries would be delivered.

I: What would happen to the girls if they were caught in town?

Mel: I don’t know of any of them that were caught in town, so I don’t know of the penalty, but the city themselves were extracting a license. They licensed them. Licensed Mrs. Urban, they licensed her as a business. Of course, that put money back in the coffers. Mrs. Urban was very generous. She used to help a lot of families. If she found out that there was a family in Park City that was needy, she’d find some way to get help to them. I think she was probably one of our better citizens. They minded their business and she was a good benefit. I remember, before she left town, she’d always stop – [a guy], Parish, had some tulips and was raising flowers at the bottom of Park Avenue. He had this huge tulip field and she’d always stop and gather up a whole arm full of flowers that she bought from him. It’s a correction that I feel needs to be corrected a little bit. They like to make a big feature out of it. In fact that’s more featured than anything there is, is Mrs. Urban and her house of Prostitution.

I: That was about all there was in Deer Valley.

Mel: No. No there were homes. They were in a section there right from the bottom of the street where the old lumber house is, it’s a bicycle place, from there on up to the roundabout. They didn’t go any further than where the junction is – going up Marsac and going to Deer Valley. In fact, her house was right at the bottom of the street that comes off of the hill, takes a curve now. It used to come right straight down to Deer Valley road. She was right at the bottom of that. The house itself was a good looking house. It was a white house with a lot of – “doo-dad’s” on the house.

I: Victorian style – the loopy stuff.

Mel: Yup. It was all well painted, it was always a beautiful little white house. Our city fathers really realized what a good benefit it was. That’s why they didn’t give them any problems. No problems at all. People didn’t bother them in town; stay away from it. Kids especially. Kids never bothered ‘em. Never threw rocks in their houses or broke the windows or anything like that. Probably get killed. [laughter]

I: Did you do that at other houses?

Mel: No. [laughter]

I: Then, there were more homes in Deer Valley?

Mel: On beyond that – there were many houses on both sides of the road.

I: There was a mine up there.

Mel: Yes. It was called the Park Con. A lot of homes. There was homes clear along that valley. Especially up where the train track comes around – where that road is now. We used to call that the Highline – it was where the train tracks would come back and go up to the loading station – in Ontario Canyon. They even had a dairy over there. There was a little isolated house right at that intersection there used to be a little dairy and they used to run, or keep cows over there in the valley. Actually, it would come pretty close to the main road going through Deer Valley and over the top of that saddle that goes over into Keetley, which is no more because of water. Jordanelle covered it up. We had a Junior Chamber of Commerce here in Park City. We had sixty three members – trying to do something for the town or liven it up. Let’s see, that was in the

thirties when we did that. I would say from thirty four to nineteen forty. It was a real live town.

I: What were some of the things that your junior commerce group did?

Mel: Well, we put some signs and advertising out. We did a lot of advertising in the Salt Lake papers. We did everything to actually promote, in conjunction with the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce, to get the ski trains in to town. We were instrumental in getting the WPA to go in and try to do a ski area. Originally, they cut the runs over there at Deer Valley. The WPA did that. They had a lodge over there. Two years after it was built somebody burned it down. They didn’t have any kind of a lift there, but they cut some runs.

I: Did the WPA use the lodge – did they do something with that?

Mel: No. It was just something to give some people some work. They also built the Girl Scout Lodge on top of Bonanza Flats. That has been burned down too. It was fairly recently, but I don’t know exactly when it was. I haven’t been up there.

I: I haven’t been up there in quite a while.

Mel: Have you been up there?

I: I used to go up and camp. I probably haven’t been there since the early eighties.

Mel: I haven’t been in that place for years. We used to go up there in the Jeep squad in the forties.

I: Did you used to hike up there as a kid?

Mel: Yes. We used to before it was ever built, we used to hike up there and swim in the water. Buck naked!

I: Cold.

Mel: I’ll say. You’d tip toe in there as much as you could.

I: Tell me about some of the jobs that you had.

Mel: Well, when I was night attendant, at the Kimball’s Garage was one of my first jobs.

I: What did you do there.

Mel: I worked almost two years on night shift since the garage was open all night, especially in the winter – people kept their cars there. We used to do a lot of chaining. Put chains on for people that would want to get in to the garage at their home – we’d chain ‘em up. We’d take the chains off if they were going to Salt Lake City. That was a little extra money, chaining the cars, taking the chains off or putting them back on. It was good money. It was twenty five cents. Pretty good money then. I worked at the Garage there, for probably about two years; two or three. I was a night attendant. Then, later I got some jobs with the Windsor Pool Hall. I used to go up and rack balls, and tend bar. I used to work for a clothing store.

I: Which clothing store?

Mel: It was Frankel’s. Frankel’s Clothing Store; especially over Christmas. I’d work there for ten continual days around Christmas. Then I worked for my dad, on paint jobs.

I: Did your dad pay you when you worked for him?

Mel: Yeah, he’d give me some money if I needed it. Cost fifty cents to go to a dance, in those days.

I: That’s a lot.

Mel: Not really. Not when they got the big bands coming in. We got some big bands in that dance hall.

I: Like who?

Mel: They used to use it as a stopover place. A lot of times they’d tie ‘em in between jobs, like they’d be going from Salt Lake to Ogden or something like that. Or going across country, they’d always contact the Elk’s and tell them when they were coming through. Cab Calloway was here; that was the first time I’d been near a colored orchestra. It was

fun. I can’t remember the names of the bands, but I do remember Cab Calloway. We used to have a dance about every Saturday night with different orchestra’s at the Elk’s Hall, in the early years, thirties, forties too.

I: Your mom played in an orchestra?

Mel: Yes. She had a small orchestra. They used to play, in Kamas and Coalville. They’d even go as far as Duchesne. Didn’t go to Vernal; they went as far as Roosevelt. That was tough traveling too. Played for a lot of weddings; never charged them anything for playing at weddings or funerals.

I: What about the mines – you worked in the mines briefly?

Mel: Oh, I worked in the Judge temporarily, for about, oh maybe, three months I was in the Judge – working on the track. Then I worked at New Park Mine.

I: Down in Keetley?

Mel: Yes. If you’re going on the road to Heber City, you’ll notice on the right hand side that there’s a little cabin up in the trees, well, right in there is where that mine was, New park Mine.

I: What did you do there?

Mel: I worked in the mine for about three years.

I: Underground – mucking?

Mel: Yeah. Shift work. Night shift, day shift.

I: What did you think of mine work?

Mel: Well, it wasn’t as difficult as people would imagine, but it was a lot of work involved in carrying machines and timbering. But, it was a good source of revenue. At that time they were paying some real good money in the mines. New Park especially. They shut it down.

I: Was it scary down there?

Mel: No. It’s so different than people realize. Especially with the modern lights. You have a battery light that was very brilliant; kind of a world all of it’s own in there. With your partner, trying to drill some holes and blasting. I get a kick out of Florallee who came [to] describe what miner’s did, how they got around. To see the system of mining – you just try to stay on the vein and when you’re drilling, in order to break rock you have to drill some of these holes at an angle – in other words, the first holes you make, you drill them at an angle and then you put your drill straight down at the bottom and you drill off on the sides that you want trimmed and the roof you generally tip it at an angle; then the first one’s you shoot is in the middle which blows out and then it starts it off. These are all timed. The spitter cords are tied to the end of the main lines and are fastened to the end of the fuse and these are all hooked together with just one line. It depends upon the length of the fuse what time it goes off. So, these three or four holes that we’d drill in the middle goes out and then each of them in the side walls goes in and the roof comes down and the last one’s were the lifters down at the bottom, goes up. You come in there and you’ve got this nice…

I: Square hole.

Mel: Yeah. Not exactly square, more round. You’d blow that out and then the next shift would come along and have to clean it out. If you were working shift work, well then another shift would come in and take the ore out, and the waste that’s with it. It’s a system that, you’d have to see it to know what’s going on. [?] You’ve seen the system of how they do it as far as the mining is concerned by going down the shaft and after you go down the shaft you tunnel off. In your tunnel, you’ve got your drifts, going off of that, just like the streets. Main Street, Park Avenue.

I: You have names for all the tunnels.

Mel: Well, I don’t know about that. But, I wasn’t in it long enough. I knew it wasn’t going to be my occupation. I ended up working for a lumber company for a while, in a sawmill making wedges. I worked on a lot of roadwork.

I: Where was the sawmill?

Mel: It was at the Junction at the old Kamas road. The old Kamas road – do you remember before they built the dam there – well, it was that junction right there on the road that goes to Kamas. I worked on that road. I did all the fence posts in that river rock and then mixed cement for the bridges. I ended up working for the state road plowing snow – I did that for five years.

I: A lot of jobs at ski places that we’ll get into later.

Mel: I left that and I worked for the schools as a Maintenance supervisor. Of course, I was skiing in the meantime too; I was a ski instructor somewhere, somehow.

I: What else? Strikes – do you remember the mines going on strike?

I: What about the big strike in the thirties?

Mel: Yeah.

I: It created quite a rukus s behind your house didn’t it?

Mel: Right in front of it, on Park Avenue.

I: Tell me about that.

Mel: Well, at the time, the Park Con was the one that was involved in this strike and that was up in Deer Valley. The mine owners themselves, went over to Heber Valley and stirred up all the miners they could find and asked them – “Do you want to go to work for the wages we’re gonna give you because maybe you’re gonna starve to death?” Anyway, they got a whole truck load of people in to break the strike. They come in on a big open truck and some closed cars. The Union got word that they were coming and that they were gonna try to break the strike and go to work. They stopped them right in front of my house. They were up in the trucks, throwing the miners out of the truck; they chased the guys up the hill. A lot of the shop keepers were there; I remember a little store, Paul Brothers and Wilson, and Mr. Paul was there with his flowing gray hair and he was issuing some profanities at them and shaking his fist. He wasn’t even a miner, but a lot of the townspeople too, were involved. They didn’t want them to break the strike for wages. But, at any rate, some of the people were hurt, they got black eyes and bloody noses and everything, but they did stop them. They stopped right there and then there wasn’t

anything at all they did about it. There wasn’t any charges made. The people from over the valley were too embarrassed to even do anything about it.

I: Went back home.

Mel: Oh, yes. Went back home. I did go to Geneva Steel and work for a while.

I: That’s down in Provo?

Mel: Yes.

I: Well, how about we call it a day. We’ll come back and do a whole other interview on skiing.

Mel: If you want to .

I: I’d like to. Wouldn’t you?

Mel: Yes. I like to talk skiing. It was a great sport.

I: That will also give us time to think about what we missed in growing up in Park City. It was a neat little place. Thanks for today.

END OF INTERVIEW 1 END OF TAPE 2 – SIDE B

BEGIN INTERVIEW # 2 May 16, 2000 BEGIN TAPE 3 SIDE A

I: So, here we are, Mel and Anji, interview number two.

Mel: Well, my first bit of skiing was standing, as an observer, standing on my grandmother’s porch, which is up on Grant Avenue, what they call Swede Alley now. She lived on a hill, in a house that still exists. I used to go up there all the time to carry her coal in and get her wood ready for her so she wouldn’t have any problem with her fire in the morning. While I was up there, it was a nice sun shinin’ day and I was standing on the porch watching the Norwegians – a group of skiers up on the side hill. Directly across from

this porch there’s a little hollow up there, which is a ski run now, but they had a pretty fair opportunity to go off at an angle and built a jump. But, then they had to make very quick turns after they got through jumping so they wouldn’t end up on the houses down at the street. After I watched them a while I got a little antsy and wanted to ski myself. I was quite young at the time, but every chance we got thereafter, the neighbor kids were always building jumps. Any hill that was steep we could find an opportunity to build a jump and we started jumping. Not too far from where I lived there was a Creole Hill. The older fella’s at that time, had built jumps on the Creole. They had cut trees. That slope up there, you can still see the lines through the trees where our in-run was. The Creole was a mine dump and it was flat. It’d give us an opportunity to have a jump and then places to stop after completion of the jump. Many hours were spent on that hill. Always trying to get it ready so we could jump. The trouble in those early days was the fact that we didn’t have any of huge machines to press out the snow like they do now. Every man that was on the hill, that wanted to jump, had to side step up the hill and stomp the fresh snow down. Needless to say, about every weekend when we skied up there, we had to work on the jump because it snowed during the week. If we were lucky and it didn’t snow, then we didn’t have much work to do, but, a lot of times our work – to get the jump ready was done on Saturday so that we could jump on Sunday. We developed a lot of jumpers. In the grade schools, we started having jumping contests in the winter. We’d have as high as probably thirty jumpers on the hill – at the schools. I got to the eighth grade and I had some pretty good jumping ski’s. We had a team, a high school jumping team. The fella’s that were jumping at the time were Theilke, a number of fella’s that would jump, and good jumpers. Bill Bailey and the Hammond brothers too, were jumping. Later, after we got into high school we started jumping at Ecker Hill. They had smaller jumps down there and they had a scaffold that the Rasmussen brothers built behind their Inn. What they called the Welcome Inn which was just a café, they lived in the back and over the top of it. That was their home. These jump meets got to be quite fun and a lot of people; a lot of the jumpers come out of Salt Lake City. They had quite a lot of tournaments there on that scaffold. The hill wasn’t very long and you’d have to walk along the run to the top of this structure, but most of the time there was just enough room on the edge of the jump that you could go up and get your start. There was a time at one of the events – it was my first accident. I was coming off the jump when Frank Rasmussen, one of the Rasmussen brothers, went across the hill in front of me - while I was in the air and just as I went to land, my ski hit his shoulder and it dumped me – right on my chest. Needless to say, it knocked the air out of me and let me know that there’s ways of getting hurt. But, it evolved into riding Ecker Hill, we went to

what they called, Class C jumps. They had a little jump on the side, and then the B jump and when we got our Ski Club going here in Park City, in the forties, in forty six, we got a group of us jumping. We jumped on the B take-off; it was the Spendlove brothers, Rex and John, there was Don Young, Shog Bailey, Cornell Diamond and his brother Lowell and we were more or less the prime jumpers. It ended up that Lowell was a good jumper in class C. We always managed to get a few places at Ecker Hill. One jump in forty seven they had so many jumpers going off the B take off that they said, “some of you jumpers will have to go off the big take-off because we have too many for the B.” At the time I was President of the Snow Park Ski Club and I thought, well, at least I should show some guidance and step forward and go off the big take-off. I said, “I’ll go up.” John Spendlove says, “I will.” Don Young said he would. Bill Bailey said he would. So, we went to the top with the rest of the jumpers. At that time, John Spendlove turned out to be the better of the jumpers of our group and he made third place. I was in sixth place and he was in the third. But, it was a huge jump. You had to make one hundred and fifty feet to land on the skiing surface. What we called the knoll is kind of a flat spot underneath the jump and then you would land on the flat part. It kind of made you jump a little bit when you’d land on that flat. Bill Bailey was not waxed very good, didn’t have good wax on his ski’s and he didn’t have enough speed to make it and he landed on top of the knoll and it caused him to jump back over the top and he managed to stand up even though he landed on the top. It took good, powerful legs to do that. He probably had the shortest jump of the day, which was about a hundred and forty feet. We had a lot of good times at Ecker Hill. We went to a lot of tournaments. The Spendlove brothers were already in Provo working and that was about the time I decided to go down with them; they were in school at BYU. They talked me into coming. We lived together and went to school together at BYU. We made a ski jump at Timp Haven and we jumped there. I was fortunate enough there to win one of the tournaments. While were there we decided, we ought to go over to Steamboat; Steamboat was having a tournament. Rex Spendlove had a pretty good car at that time, so it was Rex and John Spendlove, myself and another jumper named Gordy Dispain who used to live in Park City and Bill Bailey. Steamboat was a lot of fun. It had a band on ski’s going down the street for one of their parades; it was a preliminary to the jumps. The jumping that we did was on Hallowson Hill and it was a huge hill. Unfortunately, the year that we got there they had kind of a wet – early in the fall, the knoll had slid a little bit so it had shortened up the hill. They had to do a lot of work on the hill before winter to try and get it ready so they could even jump on it. The jump at that time was only good for about two hundred and fifty

feet. They did get the hill back in place. Howellson is one of the bigger and better hills in the United States. They had a lot of Olympic skiers come out. This is where someone like Gordy Renn, and Crosby Perry Smith, a lot of them have escaped my mind at the present time of how many were there. The good jumpers that used to come to some of the jump meets at Ecker Hill. As the war began in nineteen forty, forty four – nineteen forties when they declared that they didn’t have any jump meets. Everybody was too serious; most of the jumpers anyway, had gone to war. Ecker Hill had become a motorcycle climbing hill in the summer and very few people ever jumped it after that. They made a jump over in Alta, called Landis Jump and I jumped over there a few times. They had a hill that was called Engen Hill and that was in Brighton and one in Timp Haven in Provo Canyon and that’s about all the areas I ski jumped from.

I: Did you have a favorite jump?

Mel: Favorite jump was always Ecker Hill; it was the big one. There’s good classic pictures of it in the Park City Historical display of skiing. There’s a good picture of the big jump that was too big and too high. They had to cut it down by about four feet so that it wouldn’t throw skiers high in the air. See, in ski jumping you’re supposed to try to follow the contour of the hill by leaning forward and if the jump is too big and too high, it launches you so high in the air - you lose your speed in the air, why, you become dead fall. As a result, you sometimes fall from thirty or forty feet down just slowing down and you hit with tremendous impact. Alf Engen, at times, made dents in the snow six inches deep in the hard compacted snow. When he landed on the jump - I think he jumped two hundred and eighty eight feet the time I saw him and he was quite near the bottom of the outrun then. Skiing has come a long ways. The skiing hills, for the Olympic down at Bear Hollow is engineered so that jumpers are very seldom any more than twenty five feet above the surface. The technique has changed. We used to get points for having our skis perfectly level and they had to be together. But, now, they spread them wide in the tips. Their ski’s are wider. They spread their skis apart and they kind of lay in between the ski’s which makes a more complete air foil – it holds you in the air longer; you’re floating in the air. The air catches you and you’re caught in an air foil which holds you up longer – that’s why you get longer distance and it’s made a much safer sport out of it. One thing it has done is – no body has to work on the hill side stepping or walking to the top.

