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Show enabled them to live in the "more civilized" Salt Lake valley and commute com-mute to work. Fifty years ago Bingham waa home for 5,000 miner and boasted thirty saloons. Gambling halls ran round the clock. Other places stayed stay-ed open till the cows came home. There was good fellowship and little or no class distinction. On Main Street, matrons of integrity chatted on even terms with girls from "the houses." Now the town is joyless and the miners, grown effete, drive to Salt Lake to see a movie. In the elementary elemen-tary school, children in half-empty classrooms pasted Christmas decorations decor-ations on the grimy windows. The town, for the first time in memory, has no Christmas tree. (The above article was taken from the Sunday, December I I, issue of the New York Times, sent to Mrs. Helen Sullenger by her daughter, dau-ghter, Charlotte Rasmussen.) the ramshackle wooden buildings of Main Street that formerly housed some of the gaudiest saloons and gambling dens West of the Rockies. The town has been on the skids for several years. A $400,000 fire, started by 'children in an old theater roared down the canyon in 1932 destroying much of Bingham. Six years earlier snowslides all but Wiped out the little suburb of Highland High-land Boy. A cloudburst and landslides land-slides smashed the Markham Gulch section of Bingham in 1930. But Bingham's coup de grace was the eix month strike of Kennecott miners that ended last February. Never noted for its charm, Bingham took on an increasingly slum-tike air during the long lay-off. Shopkeeper Shop-keeper and property owner decided decid-ed to give up the ghost and sell out to Kennecott, if the company would buy. Kennecott officials said that the ore underneath Bingham was not valuable but that demolition of the buildings and widening of narrow, meandering Main Street would make access to the mine easier. They agreed that Bingham had "Ut'ived its usefulness. The m'ners had auto, and their new mobility TOWN IN UTAH IS DUE TO VANISH UNDER SHOVELS AND BULLDOZERS Bingham, Once Noted for It Gambling and Saloon, to Be Plowed Under Two weeks before Christmas this once lusty, brawling mining town feels lower than the bottom of Bingham Bing-ham Gulch, which it occupies. Reason Rea-son for the dumps: this Christmas will be Bingham' 't, Bingham, popuj -tion 2,500 will vanish in 1961. Bulldozer and power pow-er shovels of the Kennecott Copper Corporation will crunch and devour |