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Show This is the place? i Utah: Tension on the 125th birthday ...... . ti- r 1, LJMMWW" 111 JWfPZm Wf-WV" By BILL MARLING Chronicle Staff (Salt Lake City) - The 24th of July is a public holiday in Utah celebrating the arrival of the Mormon pioneers in 1847. It is more important here than the Fourth of July. Everything is closed and thousands of people line a 16-block parade route downtown to watch the "Days of '47 Parade." Legions of horsemen clop by, along with high school bands, blonde baton twirlers, and dozens of floats commemorating Brigham Young and the Mormon forefathers. The event invokes native moods of patriotism, religion, and rugged individualismall in-dividualismall at once. By most accounts this year's parade was a good one. The newspapers noted the "dazzling array of floats" and general "bubbling gaiety of the crowd" which had gathered "to pay homage to the pioneers." the change which urbanization has wrought on the nuclear , family. The Church began as a gathering of families, a huge tribe of believers. They established ( themselves in Utah as a huge inter-related extended family. 1 But the decline of community i with neighbors and the erosion of paternal power which has undermined un-dermined the old family structure , elsewhere, is destroying the nuclear family here also. And if ; the bricks decay, the superstructure super-structure will crumble. And how can a 73-year-old man sitting in a white office building battle the erosions of urbanization the marijuana, the fast cars, the fear, the heroin, the mobility, the pornography, the sexual liberalism, the smog, the industryall in-dustryall of which seem to spring from the rugged in- dividualist tradition he t s represents? t The Mormon Church is too . larp-e r.n he one bis familv S ----- - .v -'1 transportation nexus of a huge chunk of land; everything between Denver and San Francisco, Boise and Phoenix, feeds through here. After a while, naturally, Utahns got the mobility twitch. They were used to driving 200 or 300 miles a day to shop at a department store or visit relatives. So their children left when they discovered it was only 600 miles to San Francisco. And rather suddenly the roads are filled with their parents in Winnebago campers, jeeps, Travel-alls, and trailers. But the kids don't notice they 're roaring off in vans, old pickups, slick Mustangs, and middle-class Pintos. All summer gas is cheap 28 cents a gallon and expressways now connect and cross-connect the smallest Centervilles of Utah with urban gargoyles like Los Angeles. Mobile Utah is no longer isolated or protected by its quartzite mountains and vast broiling deserts. The smell of conflict raises to the nose like the sharp scent of broken flint. Pioneers against mobility, fathers against sons, a profit-making church and nodding heroin dreams; only Gahan Wilson or Jules Feiffer could draw it correctly. The nev Church president is 73 and tfci Democrats send a 17-year-ok delegate to the national con vention. Over 4,000 heroin ad diets and few treatment centers The Church builds a new off j. building and its renega brother the polygarrn branch builds a new church south of Salt Lake. One of i cleverest skyjackers yet Richard McCoy turns out to V a law enforcement student ai Brigham Young University, where Church officials say he was an elder in his ward. Utah Democrats back McGovem ant Republicans seem to wish Goldwater was running again Planned Parenthood is banne from Bountiful, Utah, and th state attorney general declares abortion counseling illegal J meanwhile the Universit) Medical Center perform: thousands of sex chang operations. And above it all, on a brow hill in the mouth of Emigratioi Canyon, stands a statue o Brigham Young leader visionary, founder who stow here July 24, 1847, and pointe out into this hot dusty valley am said, "This is the place." It was a good day tor one pickpocket pick-pocket too. Brushing against the butts of paunchy suburbanites, she stole four wallets before noon. When she drove her new VW out Interstate 15 to her parents' ranch-house in suburban Holladay, she had $102, more than enough to support her modest heroin habit for a few days. The kind of grey and ethereal change most urban areas underwent un-derwent 10 or 20 years ago, making them restless, disconsolate, discon-solate, choked by speed and smog and competition has finally penetrated the land-locked provinciality of Utah. Urban America has broken into the last foot-locker of ruralism. Like the spring dust storms that blow off the Salt Flats and Nevada desert here, the new tension constricts and fogs the air. The decline of the Mormon Church, a flood of drugs, and tremendous mobility are triggering the most painful spasms Utah has seen since it forsook polygamy. In the midst of it all, of course, is the Mormon Church. It has built a new home; a gleaming white 30-story office building symbolic of the transition it hopes to make into the new age. It also has a new president in Elder Harold B. Lee, who at 73, is the youngest man chosen president in over twenty years. He is a Rambler of a man; functional, uninspiring, but dependable enough to be around for another twenty years. The question is; will it take that long for Lee and the Mormon Church to recognize what is happening? The Mormons' main problem is anymore. It is a multi-million dollar corporation with interests in radio and television, printing and coal mining, and agriculture and food processing. While it manipulates its business with a keen sense of capitalist expediency, ex-pediency, it also holds the post of moral grandfather; operating welfare farms and factories, youth programs, and Mutual Improvement Im-provement Associations. It has held this organization together by citing tradition; the Church has always been an economic, as well as social and religious, organization. But everyone is skeptical. Critics point out that the Church pays no tax on earnings or holdings. Even a little boy whose family was visiting historic Temple Square was overheard saying to his father, "Boy, I bet they make a bundle off this place." If the Mormons don't make a bundle, it's not because they aren't trying. Their ideology is now a hard-sell package presented in public relations terms which would be unrecognizable to those polite missionaries who used to tour Eastern neighborhoods years ago. Each year the geniality becomes lighter and the sales approach gets heavier, as if the urgent salvation they preach can somehow avert the urban crisis at home. And the crisis of the Big City is imminent. Ten years ago Utah had only a few dozen heroin addicts. They didn't count either, for they lived in the Spanish-American Spanish-American barrios of Salt Lake City or the miserable slums of Ogden. Today an inside estimate places the number of heroin addicts in Utah between 4,000 and 5,000. Marijuana which once grew wild here by the name of hemp, and was used by the pioneers to make rope, is now a universal collegiate and middle-class middle-class fashion. After the "Days of '47" Parade, long-hairs sat on the City Hall lawn and lit up their joints without interference. Thousands of pounds are consumed con-sumed every year. Most of the marijuana comes directly to Utah from drop-sites along the Mexico-New Mexico-New Mexico border. Cocaine and speed unknown five years ago are used by another several thousand Utahns. In April police broke into a marijuana processing plant one block from the state capitol and confiscated 200 pounds of grass. In March, police in Sevier Junction, Utah, burned 900 pounds of grass they were holding as evidence, because dealers in the rural area tried six times to break into the evidence room. Only a few days after the Days of '47 Parade, a sheriff's posse arrested operators of an irrigated marijuana farm in desolate southern Utah which could have produced $1 million of grass at maturity. Drugs were undoubtedly introduced in-troduced to Utah by travelers. Both Jack Kerouac and Ray Mungo noted that Salt Lake, in particular, seems to be a city of transients. Its main routes are filled with the young, broke, old, and adventurous, all in need of a cup of coffee and a break, all swearing to leave when they get the money. Salt Lake is the vr ...... : r sccw BOY SCOUTS OF Afc j ts - - - ! ; ; ' " .V " I '- ' if ...f:'' ,;u'' :r ' ::tl r ' ' f' ' "' " 'W7Ti'r-" " d '"T77- --J-- db :rrr dc1 titir:1 |
