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Show Salt Lake to settle down and live he said, "Boy, it's a much more churchly city than it was when he left. That the battle had been lost. That the schools were more or less controlled by good faithful Mormons." That Brigham Young University was way on the upswing. That more and more business controls in the hands of the church. I didn't do as much thinking about the church then as I, say, had maybe in later days. What would concern me then in the sixties was, now by this time I was the correspond-ent for the New York Times here and Newsweek so I'd get much more involved in stories concerning industry, Ind-ians, the church, reclamation, things like that. And you became conscious of a power structure and the power structure, as it were, centered in Salt Lake,downtown power structure. The president of the Chamber of Cornrr~erce, I mean, the Executive Director of the Chamber of Commerce, was a man named Backman, Gus Backman. Gus would meet reg-ularly with the publisher of the Tribune, Fitzpatrick, a Catholic and with David 0. McKay, the head of the church. And Gus was a kind of a swingman, as it were. Business, helping to bring about some balance between the Catholics when who I the Tribune, you know, first was founded by the mining people, by Kearns and people like that, was bitterly anti-Mormon. Bitterly anti-church. There'd been an rappro-chement almost because of Backman and Fitzpatrick was a kind of a gentler force than the Kearns family that owned the Tribune. McKay was a rather gentler force, I think, 47 |