The hill is already prepared for them. As kids, and young men, we always had to work on our hill or we didn’t jump. We had to walk to the top. That is a long hard walk, to walk with the ski’s over your shoulder clear to the beginning of where you skied from. Once you get to the top of the hill, you swing around and you still have to go higher so you can get to the top of the in-run. I used to give a lot of ski and first aid talks to a lot of the kids and I asked them if they’d really ski if they had to walk to the top and ski down. You’d be surprised at how many of them would actually raise their hand and they’d say, “we would” and that shows a real love for skiing, but a lot of them were not about to put their hands up if they had to walk from the bottom of Park City clear up to the King mine or beyond the ridge. They wouldn’t be riding many times up and down that hill. As jumpers, we had to walk up three times during a tournament. Sometimes four if you wanted to get there early enough to get some practice jumps.

I: For the tournaments would you have to stamp it out too?

Mel: Yes. Prior to the tournament we’d have to have the hill ready. Sometimes, if we had a tournament, we’d have to work weeks. Probably all through the week, getting the hill ready. If you have a national tournament people are coming in and expect the hill to be ready. It ended up that a lot of the jumpers, all of the participants, had to pack out the snow. They got a lot of help from people who could ski but were not jumpers that would come up and help us. Sometimes when the snow was deep, we used to get up to the top and take off our ski’s. In order to get it firm, we’d walk, on our feet, all the way to the bottom with locked arms. Just like, what they call a sheeps foot on a roller now that stomps in the roads – little iron feet that they put on these rollers that get down and stomp it so it makes compact roads. Ski jumping was a lot of work. It entailed a lot of work in the thirties. In the forties you had to still work on the hill. The Landis jump at Alta wasn’t used very much because they had so much snow on their hill that it was almost impossible for them to take care of it all the time. When they did have a jump meet there they generally had it real early in the Winter, real early in December or January before they had so much snow that it covered their jump right up. But, skiing, had become a way of life for us and I was working on the state road at the time when Woody Anderson asked me to come over to Park City to become the ski patrol director. Prior to that in the fifties, when I came out of the service in 1946 I was doing a lot of skiing at that time and I got a call in forty nine - they were going to have some test for ski instructors. So there was Earl Miller, from Provo and myself and Gordan Dispain, going

to school at BYU at the time and I went over to Alta and passed the preliminary test, the Associate Test.

I: What was the test like?

Mel: They tested you to see if you actually skied well enough and could instruct someone on how to do it. Needless to say, there were a lot of books out with various ways of teaching instruction. The Arlberg system seemed to be the best for us; it was a system where you could make turns in the deeper snow. This test was put on by the Forest Service for people that wanted to become ski instructors. They had to do it because they were doing it all over the United States. They had to standardize so they knew that people knew how to teach; by giving them these tests before they’d give them a permit. Alf Engen had to go through all of this before they could set up their school. I think it was Sverre Engen that was running the first ski school at Alta. Of course, they were skiing on Forest Service ground so this was the reason for the testing. After that, the Intermountain Ski Association decided to test all of their skiers who aspired to become a ski instructor. They had to learn how to teach. They did this by going through the director of the ski school which was Alf Engen at Alta and the people who were very good at breaking down the structure of how to make a turn, wrote the books. There were some very good books out at the time. There were all kinds of ways to teach and ways to ski and ways to make turns. Then they took parts of these different instruction manuals and finally made a complete manual called the Professional Ski Instructors of America. From all of the methods, they consolidate a way of teaching and this book was one that everybody follows now. Taking it through the snowplow, what used to be the snowplow, now is the wedge. They have a bit different terminology on it, so that even the little kids can understand it better. Your sidestepping, as you work your way through the classes, it’s kind of a flowing situation where you go from one step to another; it makes it very easy now for people to learn to ski.

I: Tell me about the equipment and changes in equipment – what were using when you first started skiing?

Mel: Well, the skis we used at that time were Pine. If you were lucky enough you might get a maple ski or hickory. Hickory was for the ski jumpers – they had to make them out of the strongest wood for jumping. We had pine skis when we were younger. When they built a ski they would have to make it narrow where they make the bend in order to form the ski and get the leading part of the ski – they had to make it thin in order to put it on a

press. They put it in extreme boiling water and then they put them in a clamp that bends up the ends of them. In the earlier days they used to leave a little tip up there and that’s where they’d have something to get a hold of to pull the ski up. That one over there has one, you see [pointing to the corner]. You’d get ahold of the ski and pull it back. A Norwegian that was making ski’s here in Park City named Dick Squires, made skis for the Engens, and Steffan Trogstad.

I: What was his name?

Mel: His name was Dick Squires. I used to watch him. I used to watch him work; he had a little shop not too far from me up on Main Street. In back of the old Cozy there for a while. I used to watch him. It was quite a tedious job that you had to go through to build a ski. Mortise, it’s a hole through the ski where your foot was and that was the thickest part of the ski. The only way you could fasten your foot was in a strap through this hole you put over your toe. And then, along came the jumpers and everybody else knew that you had to have something to keep your heel from moving around. All you had there was just your toe and if you tried to turn your ski and if the ski resisted then your foot would slide off; your heel would slide off of the ski. [phone ringing] So, at the time I was skiing it was difficult to hold your foot in the ski and I had even gone through the pains of putting little screw hooks that my dad had got for me so I could put them in the side of the ski, so I could take some buckskin and lash my foot in. He didn’t like that idea too much because there was a good chance of breaking my leg. That was their thought all the time. Well, at least with the leather strap you wont hurt yourself. But, at the same time, you couldn’t control your ski. So, all time, everybody was coming out with different ways of holding your ski. The original bear traps, they were just two pieces of metal that were bent and they had holes in the plates where you went through the mortise in the ski with bolts to hold the plates on top. That was the initial bear trap and these were completely adjustable. Then, they had a harness that come up off of the toe –

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Mel: There’s a leather strap that come off of the toe irons and then loop back over your heel and then there’s a closure clamp that you snap down to hold your foot in. That was the earliest, the first time that you were able to control your ski. But, there were a lot of ingenious devices that people made after that - that had springs, and they also had cables to go around your heel and it had a clamp in the front that you push down. It was adjustable. The cable had spindles on the side where you could tighten it up and adjust it. The throw on the front of the ski had small indentations where you could adjust that and adjust the length of the cable. My first cable bindings were on the first ski’s I bought at a place called Zinicks, in Salt Lake. They were cable bindings. Some of the others were just a home made rig and weren’t doing very well. But this original ski that I had was called - a Drammond Ski and I don’t remember what my first binding was; but, anyway, it was a front throw and I had that in 1936.

I: How much would you pay for that binding and ski?

Mel: Well, needless to say it was an amazing amount the way we talked, but twenty dollars, in those days was a lot of money. It would generally cost us pretty close to thirty dollars for a pair of ski’s and ten or fifteen dollars for a pair of bindings. Some people - if they made four dollars a day they were doing well. It’s just a matter of what you’re doing and how much you’re willing to pay, but we weren’t making any money in those days either, not very much money - still there was enough money that I was able to scrape it together and buy ski’s.

I: Did you ever try to make your own ski?

Mel: No. No. Some did and found out that it was so much work that it was better to go buy them from the manufacturer’s who had the equipment and the proper wood and everything to make them.

I: Were they heavy?

Mel: Some of them were. Jump ski’s were heavy because they were generally about eight feet long. They vary between six and eight feet long. The hickory was a quite heavy ski. They used to have to build them a little heavier too in the foot because of the impact we put on them. When you’re up in the air and they come down with terrific force, why I’ve seen some of those cheapy ski’s just shatter.

I: In the jumping ski’s – would you keep your heel attached to the ski?

Mel: Well, the jumpers had kind of a swivel off of the toe iron’s in the front where they could lift their heel. You can see some of the older pictures that their skis dropped a little bit away from their heel. But, going on from the ski jumping right into the – riding the chair and going to the top and teaching skiing was all happening in the sixties for me. My basic teaching started in the fifties.

I: At Snow Park.

Mel: When I come out of the service in fifty two; I went back in the service in the Korean. I got out of the [second] World War in nineteen forty six; I joined the reserve and then I was called back in, in fifty. I was in the navy and was a metalsmith. I didn’t get out until 1952 when they released me. But, being in the reserve, I often wonder why I was called in for the Korean War. I got to San Francisco, where we left to go to Hawaii, I met all of these good metalsmith’s that had been in the service prior. Since we all were working on airplanes, it was reasonable to know that they were trying to get people who could repair airplanes and the metalsmith’s – were needed in the service again. I met people there that were called back and they had children. They could get out of the service with three children on this reserve status, and some of them had two children already, and probably one on the way, but they kept them in the service anyway, for the allotted three months. They’d take them over there and use them for three months. The reason why they did this was because they had all the new electronics, but they hadn’t put them on the planes. They had to get them on the planes. Sonar and radar had to be installed in the fighting planes. So, as a result, I ended up in the fleet air Squadran, 117. It was called the garage of the Pacific and it was in Hawaii. What they would do at that time is bring in their carriers and they’d fly all of the planes off of the carriers into the base and then we’d work on them. We worked our night and day to put all of these structures in, all their electronics. As soon as we got them outfitted they could go back to the carrier. It made it kind of good duty for us because the captain would say watch the bulletin board. You can hit the beach guys, but watch the bulletin board so that if we need you we can reach you. So, there was some times that we spent three or four days on the beach and I got to do a lot of surfing. There for two years, I looked like a Hawaiian when I come back. I can’t tell any horrible war stories, other than the fact I worked hard and did my job and they released me when I got through.

I got back in fifty two. When I got back in fifty two, I got right back into my ski teaching. I was certified and I had started this school at Snow Park. This is one of the things I learned a long time ago – that if you get the kids so they can really ski and do some turning, they will be the ones riding the ski lift. I told Otto, we better get a good ski school going here and lets start to work on the kids. After I got my ski school going I went to the city. Bill Sullivan was the mayor at that time, and I said, “Bill, is there any fat chance that you got some recreation money?” He says, “well, we don’t have what we call a recreation fund, but we do have some money that we were gonna use on the ball field.” I said, “is there any chance of getting a little piece of that to teach skiing?” He says, well “we’ll have to talk it over.” After one meeting they come back and said, “Mel, now we can give you some money. It’s not very much, but at least it will get you started.” I said, well, I’ll go to the county and see if I can get some money, so I can at least pay my instructors – that’s what it’s gonna take to get a school going over here. In addition to what private lessons we could get on a Sunday, why I could probably do pretty well that way. What my main thing is, I want to get a ski school so we can teach these kids how to ski so they don’t hurt themselves. With some help I can get we can probably fix their skis and get their bindings so that they’ll be safer for them. With this program, Otto said that he would give them free ski lesson ski time, on the lift, on Saturday mornings. This will give them free time. Then, we can get a sandwich at twelve o’clock after we get through for a minimal amount – it hadn’t been set yet, but it ended up to be thirty cents. Thirty cents for a hamburger and fifteen cents for a soda pop at that time. So, fifty cents they could get a half a day skiing, have a lesson and have lunch. Otto charged them a dollar to ski for the rest of the day. It made a fairly inexpensive day for them. We even set up some transportation to haul them from Park City over to Snow Park. Snow Park was where we were going to do all of our teaching.

I: Who did all of the transportation?

Mel: Just people that had kids skiing. We’d have a car pool that would meet at Kimball corner and they’d take the kids over skiing on Saturdays. But, it got so popular that Coalville wanted to get in on it to. I went over to the county to see if I could get some of their money and we got a little bit. It wasn’t very much, but it was enough to satisfy us. What it allowed me to do was hire six good instructors. Some of the instructors worked elsewhere, with Alta or Brighton. All they had to commit themselves to was Saturday morning, but we turned out a lot of good skiers. And there were nights, a Friday night when a kid would call me up and say, I got a pair of ski’s now, would you help me fit my boot to the binding? It was maybe three or four nights I

week I was working on ski’s, on ski bindings. Especially after Christmas. When we started our ski school was the first week after Christmas so the kids would have their equipment then. We were quite busy in early January. That’s why we started the second week of January, for ski instruction, so kids could get their ski’s all ready and set to go. But, today, I run in to people that I don’t even recognize and they’ll say, “don’t you remember me? You taught me how to ski. I was over there with your ski bunch when I was a kid in school.” It brings a lot of satisfaction. When they come up and thank you and shake your hands and say, I’d never have learned to ski if you hadn’t of taught me. [whispering] I’m sentimental.

I: How many kids would you have come up on a Saturday?

Mel: Well, it varied a lot of times, some of them couldn’t get there or something happened that they had to work, but we ended up with ten for each instructor. We’d end up with about sixty kids. And a lot of mama’s and papa’s would come with them to see what they were doing. We had a group come from Coalville, several girls and they used to come over in Levi’s because they couldn’t afford ski pants or didn’t want to bother, but, they skied in their Levi’s and they called themselves the blue bottom gang because when they got their butts wet, the dye from the Levi’s would fade right into their undies. Even on their skin. There’s a lot of kids I used to meet over in Coalville, “don’t you remember me, I’m one of the blue bottom gang.” It’s a delight to have known that you’ve helped them learn how to ski properly so they don’t hurt themselves. We had ski wrecks. As long as I was teaching at Snow Park – we did our own ski patrol – the people I had working for me had first aid instruction and also had passed their Red Cross Test, at that time, and then finally to I gave them real good first aid training through the national ski patrol. When I was the ski patrol director at Park City, we always had preliminary tests to make sure the fella’s had their proper first aid credentials before they ever went on the hill. I quit my job at State road, and went to work for Park City I had a lot of people for applications, the first year we started our skiing, because not only were we a good ski area and I was pretty well known, but the fact that they could ride the gondola up to go skiing was quite a selling point to get good patrolmen and I ended up pulling a lot of the finest ski patrolman away from other areas. We won a lot of national awards, through the national ski patrol. We won patrol of the year for the Intermountain. The little badge they give us for being the best, outstanding, ski patrol is up there in my trophy table.

I: What made you stand out as the best?

Mel: The ability to take care of accidents, toboggan handling, ski ability, first aid class – first aid. A lot of tests, or we would have some mock up where somebody was injured and what would you do. Plus the records – how many accidents we took care of in a year. There was a lot of – well, saving lives. A lot of saved lives by our prompt attention. We had one in particular that had ruptured a spleen and we had no way of knowing how badly he was hurt. That was one of our first helicopter – and we got the helicopter from Alta that time. We realized, that we had some doctors that skied with us and worked with us on the ski patrol and so all we had to do was call them if we needed them. One of the kids had fallen in a very steep area and he put the ski pole right into his side and he was showing all the indications of internal injuries and so I called the helicopter and we got him into a hospital and a kidney had ruptured. As a result, we got an award for that, for actually saving his life because he could have internally bled himself to death. But, boy, what to do and when to do it is quite a trick in that game. We’ve had plane crashes on the mountain.

I: At Park City?

Mel: Two. One of the kids from the Kamas valley had an opportunity to get the plane without permission and he had two passengers with him and he started flying over the valley here and he went over the top of our gondola and just barely missed it and he stalled out – got excited and stalled his plane out – and it went right up the top of Hidden Splendor and come across the meadow. Tore off the wings and flipped right on it’s back. It didn’t kill anybody, it hurt one guy, he had quite a nob on his head. But, if that plane had gone just a little bit further it would have gone down the fall line of Hidden Splendor and wiped out every skier from there clear to Prospector lift. That’s what could have happened, but as it was, it hit the tree and flipped. Then, we had another one from the National Guard that crashed up there in the summertime. I just happened to be on the mountain at the time. We put a back splint on him. It was a National Guard plane and they had got a false telephone call that there was a car crash on Bonanza road and that somebody was pinned in the car and they were flying trying to see it and they never could did find any kind of a car. It was a phony call. They were circling. They come over and crashed at the top of the King Con lift. The plane caught on fire and the pilot burned, but the co-pilot was what they called an observer, he had hurt his back pretty bad. I got a backsplint and we back splinted him and then the

jolly green giant came in with their double bladed choppers and picked him up and took him to the hospital.

I: What about avalanches.

Mel: We had an avalanche at Park City. We had very tricky snow conditions that would come in on the early morning storms. We had a snow condition where we were trying to get everybody off the mountain, but it was almost an impossibility; we were right in the middle of ski season, right around Christmas. An avalanche come down right by the angle station and trapped two. One of them died. We had to dig them out. But, that was released by skiers. I went up there later and found out that the tracks from skiers indicated that they had caused it to slide.

I: One of the skiers that was trapped?

Mel: No. They were on that trail going back to the angle station and the people were up at the top up there, before they get to the Silver Queen. They’d been out in the deep snow and we could see their tracks, where they went in there and turned that avalanche lose. But after that, we went in there and took care of that bowl so it would never happen again – we took some cats, and I don’t if you’ve ever noticed the hillside, but it’s terraced. We terraced it so there wouldn’t be any more snow slides. Hasn’t been one since.

I: Where did you get your training in avalanches?

Mel: At avalanche schools. They had some in Utah. Then, I went to a national Avalanche school in Seattle, where all of the areas assembled to trade each other’s information. They had all the launchers that you dropped a regular two pound charge down a barrel and then let it pressurize the barrel, then release it. It would throw the charge up on the ridge back of Thaynes. We used that launcher for quite a while. We soon discontinued usuing the launcher. We liked the helicopter for the ridges, faster and safer.

I: What was some of the things that you would look for in snow conditions to know that you were in danger?

