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Retirement? Effie Ensign Merrill Never Left the Workforce
Many Utahns look forward to – or worry about – a comfortable retirement. But having the financial security to leave paid work after a long career is a concept that is relatively modern.When Effie Merrill’s husband died in 1915, there were few…
Navajo Code Talker Samuel Holiday
Meet Samuel Holiday, whose traditional Navajo upbringing shaped his work as a code talker and changed the course of World War II.When Samuel Holiday was forced to attend a government boarding school for Native American children, he was forbidden to…
Frank Chester Robertson: Dreamweaver
Meet Frank Chester Robertson, the famous Utah author who made his living writing popular Westerns that belied his own life of desperation on the Mormon frontier.Frank Robertson wasn’t exactly the kind of writer groomed in literary circles. Born…
E.A. Miller & Sons: Big Company in a Small Town
Learn about E.A. Miller & Sons, a small family business started during the Great Depression, and how it grew to be part of the world’s largest beef producer.In 1935, in the small town of Hyrum, in Utah’s rural Cache Valley, Ernest and…
Howard Coleman: Stepping Stones to a Better Life
Meet Howard Coleman, who came West with the railroad and built a better life – one job at a time.Like many of us, Howard Coleman used his work as a stepping stone to a better life. As a black man and the son of a Kentucky share-cropper, his…
Gus Faust - American Doughboy
Utah sent thousands of infantrymen into World War I where they faced unimaginable conditions on the battlefield. But when the war ended, the battle continued at home, where returning soldiers faced a changing economy, uncertain job prospects, and a…
Labor Rationing in Utah’s Depression Economy
Meet Barney Flanagan and learn how it fell to him to keep corruption out of government-funded work-relief jobs in Utah during the early years of the Great Depression.When you hear about shortages during the Great Depression, you probably imagine…
The Rockville Bridge
Learn how the 1924 construction of a little bridge in the middle of nowhere put southern Utah’s people to work and opened the region’s scenic wonders to the world.By 1924, fifteen years after Zion Canyon became a national monument – and later a…
Utah's Rosies
You’ve seen her. She wears the red bandanna and a blue collared shirt, flexing her bicep with a look that says, “get to work.” She’s Rosie the Riveter, and Utah had an army of them.When American men deployed to the front lines during World…
Hollywood Puts Utah to Work
Utah’s romance with the movie industry began in the 1920s silent film era and hasn’t diminished since. Nearly a thousand motion pictures and television series have filmed in Utah, bringing millions each year to the state. Learn how Hollywood…
Legacy of the Wagner Bag Company
Learn how one family went literally from “bags to riches” and how a son honored his mother’s legacy by naming after her one of Salt Lake’s most noted buildings.When Izzi Wagner lost his father, he was just sixteen. Life was hard for his…
Pablo O’Higgins: Mexican Muralist
The Mexican Mural Renaissance is one of the most famous art movements in modern history. Learn how a blond-haired, blued-eyed, 20-year-old from Salt Lake City became a Mexican Muralist. In 1924, Utah judge Edward Higgins put his twenty-year-old…
Working for the Best Snow on Earth
Utahns have looked to the mountains for minerals, lumber, water, and even grazing lands. But how were our mountains re-imagined into the skiing playgrounds we know today?Alpine skiers claim that Utah has the best snow on Earth. But before people…
Joseph Hansen: Right-Hand Man of Leon Trotsky
The 1940 assassination in Mexico City of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky has an odd Utah connection in Joseph Hansen, whose journey took him from a childhood in Richfield, Utah, to the deathbed of one of the most important leaders of the 20th…
Utah's Record-Making Aviator Russell Maughan
You’ve heard of record-making aviators Charles Lindberg, Amelia Earhart, and even the Wright Brothers. But who was Russell Maughan? Born and raised in Logan, Utah, Russell Maughan was a fighter pilot in World War I, and later served as a test…
Exile at Topaz
Thousands of Japanese Americans were forced into exile in the Utah desert during World War II. Two months after the December 1941 attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 mandating the…
It's a Bird! It's a Plane!
Airplanes played a pivotal role in attracting tourism to one southern Utah town. On September 27, 1920 the first airplane cast its shadow over Cedar City, Utah. Who was flying it? And why were they flying there? In the early 1920s,…
Vagabond Artist Everett Ruess
The wandering ways of a young artist and writer who mysteriously disappeared in 1934 into southern Utah’s rugged canyon country.Everett Ruess was twenty years old when he vanished into the canyons of southern Utah, never to be seen again. Born in…
Alien Registration Act of 1940
The United States has a long history of limiting immigration and managing migrants once they are here, including a campaign to register non-citizen immigrants living in Utah. Imagine you're a non-citizen living in Utah. When you open up your…
Weathering the Road
Think about your daily travel routines. What would you do without well-maintained roads, air-conditioning, or ways to entertain the kids? Did you know that 86% of American commuters drive cars to work and spend an average 50 minutes each day on the…