Maun’s Job

 Governor Scott M. Matheson

 A very short answer as to why we stayed in Price for so long would be Maun’s very good job with the state.

Shortly after Maun’s brief carer as a substitute teacher ended she got a job with the Community Action Program as Director of the Senior Volunteer Program.  It was her responsibility to recruit senior volunteers for various service projects in both Carbon and Emery counties.  It was a good job and Maun got to know lots of people in both counties through her work.  She visited volunteers in every corner of the two counties and I would sometimes go with her to little tiny towns like Dragerton, Columbia and Sunnyside in the hills on the edge of the Book Cliffs.  We were infatuated with the Pygmy Pinon forest by then and we though the country was beautiful

But what I remember most was her work with Meals on Wheels that she established in conjunction with the administrator and dietician at the hospital along with the adult services director with the Department of Family Services.  In theory senior volunteers delivered the meals but very often Maun ended up doing it, often enough to make a difference in the lives of many seniors and to get to know lots of people.  One day Maun came home from her Meals on Wheels route with a purebred West Highland Terrier whose aging owners simply couldn’t take care of anymore.  They kept him in the front yard where the passing school kids would tease and torment him everyday until he had become a very mean dog.  And he hadn’t been bathed in years.  Maun took him to groomer who simply shaved him totally bald except for a couple of tufts on his tail and ears.  Maun had always had dogs at home and she was good at training him but this time it had to be done very rapidly because our landlord threatened to train him with a two by four, especially if he caught him messing with the chickens many more times.  Maun did a good job and he turned out to be a fine dog as well as being the first of  what turned out to be a menagerie.

In those days, before the constant gerrymandering and the post-Reagan wave of conservative paranoia, we used to elect Democrats from time to time and after Maun had worked for CAP for three years, we elected Governor Scott M. Matheson, one of the best and most respected governors we have had.  He was also one of the most progressive and it was not long before he reorganized the Department of Social Services.  The theme of this reorganization was consolidation and colocation.  As a result the state was divided into nine districts, six of which were rural, and Maun became director of the district that included Carbon, Emery and Grand Counties.  The inclusion of Grand County greatly expanded our horizons.  Often Maun would have an evening meeting in Moab and I would go with her, taking a drive through Arches before picking her up after the meeting.  Moab attracted very interesting people and we met a lot of them through Maun’s work.  It was a good job and an important one with her being responsible for assistance payments, family and children’s services, adult services and much more.  Coordination with other services providers such as Mental Health and Aging was an important part of her work as well.  She love the work and the pay was good.  The work also led to making many more friends in the community and especially among Maun’s professional colleagues.  We were already pretty well integrated into the community and with Maun’s new job we had very little reason to think about leaving.

But Price was changing.  Utah Power and Light had built two giant coal-fired power plants in neighboring Emery County.  Since Emery County had even less housing than Carbon County, most of the workers involved in the construction and, eventually, the operation of the plants lived in Price.  With this influx we were no longer the only newcomers in Price and newcomers were no longer special.  Way more important, from our point of view, were the changes that accompanied the oil crisis that began in 1973 and continued until the election of Ronald Regan in 1980.  As a hedge against the possibility of the loss of Mid-Eastern oil the big oil companies bought many of the coal mines.  The little Swisher mine, for example,  where we got our coal for heating, was bought and greatly expanded by Atlantic Richfield.  The first thing the big oil companies did, of course, was to get rid of the unions and this didn’t happen without a lot of hard feelings.  These actions led to a strike, the miners’ ultimate, and maybe only weapon.  At one point we were treated to the sight of probably fifty Utah Highway Patrol cars escorting strike breaking miners to work.  And I remember a feature article in the  newspaper that portrayed a family, a retired miner sitting at the kitchen table with his two sons, one a union miner and the other who had gone to work in a non-union mine.  Which ever of the two sons was on the right course must have made for some lively dinner table discussion.  One thing is clear, the old man, for whom the union and the Democratic party were the twin pillars of his religion, was living in a time that had passed.  These events and the feelings that accompanied them caused a palpable change for the worse in the atmosphere of the town.  And at the same time the big companies had lots of capital to invest in the mines and this greatly increased the productivity leading to a much lower number of miners necessary to maintain much higher production levels.  Times change and it was no longer the same small town we had moved to a decade earlier.

And then there was the Thistle slide.  The winter of 1982-83 had seen record breaking snow and rainfall and this led to a massive landslide at the mouth of the canyon leading to Soldier Summit and on to Price.   The slide created a giant dam that blocked the flow of the Spanish Fork river and destroyed the little town of Thistle and buried both Highway 6, the primary route from Price to Utah County and Salt Lake City, and the Denver and Rio Grande railroad tracks, essentially closing the route from Denver to Los Angeles.  There had apparently been some warning of the possibility of a slide, the railroad was worried about it and working on it, but the rest of us had no idea what was going on and when the slide came it came very suddenly, basically creating the dam and closing the canyon in one day.  I had shortly before the slide had shoulder surgery and once a week I met with a physical therapist who came to the county hospital from Provo.  He made it to the hospital and during our session he  talked about a buckle in the road.  It turned out to be more than a buckle and during the course of his day in Price they closed the road and he had to take the long way home.  The slide closed the railroad for three months  and the roads for 8 months with devastating economic effects of all of Southeastern Utah.

But it was not the economic effects that Maun and I noticed.  What we discovered by having to drive up still another canyon north to Duchesne in Uintah County, and then taking Highway 40 west to Interstate 80, in order to get to Salt Lake, was how often we were doing just that.  It gradually dawned on us that a large part of our interest had shifted from Price to Salt Lake.  And at the same time Maun had the opportunity to become the district director of the large urban district in Salt Lake,  It meant a substantial increase in salary and responsibility so she applied for the job and got it, putting finis to our stay in Price after eleven  wonderful years.

The requirements for Maun’s job should have included a contractor’s license. The motive for reorganizing the Department of Social Services was in part the colocation of as many state agencies as possible. This meant new buildings in some cases and here is the Governor cutting the ribbon for the new building in Castle Dale where Maun, with staff input, gave direction to the state building board and basically oversaw the construction.

And a speech from the director

And now a real construction project.  This building, the old Central School, was owned by the city and empty when the decision was made to remodel it in order to house the various state agencies in Price.  The former principal of the school, the man who had sold us the billboards for the antique shop, and who was now a city councilman worked very closely with Maun and the architect in the design and construction of the building.  It was a big project.  I gave some brief thought to bidding on the painting contract but I was glad I didn’t because it was way too much work, I would still be there.  The architect came up with a scheme for randomly painting each brick with one of three or four different colors and then spraying the whole thing with a clear coat.  I watched the painters at work and their system for randomizing the color was ingenious.

Maun  loved being housed in this building.  One of the agencies housed in the building was the Department of Motor Vehicles so one couldn’t tell if people entering the building were there for assistance payments, mental health services, or to register their cars and get a driver’s license.

Maun with two more governors.  This is Governor Leavitt who later became Secretary of Health, Education an Welfare under President Bush.  This picture was taken at the homeless shelter in Salt Lake where Maun spent eight years as the director after finishing her seventeen year career with the state.

And a very young Jon Huntsman, also at the homeless shelter.