7-10-2015 St. George, UT

Brigham Young was born in 1801, the son of a veteran of the Revolutionary War.  He had 11 days of formal education and his mom taught him to read.  He learned to work with glass and wood and that came in handy when he started building cities and temples.  In fact, he gave Miles Romney, Mitt’s great grandpa, pointers on how to modify the lovely spiral staircases in the St. George Tabernacle. Miles was insulted, by the way, because he considered those staircases his “crowning achievement.” Once again, management trumps talent.  Anyway, back to the story.

 Brigham Young wasn’t born a Mormon, that book fell into his hands when he was 29 years old.  I’m guessing that he believed in polygamy since he wound up fathering 57 kids and I don’t think any one wife would’ve put up with that!  In fact, he had at least one wife with whom he didn’t have kids so we know that at least a few of them must have thrown the horny old goat off a couple of times.

He lived in Salt Lake, mostly, but had pretty bad health toward the end and became a “snowbird,” building a home in St. George for the winter months.

Brigham Young's winter home & Old Rob

This original home still stands and is furnished with quite a few pieces that were owned by the Young family, including their china and furniture made of

pine table painted to look
like mahogany

pine and painted to look like oak and mahogany.  He lived in this home only a few years, dying in 1877.

pine balcony painted to look
like oak

There are numerous historical places still standing and in operation in St. George.  One is the Thomas Judd Store Co., a mercantile that traded in just about everything but mostly candy and other treats.  It is still open for business, featuring a soda fountain, baskets of old candies and wooden cases of bottled soda.  They will prepare an ice cream cone or make you a root beer float.  Back then, they also pumped Dixie gasoline.

OH NO!  A "Dixie" gas pump

 (The name Dixie is prevalent around here but there are a bunch of liberals in this town who now think that the name “Dixie” should be eliminated, all that reference to confederacy and slavery, don’tchaknow.  Fortunately, so far, they have been outvoted and roundly chastised.)

Inside Judd's Store

The Mormons were a hard-working lot, like ants.  The Morris House, for example, was scheduled for demolition but it was decided to move the house instead and rescue nearly a century of history.  Power lines were even taken down to allow the flatbed containing the house to pass.  On the final lap, the flatbed tripped over a curb, an axle broke, tie-down cables snapped and the whole house collapsed in a heap.  The people were devastated and painstakingly reassembled the home one brick at a time.  Another fellow, Benjamin Pendleton, wanted a home but only had 3 forms for making bricks.  So he made 3, waited for them to dry and cure, then made 3 more.  When he had enough bricks, he built his home.  Most of the old homes, including the Young Winter Home, were built to fend off the oppressive Summer heat with 18” thick walls.

Snow Canyon State Park is named for Erastus Snow who founded St. George and became the President of the Cotton Mission.  The park is an amazing display of lava flows and enormous red and white steeple formations, red containing ferric oxide and white lacking it.  The majesty and contrast against the deep blue sky is striking.

Snow Canyon State Park
 & red Jeepster

Snow Canyon State Park & red rocks

Careful where you step and do not piss off the constrictor king snake, one of which, Jake the Snake, lives in comfort and joy at the park ranger’s office after a car sort of flattened a few feet of him.  Another animal is one you will not see, the chuckwalla.  So many tourists have captured and kidnapped them for pets that the poor iguana-like creature has been all but eliminated from the wildlife population of the park.  This speaks volumes to those who would hug trees and “preserve nature.” You can’t buy an iguana, you have to swipe one from the wilderness?  How do you cuddle up with a lap-iguana, anyhow?  Maybe Little Iggy sleeps on your pillow?

We are having so much fun that we scheduled 2 additional days, first, to play pickleball.  As for the courts, 12 more are materializing before our eyes at Little Valley.  Their goal is 24 courts and then they will qualify for senior and other national competitions.  Three to four hours of play for 7 days straight and I am wasted!  I am also exhausted from playing pickleball.

The other reasons we had to stay extra days are, second, we had to eat one more time at Cappeletti’s.  Third, we had to attend the Hubcaps oldies concert

Rockin' out to The Hubcaps
in the St. George Tabernacle

in the Mormon Tabernacle.  This evening, Jeremiah was not a prophet.   He was a bullfrog wearing blue suede shoes in a tabernacle!  The gray-haired elderly brothers (and sisters) snapped their fingers and sang all the words!  Goodness gracious, great balls of fire!  God, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Beatles and Elvis were in the building tonight rocking out on the altar!

Well, it is time to activate Bee’s homing device.  These are all the words I have left in my fingers so good bye for now , my faithful t-loggers, and hello Pahrump.

7-7-2015 St. George, Utah

The troublemaker Mormons were booted out of the Midwest.  They were making lots of babies and changing the voting block.  (Today, this is apparently OK.    Ahem.)  So the government told the Mormons to make themselves scarce.  They decided not to move to another occupied place and face more problems, they needed to go to the middle of nowhere where they could do their own thing without any interference.  Which is where Utah came in.  Utah was out in the middle of nowhere and not even in the USA.  So they got these wooden carts that had two wheels and two handles, like rickshaws, and walked to Utah.  Yes, they walked to Utah from Illinois.  The women wore long petticoats and dresses and got pregnant a lot and the men… well, they entertained themselves by getting the women pregnant, for example.  I would have needed to live in Utah really, really bad.

