Tooele Flying Club Treasures: Old slides bring back memories of Tooele’s rich aviation history

Planes line up at Tooele’s first airstrip, which later became known as the Tooele City Municipal Airport. (Slide collection – Ed Dalton via tooeleonline.com)

The following piece originally appeared in the February 16, 2016 edition of the Tooele Transcript Bulletin.

Sometimes, the greatest treasures are those that lie closest to home, often hidden in plain sight.

Take, for example, the antique metal slide projector in Ed Dalton’s basement, which he stored there after his father passed away over a decade ago. It was only recently, while planning for a family reunion, that Dalton’s thoughts turned again to Dad’s old projector. That’s when the retired educator unlatched the heavy black box and noticed — for the first time — the small compartment built into the end of the case.

“It was full of slides,” recalled Dalton as he ran his finger along the stack of 35mm photographic slides that had sat undisturbed in their accidental time capsule for nearly 70 years.

He left the projector alone for fear of damaging it, but eventually a light table would illuminate the tiny transparencies and trigger an avalanche of nostalgia. There was a row of single-engine planes against an Oquirrh Mountain backdrop, a group of men posing beside a plane with the words “Toolee Bell” painted proudly on its nose. Another slide depicted Dalton’s sister, Brenda, at age 5 or 6, perched on the wing of their father’s plane.

Some of the slides were scenes from family trips. A few revealed Tooele City from the air. Most, however, captured the golden age of aviation in Tooele Valley — the lively postwar days when pilots flocked to the narrow airstrip southwest of downtown Tooele, hungry for air.

“It was a little treasure trove,” said Dalton.

Specifically, Dalton’s slides focus on the Tooele Flying Service and the non-commercial Tooele Flying Club, which were organized shortly after World War II by a group of pilots, businessmen and community leaders in Tooele. The most detailed account of their history comes from the journal of Tooele businessman LaVar Tate. According to Tate’s journal, the idea for a local aviation hub sprung from a dilemma: he loved to fly, but the closest airstrip was in Salt Lake City.

Tate purchased 80 acres of land in southwest Tooele City in the early 1940s to create Tooele Valley’s first airstrip. According to Tate, the dirt runway was graded with equipment from the Tooele Ordnance Depot by prisoners of war who were employed there. A hangar large enough to house two small planes was built with financing help from local physician Herb Milburn and Buck Inglesby.

Topo map of Tooele Municipal Airport (topoquest.com)

After the conclusion of World War II, Tate and Milburn organized the Tooele Flying Service and purchased their first plane, an Aeronca Chief, which they christened the “Toolee Bell.” By the mid-1940s, the fledgling airport boasted a flight school, several trainer aircraft, flight instructors and a mechanic.

Private and aspiring pilots flocked to the airstrip, their numbers bolstered by returning war veterans. Among those veterans was Dalton’s father, Edward Dalton III, who had served in the U.S. Army.

Another member of the Tooele Flying Club, Frank Eastman, was the company pilot for McFarland and Hullinger, a Tooele-based mining contractor that leased hangar space at the airstrip for its planes until 1987. Eastman often flew company founders Fayette McFarland and Sidney R. Hullinger to meetings in the region and return in storied fashion.

“He’d fly in and buzz the town so everybody knew they were coming in,” said Sid Hullinger, the latter founder’s son. “He’d get above the houses and rev the engines so we knew to go down and pick them up. If it was night, we’d drive two or three cars down there and light (the airstrip) with our headlights.”

It is unknown exactly when the Flying Club itself was formed or what specific events it might have held (Tate makes no mention in his journal entry), but Dalton said it provided a unique pastime for many local pilots.

The airstrip was deeded to Tooele City around 1948 so the Army Air Corps could pave the runway, but even then, takeoffs and landings could still get rocky. Former Tooele City Councilman Dave Faddis recalls driving the length of the runway to remove rocks and debris.

“Technically, it was not an airport,” said Faddis. “To be an airport, you have to have services and communications, and we never had those.”

Regardless, the airstrip eventually became known as the Tooele City Municipal Airport. It saw continued use until concerns about westward residential growth halted plans to develop it further. It closed in 1989 when Bolinder Field (now Tooele Valley Airport) opened in Erda. According to Faddis, the airstrip’s five hangars still stood at least into the late 1990s. Today the area is known colloquially as Tooele’s Education Corridor and is home to the Tooele Applied Technology College, the Tooele Community Learning Center and the new Utah State University Science Building.

There’s not much left of Tate’s aviation hub today, but as with Dalton’s slides, glimpses of the past can still be had. Most of the old airstrip still exists behind walls of brush and long grass, extending southward from the new USU building toward the Stockton Bar.