Mel: Well, a lot of our snow conditions develop when people aren’t aware that it’s happening. The fact that your deposition from your ridges causes most of the avalanches, your deposition. After a storm the prevailing wind blows over the ridge and it

forms cornices, but it doesn’t stop on the cornice, it just deposits the snow over the top and down in the bowl and those bowls are steep. That’s when a lot of people get in bowls and ski them and they’ll get a release, but it’s very difficult to judge exactly what has happened. Especially in the early mornings when you go out to shoot your avalanches. We always take good care, not necessarily have to worry too much about the cornices because the cornices stayed bonded together on a mountain. We do shoot ‘em, but it’s the deposition that forms below the cornice is where it’s most dangerous. This is where the people aren’t fully aware of what’s happening. You almost have to go to school and learn some of the visible things that you watch for. The school that we went to had all of the information on digging snow trenches so you could judge the various layers in the snow. Some of the ice crystals formed through the percolation of water through the snow. It’s quite a study. A lot of guys have studies this for years and there’s still an uncertainty that ya don’t quite get it. That’s where – all you can do is give people the warnings to stay out. Snowmobiles are now getting caught in avalanches. As soon as they see a nice cool even mountain and they get up there and try to see how [high] up the bowl they can go and that’s when they get in trouble. Those machines are heavy – and cause a release.

END SIDE B TAPE 3

BEGIN SIDE A TAPE 4

I: Tell me what you know about the development of Snow Park?

Mel: Snow Park. Well, let’s see, where should I start?

I: Start with the runs being cut there.

Mel: Well, when the WPA was active, in the early thirties –

I: Works Progress Administration

Mel: Yes. They were very interested in work projects that would help the population as a whole. Therefore they did a lot of things in the forest; for instance, they went up and built a ski jump in Brighton. They also come up into Park City and cut some ski runs in the

Snow Park – where Deer Valley is now. It was cut through the pine trees. They built a cabin, what they would call a “lodge” at the bottom. Those runs were in existence. Incidentally, that [the lodge] was burnt down, somebody burnt the thing down. The ski runs were there and no body hardly ever used them. It was quite a ways from town skiers had to walk up in order to use them. They sat there for years. Finally, it was Otto Carpenter and Bob Burns; two of the skiers in Park decided to build a lift. Bob was an engineer mechanic and was very good with machinery and Otto Carpenter was a carpenter, and a very good one. So, they decided to see if they could build a ski area after going over and looking it over. The runs – there were two lines that were cut. They said, “Well, we’ll run this right up here. We’ll come up and build us a lodge.” They went up on Main Street and tore a building down. A huge building, it was a two story building and they took all of the lumber they got from tearing the building down and they built that lodge. A little small lodge, that you see in pictures today of the original Snow Park lodge. They made towers out of wood that they cut for additional runs. They went up to the mine and with permission from the mine bosses at the Judge shop, Bob Birbeck helped them. They started making chairs. They had already cut a line, up through the pine trees; they had made a deal with the mining company for the use of the ground. They got cable from the mine and bought some Ford engines to use on the lift. We’re talking about one lift at the time. They went over there and cut the timber; cut a good line and it progressively turned into an operation. Bob Burns, as a machinist, had the wheels made what they call the shives, the cable would run on, cast in Salt Lake City. They got the engine mounted on the top of the hill. They put the cable in, stretched by using a truck to pull it taught. They used a counter balance at the bottom to keep the tension on the cables. That was a big box in which they threw a lot of iron – enough weight for counter balance. It was well thought out. A lot of ski lifts are turned with the motors on the bottom, but the weight had to be on the top. The way they figured it out was to put the engine on top and that meant climbing to the top every time they started it. But it was wise in the sense that they could keep an eye on the tension and also add more weight if the cable needed it. They built some excellent structures. They were made out of nice fresh pine. The first time they extended or put the lift together it was a T-bar, which means a drop cable on a piece of board – two by four – it was about eighteen inches wide, or eighteen inches long I would say. This cable would go through the board and they had a rubber hose over the cable and you would grasp that and swing the board up through your legs and then it would pull you up the hill. Well, that didn’t last very long. They used it the one year and then decided to put on real chairs.

I: On the T-bar your skis stay on the ground the whole time?

Mel: Skis stay on the ground. They decided to make a chair out of it and went up to the Judge Mine and got permission to work there in the evenings – the mines weren’t working. And they started turning out the chairs. They got the pull cable and mounted it right on the main cable. The grip they made – Bob was kind of a genius – he put that together, it was a grip and perhaps he should have gotten a patent on it because it was an excellent grip to hold the chairs on the line. But, this was all done before we had even thought of a ski school or anything like that – they had all the preliminary’s done, they built their lodge and it took an awful lot of work. They did get some help out of some of the people in town and also the families. But it turned out to be a real nice rig. It was a real good time for everybody. In 1946 when I got out of the service, why it was a viable, going situation then. The winter of forty six, forty seven, we started ski classes. A lot of people tried to keep the secret hidden so that it wouldn’t ever be crowded. We had a lot of skiers come up from Salt Lake City. Especially some of the sports writers out of Salt lake – and finally, they discovered “Us.” But, all the while, this was supposed to be a ghost town. Couldn’t possibly be – we had a ski lift.

I: Did people come from other states to ski?

Mel: No. We did have some ski races there though. They got snowed out of Alta. They had snow slides in Little Cottonwood Canyon and they brought over a tournament. They had a race. A downhill race. A slalom race. What they did was go up and then walk up just a little further. They had to side step on up to where the start was because they started quite a bit further up than our upper terminal was. I don’t know if I mentioned that or not, Engen’s book that he wrote. I’ll have to re- read it then and see if that little tournament that they put on up there was mentioned. I remember Alf was working at the time they came up.

I: Tell me about the Ski Club, the Snow Park Ski Club, how did that start?

Mel: Well, a group of us was over to Thaynes Canyon. Don Young, Bill Baily, the Spendlove brothers we were able to drive to Thaynes shaft and then we put our skis on from there and went up to the mine dump. We got talking about organizing a ski club, so that we could start traveling as a jump team and get more activity for Otto’s new lift – I

should say, Otto’s and Bob’s new lift. Why don’t we call our ski club, that we’ve been talking about all day – we got snow, and we got Park, so why don’t we put that together and call it Snow Park. And they concurred, they said, that’s a good name. We’ll go back down and when we have our next meeting, we’ll call it, the Snow Park Ski Club. We started the ski club that next week and we got a lot of members. We had as high as fifty members in the ski club. Some didn’t ski, but they wanted to belong to the ski club. We got to the point where we had little get togethers and our meetings became dinners. Our basic reason for even starting the ski club was to get transportation to other ski areas. We had a jump in Brighton and even a jump down at Ecker Hill, or anywhere, we could travel. Also, we had a bit of a problem getting the kids over to Deer Valley, when it was Snow Park. So, we thought, if we could get this club going and get some of the parents interested maybe we could get a car pool to take all the kids from Kimball Garage over to Snow Park. Well, it worked. We got the ski club organized. We had ski movies. We brought in some ski movies. Sverre Engen had a movie that he had made. I remember having that one in the Memorial Building. The Snow Park Ski Club brought a lot of activity into town. At that time we were going to school in Provo. There was one ski club down there, called the Idlewise club that we got interested in skiing at Park City. We used to get a couple of car loads of skiers out of Provo that came up to ski Snow Park.

I: What did people call your ski club?

Mel: Oh, they called it Snow Park – oh, you mean [chuckles]

I: Yeah, the nickname.

Mel: We had sweaters made and we went down to Utah Woolen Mills and told them exactly what we wanted as far as the emblem was concerned and it was supposed to be a heart with a ski trail down through it - so that this would depict the “heart of skiing.” Well, needless to say, when we got that big heart with the ski trail, which you can see on the ski sweater in the Historical collection - they started calling us the broken heart club because of a big crack going down through the heart. They were supposed to put two trails going down there for two ski’s so you could actually see it was a ski trail. But, it didn’t quite work that way. But, anyway, the emblem sufficed and we had five, six jumpers that went to Ecker Hill in the centennial jump and they all jumped off the B take-off in twin jumps all wearing our red and white sweaters. There are movies of those jumps – somewhere in existence.

I: Maybe at the Utah Ski Archives.

Mel: We had three people in the air at the same time.

I: Was it scary?

Mel: It was kind of like a ski circus. Because we started of with just one jumper going off then we had a twin jump. Let’s see, there was one, two, three, four, five, six, seven – we had seven skiers who went off that way. We had two twins, there was one, two, three, four, five six, seven – seven go off, and sometimes there would be three in the air at the same time – off the B takeoff. That was spectacular because Alf Engen, at that time, they were going off, but they only did it off the big jump – they did twin leaps – Alf and Toger Tokle. Toger Tokle and Alf made a twin jump. And, also Alf and Sverre made twin jumps off the big one. But, Ecker Hill was a really good booming thing to have. Getting back to Park City – Bob and Otto made their mark on the history of skiing in Park City. They were both pretty good skiers, Otto was a good jumper and he was very instrumental in building the take-off at the old Creole Jump. There is a picture of John Spendlove standing on one of the Creole jumps. That picture is in the historical collection. They also have a big one down at the Yarrow, in the café, there’s ski pictures on the walls and John Spendlove is standing on the take-off of the Creole jump with his big long ski’s and if you look carefully at the ski jump it’s made like an artisan made it and Carpenter was a good carpenter and he had lots to do with making that jump. We also had a flagpole so we could fly a flag.

I: Did you make other jumps in town?

Mel: Oh yeah. There were little jumps all over. There used to be jumps on the Three Kings – off of what they call – Negro Hollow – there were jumps there. My cousin, Lamar Osika and I made one clear over on the other side of Nelson field, where the Park City lift is – just about one of the small trails just as you come out of the canyon at Three Kings lift. Sometimes I get my terminology mixed up with the proper, now local names.

I: You had another club – the Wasatch –

Mel: Yes. The Wasatch Mountain Club. Well, that was a club that was formulated, oh, probably around 1915, that’s when they started their club, and it was in Brighton. They

built a huge lodge over there and were always upgrading it. The whole object of the club was to further the hiking and skiing and the preservation of the forest. At that time they were very – what would you say – my Alzheimer’s just kicked in. [chuckles]

I: So, that group didn’t want ski resorts to come into their back country?

Mel: Oh no. No, they were up for that, they wanted to see that, but what they didn’t want was the litter. We got a lot of litter - once we got ski chairs they were always throwing litter off the chairs. Beer cans and all that type of thing. They were quite adamant about some of the things that skiers did that used the ski lifts. They were very interested in cross country skiing and also skiing where nobody else had gone before. Mountain climbing was the same way. They were always climbing the mountain. Some of those ski trips they used to take, for instance, from Park City to Brighton, from Brighton to Alta.

I: Did you go on any of those?

Mel: Many of them. I used to lead the trail. Anytime they came into Park City and wanted to ski to Brighton, why I’d generally go with them and take them over the top and ski overnight at Brighton.

I: Where would you start that trip?

Mel: We’d generally start at the King mine.

I: Silver King?

Mel: Yeah. We were always able to get a bus there. Then if they came in individual cars why we’d kind of car pool them up so we wouldn’t have very many cars to go to the top. But, we’d go up to the top of Thayne’s canyon, over Scott’s pass and on into Brighton.

I: That’s a steep climb isn’t it?

Mel: We used climbers. We’d use the seal skins that you’d put on your ski’s. Those of us, that used to do a lot of cross country skiing here, we used a canvas, what we called a canvas sack, it was built the shape of the ski, tailored to the tail end of the ski and then we had a tie that would tie up over your foot to hold the sack on and you could walk up the hill in this canvas sack. Then, when you got to the top of the hill, you’d take it off and tie each

one of them around your ski pole, in a nice round roll, and put them on your ski poles to go down the hill. If you want to go back up again, you pull em off and put them back on your ski’s. They’re fast and easy. Some people never got their seal skin on their ski’s quite like they’re supposed to be and it gave them a lot of trouble because they were falling off. Some of them were using climbing waxes too. They had what you call a “klister” that you put on the bottom of your ski’s so that you can climb.

I: Then when you got to the top, wouldn’t you stick on your way down?

Mel: Well, you’d just smooth it off. Smooth it off then warm your hand and slick it up a little bit to make it shiny and then once you started it was all right. I never liked to use it very much. I used to like to wear the skins or put the old sack on.

I: Would you do that trip in a day? Mel: Oh, yeah. I’d do it sometimes over night. A lot of times on a moonlit night. I had a friend, Joe Hilbers, a sports writer for the Tribune Telegram and he was going to school at BYU and he’d come up. Leave our car at the King and go over the top, nice moonlight night, we’d go up and ski right down into Brighton. Ski right into the Wasatch Mountain Club lodge. But, needless to say, we were in great shape. Hiking in the summer. Wasatch mountain was kind of dedicated to going to various places and finding new routes and new trails and for conservation. They were always at the Legislature trying to save everything. One of the men, right now, Alexis Kelner, is one of the people that has been fighting to preserve a lot of the areas. They stopped Snowbird so that they wouldn’t gobble up a lot of their pristine areas and their bowls – so people could go and ski without a big populace, without disturbing the foliage, without killing things; without throwing cans out. Kelner talks about one of the recent one’s, was a mineral basin at Snowbird that they can now open and decide to put another lift in. The Mountain Club fought for years to try to keep everything out of there.

I: Lost to money.

Mel: Oh yeah. Well, they creep and they crawl now. We’re just about to have to give up because we’re so overwhelmed now with so many people taking over. There used to be a time when we could just put our skis on and go just about anywhere, but you can’t anymore. You’ve got to get permission.

I: Well, maybe we should call it a day so we can get ready to go, but I’ll have to come back another time, maybe next week.

Mel: Maybe we better do this every two weeks for months or years.

I: Well, Thank You.

END OF INTERVIEW #2

END SIDE A TAPE 4

BEGIN SIDE B TAPE 4

INTERVIEW #3 - June 21, 2000

I: Today is June 21. I am here with Mel, interview number 3 and we are going to start off today talking about some of the civic activities that you have been involved with and I will let you pick one to start with.

Mel: This is four days after my 82nd birthday!

I: Wow, Happy Birthday Mel!

Mel: I celebrated it by going up and hurting my ribs.

I: That’s not so hot.

Mel: I had a small fall while out fishing. Just recalling Park City, I was very active with working for the kids. The beautiful mountains were our playground in itself. We had two scout troops in Park City and a friend of mine by the name of Virgil Street was the troop leader. We used to take the scouts up to an area they used to call Scout Lake, up in the Uintahs. I had an old twenty four buick that I used to load up in order to take the scouts up there. It had a rumble seat and huge fenders and training boards, a club Sudan because it had a seat in the rear seat section and we’d have as high as seven to eight scouts with all their gear that we could put on that thing to go to the Scout camp. That meant staying a

weekend or even more, sometimes they’d extend it to a whole week that we could stay up there. We spent a lot of time trotting back and forth to see how our scouts were doing when we’d leave them at camp. The lakes were extremely cold up there and you couldn’t stay in them very long or you’d cramp. We spent our time by finding an old dead tree and we used to throw axes at a target. They were small hand axes. A lot of the scouts made bow and arrows and we set up targets. The mountains were just a natural playground for us at all times. Getting back to the civic end of it – I become First Aid chairman of the Red Cross, [phone ringing] at that time, in Summit County. I organized swim classes so that we could take them in groups. Hustling around trying to get transportation so we could do all this was a chore. We had to teach over in the Hot Pots – Luke’s and also the Snyder’s Hot Pots. We also had some first aid classes. I had scouts that helped me with that. Needless to say, we were quite busy in the summer with that type of activity as well as our Chamber of Commerce. I don’t know whether I mentioned to you before that we had as high as sixty members in Junior Chamber of Commerce at that time. We were, at this period, trying to get more activity in Park City so we could get more people. We ended up having all kinds of ski contests; we used to do good jumping on the Creole and organize some cross country skiing. We also had to close off Main Street for sleigh riding one time – during a winter carnival we sponsored. We always used to use the top of Park Avenue for sleighing at night. You’d start up by the Jefferson School, in the area where the Catholic church is and we could get on those sleighs and we could go clear, almost to the Park City junction, if the way was clear. A lot of times the cars were parked and we were able to use the streets. Eventually the police would ask us to go up to Woodside. Woodside is where we used to get a lot of air. We’d come down out of there and we’d hit the tramway – the tramway is off, kind of a bleak angle and when you hit that thing with your Three-C or flexible flyer with a couple of you on it, needless to say, you’d be in the air for a period of time and if you didn’t set your runners you were down in what used to be the Watts’ house, it used to be the Beggs’ house then. Needless to say, you didn’t get hurt because you’d just be off in the snowbank. But, one group had four of them sitting on what they called a Five-C Flexible flyer and they hit so hard after jumping the tramway that their runners just flattened out. All they did was have a sleigh that looked like a crab. [laughter] We could go all the way to the high school at that time, on the sleighs. We had one lady that was kind of not nice. We used to make so much noise in the evenings that – with her wood burning stove – she’d throw her ashes out which kind of made us slow down a little bit. Kind of curved the activity. Pearle, was the lady’s first name and she was a little

bit grouchy because she’d always throw ashes out and we’d go down there and try to throw some snow back on the ashes so we could keep up the evening. All through my life I have been involved in participation in a lot of the organizations in Park City. The Junior Chamber of commerce was one.

I: Tell me more about the Junior Chamber of Commerce and how it was organized; who did it and why.

Mel: Well, actually, the Junior Chamber of Commerce was made up of store salesman, gas station owners and other store owners. It’s main purpose of the club itself was to try to make a town more viable for visitors to come in. Our object was to organize all these little ski events. We tried to always do our best to get Labor Day and the Fourth of July going. Because we did bring in a lot of people. It was more money for the merchants.

I: Did people from Salt Lake come to jump in your jumping contests?

Mel: Well, no. Of course, we did a lot of jumping at Ecker Hill too. The Chamber of Commerce also brought the train I to Park City, the Union Pacific. The people would get on the train in Salt Lake City, go to Ogden where they’d pick up some more cars and then they’d come in to Park City. That occurred twice. The first time, I think was in 1936.

I: Where did the people go?

