 | One hundred years ago Thursday, the Salt Lake Telegram welcomed 1915 but cautioned that whether it was a big year in the city, “all depends on baseball success.” Forget about that war in Europe. The city was trying to get a team in the Pacific Coast League, for heaven’s sake, and it all depended on the city’s wealthy people subscribing generously for stock in the team. The effort, the paper assured its readers “is vital to the city’s future,” and, “If it should fail, there would be no cause for boasting about this city’s reputation when 1915 had gone very far.” New Years can make people unreasonably giddy. Ours obviously is not the first generation to overstate the importance of bragging rights related |
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 “So long mom, I’m off to drop the bomb, so don’t wait up for me. … I’ll look for you when the war is over, an hour and a half from now.” — Lyrics by Tom Lehrer, to the song, “So long, mom.”
Fifty years ago, when Tom Lehrer’s hilarious topical humor was being set to music, the notion of World War III was imagined as one consisting of nuclear warheads that could attack any target in about 30 minutes. After that, it was anybody’s guess. As a guide told my family during a tour of an old missile silo in the Arizona desert, once the command was given to launch, the men in charge of a silo were to subsist on available food storage for a month or so. Then, if they had heard nothing, they were to venture aboveground to see what was left of the world. Make no mistake, such a threat still exists, although many of the old Cold War missile silos dotting the land have been  Efforts to rehabilitate Salt Lake City’s Pioneer Park seem about as frequent around here as winter inversions, and about as easy to tackle.
This time could be different, not just because successful business owners are involved, but because they seem genuinely interested in understanding what it means to be homeless and what it would take to help them. The Pioneer Park Coalition, formed earlier this year with the aim of bringing all stakeholders together
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The author
Jay Evensen is the Senior Editorial Columnist of the Deseret News. He has nearly 40 years experience as a reporter, editor and editorial writer in Oklahoma, New York City, Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. He also has been an adjunct journalism professor at Brigham Young and Weber State universities. Archives
June 2021
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