Dalton doesn’t know how or when the Tooele Flying Services and club officially disbanded. He said his father’s involvement largely ended when a stiff wind flipped his plane upside down on the flight apron. But that didn’t stop the elder Dalton from flying when he had the opportunity, and it didn’t curb the younger Dalton’s affection for the old airstrip.

Dalton, who serves as Executive Director of the Tooele County Education Foundation, reflected on the old days as he gazed down the airstrip during the grand opening ceremony of the USU Science Building last month:

“The view brought to mind a number of those stories told by my dad of those early flying days. I could visualize small planes coming and going, flying around town, buzzing the business district and returning to land and take off again. It must have been a busy airport 65-70 years ago.”

-Clint Thomsen

 

About that giant Christmas Tree in the foothills above Tooele

The Little Mountain Christmas Tree lights up in 2009. The tree has been a staple during the holiday season for the past 30 years. (Photo by Meagan Burr, Tooele Transcript Bulletin)

30 years ago, when Tooele residents Maxine Grimm and Paul Bevan teamed up to spread a little Christmas cheer, they never imagined that their homemade light display would become the valley’s most recognizable—and beloved—holiday symbol.

The 30 foot tall display known simply as “the Christmas Tree” became a wintertime staple. Thanks to volunteer efforts and generous donations from private companies, it has returned to its perch atop Little Mountain every year since. The tree’s current incarnation features 400 60 watt light bulbs strung taught from a cell tower. On clear nights, it can be seen as far north as I-80.

“There’s a story in everything,” said Grimm, 96, as she fondly recalled the project from her Tooele home. “I never dreamed I’d be a part of something that would be so inspirational.”

The Christmas Tree’s story began in 1979 when Grimm and Bevan set their sights on a flagpole on property owned by neighbor Doug Gordon. Positioned prominently atop the 5,515 foot Little Mountain,

the pole was visible from virtually anywhere in the valley. The friends had had flown Bevan’s 25 foot American flag from it on patriotic holidays. With a little work and some help from friends, they could transform the flagpole into a giant Christmas tree.

Bevan would take care of the technical legwork while Grimm, a longtime community service leader, would fund the project and handle public relations. Dugway Proving Grounds donated two large spools of electrical cable and Grimm talked her sister and several other friends into helping them wire the lights.

The work was done at night in the basement of Bevan’s father’s hardware store on Main Street, which is now occupied by the Sostanza restaurant. The friends laid strands of copper wire on long tables and spent long hours soldering patch cables every two feet.

“I think I was better at stripping the skin off my fingers than I was at stripping those copper wires,” Grimm laughed.

With the donated cable, the total cost for hardware—including Band-Aids—was about $500. They attached standard yellow bulbs and hauled their masterpiece to the top of Little Mountain, where they used the flagpole’s rope to raise the strands to the top. With the lights in place, it was time to breathe life into their giant Yuletide creation.

“When I finally threw switch, the lights came on like you couldn’t believe,” Bevan said. “It was brilliant.”

The brilliance lasted about a minute before things went horribly wrong.

“It was just like day, it was so bright,” Bevan said. “I was almost getting sunburned—and I was at the bottom of the hill!  Then all the sudden the bulbs started popping.”

Two Tooele County Search and Rescue members set up lights on Little Mountain in Tooele in 1982. (Photo courtesy Tooele County Search and Rescue)

Bevan quickly cut the power, but only after losing a third of the bulbs. He later realized he had plugged the 110 volt cable into a 220 volt source. Though she laughs about it now, Grimm says there was no smile on her face that night.

“It was horrible. We were so exhausted and we thought all that work was gone,” she said.

But Grimm and crew persevered. A local electrician re-wired the timer box, pro bono, and Grimm bought new bulbs. The newly repaired tree was re-lit to the delight of the valley’s communities, and the new tradition was born. Grimm said many Tooele residents used the tree as a beacon—a sort of landlocked lighthouse—to find their way on stormy nights.

Bevan originally kept the light strands hanging loose so they swayed in the wind like a ball gown. He said the tree had a distinct golden glow that that inspired awe and regularly attracted curious visitors.

Once he was visited by a traveler from I-80 who was en route to Salt Lake City when the tree caught his eye.

“There were no other lights around it,” Bevan said. “It just hung up there, suspended in the blackness. The guy drove 15 miles from the freeway just to ask about it.”

The Christmas Tree was a hit, but Grimm and Bevan realized more manpower would be needed to keep the tradition alive. In 1981, Grimm successfully petitioned the Tooele County Search and Rescue team, and they have maintained the tree since.

“She could talk the socks off of anybody,” chuckled Bevan.