Mel: Well, at that time Union Pacific had a spur that went over into Deer Valley to the Park Con mine. They’d just take the train right over there and the people would just come out of those cars; some of them would come out the windows in their anxiety to get on the snow. They also had a bar on the train and some of them were not in too good of shape to ski, but they all had fun. They got wet. Some of them that could ski, climbed the mountains and could get a pretty good ride. At that time, the WPA had cut some runs over in Deer Valley and they also built a log cabin. Two years after they built it – it burned down. They had kept those runs in anticipation of sometime getting a tow over there. It was a T-bar which was used for one year and then evolved into a chair lift. Later they built another chair lift. The one chair lift was made by Otto Carpenter and Bob Burns and they worked very hard all summer cutting trees and improving the runs that were already there from WPA and their first lift was the long one, which went right straight up the fall line going south. The chairs were fabricated

in the Judge shop where Bob Burns worked. The Sheave wheels were cast at a foundry in Salt Lake. Some townspeople helped Bob and Otto accomplish this. A mechanic by the name of John Fritch helped Otto and Bob with motors. They had two big Ford motors up there when they had both lifts going. The lifts were driven by these motors, but they were always at the top of the mountain. The reason for this is you have to have a counter balance on the bull wheel to keep the cables taught so you wouldn’t have any sag in them. Rather than have to carry all that weight to the top they put the counter balance on bottom and the motor on top. Needless to say, during the cold winter, it was started by battery. They’d always bring the battery down and since they run it only on weekends - they were able to bring the battery down and keep it warm. Then they’d have to carry the battery clear to the top. And, during the knee deep snow [it]was quite an operation, early in the morning, to get the ski lift going. When I was running the ski school over there, why, we’d use the students every Saturday to side-step out a teaching area while we were waiting for the lift to go. After they got the lift going, they would transport the gasoline on the chairs. That was the first thing up those chairs was to get the gasoline on top so you could run the motor. These lifts were very stable and the only trouble we had, was when the kids would try to get off the chair when they didn’t want to go to the top and they’d swing the chair and some of the chairs would go over and hook a wooden tower once in a while. Therefore, we’d have an emergency in which we’d have to get the saws and axes and go to work and do some repairing. The lift was built close to the ground so that we didn’t have any problem with falling off. If they did snag a ski and get jerked out of the chair, why it didn’t hurt them, because their ski’s were generally on the ground or on the trail as they’re going up the lift. This is a phase of lift education earlier in the year. Going back to some of the earlier clubs that we had in town that were very supportive were the American Legion. Of course, the Junior Chamber of Commerce and the Elks, but we also formed a ski club. The basis of the ski club was to help us with transportation because it was quite a ways from town over to Snow Park. We’d always meet down at the Kimball Garage to take the kids over. Anybody who wanted to ski over there, it would be tough for them, if they didn’t have a ride - they’d be tired carrying ski’s before they got there.

I: Did the train ever come up to Snow Park when the lifts were there?

Mel: No. I think in 1967 it just came into town. We had another one in 1936. I don’t think they went over into Deer Valley; I think they just come into town that time. The train that come in, there’s people there that would spend more time just going up town and goofing off, than skiing. It was a fun time for them and we had lots of snow. I remember Rex, my little boy, was out in the back. So, he had to be – it was about sixty six or seven that that train come in. We had him out there and we had a little sign, made the sign, “Do you love snow? Take some home with you.” People got a kick out of that because we had so much snow we just wanted to get rid of some of it.

I: You put that sign out back of your house for the train to see?

Mel: Yes. Right behind our house. Where I lived, it was a hustle bustle area. We were commercial in the respect that my dad would have a sign on the fence and he was a contract painter and paper hanger and sign writer. We had a coal yard just to the north of us. We had a railroad track just to the north of us. One railroad was the D and RG and the other train was the Union Pacific. There were two trains coming into Park City. The U.P. came out of Odgen and the other came right directly from Salt Lake. There are a lot of people that don’t know that there was a tunnel underneath the (Parley’s) Summit that the train had to go through. It was on the same level where the service station is now, down in Summit Park. There’s a tunnel that went through there. Of course, when they took the tracks out they caved the tunnel. They didn’t want anybody messing around in there getting into trouble.

I: There are some tunnels in Park City too aren’t there?

Mel: The Railroad didn’t have any. The whole area has mine tunnels under the town. Of course, you can see in the network of maps. There are maps up at the museum that show exactly where some of the tunnels are.

I: Wasn’t there a tunnel underneath Main Street that went to Welch, Driscoll and Buck store?

Mel: Yes. There is a tunnel there and the main reason for that tunnel was to drain the water from a spring there. They had a shed that they used to keep kerosene in for the people to buy and it was on the North end side of Welch, Driscoll, and Buck. It was a little small shed and if you stood right there you could hear the gurgling of the water going

underneath in the street. It would go underneath the street and into Silver Creek, Poison Ditch as they called it.

I: I remember hearing a story about whiskey being transported through that tunnel.

Mel: I don’t know about transported, but it was certainly being stored because they had a still. They had a still under one of the bars. That was kind of close to – well, it would be just below the theater on the same side of the street. The secret of that, they actually did have a still in there, but they had to be very careful because in order to make whiskey you had to mash and sugar was needed. So, the store was along side of there and it was very easy for them to transport the stuff they needed to make their mash and everything went up the chimney. See, you have to have a fire to cook it. And you had to have a big vat that they’d use for distillery. So, they’d go start a smoky fire and then let that smoke go up the chimney. That was found later. The people actually protected the bootleggers. They didn’t support any financially, but then they wouldn’t ever tell where it was. A lot of times when they’d raid some of these stills that were outside of town, they’d bring ‘em in, but they wouldn’t ever harm it. They wouldn’t smash it. A lot of times they’d store the things behind the sheriff’s office and by the next morning why somebody had gone back there and stole the still. The same still was probably confiscated several times because it was still in action. But, getting back to organizations that was in town. We had the Junior Chamber of Commerce, the American Legions.

I: Tell me about the American Legions.

Mel: The American Legions was composed of war veterans. When they got out of the war they organized to assist the city and also to assist the war veterans in getting some money and hospitalization they needed. Some of them come back wounded and without jobs. To handle the veterans affairs, they were always able to send committees back to Washington DC to see if the veterans received fair treatment and also the hospitalization that they needed. The GI Bill of Rights was one of the things that was backed by the American Legion. They put that together. The GI Bill of Rights that was money for schooling and they put through millions of the veterans, with this GI Bill of Rights, into colleges for aide. This is what you call the baby boomers. The baby’s were born at that time. They eventually become the one’s that right now, are in a very prosperous situation. They were hard working individuals and were able to get education’s. All the veterans that come out

was able to get through college if they so desired. It wasn’t completely paid for, but at least they had a foot in the door if they could get education. The Veterans Hospitals were done by bills that were backed by the American Legion and veterans club. Veteran of Foreign wars was another organization. They had some stringent rules to join the Veterans. You had to be over-seas and had to have had an active participation in the war. Seventy five percent of the people were not active in the wars. That may be a misnomer on my part – I don’t know exactly what the percent was – but it takes people to support the people and get one soldier up on the battle line – there’s probably twenty six or thirty people who have to do something else to get him there and support him and keep him there. Building ammunition and the clothing and the tanks and everything they need. Of course, they were a friendly association because they were still all war veterans. But, our American Legion in Park City was very helpful in the city government and assisted the town in all kinds of situations. The Fourth of July, they always organized the parades. They were always dutiful to the country. They taught people to respect the flag. Also, to respect the fourth of July and Flag Days, just as a patriotic vision. But, they were also very active in the town. I say they were active in generating the GI Bill. The veterans themselves also participated in decorating the town with flags. We spent a lot of money on flags to put on the light poles. They had a bracket for them up there. It was very easy for them, all they had to do was take the flag and stick it in the hole. That was already done. They were always raising money with dances. Any way they could raise money was utilized in supporting the Legion and their affairs. Our legion was always, our Legionnaire, was always taken care of by the rest of the members. Many of them helped, but without other people knowing, because they didn’t want to embarrass anybody. The people that needed help. It was just like the Elks club. I’ve belonged to the Elk’s for years and even during some of the depressions and those things – these Elks Lodges, through the help of all the National organizations were able to help disaster areas, where they’ve had floods and those types of things. The Elks Hall was utilized by the public. They had dances there on Saturdays. The Elks Hall, incidentally, was the first gymnasium. First big gymnasium that the Park City High School used. I can remember – as a kid some of those athletes, they’d change down at the high school and run all the way back up there, even in the winter, in their basketball uniforms – to go up and play and practice – and run all the way back to the school to shower – this was in the early thirties. Things were tough in those days. We had a very difficult time making money to put food on the table. During our depression days why hardly anybody had any money, but we

had a form of barter that helped us get through the hard times. My dad being a sign painter – he’d make a sign for the shoe maker and we’d get our shoes fixed. The peddlers that used to come into town from Orem and Provo, areas that were selling fruits and vegetables, if we needed something, why my dad ended up painting a sign on their little fruit truck to pay for the. If we needed our teeth fixed, the dentist got a nice gold leaf sign on his windows. That was difficult to do. My father was quite an artist and sign writer. That’s how he got to Park City, was by painting Bull Durham signs on barns. I believe I probably mentioned this to you before about. How we managed to get through the depression just by -

END OF SIDE B TAPE 4

BEGIN SIDE A TAPE 5

I: Yeah, we did mention that. How long have you been a member of the American Legion?

Mel: Fifty four. Let’s see. I joined in July 1946. When I come out of the service for the second time. It was July 1946 that I joined the American Legion. So, now that’s fifty four. Fifty four years.

I: And the Elks?

Mel: The Elks Club? I joined about the same time. I have plaques over there that they’ve only issued for fifty years. There’s two plaques over there.

I: Tell me about the Elks Club.

Mel: The Elks Club was born, these fraternal organizations were formed because of a necessity. By gathering in a group they were able to perform more than an individual. The Elks Club’s are always involved in assisting the welfare of the children. Right now we have a huge area towards Toole that we have buildings out there – we have six of them – that are used just for children who are crippled or need specific attention. They get to go out there for weeks. It’s divided into weeks. The expenses are all paid by the Elks and the buildings are perfectly maintained. As Elks we have a lot of contractors and ways and

means of getting things done once we set our object - to organize or help somebody we can very easily get assistance. Our lodge is composed of four stations. He member is elected, or appointed to each station to serve for a year. The next year he is moved to the next station. After serving in all stations he becomes the exalted ruler, the leader or B.P.O.Elks Lodge # 734. It’s a brotherhood to help the people and to help each other.

I: Are there criteria that you need to meet to become a member?

Mel: All you have to do is be an American citizen. You would have to have a pretty shady past in order to be turned down. But, you still have to make the application and it has to be reviewed by the members to see whether you are a fit type person that you want to have in your organization. Who can help you and not bring embarrassment. This organization of course, is national. I think something like, oh, maybe three million. I don’t know the exact figure, but there are many lodges. Some of the most active lodges are even in the smaller communities. They become a hub for activity because they always utilize their building. They let people use their building. In Park City, we have found that it’s just like the Memorial Building. That’s another story. It was built through the influence of the American Legion and the American Legion went back to Washington DC, a committee went back there, in order to get money for the construction of the War Memorial for Summit County and that become the War Memorial Building where they had rooms for meetings and a gymnasium, a kitchen, banquet room, change rooms, and a shooting gallery. The situation is, that most of these organizations, like the Moose and the Elks and the Knights of Pythius and the Fraternal Order of Eagles are not formed to worship a particular bird as some people think. We’re not animal worshippers because of our Elks emblems and this type of thing. We have to believe in god, for instance, to join the Elks. I always worked for something I believed in and one of them was the Elks the other one of course, was the fire department. My grandfather died as a result of pneumonia contracted from fighting fires.

I: In Park City?

Mel: Yeah, in Park City. My brother was a fire man. At least the two generations there of fire fighting that goes back clear into the eighteen hundreds. I have fifty four years in the fire department. And, this wasn’t exactly an easy job. You don’t put a hat on and go sit and wait for a fire. All the equipment we used to have when the town was in dire straights

and we needed help. We had fire trucks that we were always jerry riggin’ to keep the motors and pumps going. We used to hold dances to have enough money to buy hoses. As a volunteer organization, why – only the chief was paid – and a lot of times he give the money back to the city because the city probably needed the money. We didn’t have a paid fire department. Well, this has evolved into one of the finest fire departments in the whole world. Park City has six stations now. It’s growing steadily. We spend money – tax money – for these things, but if you’ll notice the instant or immediate fire help to a fire is one of the best things that happens. We have stations in an ideal locations so your truck can get there immediately. The sooner you get there the sooner you’re able to kill fire. Volunteers used to be very dutiful – we were initiating new members at the Elks and the fire whistle blew and just about every one of us were fireman. We went to the fire in our good clothes. We were always ruining clothes, especially in the winter when we were out there in regular city clothes, with not much protection. We always had a helmet and fire coat that we could use. But, we ruined many clothes fighting fires and with no remuneration. We didn’t get paid; it was just a civic duty. They are some of the most, probably un-thanked or un-rewarded people in the whole world. They were risking their lives many times. We used to crawl on the floor in order to go back in a building and get somebody out of the building. We did our best to try to help people after they come out of the building and get them the necessary medical attention that they needed and also get them in clothing if they lost all their belongings. Our little volunteer fire department is one of the least written about organizations in Park City. There are many, many tales to tell about what happened in the fire department and how we used to try and patch and jerry-rig the fire trucks back together. In the seventies we did our best to change the administration of the fire department, we were getting very small taxes from Summit County and a lot of times, we’d put on dances or raffles to get equipment. We always were alert by other people when there was a fire truck that somebody was going to turn in from another department so we could get in there and get first bid on it so we could get another truck. When the ski business started, it was a boom to the fire department. We would get more tax money in and we were getting quite a few donations from these larger companies to help us out. The one good initial thing that happened to us was the fact that we got – we got the special tax that was put together for special service. In other words, a fire service district and this service district had a direct tax that didn’t go through the county. It was collected by the county but then it would directly go to our fire department. That’s how the good fire departments were born.

Kamas has a good fire department. Coalville also has good equipment now. But, Park City, with their tax base has excellent equipment. The main reason is because of the time we spent in the sixties as an initial group of fireman led by the Sullivan brothers, one of them was the mayor, Will Sullivan was the mayor, and Tom Sullivan was the fire chief. Too many to numerate their names, but these people were the ones that went out and got a petition formed so we could get this brought before the County Commission to get our service area. I remember the one night we went out with our petitions and Mrs. Marcellan, one of the ladies of one of the great families in Park City – the boys were always active as a highway patrolman and other phases of the government – she says, well boys, “I’ll do anything for ya, what do you want me to do? I’ll get ya a cup of coffee first, then I’ll sign your paper.” Then she asked, “just what is that?” We tried to explain to her that we weren’t getting any tax money, that we had to get it from Summit County and it was only through the commissioners that we could get it, but by signing this paper it give us a fire district the tax money would go directly to the fire department and we didn’t have to sit up and beg like a bunch of little puppies, for a new hose or a new fire truck. Ernie Anderson was one of the prime leaders of getting this funding. He was one of many of us that took active parts in getting this through. The one night we went out to get these petitions – that’s the only time I’d ever been bitten by a dog. There’s a little dog that was running along there and he give me a little nip on the leg while I was walking in the yard, walking into another yard, but he come from somewhere else and I chased him all the way home, just to give him a little pat on the butt. I don’t think he nipped anybody else after I chased him home. But, that was part of the fun. Everybody that signed that petition would like to have signed it twice because they knew we needed the money. These are kind of the unsung hero’s of Park City. Some of these old timers fire man who were fighting the fires when we hardly had any equipment. We ruined clothes. We got pneumonia; we had all kinds of troubles. However, none of us died in fires. That was one of the blessings. We used to have a lot of people always complaining about our inability to get there fast enough. Well, what they have to remember is that we had to leave our homes; we had to hurriedly throw our clothes on – if we were in bed we had to get dressed – we had to make it to the fire station and it took us quite a while. But, when people have their house on fire, it seems like an eternity before the fire truck gets there, even though it might be ten minutes. In ten minutes time, why, a lot of damage can occur, but still in all, we’d save the house. There’s a lot of things that happened in the nineteen seventies. People were buying houses in Park City and a lot of the houses were not in very good shape and they were buying them just for the property. During the seventies, we had a lot of arson in this town.

We knew it was happening, but hard to prove. If it’s arson, you must catch them in the act of burning something down. We went to one fire one time and the building was completely ablaze, but we managed to put out the fire. Part of it was saved and it was a bedroom and we went into this bedroom and most of the stuff – all of the furniture was gone. The refrigerator was still there. But, in the clothes closet there was one solitary tie hanging on the hanger. So, this meant, that whoever it was had cleaned out the house before they left so there was nothing there. And it was set fire to. We knew it was almost an impossibility to get any kind of a conviction. One of the popular sayings at that time was, “Well, we saved another lot!” We couldn’t save the house, but we saved the lot. They wanted the lot; not the old house that sat on it. In the early days in the Kiwanis Club we used to go around and tear houses down for people if they wanted their house torn down; we’d tear it down for them. We lost a lot of historic structures. But the Kiwanis club did that to make money for their projects. It was arson in the depot. It was proven arson, but no body was convicted because we didn’t know who did it. We had an idea who did it, but we couldn’t prove. Burnie Watts and has wife and Mel Fletcher and his wife walked right past the depot that night. We had been up to a dance at the Elks club and it was approximately twelve thirty at night when we walked by it and as soon as I got home, the fire whistle blew. I only had a half a block to go to get to my home and we met fire sirens sounding and we both were alerted. Burnie came out from his house across the street and he said, “It’s the depot.” I turned around and right behind my house the depot had burst into flames. Now, we went by that place there was no smoke. But, how they did that. They went in and they soaked the floors, next to the walls around the waiting room of that old depot with a kerosene and gasoline mix. They mix kerosene with gas to keep it from being too flammable. But, they poured it around the foundation right around the inside of this space and in the back. They put a cardboard box, full of paper on the floor and soak it with flammatory material, turn it upside down, put a little short stubby candle on the top of the box, light the candle, go back out through the window where they come from, close the window. As a result, you have a human torch – and a minor explosion type of thing that happens. The room starts running out of air and it gets so hot that it finally busts out a window and then the whole thing is in flames. We saved half the living quarters and all of the rest of the depot. We were on it right away and I went out of course, I had my wrench in my fire coat, to turn the hydrant, I had the hydrant all ready – I had the cap off and waited for the truck to come. We immediately jumped on that. It was probably one of the earliest put downs that we ever had. Because we just happened to be there and ready; even though it was past

midnight, people were still alerted. This was one of the many things that our fire department had to contend with, a lot of arson. There’s also suspicion in just about anything that happened at that time. The Coalition Building was one of them. I am not going to pass any blame onto anybody for that, but these two fella’s. Here it was a June night. Nice and warm and yet, these two fella’s who were in town, they claimed that they were cold and they climbed up over the fence to get to the Coalition Building and went in there and they set a fire - started a little fire in the corner to stay warm. But, one of the things that made this kind of a fallacy was the fact that this was a warm night, and they had railroad cars sitting on the tracks - that they were going to convert into skiing quarters around the depot. Nice soft cushions and they could have very easily stayed nice and warm in there. It was two Korean War vets called into court for that, they supposedly caught them. They caught them hiding in the cars, but they were not convicted. They called it uncontrolled burning or something like that. The Judge handed it down.