Joseph and Hiram Smith were murdered in a jail in IL (So much for freedom of religion.) so Brigham Young took over and started the emigration ~1846.  St. George was populated ~ 1861.  The families who moved to St. George decided it sucked and started getting restless to move back to Salt Lake so Brigham Young tasked them to build a tabernacle.

St. George Tabernacle

They all thought that was a good idea and it brought everybody together to focus on a project.
It took 13 years to build it and they were kind of poor so they used pine instead of pricey woods like oak.  A craftsman painter taught the folks how to paint the pine so every square inch of everything everywhere was painted with different shades of brown to look like oak, cherry and mahogany.

Pine painted to look like oak in the tabernacle

Painted pine in Brigham Young's home

The tabernacle has a lot of glass, 2,244 panes, that were shipped from NY.  They knew the glass would not survive the bumpy ride across the plains so the glass was put on a ship and sailed around the tip of S. America to Los Angeles and then carted on wagons to St. George.  A lot of the glass panes in the tabernacle are the original pieces, swirled and blurry with age.

Silver was found a short distance from St. George and a community of miners was established at Silver Reef.  They were mostly Catholics.  Fr. Scanlan wanted to hold a high mass for his Catholic flock but they had no church so Brother McFarlane offered them the use of the Mormon Tabernacle.  The Catholics didn’t have a choir to sing the hymns that fit into various parts of the liturgy so the Mormon choir learned all the hymns in Latin and the big event, the Catholic mass, took place on May 29, 1879 in the St. George Mormon Tabernacle.  There were more curious Mormons at the ceremony than there were Catholics.  By the way, there are Mormon churches, tabernacles and temples and I have no clue as to the difference but if I find out, you’ll be the first to know.

Augustus Hardy was the town sheriff in the 1860s.

Sheriff Augustus Hardy (L)

A miner went postal and murdered the foreman at Silver Reef so Sheriff Hardy arrested him and had him behind bars at the Hardy House where the little quarry rock jail was located.

Jail where guilty prisoners were
apparently baked to death

This pissed off an unruly mob that broke into the Hardy House, stole the keys to the jail and kidnapped the prisoner.  He was taken out and hanged, probably from a tree, since there was a copula added to the courthouse building for hangings but it was never used.  Sheriff Hardy was pissed, too.  He had a prisoner stolen from his jail.  Prisoners are often thieves but thieves are not usually stolen.

In Spain, if you want to stop in at a saloon and have a beer, you have to order food to go with it.  They call it a “tapa” because you put the snack on a plate and set it on top of your beer like a cover.  Well, St. George, Utah has established the same rule.  If you want to stop in for a cold beer, you MUST order food to go with it.  I like this.  Don’t outlaw beer, inlaw food!  Good idea.  So we broke up the tour of the city to stop in for a cold frosty and fries.  More to come.

7-4-2015 St. George, UT

The hail storm and deluge cleared up as suddenly as it had arrived.  These aren’t “normal” for this area but there are a lot of warning signs around for those who like to hike in the canyons and arroyos.  They don’t need to worry themselves about me.  I do not believe in snakes, spiders or gully washers, they all should be against the law.

The locals didn’t blink.  The 4th festivities went on as usual.  We went down to the biergarten but they didn’t believe I was 21 without an ID, those rascals.  So we found a different place to have a fine Italian dinner, Cappeletti’s.  An appetizer of insalata caprese was first.  The mozzarella was so freshly-made that the kind waitress apologized for the delay.  Freshly-made, like right now, not kidding.  The cheese is kneaded and then woven into a braid and submerged into a tub of hot water, then squeezed and sliced. The cheese on the salad was still warm, drizzled with fresh basalmic vinegar sauce and topped with freshly-made ground walnut and basil pesto.  It was divine!  Not even in Italy did I experience mozzarella fresh off the hoof or warm from the pot in the last 30 minutes (at least, not of which I am aware).  Escuisito!  The rest of our dinner and the accompanying chianti was also perfecto!

This morning we sang “Happy Birthday” to our wonderful USA.  There aren’t that many reasons to get up early, trust me, but getting a front row seat at the Fourth of July parade is a good one.  This was not the spectacle that occurs in Flagstaff, by any means.  It was over in an hour.  The parade, however, was rife with American flags, soldiers, military vehicles and one very old veteran who served in 3 wars; WWII, Korea and Viet Nam, just like Dad DeLaMare.  His birthday is today.  Happy birthday to you, too, brave soldier, and thank you.  (At the rv park, we also met John Burkholder.  He flew the Corsair 2 off of the Midway.  His dog’s name is “Midway.”  Thank you, too, John.)

