Now and again I’m tempted to feel sorry for myself, but then I think back to how hard life was back in the summer of 1966, when I first moved to what we here in Utah think of as “The Big City.” For those of us who grew up in Carbon County, it’s a daunting mission; most of my high school classmates, in fact, never got closer than the southern suburbs. However, I had an ally in the person of Clark Hunt, whose father was resident manager of The Cadillac Motel at the northwest corner of 21st South and Main in Salt Lake City. Thanks to Mr. Hunt, I was able to live rent-free in the motel’s basement, along with Clark, Clark’s cousin Steve, and a long haul truck driver whose name I forget. The Cadillac was convenient to Porky’s Diner on State Street, where I enjoyed a nightly 69-cent chicken fried steak supper. Breakfast consisted of standing downwind from the Famlee Bread Bakery and inhaling deeply.
Just north of the bakery was the O.C. Tanner Jewelry Company, maker of LDS perfect attendance badges, of which I had won more than any other member of my home ward. It was at the Tanner Conference Center where I met Susan, daughter of my boss at the Jewel Tea Company where I had landed a job by answering each and every question of the written application incorrectly. Susan was affixing carnations to the lapels of Jewel Company route salesmen, of which I was the greenest and least successful. Nonetheless, we soon became a couple.
I suppose this is how many success stories begin. Newcomer to the big city marries the boss’s daughter and thereby rises to a managerial position in spite of having no qualifications. However, that’s not how it worked out in my case. By summer’s end the romance had fizzled out, as had my dreams of saving enough money to pursue a master’s degree in creative writing at the University of the Americas in Mexico City. A last minute application to the University of Utah was turned down on grounds that I didn’t meet the “high standards” of that esteemed institution of higher learning. No matter, I relocated from the Cadillac Motel to a room on University Street, where for the next several months I went through the motions of studenthood whilst forging friendships with people who were determined to help improve my lot, one of whom fixed me up with a sorority girl who, according to my friend, was J. Willard Marriott’s daughter.
Afterward, he asked me how it had had gone.
“Well, she is plain-faced and dull,” I said. “We have nothing in common and I’m pretty sure there won’t be any second date.”
My friend was taken aback. “Did I not I tell you she is J. Willard Marriott’s daughter?”
So, 1966 was a year of missed opportunities, business-wise, and that winter I became quite depressed. But then came spring, followed by the so-called “summer of love,” and things soon got a whole lot better.
