iwasborninthefallof1947inlogan,utahhardagainstthe.docVIP

I was born in the fall of 1947 in Logan, Utah hard against the eastern edge of the Cache Valley where a hundred years before the Indians and the mountain men would rendezvous and barter until the snow fell. My parents had gone down to Utah State University on the G.I.Bill. Both my mother and my father were from Brown County, South Dakota, a son and a daughter of farmers, each one of ten kids. They had married in the spring of 1946 after my father returned from his duties in the navy. He’d enlisted in 1942 and served three years in the Philippines in the Construction Battalion, or Seabees, as they were known. He was building a post office in Manila when news of the end of the Pacific war arrived. In 1950, my family moved to Salt Lake City, and my father took a job as a welder with Chicago Bridge Iron Company whose huge metal buildings stood at 1700 South and 500 West. These were structures in which tanks and sections of bridges were welded and then drawn out on trains, and going into them was like entering another world. My father wore khakis to work, pants and shirts, and he wore a hard hat and always had pencils in his pocket. My mother wore dresses mostly, aprons, and she kept our house on Wasatch Avenue friendly and full of baked goods through and beyond the arrival of my two brothers in 1950 and 1953. They would both eventually follow my father into metal fabricating. The west side of Salt Lake is the blue-collar side of town, and growing up there was a paradise. The huge field across from my parents’ little house turned out to be Sorenson Park, where I spent more of my first fifteen years than any other place. Later, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Utah I would take girls I was dating down there and walk the grassy expanse, showing them my initials in the old bandstand and offering interwoven tales of the many trees and the accidents that had occurred in and near each; I was twenty and talked like an old man, my history alr