After the parade, we went to Worthen Park to see what else was shaking.  There were lots of rides, food vendors and a bit of music.  Oh, and gaggles of little miniature Mormons in strollers.  Indeed, veritable herds of them.  These are little miniature conservative hatchlings.  This can only be a good thing and I enjoyed the feeling of being among birds of a feather.

Suddenly at the park, Rob’s antennae went up as he heard the familiar, “pop, pop, pop.”  What the…?  Do we hear pickleballs?  We followed the sound as it got louder until we found them!  Six courts!  Yay!  Home to Bee we scurried, changed into our game clothes, grabbed our gear and we were off like a dirty shirt!  An hour and a half later, in the heat and humidity, we couldn’t take one more swing.  Of course, we were playing against 30-somethings and they played our pants off (there’s a vision).  Now, we be bitten.  We had heard of other courts here and so went to have a look see.  These 12 are designer, complete with canopies for shade and, yes, a wind sock!  A wind sock, seriously?

Aerial view Little Valley

The plan is to add 16 more.  So far, we have come across 22 courts and Rob just found 14 more on the net.  We may have found a reason to move to Utah.  Not MANY reasons, A reason.  High taxes, our minority status as non-Mormons and the scarcity of saloons are sniggly problems.  (“Toto, I don’t think we’re in Wisconsin, anymore.”)  Granted, Utah has snow and temples.  At our age, snow is something you look at and gasp, “Wow, look how deep the snow is!” and then wait for it to melt.  I guess you wait in the temples since saloons are, shall we say, not so frequent whereas there are veritable gaggles of temples.  Many more than pickleball courts and without the windsocks.

Windsockless Temple

7-3-2015 4th of July in St. George, UT

7-3-2015 ST. GEORGE, UTAH

On the subject of “What to do over the 4th,” votes were tossed into the hat including our usual favorite, Flagstaff, where we’ve been several times for their 3 hour long parade and festivities in the local parks.  Rob’s research brought up St. George, Utah for the parade, craft fair and jazz festival in the park biergarten (in UTAH?!).  Lindy’s reply is ,”YUP!”  So we returned from the MSRA Cruise-In in St. Paul, spent just enough time (one week) recovering from the fever and cold I caught there, packed up Bee and embarked on the fairly short trip (~180 miles).  Logistically short, yes.  About 20 miles from our final destination, however, road construction brought us to a halt.  They are building a new bridge (Do it in the Summer or don’t do it at all, as we often say in the Midwest.) through the mountains and so it was an hour to travel the last few miles.  The tall red rocky crags were most beautiful,

if a little intimidating, with the tiny trickle of the Virgin River snaking its way far, far below.  Bee kept her cool in the 110F heat on the climb, always a little worrisome, and here we are at Temple View RV Resort, sitting on our porch, sipping a cold brew with a fine… er… view of the temple.

Why is it called St. George?  First, Joseph Smith started all that Mormon hullabaloo and he was the first President of the Mormon Church.  When he died, Brigham Young picked up the torch and agreed to export the troublesome Mormons out of the Midwest (mostly Illinois) and head out west.  Thus, the Emigrant Trail was born.  When I say “emigrant” it is because the Mormons were actually leaving the USA.  They settled in the Utah territory.  Joseph Smith’s cousin, George, was instrumental in the creation of St. George, or “Dixie” as it was nicknamed.  He and his buddies, apostles, were sent here with their wives (epistles) and 300 families to begin colonizing the area and start raising cotton crops (thus, “Dixie”), to supply themselves and to market the rest. George was called the “Potato Saint,” because he convinced people to eat raw unpeeled potatoes to fight scurvy, which apparently worked, all that vitamin A, don’tchaknow.  So at least one story says that St. George was named after George, Joseph Smith’s cousin.  They all call each other “saint,” which I kinda like.  Saint Krauser has a nice ring to it.

Today, we saw dinosaur tracks at the Dinosaur Discovery Site.  A guy named Sheldon Johnson was tilling his farm land and he had removed about 20 feet of rock layers (Would you have given up?) when some of them split open laterally.  Between the layers were all these footprints and fish bone

T. Rex (R) just for comparison

fossils, skeletons and even leaves and branches.  They hit the jackpot with this and now, for a fee of course, you can walk through their small museum to see it all up close and personal.  The dating on some artifacts indicate ages in the millions of years, in some cases 70-250 million years old.  Makes you kinda wonder why Adam and Eve got such a late start, eh?

Rob (on the R with the hat)

We’ve been scouting out the town and trying to figure out where we’ll situate ourselves for the grand parade tomorrow.  While doing this the sky turned rather black.  By the time we got back to Bee, we had ourselves a storm, rain and big hail.  The rv site we were originally going to choose, next to the one we are in, was submerged under a foot of water.  We got soaked to the bone battening down the hatches.  We even pulled the Jeepster up under the awning as much as possible to try to preclude hail damage.  I was a bit frightened.  Over the thunder, amid the gale force winds, Rob shouted frantically, “You want a beer?!”  “Well… yeah.  What’s a little hail?”

Hail to the Jeep