By Gary Topping–
Our blogger-in-chief Mike O’Brien’s recent recollections (An infamous anti-Catholic Klanniversary) of his adolescent brushes with the Ku Klux Klan trigger some recollections of my own.
Larry Gerlach was one of my profs in graduate school while I was working on my Ph.D. at the University of Utah. When he was researching Blazing Crosses in Zion: The Ku Klux Klan in Utah, I was employed as Curator of Manuscripts at the Utah State Historical Society. Larry put me in touch with the Grand Dragon of the Utah Klan, who went by the pseudonym of Gene Hammond (I knew what his real name was, but I’ve forgotten). I met Hammond for lunch one day and tried to get him to deposit the Klan records at the Society. I failed. He told me they had a Klavern in every county in Utah (this was the 1980s), so the Klan was anything but dead at that time. Their statewide headquarters was in Riverton, and Larry told me that a bunch of thugs harassed him one night out there while he was doing his research.
I remember Hammond as a pretty big guy and very ugly, both physically and morally–a typical loser who gets caught up in these hate movements. He was wearing a big metal belt buckle that said either “KKK” or “Ku Klux Klan,” I can’t remember which. I was hoping nobody at the restaurant would notice that and hold me guilty by association! After that meeting he stopped answering his phone and would not respond to any of my attempts at further communication.
When Larry’s book came out, I learned that some of the Colorado River explorers I had encountered in my research for my book Glen Canyon and the San Juan Country were founders of the Utah Klan. Dr. Russell G. Frazier, company doctor at Bingham Canyon, was one of them. My friend Millie Fletcher, who grew up in Bingham, still has a hole in her shoulder from Frazier’s inept surgical attempt to remove a tumor. Charles Kelly, an amateur historian and first superintendent at Capitol Reef National Monument, was another. I was in charge of both Frazier’s and Kelly’s papers at the Historical Society. Finally, there was Dr. A. L. Inglesby, a retired dentist who ran a rock shop in Fruita, Utah and a tourist excursion company called Intelligence Tours. The Historical Society has a collection of fascinating photographs of Inglesby’s big tour buses visiting various historic sites in Utah and even negotiating the hairpin turns in the narrow streets of Bingham Canyon. Inglesby was a member of the party that took river explorer Julius F. Stone through Glen Canyon to celebrate Stone’s 83rd birthday and commemorate his 1909 river trip. During my research my friend and backcountry partner Dr. A. W. Scott, Jr. gave me the big easy chair Stone had ridden in on that trip. It is at the Historical Society today.
That’s my story of my various brushes with the Utah Ku Klux Klan.
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles. Signature Books recently published his latest work titled D. Michael Quinn: Mormon Historian.