The process of setting up the tree has changed somewhat over the years for reasons of practicality. The flagpole was replaced by a Beehive Broadband cell tower in the same location, circa 2006. The Search and Rescue team tethered the light strands to steel cables and devised a pulley system that lifts them to the top. The strands are secured to the ground with chains, creating a taught cone shape with a 30 foot radius.

The volunteer organization meets every year before Thanksgiving to choreograph the maneuver and make any needed wiring repairs. They set up the tree on the Saturday after Thanksgiving and take it down again on the Saturday after New Year’s Day. The tree is lit every day at dusk and remains lit until 1:00 am. Tooele County foots the maintenance bill, while Beehive Broadband donates the power.

Maxine Grimm expressed a deep appreciation for the Search and Rescue team and all that have donated to the cause. Bevan, who has since relocated to Washington County, says the Christmas Tree was probably the most rewarding thing he’s ever been involved in. He plans to create a similar display with a mountainside flagpole he owns in St. George.

Grimm wants to someday place a star at the top of the tree, but hasn’t yet come up with a feasible idea.

“It would have to be mechanically right or the first wind will take it off!” she said.

Tooele County Search and Rescue Commander Fred Denison says he enjoys role in the tradition and hopes the team will maintain the display indefinitely.

“We do this for the whole county, not just Tooele City,” stipulated Denison, echoing Grimm’s notion of a guiding light. “We do it mostly in hopes that everyone finds their way home safe on the holiday.”

Grimm sees the tree as a spiritual beacon, too:

“It lifts your thinking and stirs up the spiritual in you,” she said. “So many things are changing and there are so many events that aren’t good, so you need something to hang on to. I see that beautiful light every night from my house and I get a warm feeling because it reminds me of the birth of Jesus Christ—the real meaning of Christmas.”

—

Jolly Rotor, a local aerial production company, filmed this year’s tree setup.  Great video.

 

KDYL: KSL’s Doug Wright Reflects On His Days At Tooele’s Old Radio Station

This article originally appeared in the 11/12/13 edition of the Tooele Transcript Bulletin.

TOOELE, Any given day in 1968 – A young disc jockey sits in a small radio studio at the corner of Main and Vine, sorting through a stack of vinyl records.  The station’s reel-to-reel automation block has ended and it’s time to go live.  He unscrews the side of the massive belt-driven turntable, adjusts the gear speed and cues a Hank Snow track.  When he drops the needle, Tooele Valley is bathed with the lo-fi sounds of classic country music.

The station is KDYL 990 AM, “The Country Gentleman.”  The fledgling DJ is a high school student from Salt Lake City by the name of Doug Wright.  At age 16, Wright also serves as program director, news reader and janitor for the bare-bones, 1 kilowatt operation.  Being more of a rock and roll guy, he’s not particularly keen on the station’s country format.

But he’s obsessed with radio—and that is all that matters.

45 years later, Doug Wright is a mainstay at KSL Newsradio in Salt Lake City, and one of the best-known radio personalities in the business.  He sat down last month with the Transcript Bulletin to reflect on his radio career and its humble beginnings in Tooele.

“I always loved radio,” Wright said shortly after signing off his daily topical program, The Doug Wright Show, at KSL Studios in downtown Salt Lake.  “I was one of those geeky kids that would listen to those big old tube radios.  The game was to see how far away your mom’s old set could pick something up.  I remember thinking, if I could ever just be able to say that I was on the radio—just once—how cool that would be!”

Wright’s first turn behind a radio microphone, a volunteer gig at the University of Utah’s KUER, came when he was 16 years old.  After only a few months spinning records there, he set out to begin his commercial career.

“At that age you think you own the world and you think you’re a whole lot better and hotter than you are, and I just couldn’t understand why anybody wouldn’t hire me on a commercial basis,” Wright laughed.

After failing to find work in the Salt Lake area, Wright turned his focus westward to Tooele’s KDYL.

Relatively little has been documented about the early history of Tooele’s only long-lived radio station.  In fact, commercial radio amounts to only a side note in Tooele County history.  For most Tooele County residents, clear signals pouring in from stations in the Salt Lake market were local enough.  But that fact didn’t foil a significant run for Tooele’s AM station.

KDYL Tooele began airing in 1955 with the call sign KTUT, originally broadcasting from the Ritz Theater on Main Street.  The station was renamed re-branded KDYL in the mid-1960s and was purchased by Wendell Winegar, who moved it across Main to the building that now houses the LA Hispanic Market at the corner of Vine.  The cascading diamond shaped outlines of the letters K, D, Y, and L are still visible on the south face of the building.  The studio itself was located on the second floor in the southeast corner.  The station’s 200 foot tower still stands in a field at 600 N. 400 W.  The station switched from middle-of-the-road (MOR) programming to country in 1966.

