HERE WE COME UTAH I HOPE YOU ARE READY FOR THE H…DS

Here we are, late in the fall of the year 1985 with our butts heading to Utah. We escaped the disaster of the big layoffs in San Fransisco, and were now headed for a new adventure in Ogden Utah. I had been assigned to oversee a fabrication shop that we had contracted to make the pipe assemblies for our project at the Kennecott Copper Mine outside of Salt Lake City. At that time it was the largest open-pit copper mine in the world. The memory of our arrival there is fixed in my mind and will forever remain.

As usual I had to be there a few short days after being assigned. I was now out of the Oil and Gas or Refinery and Chemical group and had been traded to our Mining group. My old group got nothing in return but the promise that Mining had to keep me if they took me. Mining on the other hand had hit it out of the park and got me!

Some things never change, except this time we got to drive together. Deysi still had to once more clean up my droppings, organize everything, get our stuff packed and loaded in the moving van. She was the best at this! Having her back me up every single time that I was re-assigned was a godsend. She packed my suitcase and pushed me out the door with full instructions on what I needed to look for in new accommodations. Her final words were “go make some money”! This time I had a housing allowance and a company car. I thought I had just won the lotto! I made a quick trip out to check the lay of the land and then returned to load up the family and drive back out to Utah.

Once there we had to find accommodation, get our goods unloaded and settle in, this while I was working every day. I cannot say we were getting used to standard company procedures, because you never do. It is always a pain in the butt, however with the proper backup (Deysi) it always seemed to work, out in the end. I fondly remember our house hunting experience. We picked the city of Ogden, Utah as the place we wanted to live. It was closest to the pipe fabrication shop where I would be spending 95% of my time. Ogden was not a huge city, about 62,000 at that point. It was situated on the western slope of the Wasatch Mountains and overlooked the Great Salt Lake.

The housing in this city was not what you would call pretty, modern or even acceptable. I was worried my girls would continue right on thru town and head for Alberta. However we did find a very acceptable house, in the one upscale district of town. It was a little higher up the mountain and overlooked Weber State University. In fact we looked right down upon their football stadium. If I crossed the street from home I had a great view of the football games. They had a fairly good football program at that time. It wasn’t exactly Brigham Young but it was pretty good. The house looked out over the Great Salt Lake a couple of miles to the west of us. We watched the sun set over the lake many times. Anyway on to house hunting.

Couple that owned the house, just happened to live next door to it. When we applied for the rental, they invited us over for an interview and general chat. We sat out on their upper pool deck, sipping lemonade and got to know a little bit about each other. They were middle aged and appeared to be well “heald”. Apparently, the reason they had bought, the house next door, was that it had a humongous tree growing in the side of the yard which blocked their view of the University, downtown and the north side of the Great Salt Lake. They bought it just so they could cut that damned tree down and free up their view.

Now, they were looking for a young professional couple like us to rent to. They liked us we liked them, a deal was done and we had just rented one of the very few acceptable homes in the city. One thing I might add about our neighbourhood, a couple of street behind us and further up the side of the mountain was a great purple monstrosity of a castle looking home. It was truly palatial. We were told it was called the Pimple Palace, because it was owned by the local dermatologist. We are now settled into Ogden, Utah, Ron is enrolled in a good school fairly close by, I am at work, Ange doesn’t know what the hell is happening at that point and Deysi is getting settled into a new adventure. Not much fazed this woman. Let the fun and games begin.