By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
The Summer of 1979 was alive with news. The first Polish pope went to Poland. Men named Carter, Kennedy, and Reagan battled to be president. Ted Bundy was on trial in Florida. And both the Tin Man (Jack Haley) and the Duke (John Wayne) died. The biggest story, however, was very local…I got the best summer job ever.
Right after graduating from St. Joseph’s High School, I worked for my hometown newspaper in Utah, the Ogden Standard-Examiner. I wanted to be a lawyer or a writer. There were not many law jobs available to 18 year olds four decades ago. I jumped at the chance to work at the newspaper before I left for my first year of college at the University of Notre Dame.
I had served as my high school’s correspondent to the paper, and so I was thrilled when City Editor Flora Ogan offered to employ me to work full time for three months as a junior reporter. It was a significant improvement from the fast food restaurant jobs I’d held the previous two summers. One of my old classmates started calling me the “white collar man.”
Ogan started work as a news reporter in 1955, an intrepid woman breaking into a man’s world. She soon was promoted to city editor, where she served for more than a decade. She moved on to the editorial pages and retired in 1996 after a distinguished 40-year career in journalism.
On my first day at the newspaper in May 1979, Flora told me my title (“cub reporter”) and my wage ($5/hour). I thought I was quite rich and relished my new-found financial “independence.” I could buy my own lunch without asking my mother for money; that lunch usually was a glorious invention called a “potato log.”
Stimson’s Market, a nearby convenience store, breaded and deep-fried long sliced potatoes and sold them five for a dollar. Add a dollop of sour cream and an Orange Fanta, which I almost always did, and it was a fulsome feast for an 18-year old. It tasted like salt, grease, and freedom.
Unlike lunch, the job was not always so glorious. Flora correctly deduced that I needed some reportorial ripening. I spent several nondescript weeks working on the “re-write desk.” I used two fingers to hunt and peck on an old Smith and Corona to repackage PR notices and public service announcements into acceptable community newspaper copy.
After I mastered the we’re-having-family-reunion genre and the off-to-a-mission composition, Flora allowed me to cover the police beat once or twice a week. The paper’s very cool (he had a motorcycle) investigative reporter Vaughn Roche patiently showed me the ropes, which included riding a rickety and sometimes blood-stained elevator to the jail at the top of the municipal building so I could examine the latest booking records.
Besides reporting on traffic tickets and DUIs, I broke some amazing stories, including the whodunit crime mystery involving the severed hand found in a local car wash. (Forensic exams showed it was just old bear claw.) I also alerted Vaughn to a police report about the theft of the “Big Boy” statue from a local hamburger restaurant. He turned the nondescript report into a magnificent throwback feature story about college antics and Stutz Bearcat cars.
With all this experience under my belt, Flora unleashed me to cover the wide world of Ogden news. In rapid succession, I wrote bylined stories about a family’s century-long heritage of workin’ on the railroad, a dog that littered 13 puppies on Friday the 13th, and a growing city’s decision to put a moratorium on housing start permits.
I also wrote about the annual arrival of the circus at the charming but decrepit John Affleck park on Ogden’s west side, a naturalization ceremony for new citizens, and about a Rotary club speech addressing the plight of the local poor. My “person on the street” feature on July 20, 1979 noted Ogden’s dim memories about the first moon walk that occurred ten years earlier (see: https://theboymonk.com/blame-it-on-the-moon-landing/).
Flora even gave me a pass to nearby Hill Air Force Base and told me to cover the arrival of two F-16 jets from Europe. I met the two pilots, from Belgium and the Netherlands, who made the 14-hour trip. The American planes were assembled in Europe as part of a cooperative effort of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a small reminder that in 1979, the Cold War still raged with the Soviet Union.
Towards the end of the summer, large boxes arrived. Soon the real reporters were sitting in front of what they called “cathode ray tubes” and typing away on the first generation of journalism computers. I followed one of their first word-processed stories. It was about Ogden’s conjoined twins Lisa and Elisa Hansen.
Joined at the top of the head since their birth two years before, they were successfully separated by a team of health care providers at the University of Utah. Lisa continued to have significant post-surgery disabilities but later was reported to be working for a developmental training company. Elisa had her challenges too, but has worked several jobs and while cherishing her separate life, regularly cares for her twin sister.
There comes a time when we all must endure some sort of surgery and be separated from our parents, siblings, childhood, from old to new, and venture off into autonomous personhood. My own separation, while neither heroic nor historic like the Hansen twins, started at the same time.
In the years that followed, I have found interesting and rewarding work as both a writer and a lawyer. Most importantly, a few years ago I also found another place that makes potato logs. They are more expensive, and still delicious, but don’t quite taste the same as those I first savored, five for a dollar, during the Summer of 1979.
*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.