I: Where did you get your training – to be on the fire department?

Mel: From other fireman. That’s where all the training came from. We used to have training sessions. We would put our pump in the Spiro Tunnel ditch. There was an area there where we could put our pump in the water and we’d go through the phases. A lot of times we’d do a lot of ladder training and getting on roofs using the extensions. A lot of times we’d have a time clock where you’d bail out the end of the fire truck, with one end of the hose and get the fire plug, take one wrap around the fire plug and then put the hose on and by that time the truck had pulled out a lot of hose and the men at the other end were putting on the nozzle. We, as far as the training was concerned, we put people on the fire department as an apprentice, but they learned generally by going to a fire with us. Because we were all working people. We’re volunteers. We got most of our training by going to a fire and assisting – go there and assist the fireman and watch what’s going on. But, thankfully, we started getting this tax money that was coming in. We got some help out of the ski area; Warren King was a donator. We had to have an ambulance to take people to Salt Lake City we picked up a second hand ambulance. We couldn’t take it over fifty five miles an hour because it shimmied so bad in the front it’d shake you right off the road, but still, we got skiers with broken legs and a lot of people into the hospital. Progressively the department became stronger as the tax money was came in; we got new trucks; and an excellent chief, Kelly Gee. Kelly Gee was one of the original old

volunteer fireman. A lot of those fella’s that became regular fireman were actually volunteers at one time. I am glad I was a fireman; I’m glad I did it. I have nearly fifty years of service and I still maintain my membership in the State Association.

I: Tell me about your group that was formed through the Sheriff’s department.

Mel: Oh, our Jeep posse. See that over there [pointing at a sign] it says, “Jeep Patrol.” The one behind the television in the corner. The Jeep posse. We started getting a lot of Jeeps in town because the guys would go out and buy them at these surplus – war surplus jeeps. Fortunately, I was able to buy one from this kind of a “third” handed Jeep. We had respect for our mountains; we had no limitations at that time. We didn’t go out in the Spring and tear up the mountains because we were on other people’s ground. It was mostly the mining and forest ground. If they caught you tearing up the mountain they’d give you jail time. We got to the point where we started forming these jeep clubs. People would get lost in the Uintah’s. We decided to help the sheriff out. Sheriff George Fisher. He said, “I’m up in years; I’m very heavy, and I can’t go up into these mountains and guide or direct anybody to find a lost person. He says, “my deputy’s are probably in about the same kind of shape.” He says, “we could use some help once in a while.” They had formed a Jeep Posse in Bountiful to assist the Police and the Sheriff with search and rescue –

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BEGIN SIDE B TAPE 5

I: Okay.

Mel: The Jeeps became a formidable partner to getting out in the woods. Downed planes. We found out that we were a needed asset so we started forming these posse’s. Bountiful was the first that we modeled it after. We got to the Sheriff and says, this is what we could do – we don’t want to carry arms, we don’t want to make any arrests, but if you have an emergency like a drowning or something like that, you’ll have a pool of people that can help you out. We have boats; we have Jeeps and we have horses. So, if anybody is lost in the forest, we can organize and have ten men generally at your disposal to help

you. We don’t need any pay, we’d be appreciative if you’d pay for our gas and we’ll help you out. So, we become a Park City Jeep Posse originally. There was Bud Gasparac, I can’t say most of them at the time, but, Peterson – Clarence Peterson, there was Charlie Woodbury and Richardson. There was quite a group of us that had Jeeps in the town that was able to form this posse. We had assistance in the respect that we – well, it wasn’t assistance, it was just the way our jobs were formed that we could get away. In case of emergency, the Sheriff could call us and we could come immediately. We didn’t have job responsibilities that had to keep us there. So, we had a lot of fun. At that time, the old Sheriff's office was open because they’d moved the Sheriff’s office out of there and into Coalville. And so, we utilized that. Mike Ivers was another one. He was very instrumental because shortly after that he became a deputy sheriff and he helped us with equipment. We got a lot of free-bee equipment like these backpacks for fires - fire packs; we got surplus cans to go on our jeeps to fill ‘em with more gas; we had developed – the sheriff insisted we had a badge of types – so we got a sheriff’s patrol badge; then we also decided it would be good if we had a uniform too; we didn’t carry any side arms – all we did was assist the sheriff and the police wherever we were needed. One of the things that happened was, Lady Bird Johnson came to town and Warren King said, Mel, “would your Jeep Posse help us out? we’ve got to have some protection here for Lady Bird. We don’t want her harassed or people after her autographs or anything like that, but we’d like to protect her.” So, we were an escort. We escorted Lady Bird Johnson from the ski area; it was the opening of the ski area is what it was and into the Memorial Building where she was supposed to go to her banquet and speak. We performed all kinds of duties, but our main duties was going up into the Uintah’s and trying to find kids that were lost. Some of the stupid people that would go up there without a map and a compass and not knowing where they were. In the forest, everything looks a lot alike. Especially up in the Uintah’s. If you don’t know your direction, you could get lost pretty easily. Because there are a lot of lakes that look alike; there are a lot of rocks that look alike; there are a lot of trees that look alike. And especially when you are in a flatter area without any height, you don’t have any landmarks. When you do get up to an area where you can see some of the landmarks, if you had not noticed the direction in which that landmark was, everything looks alike. All the rocks look alike; the trees. There’s no differential at all when you’re in the forest. Especially deep in the forest – you’re just walking around aimlessly trying to get back to where you were. The guys over in Kamas and Oakley had horses and they could be a very formidable help to us by going up into the forest and covering a lot of ground. Of course, we had hikers – ground people - that would go around, say for instance fifty yards of each other.

We had walkie talkies that we bought ourselves and we had all kinds of necessary equipment. We knew the country and had a meeting place, so that we didn’t lose any of our own people. On one occasion we had a little boy that was gone over night. The parents were just desperate, being gone all night. We hunted for approximately three hours and one of the fella’s on horse back gave us a big yell, he says, “I found him.” He was laying on the log in the sunshine. The sun had just come up and the horse had shied away from him. When he moved, the horse shied away and that’s how they found him. But, he’d been gone all night. Some of them weren’t that lucky. I’m a boob. [clearing throat] Well, anyhow, that’s one of the stories. We went to Southern Utah looking for a plane down there. That’s where we had our first rattle snake. I was with Bob Richardson, he was one of the local mechanics who had a jeep at the time. We were on this ridge looking down into the canyon and we saw a lot of little holes in the top of this ridge, like gofer holes, cut into the rocks. I looked at Bob and said, “well, those aren’t gopher holes Bob.” I said, “snakes probably. Because they don’t pull out any dirt they just find a place to go in.” Well, it wasn’t any longer than about five hundred yards from there that we heard a buzz – of course Bob and I jumped aside. He said, “Some of those guys are looking for snake skins to make belts out of them. He says, I hate to kill one, but we’ll tell them where this baby is. So, we walked around the snake and some guys from Bountiful went back up and got themselves a snakeskin. It was a big one. I got the rattles off it though. Seven or eight rattles. That’s one of the things that can happen to you when you’re out there. You never know what you’re gonna see. Our biggest threat was to get lost. If we didn’t have a natural locator – that’s one of the things, when you get out like that, you immediately find yourself a good point of direction. A peak or something that you can really know the direction that thing is so that you can get back to where you started. The deep forest is the worst because you can’t look out. Can we can shut down?

[short break]

I: Let me ask you one more question about your Jeep patrol – dates? When you started that.

Mel: [thinking] Let’s see, Charlie Woodbury was our first president and he was principal of the high school so, it was during his time that we were there. George Fisher was still alive. Oh boy. I can’t figure out the time there. It had to be in the seventies. Well, no, it had to be in the sixties and late fifties.

I: You kept it going for a number of years.

Mel: Well, what happened was it evolved into just one patrol. Kamas had one and Park City had one and then Coalville got one and all these town’s were starting to organize Jeep Posses. We became the Summit County Jeep Patrol - we merged with Kamas and Coalville. Then we had real good, bigger patrols. Because each of them had a contribution to be made - they had horses and their knowledge of all that country because they had herded cows or sheep up there and they always had relatives that had ranches where we could set up headquarters. And it made it much easier. I went to work with the ski area in sixty four. That’s when I took over as Ski Patrol Director, and was part of the Jeep Posse then. We also knew that we had to do a lot of rescues in the winter, so we decided that Park City’s main thing would be to have complete knowledge of all of our area and also of our ski areas, so that we could assist in any kind of search for lost skiers. We had quite a few lost; they were always going down the wrong side of the mountain and getting lost. As the director of the Ski Patrol, I kind of organized a mountain division of the Park City branch and used Snowmobiles. Since Mike Ivers was the Deputy Sheriff and he was also representing the Polaris Snowmobiles that we could very easily have access to. Snowmobiles, as the Ski Patrol Director in Park City, Warren King came to me once and he said, “Mel, what can we do to help the situation here as far as for you to take care of your job.” I said, “Well, one of the things that we can do is get some snowmobiles.” He says, “how can use them in the ski area.” I said, “Well, we’re getting to the point now where the ski patrollers have to work pretty hard to get the toboggans on the lift and to assist us it would be wonderful if we could get some snowmobiles to rig up a deal on the back so it could actually pull a toboggan. With the Polaris we could even bring the Patrolman that attended the accident back with us. He says, “well, lets do it.” Another thing, Henrion, who’s the head of Maintenance, could also use one. If the lift goes down, he can get back on top of the mountain earlier. Warren said, I think this might be a good thing for us. I got one of the bigger ones that was long and you could get two people on it. It has a bar on the back and we can bring our toboggans back with it. We can turn it around and have a patrolman ride between the handles and control it in the back. I said, we’ll keep a chain, one of these short snap chains on the back of toboggans, every toboggan will have one, where we can turn it around and hook it to the snowmobile. One of the primary things we’ll do, instead of hooking the toboggan to the snowmobile we’ll hook the basket through the litter to the snowmobile. That’s in case we lose the toboggan, we won’t lose the litter too, with the person in it. If the jolting causes the litter to come off the toboggan you’ll still have the victim. He says, well, I’ll look that over. So, we got one and we

started fooling around with this big Polaris and I said, maybe you better have two of these and he said, what do you mean. I said, Johnny needs one – Johnny Henrion, he is boss of Maintenance on the lifts. I said, he could use one because if the lift is down, how is he gonna get up there? He says, oh, well, we’ve been using that snow cat. I said, well, the snow cat, you gotta go back and get it out of the garage, so lets get snowmobiles up here.

Our first year with snowmobiles was a boom because after that Warren said, this has proven to be one of the best thing to happen to us. Plus the fact that John is happy now and is able to get up top of the mountain. He wont ever have to ride the lift again. If the lift is down, how do we get the boss up to find the trouble. So, we started a real good operation there and I trained my ski patrollers on the use of the Snowmobiles. What was nice about this was we could go get somebody’s glove if they dropped their glove off the lift. Woody Anderson asked to me – he come up on top of the mountain – and he said, “I understand that you’re trying to get in touch with me Mel.” I said, “yeah. I want to take you out here and show you something.” So, we got our skis on and I took him immediately in between the Prospector Chairs and the other runs that went down the mountain. We started skiing through the trees and he says, “ah, all you wanted to do was get me on this powder.” I said, “no, Woody, I got something in mind here.” I skied him down and I showed him a ledge that went right up to an oblique angle coming off the Prospector up towards Hidden Splendor. It come out right at the top where Hidden splendor gets steep. I said, see this ledge along here Woody. I said, why don’t we go above the ledge here and cut these pine trees. I said, I could get my snowmobiles back up here and not only that, you could get your cats back when they go down, because we can’t get a cat back up Prospector. I said, once they come down Prospector, they can go all the way down, turn around at the bottom of the lift and come right back up this trail. It would save a mile and half. You’ve got to go clear around Payday to get back on top of the hill to roll it again. Then I said, we’ll have access where we can come back up this with a snowmobile, we won’t ever have to put a toboggan on the lift anymore. He said, “okay, how many snowmobiles do you want?”

I: And they cut that run right? What did they call it?

Mel: They cut that run and they called it Mels Alley.

I: That’s appropriate.

Mel: I had a telephone put on it. Incidentally, I had gone around the mountain and put phones in - with the help of the phone company. I went to Ernie Anderson and I said, Ernie, I want accident phones all over that mountain. He says, good – we’ll give you the wire. We’ll also give you the phones. I might have to charge you for the phones, but I won’t charge you, I’ll rent them to you. Two dollars a phone or something like that, he made it ridiculously low. He says, you guys have always taken us on our trouble trips up here. When we had backcountry troubles with the line that goes from Park City to Brighton. He says, you’ve always taken our people out there. With the snowmobile, we can get to it real fast and there’s no doubt it will be one of the best things to happen to us to have a snowmobile available and telephones on the mountain. Ernie, as a consequence, helped us a great deal, because we were always helping him. We used to go up when the trees would drop over their line that came up out of Thaynes and go up over the top of Scott’s pass and into Brighton. A lot of times, the timber, the dead [?] would go across those lines. We’d send a ski patrolman with the maintenance personnel from the phone company and we’d go out and cut the tree off the line and help them out in that respect. So, we’re scratching each other’s back. As a result, we got a fine emergency system – a ski patrol system - a call on those orange boxes we had on the hill, went directly to our patrol room. If it was an accident, we were able to service the accident in better than half the time. Most the time, if they had an accident, if it was their friend, they’d have to ski to the bottom of the terminal before they could even get to a telephone to contact the ski patrol. This was one of the fine things that happened to us, was getting mobile on that mountain. We were probably one of the first ski areas to utilize the snowmobile on the ski patrol. After the lifts were shut down, a lot of times we had lost skiers. We utilized the snowmobiles to go looking for them. We’d go up and down a lot of the ski runs after the lifts were down. We could see any tracks that left the perimeter. A lot of times they went through our closed rope and we already had the lifts shut down, so there they are at the bottom of the hill with no way to get out. If they were on Thaynes Canyon side they could probably ski out, but most of them didn’t know how they could get out. A lot of times we’d have a lot of searches. We had kids get lost. We had one real strange one in which a doctor and his wife were staying at one of the lodges and he was missing some kids. So, we started an immediate search on the hill and the girl and the boy were supposed to be together. She had presumably gone to this restaurant. [But,] what had happened was - the brother and the girl had gone back to Prospector.

What happened, was we conducted a search for both of them up on the mountain, and finally, I said, well, what do you drive and he says, a Volkswagen. I said did you know that on the back of your Volkswagen there’s two pair of ski’s? He said, well, those kids had to have come back and put those ski’s on. I said, then you don’t have any kids on the mountain, they’re down here in town somewhere. So, they conducted a little search through the bars. The wife was getting a little tired, so she went back to Prospector and just out of an idea she went to the desk and she asked about two kids – if the two kids had come back and were hanging around the lobby or anything. He says, oh no, I think they’ve gone to bed. They got in the wrong room and we were hunting until two o’clock in the morning looking for those kids and they’d come back, put their ski’s on the back of the peoples’ Volkswagen. So, needless to say, we had a doctor that had cake on his face – eggs on his face was the terminology. He wrote us a real long letter about how nice it was to have people like us working and able to find the kids and apologize for their actions, and he sent us a hundred bucks to go toward our year end ski patrol party. So, we came out in pretty good shape with that one. But, as far as that mountain was concerned, we ran a real good mountain. We had some of the finest ski patrolmen there was in the nation. A lot of this was a result of having a gondola when we first started our ski area guys from over at Brighton and also Alta wanted to come over to our area.

END SIDE B TAPE 5

BEGIN SIDE A TAPE 6

Mel: - ski patrolmen had been ski patrolmen for years over there and wanted to get over here where the gondola was and I had stacks of applications.

I: Now, you also paid your ski patrollers didn’t you?

Mel: Yes.

I: That was unique?

