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Show How Trains Helped Win a War. ....... Richard C. Roberts 2 Getting Around Town ............. C. W. McCullough 6 Fritz Zaugg - Teenage Immigrant . . . . . . . . Douglas D. Alder 10 The Beginnings of Commercial Aviation .......... Charles S. Davey 13 Horses, Wagons, Drivers, Kids ............. C. Ray Balmforth 16 Utah's Newspapers 100 Years Ago ......... Sherilyn Cox Bennion 18 Lester F. Wire Invents the Traffic Light. .............. Linda Thatcher 22 The View from the North Rim.. ................. W. D. Rishel25 The Telenrawh Comes o ~ t a .6.. ........ Miriam 5. Murphy 29 DURING WORLD WAR II OGDEM UNION STATION WAS OME OF THE BUSIEST PLACES IN UTAH. TONS OF FREIGHT AND THOUSANDS OF SOLDIERS CAME THROUGH. BY RICHARD C. ROBERTS The good times of the 1920s came to an end in Ogden, as in other parts of the United States, during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Business declined, and many companies and industries even went broke. The railroads suffered along with other businesses. Both freight and passenger traffic declined. Thor Blair, who ran a newsstand at the Ogden Union Station, remembered that during the 1930s the trains were " sporadically" ridden by " gaunt men led by a faint hope of finding some employment" in a city some-where along the line. Sometimes the passenger cars ran almost empty. The 1930s were hard times, but the 1940s brought new business to the railroads as trains became a part of the nation's military system during World War II. The railroads & d their greatest volume of business carrying materials and hoops for the war effort. By 1944 the total railroad volume in the United States had in-creased to 783 billion ton- miles of freight. Passenger travel saw similar increases, with 95 billion passenger- miles recorded in 1944. During the war American railways carried 43 million members of the armed forces in 114,000 special troop trains. The Ogden Union Station on America's main east- west rail line serviced a bemendous amount of this wartime freight and passenger traffic. LeRoy Johnson, a Red Cap at the Ogden Union Station for over 40 years, re-called those busy days: " At one time, during World War 11, 62 passenger trains left the depot every day - streamliners from all over the nation carrying presidents, kings, ambas-sadors, movie stars, doctors, lawyers, authors, poets - and just people - thousands of them, every day, from all walks of life." During that time 18 Red Caps " worked around the clock to help all these people on and off the trains." TrwpTmh Tom Zito, who worked in the Ogden Union Pacific shops beginning in 1941, also remembred the war years at the station. He said the hoop irains " would come in there so fast and so thick that people [ would] just run |
