By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” – A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
I first read the classic, opening lines of the great Charles Dickens novel in about 8th grade. Of course, I did not personally encounter the words as part of some sweeping historical epic like the French Revolution. Instead, one of the pressing dichotomous problems of my middle school years was that my Catholic school smelled like either fresh bread or rotting dead animals.
St. Joseph’s Catholic Grade School sat on the corner of Lincoln Avenue and 28th Street in Ogden, Utah. Our little corner of Ogden’s rough and tumble West Side was just steps away from the notorious 25th Street, nicknamed “Two Bit Street.” It was a place, according to USA Today, that even gangster Al Capone said was too wild for his tastes.
Our two-story school, dedicated in 1923 during the height of the Prohibition Era, was constructed using an odd-colored brick, too dark to be brown but not quite black, so I just call it “brack.” When I started attending school there in the mid-1970s, the fifty year old school was surrounded by deteriorating houses and nondescript industrial plants. Two of those factories constantly competed with each other to dominate our young olfactory nerves.
The best of times came courtesy of the local Wonder Bread Hostess factory, from which the alluring aroma of fresh baked goods gently massaged my nostrils each morning as I walked to school for another long day of rigorous Catholic education. For several decades, the Ogden bakery turned out truckloads of Hostess delights, including Twinkies, Cupcakes, Ho-Hos, Snoballs, Ding-Dongs, and many varieties of Wonder breads, all byproducts of the hard working hands of devoted and multi-generational blue collar laborers.
One such employee was Mario Alfonsi, a Chioggia native and POW captured in World War II after the British torpedoed an Italian submarine, the GLAUCO, near Gibraltar. Interned in Ogden as a 24 year old, he liked his treatment in the United States so much that he stayed, and worked as a baker and mechanic at the Hostess plant for almost four decades. Mario also usually arrived at St. Joe each day about 3:00 p.m. to pick up his son (and my classmate) Shawn. He always said hello to us with his lyrical Italian accent and while wearing his bakery uniform…white t-shirt, work pants, and diner style cook’s paper cap.
The worst of times usually arrived in the afternoon, when the stifling heat of the day or an ill-wind brought to us the odors emitted from the nearby Colorado-Utah-Idaho International (CUI) animal rendering plant. From about 1966 to 1977, CUI took dead animals and their byproducts from various meat packing plants, wholesale outlets, and grocery stores, and then processed them into soaps and animal feeds. It was a business model that stunk, literally.
The animal rendering plant’s rancid and noxious odors vexed those of us sitting in school classrooms air-conditioned only by open windows. Our teachers strategically placed fans and air fresheners in a futile effort to provide relief. In response to our moans and groans, a nun at the school sometimes suggested that we “offer it up to God.” My own Irish Catholic mother cheerfully told me that patiently enduring my nasal suffering would get me “time off in Purgatory,” thus shortening my eventual journey to Heaven. “Well,” I thought, “that might be worth it.”
These school day memories rushed back to me recently, when I heard the news that developers had torn down the old bakery. It closed in 2012, in the midst of nationwide labor strikes and the company’s economic problems, putting some 250 workers out of jobs. Everything else had changed too. The rendering plant was shuttered in 1977 after numerous complaints and a civil lawsuit brought by Ogden City and Weber County alleging that it was a public nuisance. My grade school relocated in 1979, and the old Lincoln Avenue building was razed and replaced in the 1990s by a complex of townhomes.
As for my fellow smellers, my classmates now comb gray hair, if they have any hair at all. Our teachers and nuns, along with their very Catholic brand of offering solace, are mostly gone to Heaven (or Purgatory), as is my sweet mother. And even the strong and hardworking Mario Alfonsi now enjoys eternal rest in Salt Lake City’s Mount Calvary Cemetery, a beloved memory for his family and friends.
What seemed back then to be the enduring best of times, and the unending worst of times, actually were just brief moments of transition, mere rest stops on a journey that had just started. Yet, almost fifty years later, those transitory moments persist and cling to me. Even today, I can smell Ogden’s old West Side, the fresh aroma of the bread of life battling the putrid odor of death.
It was a Dickens of a time.
*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (found here), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, will be published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021.
(Note: this article originally appeared in the Ogden Standard-Examiner: https://www.standard.net/opinion/guest-commentary/guest-op-ed-a-tale-of-two-smells/article_92076924-1be9-56fa-8f79-31cc81ef7863.html)