Mel: Yeah. We had a paid patrol already, but it was our volunteers who came in on weekends and on special occasions or special holidays. We had a volunteer patrol that was run by very efficient people. Rick Osborne was the director of the volunteer division. He brought with him, many, many good ski patrolman that he had skied with in the past. We got an award once for being the finest ski patrol in the nation - we had a badge that we wore as the outstanding ski patrol. We had a very good training situation. We had a team, three of our weekend patrollers who did all of our training for us. They had fifteen or twenty years of ski patrol knowledge. We were always upgrading our patrolmen, getting first aid and avalanche training. We had a first aid seminar every year prior to our going on the mountain – generally in November. We had all of our patrol upgraded. Most of them had patrol badges from the National Ski Patrol. Our patrol, even though it was a professional patrol, or full-timers as we called them, worked weekdays and then the weekenders would take over on Saturday and Sundays and holidays, so they’d give my patrolmen a break. They could ski or they could have the days off. It was a well run operation. Most of it was due to the fact that we had the best professional people that I was able to hire. We immediately went in to a training session of unloading. In other words, if we had a lift break down, we had to evacuate the chairs. We also had to evacuate the gondola in case of a break down. Well, we started our practicing at that. Once we got a patrolman in the gondola he could drop a rope and pull up a canvas bag that we could put the skiers in to lower them. My assistant ski patrol director, we went over and we put him in the canvas sack and dropped him down to the hollow on the bottom. We had a bit of problem. The canvas sack started revolving, so it was just like being on a merry-go-round while it was coming down – spinning. We found out after this experience that we had to have a tail rope on the bottom so that it would not spin as they let it down. We also got a contraption that was devised in the east. You take it up on a tower and could get on it and it was kind of like a fastened seat, like a bolster chair, they use in the Navy, and then you slide down the cable. Of course, we’d need a key to the outside of the gondola to open it. And once you got in there, we had some bars inside the gondola so that you could put a rope over and just lower the people. We found that we could unload least three quarters of the gondola with a ladder. So, being an old fireman, I rigged up the snow cats, one that had a back, pick-up type bin on the back that we could stand the ladder over the top of this snow cat and maneuver it into position. We had a rope attached to the ladder that we would throw the people inside the gondola so it wouldn’t swing away from us so we could tie the ladder right to the gondola. We’d open up the door and get them out.

I: Did you have to evacuate the gondola?

Mel: No. Never had to. But we were able to. We had a national seminar and we showed these people how we could do it. Also we had a Gibbs ascender that would aid in climbing the rope to the chair lift. We could go up to help somebody that was too scared or little kids or something like that we could get in a chair. This Gibbs ascender was a contraption that let you just move up the line. A clamping device that as you move it up the line and as soon as you put tension on it it’d grab the rope. A patrolman could go right up the rope without any problems at all. Then we had a harness that was a belt, what they call an evacuation belt. We just put it around them and it would cradle them like a fire hose, right around their pits and we’d throw the line over the cable and we could drop them out of the chair lift. We had a National Seminar over at Alta, they had some of the ungodliest get ups – where you put the strap here and you put a strap there trying to get these people out of the chairs, but we had a strap that they used in the mine. Big old half rings and you’d snap a caribener in it and all you had to do was slide it over your head and put it under your arms and you didn’t have to go through all this fastening of straps. Especially when the people were cold. Just slip their arms through there and drop them out of the chair. Fortunately, we never had to use that either, but we always practiced. We had an avalanche gun. We put a hard rubber ball on the end of a line and this line came off the spool and we got the line in the air, we had a twenty two blank cap. It was like a gun, pull it back and snap it. The shot would go off and launched a big orange dummy on the end of it and it would go sailing over the top of the cable and as soon as we got it high enough you’d drop it so you didn’t run all your line out and then the dummy would fall and it would be over the cable we could tie a rope on the line and get it inside the gondola and then fasten our harness on the end of that and pull it up and if they were scared we’d have to put a patrolman up there – with little kids and stuff. But, we showed this at that national seminar and people left there and they were really enhanced by what were doing. I think we were probably the first to be able to unload a gondola very easily. In other words, we had no problems. If we did get in trouble and if we had a gear problem or something that there’s no way for the gondola to run or no way for the chair motors to run, then we could unload and we had guys on call anyway, if we needed extra patrolman we could call them. We had good radio communications to assemble all the patrolman. As I say, we had the finest ski patrol in the Nation, right here in Park City. What started to pay the volunteers. This meant paying them at two dollars a day, but it was just

to get them as a paid employee and all that would do was buy them a little bit of gas to get there; but what it would also do would make them a professional patrolman where they could get half price on their skis. In other words, we had all these little gimmicks. We were actually a fully-paid patrol, the part-timers, would work one day on Saturday or one day on Sunday and we figured that by paying them two dollars we made them an actual paid employee where they could buy ski’s at a reduced rate, plus they had privilege of building up some social security –but it didn’t amount to much, but it was a good system. Fortunately I had one of the finest guys in the world to work with – Warren King. He was an excellent boss – the General Manager.

I: That was still when it was Treasure Mountain?

Mel: Yeah. Well, it was Treasure Mountain, then we made it Greater Park City.

I: Who was Woody Anderson?

Mel: Woody Anderson was the Assistant Ski School Director, in Brighton, and he was one of the first ones to get a shop over there. A ski shop in Brighton. I was not the ski patrol director at that time, I was working for the state road, but I used to go over and work – because I worked a lot of night shifts, I could go over and work as a ski instructor over at Brighton. And that was before I was the director at Park City.

I: So, Woody Anderson didn’t work at Park City.

Mel: Yes. He eventually sold his business and came back over to Park City as the Mountain Director. I’m trying to get their titles proper.

I: So they were there at the same time – Woody and Warren?

Mel: Yeah.

I: Who initiated, or how did the ad campaign for Treasure Mountain start – with your mom – tell me about that.

Mel: Oh, that was Roger Haran. Roger Haran was a ski instructor who later became the public relations man of the area and he worked under Woody. He was the one who actually formed a publicity campaign in order to get people to come to Park City to ski. He

would go back to some of the ski schools, or rather, the ski clubs in the east and also in the west coast and give speeches and show them films of Park City. How cheap it was, how easy it was to get to Park City via airplane and they could ski – they could leave LA or leave the east coast in the morning and they could be skiing by noon. This was our theme. We had movies to show the area. I went with him to Santa Barbara. We went to the ski clubs and talked to them about the mountain. We had an open forum so they could ask us questions and we could describe what our mountain was like. Roger Haran, was probably one of the best Public Relations men there because he got affiliated with the airlines. He started having the airlines people come in at a discount rate and also started some of these days in which they’d have airline days in which all the pilots and stewardess’s could ski free. The result, we had people working for us, Public Relations people working on the airplane, for this ski area in Park City. Then he decided he wanted to do a lot of advertising with my mom. One time when she was appointed the Queen of the Winter Carnival and they [phone ringing] dressed her in a Ermine Cloak and she put a little crown on her head and she road an imitation sleigh on a truck in this [winter] parade they had. It started at the head of Main Street and went the full length of the town and it was quite an event. My mother had her picture taken. That’s when Blanche’s run was named for my mother. How this evolved was after this, they also had Marie Osmond and the brothers and they had all kinds of people from movies that came to this winter carnival in Park City. As a result, Roger decided to make a campaign using Blanche on the posters. He dressed her in ski outfits. Have you ever seen a picture of my mother in the ski outfits? There was a series of about six or seven pictures and they all turned up in the ski magazines with her making little sayings. Like, she’s in a rocking chair and she has boots beside her and the caption is, “Just a minute honey and I’ll have my ski boots on.” It was skiing Park City Resort – well, it was called Treasure Mountain then, Treasure Mountain Resort. We had a lot of magazines with those ads in them. Well, right over there, there’s one picture of her right up there in that corner, that was one of Roger’s pictures. She was quite a ham. She really enjoyed working with Roger.

I: I’d like to get some copies of those and put them with your interview.

Mel: We can do that. We got the big pictures.

I: Well, Mel, I have a few more questions, but I’d rather not rush and I have a meeting at noon.

Mel: Okay, I’m sorry that I took a half hour and had some coffee.

I: Oh, that’s okay. We still wouldn’t have finished. Is that okay if I come back next week?

Mel: Sure. But remember where we stopped because I don’t have any idea.

END OF INTERVIEW #3 END OF SIDE A TAPE 6

BEGIN SIDE B TAPE 6

BEGIN INTERVIEW #4 June 28, 2000

I: Okay, today is June 28 and we are doing interview number four today and we’ll start with you telling me about what did at Brighton Ski Area.

Mel: That was in the early sixties; I went over to Brighton. I was working with the State Road at the time weekly, plowing snow for Utah State Road at the road shed at Kimball’s Junction, with Don Peterson. We had all of the area from the Parley’s Summit to the Silver Creek Junction, all the way over to Peoa, and then all of the Park City area to plow the snow in the winter. This was a five day job so I could work at my ski school over at Snow Park. Let me go for a weekend – was about all I was able to work. Later on, they had a transfer of administration and I ended up with just the ski school itself. I was started to work at Brighton weekdays. Let me re-trace my steps. When I went to work for Park City, in 1963 I took the job with the stipulation that I would have weekends off so I could run my ski school at Snow Park. When I left the State Road and went to Park City to work for Woody Anderson who was the director there. This is where I get a little confused if I don’t have my calendar in front of me with some of the things I was doing at the time. But I went to Brighton, let’s see, it had to be before that. [Pause - thinking] It had to be in the sixties, sixty two? You’ll have to excuse me, I’ve gotta go upstairs and find that paper.

[recorder pause]

I: Okay.

Mel: It was in the year of fifty five and winter of fifty six that I found myself working weekends at Deer Valley. There wasn’t anything that could take me away from that job, with the exception that I was out of work for a while. I decided it would be a good idea if I went over to Brighton and that summer, previous to that, I was approached by Felix Kozial, if I wanted some summer work I could work for the Forest Service.

I: Who was Felix?

Mel: Felix Kozial was director of the Forest Service - the National Forest. He, incidentally, was on the board when we had our first test for ski school instructors. That was in 1950; that’s when I got my first certification. Then I went in the service from fifty to fifty two. When I come returned during the winter I worked over at Snow Park and also at Brighton for Kay Smith. So, in fifty three it was a beautiful winter and we had an abundance of snow and Brighton turned out to be a lot of fun. I worked in a ski shop for Woody Anderson and he was assistant to Kay Smith who was director of the Ski School. You’ll have to excuse me if I get the words mixed, the Ski Patrol and the Ski School, because I was involved with both. I found myself driving over on a Monday to work at Brighton and then I was able to stay over in the ranger station at night. So, I was working just about every day at Brighton with the exception of weekends, then I went back over to Park City to the Ski School at Snow park. Brighton was a lot of fun. We had a lot of kids. That was quite an area, there was a lot of youth running around in the boon-docks. A few of them were getting lost. At that time, there was a snow ranger working with the Forest Service and shooting avalanches. His name was Ray Lindquist. At that time, we didn’t have an avalanche gun. We were hand charging all of the slopes at Brighton and we used a two pound charge called tetratol that was part of Army Surplus that they had at Fort Douglass. They were two pound charges in which we’d put a cap and a fuse, and light the fuse and throw the charge out on the slope. This became quite regular for me to go with Lindquist early in the morning on the slopes of Brighton. This was very rewarding for me because it made me well aware of where the chutes were and where the snow collected and where the danger was in the terrain from one slope to the other. It gave me a lot of perspective on what could happen. Because a lot of the slides we let turn loose at Brighton were pretty good size slides, but they were normally in the chutes. All we had to take care of was just the area where the lift

was. We rode the lift, then we had to side step and climb. We had climbers and we’d climb up to the area on the ridges where we had to do our shooting. After I got back down then I’d go to ski school which started generally at ten o’clock. By the time we’d get our shooting done I’d go out and put climbers away, re-wax my ski’s and start teaching. The terrain was excellent for teaching over there at Brighton. It was not too steep and learning abilities of most of the people was very good. They came with an expectation of being able to ski after just their first lesson. It takes quite a little bit of work to learn how to turn those ski’s. At that time we had a problem in the fact that we wasn’t getting our snow packed down. First thing in the morning it was the instructors duty to go out and pack an area. Side step an area so you could actually show the people how to do their turns. We were starting with the old original snow plow and then the stem turns. But, it proved to be a very rewarding winter over there. There were two years of them - I spent going over to Brighton. I got acquainted with a lot of good instructors. We had quite a clientele coming from out of town. I remember one little family we had that come from Canada that I had the opportunity to teach. It was great fun because the little girl talked a little bit of French and it kind of broke up the monotony to have someone around there talking in a different language. Of course, I had French in high school so it kind of helped me out too and we had a lot of fun talking, helping me out with some of my verbiage. Brighton was growing at that time and some of the time that I spent -

[recorder pause]

I: We’ll start back in with – that you stayed at the Ranger Station when you went to Brighton.

Mel: Yes. And occasionally, I also stayed over night in the Silver Fork Inn that Ted and Ethyl Glines ran. That was just down the road probably about three quarters of a mile, it was right around where Solitude was. At that time, Solitude was just getting started. Again, going back to the Ranger Station – it was quite an experience for me, staying in there at night because we kept a radio on and if there’s anything that happened in the ranger district it would come over the radio. It was quite interesting to me to sit there in the evenings and listen to the chat. Of course, I didn’t get in on it by doing any responding, but I certainly learned a lot about the forest service and their difficulties. In the summer after I come out of Brighton’s winter, Felix Kozial approached me to ask if I’d be interested in a summer job on the Forest Service. I jumped at the chance and

ended up being a more or less, a crew boss. I’d have five to six kids, ages sixteen or seventeen years old going up the Canyon and cleaning all of the camp areas. They had some fifty five gallon drums up there that they used for trash and for their picnic refuse. It become quite heavy and we got to the point of where we hated Watermelon because Watermelon was one of the heaviest things. They’d have big Watermelon parties and it would all end up in the garbage can and it made it quite heavy and not only that it was sticky and it drew fly’s. That was probably one of the biggest troubles that we had in the canyon was trying to keep it a little bit sanitary. Like I say, the Watermelon was the nemesis of the canyon. It’d seem like it would soak into the boards and you’d of the picnic table and the bees would all be swarmed around the area where all this sweet Watermelon rind had been. We continually tried to bring in new gravel and tried to clean it the best we could. There was a lot of vandalism in the canyons. By having some of these kids who were kind of on the other side of the law a few times - it taught them quite a bit and they come to realize how much work it was to repair some of the outhouses that were there. We tried to keep paper in them and they’d break the door knobs off. But, this group that I had, it seems like it was probably one of the best things that could happen to young people this age – to see – to go up and try to straighten out the damage that is caused by others. As a result I think we made much better citizens out of them by going up there and doing the repairs in that probably some of them had been doing before. I thoroughly enjoyed my summers working for the Forest Service. I was asked if I needed employment the next summer, why they’d be glad to have me back, but I only worked the one summer. But, it was very rewarding being able to be in the mountains and spending the time even with the kids. Some of the kids were very, very intelligent. It seemed like when you get them singly, they’re far different kids than when they’re in a group. It only takes one in the group to kind of mess things up. I always did my best to single out and jump on the one’s right away that were the trouble makers. I treated them all pretty decently and we got along real well.

I: Let’s talk about the work you did at the little ski resort at the top of Parleys.

Mel: That was a fun area. When they started that up again it became a baby-sitting area for people who wanted to ski at Park City. They’d come up and drop the kids off at Gorgoza and as soon as they got through skiing at Park City, they’d come back and pick them up. It was a really good place to teach kids. It was not too long of a slope and they were easy to keep track of. I worked there with Pokey Richardson. It was kind of the reverse – I was Pokey’s boss when we worked at Park City because he worked for me on

the Ski Patrol and then he become boss, or the manager of Gorgoza and he asked me to come down there and work for him. So, it was kind of reversed. But, kind of a rewarding thing for me, to be down there and be with the kids again. I went to work later at the school district as the Maintenance supervisor and then in the winter I went to Gorgoza worked on weekends, just as a part-time job. It was just to help Pokey out with his ski area that was small but adequate for what they had intended.

I: Three ski lifts at that little resort?

Mel: They only had two. They had installed a bigger one that went up to the top. The mountain was small, there wasn’t very much area. But, we didn’t have any problem losing kids. It has highly visible. You could spot all of it from the Lodge.

I: Tell me about the mine train that was at Park City Ski Area.

Mel: The mine train that was at Park City was very short lived because it was very difficult to make any money because they had to build some new cars – new trains – to take people back there. It was a five mile trip – you’d get raised up the Thaynes Shaft. Get out at the top of Thaynes Shaft and ride up to Thaynes lift to get to the top. It seemed to me like it took too much time. They had had a sleigh that took the people over from the Park City Resort, from their parking lot, over to get in the mine trains. And, by that time, it would take at least twenty minutes before they could possibly even put a ski on. It seemed to me that after they skied down, they’d stay there. In other words, it was just kind of a one trip type of thing. They’d take them in and they’d ski to the bottom and then they’d have to purchase a ski lift to ski the rest of the day. So,if you wanted to really ski for the day, then it was a time consuming thing to go on the mine train.

I: So they’d charge you for the mine train and then also for a day pass.

Mel: Yeah. I think they had a combination - they could buy a daily pass and then they could go over and ride the mine train. But, it just seemed to be once, it seems to me like it was a one time deal. They’d go on the mine train and then after that they realized it was taking so much time that that’s all they wanted to do was go in and see what it was like and then after that why they didn’t do it anymore. If they had some visitors that wanted to go in, why then they’d go over and ride it. Libberacci was there and they asked me if I’d come down and take him on the mine train. He had a big furry coat and he was quite a character. When I was introduced to him,

he says, call me Lee. So, after that, why, he was Lee Libberacci. We got in a conversation when we got on the train and were talking about his history. When he found out that my mother was a piano teacher – he inquired about me and my family, and I told him that she was a piano teacher. He was delving into my musical background when I told him that I never learned to play the piano or another instrument, but my mother was the town musician and had a little band. He was very interested in that. He of course, explained to me that he would have probably never become a musician if it wasn’t for his mother pushing him because she was also a musician. We went in the mine; and were raised up the shaft, rode the Thaynes lift and then we walked down the ridge and then we rode the gondola back down to the bottom. When I got down to the bottom there were people waiting for him and he come over and gave me an autographed picture for me to give to my mother. That picture was on her piano for a long time, but we had so many visitors coming and going in that house that we lost the picture. We never did know where it went. I always had an idea that it may even be one of my own relatives that got it, but that couldn’t be authenticated.

I: Okay. Let’s keep jumping around. Let’s jump to the Winter Carnival that you organized.

Mel: Let’s see. The Park City Winter Carnival [looking through papers]. I got it here somewhere.

I: Was the Winter Carnival at BYU in 1948?

Mel: Yes. 1948. What do I have to say about that one?

I: What was it?

