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Show Dignity maintained even though we won By MARCELLA WALKER Saturday night was the annual awards presentation for the Utah Press Association at its convention in Salt Lake City. I always look forward to this event because it is fun to receive awards for your past year's accomplishments. accom-plishments. There is also a certain amount of trepidation as you fear that you might not receive any awards at all. It was gratifying to receive a first place award for Best News Story for the reporting of the Mur-dock Mur-dock Canal break last spring. I wished that Jack Hill could be there to receive the first place award for Best Sports Column. He really deserved it. It would h ave been nice if Mark Bezzant could have been there to get his third place award for Best Feature Column. Incidently, someone recently sent a letter to Mark Bezzant at the newspaper with him addressed as editor. Mark is a columnist, not an editor. The writer may have had him confused with Brett Bezzant, publisher of the Pleasant Grove Review. We also received a third place award for my series on Emergency Preparedness and a second place for In-House promotion. When some awards were an- i nounced the staffs of those newspapers newspa-pers went bananas and whistled and yelled and clapped. We from the Newtah Newspapers, Newspa-pers, Pleasant Grove Review, American Fork Citizen, and Lehi Free Press, tried to use decorum and did not holler out. Our publisher, Brett, came down to us later and asked us where our cheers and enthusiasm was. I don't know but I do know that each one of us was proud, especially American Fork who won the General Excellence Award. Brett will be president of the Utah Press Association for the coming year. That is a pretty prestigious pres-tigious honor and we are very proud of him. Between sessions at the convention, conven-tion, my husband and I decided to go out to the Valley Fair Mall and see what all was new. It is one of my favorite malls anyway and it has been remodeled. We saw some of the most outlandish out-landish outfits on some of the young men that I have ever seen. A couple of kids had on jeans which had been ripped and torn in so m any places on the legs th at only tiny threads were holding some of the slits to each other. One had holes in the backside so that you could see the bottom of the boy's shorts underneath. I guess I should just be glad that he at least had some on underneath. It could have been worse. I think the boys were a bit self conscious about there attire by the way they acted but they were determined deter-mined to not let it faze them and they went on their way. I found a nice pair of dress shoes on sale, too. That was an extra bonus. Parking was near impossible. Saturday is always bad at any mall but it was worse than ever because the snow piles took up so much room and left only narrow lanes to drive through and when you parked your car stuck so far out that you were afraid it would get bumped. Salt Lake is getting worse and worse for traffic all the time. I hardly know a soul that likes to leave good old P.G. and go up there to do anything other than drive through on the freeway. We haven't been to shop in downtown Salt Lake for so long that it would all be like a brand new experience to us if we went. It is hard to find a parking place at the University Mall sometimes and once in a while you cannot even find a parking place in downtown Pleasant Grove, but I'll take it all any day over a trip to Salt Lake. Have you ever tried to find a drinking fountain in a hotel? While we were waiting for a seminar to begin on Saturday I was thir sty . I m ade a complete circuit of the ground floor at the hotel and never did find a fountain. I finally got brave and went into an empty room that had been set up for a seminar which had a water dispenser on a table along with fine glassware. I helped myself. It was fine and quenched my thirst, but Salt Lake water is sure not as good as Pleasant Grove water. That is for sure. So I had my annual trip to the big city and it may be some time before we get up there again. In fact, the newspaper convention will be in St. George next year (they alternate between Salt Lake and St. George) and so it may be even longer before I get to the metropolis. metropo-lis. It is funny, but nearly every trip we have made to Salt Lake this past year has been to the Salt Palace. Pal-ace. We go straight there and come straight home. We don't dilly dally in town at all. I think I have been to two or three weddings at the Salt Lake Temple an d to the Salt Pal ace to see the Globetrotters and the Festival of Trees all within the past year. p Think spring! |