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Show the old fades out into the dim pastThis is the story of a university, a story told in a few words and pictures of the year 1958-59; an almost peaceful year on a tired world blemished with strife from Berlin to China. And in the apparently peaceful little valley of the Great Salt Lake, people enjoyed the balmy fall weather and watched it turn the leaves of the trees brown. The sun moved further to the south, and stretched the shadows out across the hilly terrain; then people watched indifferently as it became winter in the valley. Winter was usually cold and damp, and was always done in shades of gray. Thin black smokestacks smeared the hazy gaunt sky with darkened smoke stains; and even Christmas with the colored lights and busy shoppers didn't brighten things much. So it went until March, or later.Finally green grass overtook the gray hillsides, the woes of winter melted with the passing snow. Gay Persephone entered the valley with her lengendary warmth. She was still young and fresh-smelling with all of her mythical charm that made winter seem so far away, that opened the cherry blossoms, that made the larks sing, and that could make the most sad glad to be alive. Crisp rains wetted her path, and in the evenings the valley glittered like a dis-membered night carnival, and some people would drive into the surrounding foothills just to get a long, long look at such a scene, they say.Such are the climates and environs of the University of Utah. Set in a typical temperate zone at the base of the Wasatch Mountains, 25,000 people, more or less, teach or study or work. They read and talk or light the furnaces, they complain, do research or cut the grass. They join fraternities, give lectures and wash windows. These things they do, and more. Here is a complexly moving little social organ, bigger than some of the communities that its students come from, under the direct control of the governor and a board of regents including the president. There is a student government too, but it's like student government almost anywhere else, next to impotent.This is the community of education, the University, 446.6 square acres of "prairie grassland" have since 1900, been converted into paths, classrooms, flower beds, and parking lots. Every day, five days a week, 10,000 students trek between their halls of ivy and others of glass and steel. Nestled on the lower part of the campus, is a world of the early 1900's, of late neo-classic architecture, of marble veneer, and behind it ranging structures of porcelin and glass entrenched in the hills. This is the campus of the University 1959, as different as Kitty Hawk and White Sands. Only strings of humanity tie the two together and breath life into each.A quaint circle of buildings knit tightly together under the protection of great blue spruces and lacy black trunked elms mark the original site of the institution, "oldest university west of the Missouri River." They stand in elder dignity with dirty, sooted faces, with haughty limestone pillars scaling in abuse from the winds and rains that have beat against them for more than a half century. Their stable authority remains, but now somewhat sheltered behind growing, concealing shrubbery, getting a welcome rest from scrutiny.The bronze image of a former president, John R. Park, gazes silently over the campus and the valley far below. |