Mel: Well, at the time, I was going to BYU and we built a ski jump at Timp Haven and were jumping all the time. We had quite a jumping group and we also were involved in some of the ski slalom races that they had. It was the Spendlove brothers and I that were trying to do a winter carnival. They asked me to be a chairman, so I organized some cross country races and a jump meet and also skating. We did some skating contests down on Utah Lake.

I: And, you were quite the skater, weren’t you?

Mel: Well, I ice skated for a long time. I used to go from Park City to Sugarhouse at Hygia ice rink and I got to the point where I was ice dancing every Thursday. I had lessons down there. We had an excellent instructor. We learned the Fox Trots and Waltz, on ice skates. There was a young girl at the time that had been a Roller Skating champ and -

END OF SIDE B TAPE 6

BEGIN SIDE A TAPE 7

I: What was her name?

Mel: Carole Orbin. Her dad was one of the foreman at Geneva Steel – the Steel Mill. That’s where I was working; I was working out at Geneva Steel in rolling mills part time and he found out that I was ice skating and he asked me if there was any opportunity I could to go with him and his daughter to Hygeia ice rink in Sugarhouse. So we went up there and we started ice dancing together. Carol was a very good skater. We got into some of their ice shows. I think there’s three consecutive ice shows in the winter. The Salt Lake City Skating Club; they call one of them the Utah Skating Club – organized and they put on shows at the tail end of their season every year. They were quite elaborate; real good shows.

I: You were telling me before about a doll that her mom made.

Mel: Yeah. They asked me if I would do a single act. Carol’s mother made a dummy for me that I could skate with and do a clown act with. She put an evening dress on it and long white gloves, rings on the fingers and a blonde wig. In subdued light it looked very much like a skater. On my skate shoes I had a little stiff wire that I’d hook into my laces on my ice skates. We’d (the dummy and I) do a fourteen step around the rink and then I would intentionally fall down on top of the dummy and in the subdued lighting the people would say “Oh, goodness.” I’d get up and then they’d turn the lights up a little bit and I’d be shaking the dummy off; shaking the snow off of her butt, straighten her out, put the wig back on. It was a great sport. It was kind of fun. I only did that, let’s see, twice. It was just an opportune moment for me to ham it up on the ice.

I: What was the Winter Carnival that we had up here in Park City – was that something that the Junior Chamber of Commerce Organized?

Me: Yes. At that time we had an ice sheet that we had made up behind the Post Office, what is now a parking lot. The Junior Chamber of Commerce would start about midnight freezing ice. We had a pretty good ice sheet. We decided to have a Winter Carnival. We had snow on Main Street and we asked them not to bother the snow if at all possible. We had sleigh riding down Main Street; we had cross country skiing down in the flats; we also had a ski jumping meet over on the Creole hill. It turned out quite successful. We put out some pretty good little brochures and one of them – I think I put it up in the Museum – I don’t know if I did or not.

I: I think you did.

Mel: You think it’s up there? Well, we had a good Junior Chamber of Commerce. It was quite active. There were over sixty members. We also got the snow train to come to Park City through the Chamber of Commerce’s in Salt Lake. Thirty seven. Thirty six was the first one. [looking through papers] I read it somewhere – it was in 1936 – the Winter of thirty six, thirty seven. It went over into Deer Valley and people were so anxious to ski that they were climbing out the windows. They were throwing their ski’s out the window and climb out the windows and try find them later.

I: They were ready.

Mel: Most of them – they had a bar on the train – and quite a few of them were quite inebriated, some of them didn’t even make it off the train. That only happened that one winter and then it wasn’t again until sixty five, when we had another one. I remember Jan Peterson’s dad being on the platform on the one that come in – was it sixty five? [looking through papers] I’ve got it somewhere. I saw it. Sixty seven. February 18, sixty seven – Snow train, Winter Carnival – left the Union Pacific at 2 PM via Ogden and arrived at Park City at five PM and they had a buffet dinner in town. The train returned to Salt Lake by midnight.

I: So, they didn’t come up to ski? They just came up for the train ride?

Mel: They just come up for the train ride.

I: Now, your Junior Chamber of Commerce, or maybe it wasn’t the Junior Chamber of Commerce, but you kids played some funny games too at the Roller Rink and the Ice Rink.

Mel: Oh yeah. When Parish had his roller rink, we played Basketball on roller skates. It was a lot of fun. We used teams of four because five was too many for the size of the floor we had. We suffered a lot of scrapes and little floor burns a lot of times when we’d go down, but those skates were easy to handle. We had a lot of fun. We consistently always played around like that. We also decided we’d play on Parish’s ice rink, when he had a sheet of ice. We went down and laid out some bases with blue ink – we put blue ink out on the ice to color the bases and we’d play softball on ice skates.

I: I bet that was fun.

Mel: That was a lot of fun. We played hockey, but we had kind of makeshift cages and we were always using a big box for a cage and it was difficult for us to play any kind of good hockey. But, at least there was always something to do. Making and keeping ice, an ice rink in Park City – an outdoor ice rink was very difficult. Because we had so much snow. We’d get a sheet of ice that was stable and nice and smooth and then we’d have a snow storm and we’d have to go out and shovel it off. Our nemesis was a blizzard. The blizzard would hit those snow banks and stuff the snow right on the rink. So, our pleasure was not without a lot of work.

I: Okay, lets keep jumping around.

Mel: Jumping around – we are jumping around.

I: We are. We have a lot of catch up work to do today. I have a few questions that go way back and then we’ll jump around some more. I was reading someplace else and you were talking about all of the dogs that were in Park City and the dog catchers. Tell me about that.

Mel: [chuckles] Back in the thirties we had a dog catcher by the name of Friday Larsen.

I: Friday?

Mel: Friday, they called him Friday Larsen. He was the delegated dog catcher and we had a lot of dogs in Park City at that time. They decided to license the dogs – this is where the trouble begun. Because it was an era where there wasn’t much money in town. It didn’t cost much for a show, but it certainly cost quite a bit for a license. I think the license at that time was two dollars and fifty cents, but we always avoided paying the license fee. At that time, Friday had a lot of our dogs captured in a pen behind the city hall. It was a wooden structure. My cousin and I each had a dog and they both ended up in there at the same time – so, late at night after it got dark, we went up and let the dogs loose. Since he (my cousin) was the taller of the two of us why he got down inside the dog shed and raised ‘em up. What we had done was pulled a board off the roof and I’d grab the dogs by the paws and pull them out. Friday had six dogs in there and we emptied it and put the board back. Needless to say, after a couple of weeks and by golly, pretty soon our dogs ended up back in the dog pound. We were always watching the dog pound to see if there were any dogs in there and we’d go up there and turn them loose. This one time, Friday thought that the dogs were digging out and he put all this tin down, but what we did was make him think they were digging out, but the whole time we wanted to keep it quiet. We didn’t ever leave that board loose on the top, so that he wouldn’t know we were taking them out the top. But, needless to say, poor old Friday lost his job because he couldn’t keep the dogs in the dog pen. So, they didn’t have a dog collection agency in Park City.

I: He never did find out?

Mel: Never found out who was doing it. We’d get in trouble.

I: Tell me about the incident when you and Lamar were up at Reservoir Hill – is that correct, is that where you were?

Mel: Yes. I’d like to find that article. I’ve got that article somewhere – from the Park Record. When Hal goes around all the time and depicts Judge Don, that reminded me of the fact that it was Judge Don that wrote the article in the Park Record about Lamar and I. What happened was, we got some blasting caps and I was the one that got injured. We found blasting caps in an old box. We just happened to be walking up a trail and the end of a box was sticking out, “a buried treasure,” so we dug the box up and it was a box of dynamite and also had some caps in it. We were quite astounded that someone would bury that up on – what was called Reservoir Hill.

I: Where is that?

Mel: Well, it’s right behind the City Hall. The other one is Masonic Hill, but we’ve always called that Reservoir Hill because they put the Reservoir on it. It was a concrete top. The reservoir, when they filled it full of water, it broke one of the walls and all the water ran out. They never fixed it. That area up there always seemed to be a good place for kids to play. It was a nice smooth piece of cement. One time we had taken some phonograph records and we’d sail them off and shoot the dog gone records with shot guns. But, this time - the incident of the blasting. We took the box of caps out and put them in our back pockets and went up the trail. That’s the most dangerous thing you could do is play with caps. We had a little knowledge and we knew they were dangerous and we were a little careful when we set them off. We put some down on the cement and then we’d hide behind the shed – on the Reservoir there was a shed there - that had a pump in it – we’d kind of hide behind the shed and then throw rocks at them and they would scoot across and they wouldn’t go off. So, we got a little discouraged about moving them like that, so we thought, well, maybe concussion would do the job. So, we put a little flat rock on the top of these caps to keep them from running away and then we peppered rocks at that trying to make them go off, but I finally got a little discouraged about what was happening and so I got a big rock and threw it in the air and it come down on top of the rocks that was concealing the cap and it went off. Knocked me down. Fortunately, what blew was the copper from the caps. The fortunate part was – that it blew the rock - we never knew where it blew the rock, it went down to town somewhere. Probably in real small pieces. All the powder of the blast came back in my direction, so, I had copper in my arm and down one side of my leg. These little pieces of copper that had gone in my skin and I would hold my fingers down and blood was dripping down my fingers. So, Lamar decided to put a tourniquet on, tore my shirt and put a tourniquet on my arm. We were young scouts at the time and the tourniquet couldn’t stop that type of bleeding – because it was surface bleeding. It wasn’t involved with any arteries. But, we made it home and my dad met us and asked us what happened. We dreamed up a story – we fell in some glass, we knew we weren’t supposed to be playing in powder. Of course, that went over like an iron balloon. So, the doctor called and he come down and he put axle grease on my arm. It was Dr. LeCompte who come down there and put axle grease all over my arm and then wrapped it.

I: What did the axle grease do?

Mel: Axle grease just stopped the flow of the blood – it was the easiest thing – instead of using a lot of bandage for the whole arm, he just put that on. What it did, after it stayed there for a while, it just started healing up. When I tell people that the Doctor put axle grease on my arm to stop the blood they say, “what?” But, anyway, in the Park Record, Judge Don had a little story about it in the paper. It read something like, the acts of young people when they play with powder – they’re lucky to be alive – this type of thing. An angel was sitting on my shoulder. It’s one of the foolish things that I did in life.

I: Well, you’ve got to have a few of those.

Mel: One of the many foolish things.

I: What about, when we were looking through all of your employment dates here – you worked in the mines for a number of years – what did you do?

Mel: I worked in the Judge for a little while and I was repairing track and then later I worked for New Park Mine. I was working various jobs when I got out of the Navy in fifty two and one of them I worked at the Great Lakes Timber company. I was working in a saw mill making wedges for mines. Sawing wedges and bundling them. Putting wire around them to hold them together. Later, they were advertising for help in the New Park Mine, so I went up and turned an application and ended up working in the mine for a period of five years.

I: What did you do at New Park?

Mel: I was what they call, a mucker, a miner’s assistant. Ray Jordan was the miner and I was his helper. It wasn’t a bad job. It was a good job. I bought the first new car I had was the result of my pay from the New Park Mines. I bought a nineteen – let’s see, it was a Plymouth, a nineteen fifty two Plymouth.

I: Did you like the work in the mine?

Mel: Well, no. I didn’t cherish it. It was all right. It was something to do. At that time, jobs were pretty scarce. Mining isn’t as bad a job as people depict it. It was a good job – some mines. As long as you don’t have to work in the water and the mud. You get extra money when you work in water at the mines.

I: Did you have water at New Park?

Mel: There was some down in the lower depths. The mine shut down and I ended up working for the state road. I was helping them build roads and plow snow in the winter. While I was working for the mine and also while I was working for the State Road I was working on weekends for my ski school.

I: About in that same time period – was that when you met Peggy? Tell me about meeting Peggy.

Mel: I met Peggy in sixty five. Sixty four.

I: How did you meet Peggy?

Mel: I was working for the state road and one night we stopped in – we were plowing snow – and we stopped in the Kimball Junction Café – the Davies. The Davies had a daughter that was an airline stewardess and she worked with my wife – who was a stewardess for Western Airlines. At that time, Peggy was visiting with Ms. Davies –

END OF SIDE A TAPE 7

BEGIN SIDE B TAPE 7

I: Okay, so, Peggy was a stewardess for Western Airlines.

Mel: One of the stewardess’s that she flew with was Betty Davies and since Alex Davies and Thelma owned the café at Kimball Junction, why it was coincidental that I come into the café one night to get a cup of coffee with some co-workers and I talked Peggy and Betty to go to town for a beer. So, one thing led to another and when she kept coming over into town, I’d date her. So, eventually, Peggy was stationed in Denver and she moved to Salt Lake, so, we dated and then got married.

I: When did you get married?

[recorder pause]

I: Okay, so you and Peggy were married in nineteen sixty three.

Mel: Yes. Nineteen sixty three.

I: All right. Lets jump around more. You were on the school board for a year. Tell me about that.

Mel: Well, it was a great time. Our new High School was already built, but we were having trouble with our school tax. Years ago, when Park City was prosperous and South Summit needed more taxes; they had a very small tax base - Park City let them move their boundary line, for their school taxes right up to our city border. Well, at this time, with the new ski area coming into Park City and South Summit also had oil money coming, we wanted to expand our boundaries in Park City to include Snyderville. In order to do this, we wanted to make our tax district lines extend out further. So, it was at this time that we had quite heated arguments with South Summit. They didn’t want to move the line because they wanted as much tax money as they possibly could. But we in turn wanted to put our city boundaries out to where the people – actually taking in all of Snyderville and even going in to Summit Park. So, they acquiesced and told us that they would finally do it and that’s how we managed to move the school district border. One of the weapons we had – we said, if you are going to get our taxes for our kids we’ll have to start sending these kids that are out in Snyderville, since it’s in the South Summit tax area, we’ll have to start sending them over there to school and you’ll have to provide a bus. This was one of the real turning points of the whole argument was the fact that if they were going to get the taxes for the kids, then we’ll send the kids to your school. That’s the only way we can handle it. Well, this is one of the things that turned the tide. But that’s one of the small things I took part in while I was on the school board.

I: Tell me about – last time I was here you mentioned the Sports Hall of Fame.

Mel: Yeah. That’s an organization of old athletes [The Sports Hall of Fame] – it has been in existence for years. They have organized an association to create money for scholarships for kids and also for athletes. It’s just more or less to keep the athletes together and bring in the old stories of the football and basketball games. But, this has become a State Association that gets all of the old time athletes together and we have a big picnic in the

summer time with a golf tournament and every year they have banquets in which they honor somebody that has done things in the sports world. Some of these people are all-staters or had even gone into professional sports, but this is how they’ve started the Utah Hall of Fame. They have a wall in the Salt Palace where they have their pictures and also a lot of their trophies that various athletes have garnered in their years of playing, softball, football. All kinds of sports. They’ve taken in all the rodeo; they’ve taken in all the skiing, baseball, basketball. One of these days we’ll have somebody from hockey because hockey is getting very interesting in Utah. But this is a nice part of having this association, when they do have the picnics you go down there and meet all of the old athletes that you played ball against. They were always talking about the game that came down to the wire. There’s always people that went on from Utah sports and become famous – in boxing. All of these people congregate there with the sports writers, probably two hundred at the banquet every year. This has been going on for a long time, but they have quite a list of famous people that had become their presidents. I’d like to have one of those letters here and I could talk about some of the athletes. My mind’s gone dead.

I: You’re in it?

Mel: Yeah. As a former ski school director, ice skater, ski jumper, softball and baseball player.

I: They have a display someplace – in the Salt Palace?

Mel: Yes.

I: Is it still in the Salt Palace?

Mel: I think so. I haven’t been down there for quite some time. I think they have a lot of the pictures of some of them. They have a board of directors of the hall of fame. Some of these people have gone on to be coaches –like Bruce Summer Hayes’ dad – he is in this group and all the Summer Hayes are all golfers and they should make a spot – they’ll be drawing them in this group eventually. Are we still on?

[recorder pause]

I: Okay, we’re gonna jump now to some of the work you are doing now, like at Glenwood Cemetery. Give me an idea of what you do there.

Mel: In the old days they used to have what they call a Sexton. The Sexton would be more or less in charge of maintenance and up-keep of the cemetery, but he was always governed by a board of people that were in to the finances of the cemetery and also took care of records and this type of thing. Well, I’m – a member of a new association. Do you want me to do any talking about that? Well, for many years the people that had relatives buried in the cemetery, were generally scattered all over the world, and they didn’t ever try to get back to take care of their plots where they had relatives buried. It got to the point where the cemetery was becoming in disrepair. When the cemetery was formulated, it was purchased by a group of fraternal organizations and they bought five acres of land and in that five acres it was divided up into squares – four squares. Each of those squares have blocks and the blocks of course were divided. They allowed the fraternal organizations to buy blocks for the members and it was divided up into these sections – one of them for instance, block one, is the Elks. In these sections there’s the Masons, the Woodsman of the World, the Knights of Pythius – there’s eight organizations in there that have different areas where their people are buried.

Well, these organizations moved because of lack of membership – since they were nationwide organizations – they’d move and take their membership with them. In other words, once an Elk always an Elk. If I’m an Elk in Park City and I moved away, I can go to the lodge where the Elks are. The same holds true with the Masons. The Elk’s are the only organization that is still an active organization, in Park City. As a result they were about the only ones that were taking care of their lots. [phone ringing] Other than the people themselves – the relatives of people that were buried there were always taking care of the plots. So, we decided, since there was no longer any organization taking care of them we decided to renew the Park City Glenwood Association. We had kind of a little election as a group together and one of our first presidents was Pat Smith and we just started getting gradually better at expanding our membership. Bob and Lynne Anderson, Bob Anderson had become one of our presidents and he was very instrumental in getting more people involved. I became the Vice president and have been the vice president ever since they started the organization. I didn’t choose to be the president because I don’t enjoy the prestige. I have been president or director many times, on other organizations.