The late 1960s marked a period of transition and mild upheaval for KDYL.  According to Wright, when Wright came calling in 1968, only the General Manager of the station remained.

“His name was Don Hall,” Wright recalled.  “And he was so desperate that, instead of seeing this pathetic little kid who wanted to be on the radio, he saw somebody that maybe could actually help him.  So I was hired pretty much on the spot.”

Together, Hall and Wright operated the small-town station using equipment that seemed ancient to Wright at the time.

“It was a great, great old station and everything was hand-me-down.  We used to just keep that place together with spit and bailing wire,” Wright said.

KDYL was a daytime station broadcasting between sunrise and sunset, with Wright at the helm as often as his schedule allowed.

“High school was kind of a casualty, if you want to know the truth,” Wright said.  “I was so in love with radio that high school, well…”

He commuted each day from Sugarhouse in his mother’s 1960 Plymouth.  Because his pay at KDYL was negligible, he financed the commute by working a part time job at a Salt Lake grocery store.

The station’s Schafer 800 reel-to-reel automation system allowed Hall and Wright to fill in parts of the day.  The format was country music, which Wright said was mainly geared to the adult population.  KDYL hosted weekly live show on Saturday mornings called “Country Jamboree” (or Country Jubilee—neither Wright nor Winegar could remember exactly), which featured local artists.  A block of Spanish language programming ran on Sunday.  For several years, KDYL covered Little League baseball games.  Surplus speakers from the Tooele Army Depot were installed on light posts along Main Street so listeners out and about could hear the coverage.  Wright remembers providing live coverage of a parade on Main Street by stringing a microphone through the roof of the building.

“It was a mishmash of things.  It was an eclectic place,” Wright smiled.

Hall and Wright integrated news into the programming where possible, but since a traditional news wire service proved too expensive, they occasionally lifted stories from newspapers (including the Transcript Bulletin).  Even so, Wright remembers the particularly jarring experience of going to a murder scene near the Tooele Post Office to gather details on the crime, then breaking into programming to provide updates over the air.

Particularly memorable to wright was the need for careful timing—especially when it came to the Tooele Valley Railroad, which used to run down Vine Street.

“You had to be really careful of what you were doing when the [train] came down,” he explained.  If you had a record on, it would just shake the needle right off.  If you heard that whistle blow as it would cross Main Street, you better not have a record on!”

In time, Winegar allowed Wright to break format on Saturday afternoons to play rock and roll.  This, according to Wright, was refreshing to younger listeners who began to visit him in-studio on Saturday nights.  He maintains friendships with many of them to this day.

“The kids just gravitated to it,” Wright recalled.  “I say ‘kids,’ but they were the same age that I was.  They kind of tolerated the country station, but it was so exciting to them to have something [of their own].”

Wright paused to point out that despite his initial aversion to the country genre, he acquired a taste for it while at KDYL.

“I used to joke with my friends, saying all I do out there is play Hank, Hank, Hank, and Hank.  Hank Locklin, Hank Snow, Hank Williams, Hank Jr.  But it got in my blood,” he said.

It was also during his time at KDYL that Wright became fascinated with mining history.  After signing off the air, he would frequently take excursions to local ghost towns and historic sites.  While venturing further south into Juab County with a girlfriend from Tooele, he fell in love with the small town of Eureka and later bought a home there.

After about a year at KDYL, Wright returned to the Salt Lake market, finally landing at KSL in 1978.  Originally working as a fill-in host, he became Program Director and began hosting his own show.  The Doug Wright Show airs from 9:00 to noon on weekdays.  According to KSL Program Director Kevin LaRue, Wright’s show is heard by some 50,000 listeners each day.

Winegar sold the station in 1979 and KDYL continued broadcasting as such until 1982 when it released the call sign to a Salt Lake station, assumed call sign KTLE, and switched its frequency AM 1010.  The station switched ownership and formats several more times until 2009, when it was purchased by IHR Educational Broadcasting.  The station, now KIHU (for Immaculate Heart Utah), broadcasts Catholic religious programming.

The seasoned broadcaster looks back on his KDYL days fondly and said his experience broadcasting from Main and Vine helped shape his career.  He lamented the demise of small-town, community focused media like Tooele’s KDYL:

“When we lose that small town newspaper, that small town radio station, we lose a little bit of our soul.”

But channeling Mark Twain, he posited that the reports of radio’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.  It must adapt and evolve, but the need for local radio will always remain.

“There’s something to tuning in and knowing that person’s right there too, that they’re in the same time frame that you are in, that the weather you’re experiencing, they’re experiencing too,” Wright explained.  “The core of it is that friend on the radio.”

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