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UTAH PRESS ASSOCIATION penned, he turned his attention to a wide variety of subjects ranging from wheat, livestock, farming and highways to marriage and housekeeping. His early editorials campaigned for competent teachers with "good, prompt pay" and advocated they spend much of their leisure time "resting up." There was no objection, he said, to teachers going to a dance or indulging in "other innocent amusement," but he advocated they "be in bed by 10p.m." On one occasion, Dr. Richard's tongue-in-cheek lead editorial read, in part, "As you are or should be always ready for a little or nothing, anything or everything, according to circumstances, we give you a dish of suckertash (sic) from the old world, as a kind of editorial, and hope you will be edified and blessed in your meal after a long fast." Pages of the News frequently carried reference to new products - a timely subject indeed since the civilization Mormon emigrants had left behind was constantly offering new and better ways of living. There was space devoted, as well, to "do-it-yourself projects - most appropriate, too, inasmuch as almost everything was a do-it-yourself project in this new land so far from other habitation. Other articles discussed scientific matters and a variety of topics ranging from tanning and gardening to Church history and sermons. The paper, of course, carried the day-to-day news of the area, though the tendency was to somewhat play down the more tragic events which were part and parcel of frontier living. Dr. Richards was a man of many talents. In his native Massachusetts, where he was born June 24, 1804, he had become both a dentist and what was then referred to as a "doctor of herbs." It is noteworthy that his descendants have included many medical doctors. The Richards Memorial Medical Foundation commemorates him and from it has come the Memorial Medical Center in Salt Lake City. He was a cousin of Brigham Young and was brought into the Latter-day Saints Church as an indirect result of this rela- 616 |