But, I have become Gidley was to be the last sexton that was appointed. So, I more or less have taken over the duties of maintenance and trying to get the cemetery back on its feet. The good people that we had in the organization had ways of getting money into our treasury so we could perform better work and be able to hire people to come in and help us. We organize clean up days, and we are a non-profit making organization, we have solicited a lot of people to help us with donations. We set our organization up originally as a ten dollar a year membership. That bought us some paper and stamps so we could send some letters out. It did us a lot of good. We managed to get the wheels rolling and we got the condominiums around us, the Snow Flower and the Three Kings involved because the lot is sitting right in the middle of this residential section. We’ve had all kinds of programs. Bob Anderson come up with a program – he belonged to a Barbershop Quartet, a Salt Lake organization, and we sold tickets to raise money. The whole thing was to try to get enough money so we could afford necessary things that it takes to make that cemetery a more beautiful and well kept place like it was supposed to be. The money that we collected started with the gate first. We had to get a gate to keep the traffic from going in the cemetery. The vandals were coming in and dumping stones over. They were having big parties over there and leaving a lot of trash about. My mother died and in lieu of flowers we suggested that they donate money to the cemetery and that is how we managed to get the gate going. With the assistance of Pat Smith who drew a design for the gate and the contacts were made to get a large gate for the cemetery. Once we got the gate we figured well, we just as well fence all of it. So, we gathered money by collections and donations and we started a fence project. A gentleman, an iron works man in henefer was contacted, and as we got the money we’d buy sections of fence. We’ve completed five acres of the fencing. I believe we spent in the neighborhood of thirty thousand dollars and this was all donated money through various projects - like we were selling cards – Pat – let’s see an artist painted a picture of the Glenwood gate and then we started selling cards of the gate on Memorial Day. Memorial day was a big day for us because we made a list of the people that were coming in to put flowers on people’s graves. We had a few records and the records that we have, the Book of the dead that was in the city hall, but we didn’t have any maps. We didn’t know who belonged – what plot belonged to who. I had contacted my life long friend, Bob Wright, who was an engineer and we were getting ready to engineer the whole cemetery and find out what the sizes of the lots were and get some manner of knowing where people were. In the book of the dead there was a

location and it was laid out so there was actually four squares and then it was divided from there into plots. Well, we were fortunate. I got a phone call from Salt Lake City and it was one of the guys from the Knights of Pythius. He asked, Mel Fletcher, is your name Mel Fletcher? I said, yes. He said, is your dad named Roy Fletcher; I said yes. I said, he was former chancellor of the Knights of Pythius, he was head of the Knights of Pythius of the State. He said, I’m with the Knights of Pythius and we’ve been cleaning out our archives. He says, we’ve run across a map of the Glenwood Cemetery. He said, are you interested? I said, yes, we’re interested. I’ll be down there probably before you get the phone hung up. I got his address and I called Bob and asked him if he was busy – No, I’m not busy. I said, well, lets go to Salt Lake and get a map – I found a map of the Glenwood. We were quite elated that we didn’t have to do all of this survey work. So, we did get a map. As soon as we got it in hand, Bob says, we better take this map and get it mylar’d. Transferring it to a transfer sheet so it would never get cracked or wasted. We kept that copy and then we made a copy of the old map and give it back to the Knights of Pythius, give the old map back to them. Since that time, that was probably the best thing that has happened to us in those particular years because now we were able to go around to all of the graves and get names on where people were. So, we could upgrade the book of the dead which was not complete. We had a good friend, Pat Cars that joined our association and she was very good with her computer and as a result we have everything on computer now and it’s updated. We have buried new people in there, and as we bury them we make a record of exactly where they are and we have done a complete survey of the cemetery by sight and by measurement and we have some very update records now. We have what we call the “Book of the Dead” and a copy of the location of graves located in the Park City Library and the Park City Museum and we also have a couple of copies that we keep with the organization. I have used this map all the time to work off of. As we progressed we got money and engaged a monument person. Hans monument company. Hans monument company has been coming up with their big equipment. They have a big hoist on the back of their truck and they can also do their work with a satellite to run the hoist. Hans and his wife used to come up at night and he’d do the work with a sling on the end of a chain and his wife would run the hoist by swinging the arm into position and then Hans would give her the signal. Once he got the sling on to the stone he’d do the major work and she’d set the stone back down. They were working, not because they needed the extra money, but because they enjoyed these old headstones and the cemetery.

They are third generation monument people that make monuments for cemeteries. His family history goes back to Germany. Hans always told us, if you ever want anybody to work on monuments, you get a monument person, you don’t get a mortician. A mortician, all he does is get them ready for burial. He’s smart enough that he can go through all of the cemetery and look at a stone and tell who made it. We were fortunate in getting a hold of Hans and Ursula because they have been with us about four years and they came up to do all of our major monument repair. A lot of our budget is utilized in this monument repair. And then we also have utilized – some of our new workers that have come into Park City, some of our Latino’s – we have been using them for some of the landscape work and cutting the grass.

END SIDE B TAPE 7

BEGIN SIDE A TAPE 8

Mel: Let’s see. We also have maintenance on the fence at all times. We have to re-paint that. Now, we have a lot of help from the condominium owners who have donated money for painting the fence and have also helped us with cutting some of the trees. They’ve offered us tools. Through the years, with their money they have donated, we have managed to get a gate and a building built. This was through our first president, Shirley Smith – and second president, Bob Anderson. He got in touch with contractors. He had about four contractors involved in building a utility shed. I was always hauling the tools around in the trunks of our cars and it was better that we have tools there on the job rather than have to bring them in every time we used them. We now have a building that is made very much like a jailhouse. It has bars on the windows, cement floors, thick walls and a metal door. The keys, we have about three or four sets of keys. In that shed now we have two DR Mowers, we have weed cutters, brand new weed cutters; we have nippers. So that when we have a clean-up day or we hire laborers that don’t have the equipment – we have the equipment available so that we can get our work done. Also, during this time, I’d found a friend that I used get a t-time on the golf course with all the time, when I was working at Park City Golf Course. He also owns a condominium with his family in Park City. He owns the Plumber supply in Salt Lake City. We figured we needed a hydrant, or a source for water. We have a stream running through

the place, but carrying a bucket of water up to the graves wasn’t exactly the way we would like to have it. So, we decided to get water in there. I made a visit to him and had a conversation with him – told him what we wanted. We wanted a ranch type of a hydrant that we could put in the cemetery and needed a hundred feet of three quarter inch copper tubing and everything you needed to put that in operation. When he gave me the bill, it was thirty dollars. Thirty three dollars. That was for taxes. So, we got a hydrant in and that has been in use for six or seven years. Just this year we got another one. We have engaged a man that’s been very beneficial in giving us gravel and helping us with our roads. A contractor by the name of John Whitely. I asked John if he’d go down there in the middle of the road and cut a narrow ditch so we could lay a big pipe and take a water line from the other hydrant down to the shed. I always wanted another hydrant. We had that successfully installed and working. We have some other projects that we’re working on. We have got to stabilize our fence down on the North end because the spring that’s down there in the corner has weakened the fence so that the fence is loose. That’s another project that we have to do is get in there and straighten the fence. So, that’s the next major thing we have to do. It’s an ongoing thing for us all the time. The wooden caskets, they eventually rot out and the graves they get their water and soil are consistently sinking and making the ground very uneven. So, that’s a fight we always have - to bring in more topsoil and to even them up. As this ground settles through the years – that’s where we have the trouble with our big monuments. They start tipping. We had one that caved in and toppled all the works. There were six sections. Six sections of this big monument that we had to put back together. When you fix monuments, it’s quite a job because monuments are generally in three or four different kinds of rock. While they always start with a rough rock on the bottom which is generally a sandstone or a cheap type granite, pour cement even, for a base and then they build on that. Some of those monuments have sometimes five different kind of rock that make up their stones. Every time you put one on top of another one you have to have it perfectly level or it walks off. So, it’s kind of a nuisance for the maintenance because it’s happening all the time. It’s just like an old shed out in the desert. Pretty soon you got the hinges off the door and all of the sudden the doors flapping in the wind and then the shingles come off. Our cemetery is much like that because the ground is always moving. It would be so much better if it had been built down on the flat somewhere. Just don’t have near the trouble down there where the city cemetery is because of the terrain.

I: That’s excellent. You have done some great work up there.

Mel: Yes. But, our foundation that we have formed now - we have seven trustees on our board and we have also insurance, liability insurance for our workers. We also have ownership. We derived ownership by going to all of the associations that originally started the cemetery and asked them for release so that we could have ownership so we can handle the business without any problems. It is a very restricted burial in Glenwood. We don’t sell lots, so to speak. The lots were established by the old organizations and as a result, if you do see a burial there it may be ashes, which we can allow, but it all comes before the board so the integrity of the cemetery still exists and will exist in eternity.

I: As it should.

Mel: Good. I got my mind going pretty good.

I: Real good. I have one more question –

I: Talk to me about the sense of responsibility that you may feel for this new Park City, today. This big tourist town and ski haven.

Mel: Well, you know, for years – it was just like in the days when I graduated, it was in the thirties. In thirty-seven when I graduated. There wasn’t a lot to do in Park City other than the mines. A few grocery clerk jobs and of course there was the mine – for instance, in the depression, we didn’t have any money – no body had any money during the depression and the way some lived was to barter and make exchanges. My father was a sign writer and if we needed a pair of shoes dad would go to the shoe shop – You need a sign on your shop? It would look a lot better and we need some shoes. Same holds true with the dentist. We had a dentist, Doctor Sheen, he had all kinds of signs. Every time he moved he had a new sign that was done by my dad – it was just trade-off. They didn’t exchange any money – he worked on our teeth for a sign on his door. That’s how we survived through all that. If you knew how to do something special, why you were always able to get a long. If you had a line of work like my mother; she was a piano teacher. In between piano teaching and my dad’s artistry of being a sign writer and paper hanger and house painter, why we got along and did quite well. They raised five kids through the depression and it was just a matter of trading work. The city itself was easy to live in because we had all the wonderful, beautiful mountains. We could go fishing, we could go hunting. A lot of times, why, it was our meat for the winter. Deer was in abundance and nothing was ever wasted. We hunted rabbits;

we hunted pheasants; we also hunted sage hen. That was how we managed to make our livelihood was by always trading barter was always used. The produce people would always come in to town with the produce trucks and we’d always be buying off of them. When it was in season, we bought their potatoes, cherries, apples. A lot of people come in and traded – traded a sack of potatoes for a little sign. Back in the thirties, especially in thirty five, it was a going town. We had all kinds of shops open; we had approximately sixty people involved in our Junior Chamber of Commerce; we were always trying to get something else going in Park Ctiy. We had jump meets up at the Creole. That was the time Ecker Hill was going. We used to hitchhike all the way down there to watch a jump meet when Engen was jumping on the mountain. But, as the time progressed, we could see skiing in the future. It was in that book of Kelner’s, Alexis Kelner’s, that I was quoted as saying, Park City has an abundance and a wealth and there’s always snow to get something going here and get a ski lift. The mines were reluctant because they were in the mining business and they didn’t want to have anything to do with the skiing, but finally it got to the point where they were all of the sudden finding out that they could make money on top of the ground as well as under the ground and this is where all the ski stuff started boiling. I was a lifetime member of the Wasatch Mountain club; I have a lot of ski connections. One of the major things that happened in the winter with the Mountain Club was a trip from Park City to Brighton. Pick a night when there was supposed to be a big moon and we’d organize a ski trip. I always ended up being the pilot or the leader to get them over there because I had been over there so many times on ski’s. They generally rode a small bus, rom Salt Lake, either that or cars. We were able to drive to the king mine. We’d go up from there to the Wasatch Mountain Club lodge in Brighton. A lot of times – it was difficult to arrange to have people that have the skiing ability it takes to make that trip. We always used to screen the people to make sure they were equipped. My job was just to be directing – in the direction they were going and then go back and make sure the stragglers were still able to keep up with us. Most of the people in the Mountain Club were hardy and sometimes it would take, what would have normally been a one hour trip was extended to three hours because of the people that had trouble with their bindings or their ski’s or their climbers. Fortunately, we never had anybody hurt; we never had any accidents. It was fun to get over there in the lodge and get warmed up. Hot chocolate. Can you imagine us having hot chocolate? Some did. [laughter] The other thing that was happening in Park City and a lot of people were pushing it – was the fact that we should get a ski area here in town. We had the mountains we had the snow, we had all of the facilities to make a good ski area and all it did was take a little

convincing. Drubay, of course, was quite an energetic fello and he could see the writing on the walls because they were having a hard time with miners. There was so much plastic innovation that they didn’t need the lead and the zinc and some of the things we were mining. Could always use the silver, but then, this is what would make the city, is to get the skiing going. We had some people that were kind of living in the dark ages in Park City here because even after we got the skiing going over in Deer Valley and Otto and Bob built the chair lift – there was people in town that didn’t even know there was a ski lift over there, in Park City. There’s times people would come to town and they wanted to know where the ski lift was and they sent them back down to Ecker Hill. People on the street. Clear out in left field, some of them. The one thing that hampered Otto was that it was quite a ways over there. You had to have transportation. That kind of slowed a lot of the kids down from skiing because it was a long walk to get there. Some of them tried climbers over the top to get there. When I was in Provo going to school down there – I tried to get the people that were involved in ski classes to ski up here at Park City if they couldn’t get up to Timp Haven. If they had a slide in the Timp haven canyon or there was too much snow, they used to take the kids to Brighton – I told them, that’s a lot longer trip for you to take than it would be for you to go to Park City. While I was down there I was always trying to get them to go up to Park City. I finally got the people that was in charge, to take a trip with me up to Park City. I brought them to Park City and I took them up to Deer Valley and over to the ski area. They really liked the ski area, that was really great. But, there’s one thing about it – “We’re not going to drive our children past this house of ill-repute.” We had to go to Deer Valley and there was still a little bit of hanky panky going on there and I told them, “That’s not going to hurt the kids. Kids are going to look out the window all right, but they don’t even have to know what it is.” “That don’t matter. I have to take this to the highest authorities and since this is a BYU class, we can’t do that. So, they wouldn’t bring them up. That was another situation.

I: You were out doing a lot of promoting of Park City skiing.

Mel: Yes. Well, of course we had other people who started promoting it after I got them up here, then they started promoting it. They had a group in Provo that used to come up by the car loads. And they used to love the bars. Otto and Bob, well, Bob wasn’t so bad, but Otto – he didn’t want to do any advertising. He said, well, once they ski here they’ll come back and we don’t have to do any advertising. It’s word of mouth. Word of mouth will get

around that we have a ski area. One time I told him, let’s put an ad in the BYU paper at the school – the college paper. Of course, the ski school may not come up here, but we’ll still get some skiers. “Oh, by god, I’m not going to do that.” So, I paid for that. I put a couple of ads in there and then, why all of the sudden we started getting a lot of people up from up there. Especially when Timp was down. That was quite a canyon. That canyon gets a lot of snow. I don’t think the road workers wanted to work up there very often to keep it cleaned out and it was noon before they could get skiing up there. But here you could travel on this main highway and drive right into Park City. That was one of the beautiful things about Park City, it’s location. That was what we were always preaching when we’d go out. When I was with the ski resort and we went on Public Relations jobs – what we’d do is take our films with us and our display and go to ski shows. We went to California, Alhambra was one of the areas. And we showed them what we had with our movies and finally we got them coming to Park City. We had a guy by the name of Roger Haran who was a really good man with our public relations and he did such a good job. He got involved with Delta – Delta started bringing in their people and started bringing them into Park City. Once that caught on we had people flying in here from Chicago. They could fly in here from the east coast and be in Park City by noon and skiing by one o’clock in the afternoon. People from Connecticut, would say, it takes us six hours to get to where we have to ski back there, yet we can fly out here and be skiing in the same afternoon. So, we were always pushing. Now, we’d like to have it go in reverse. We don’t want to tell anybody about what it’s doing out here. It’s over done. Once it caught fire it went out of sight. It went faster than reasonable. They shouldn’t have all this country out here dotted with houses on every ridge you see. I got a jeep under the deck now, and it hasn’t been out of there for ten years. I used to run and chase all over these hills. I’m just a little bit bitter that it’s happened so fast. It should have been more progressive and a little slower for the people to digest it. No wonder these poor old people are leaving and going to Kamas. Kamas is going to catch it too. Get on the top of that mountain and see all the people and miles of field down there and miles of field up this way – let’s get that full of houses.

I: So, what do you think is going to happen to Park City?

Mel: Well, unless something happens economically to the market there is a chance that they may become over built. See they’re building all these things – these condominiums and everything else and there’s some of them not being occupied. There’s businesses here that I’m amazed that they still exist. But, we have so much wealth now in our nation that a

lot of people don’t mind losing money because they can write it off and you and I pay for it.

The people down here now, in the Canyons are in deep trouble as far as money goes, but they can go back out and float some loans and if they lose they’ll write off. There’s no reason in the world – well, there is reasons. But, just like our ski area, we used to be able to write off the toboggans and all the expenses. Every time we wanted to buy something new we’d always have it bought by writing some of the early stuff off. The snow cats – we could write it off. Maybe in about three years they’d write off the whole dog gone snow cat – that cost a hundred thousand dollars. Wear and tear. They could get a new one pretty cheap. I’ve always been a little skeptical of the prices of ski tickets. They priced all the little people out – completely out. Whereas we used to have skiing families. Mom and Pop had to quit skiing if they wanted their kids to ski because they can’t afford it.

END OF SIDE A TAPE 8

BEGIN SIDE B TAPE 8

I: Yeah, it’s a pretty expensive weekend to come to park City and take your family skiing.

Mel: You cant’ even take them out to dinner these days. We had a lot of ski instructors on the hill carrying their sandwich. Couldn’t even afford to eat on the mountain.

I: It’s a pretty different place, isn’t it.

Mel: Yeah.

I: All right Mel.

Mel: Did you get enough for one day? If you can sort it out.

I: Did we miss anything? All right. Thank you. We’ll call it a day.

Mel: Okay, thank you.

I: We might even call it an interview. I think we’re done. END OF INTERVIEW #4 END OF TAPE 8