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Loading...The Tooele Transcript Bulletin has published Tooele County news since 1894. Here is a flashback of local front-page news from 25, 50, 75 and 100 years ago that occurred during the third week of January.
Jan. 14-16, 1997
Just because there wasn’t any snow on the ground didn’t mean that Tooele Valley was below average for the water year.
In fact, the year was on track to set new records for precipitation and snowpack. Basinwide, the area was 155 percent of average for this time of the year.
“The water year looks really good,” said Carlos Garcia of the Natural Resources Conservation Service. “I’m not sure the last time we had these high readings.”
Later in the week, the decomposing body of a 19-year-old Grantsville High School senior missing since the previous summer was found Jan. 2 in a desert about 15 miles west of Wilcox, Ariz. (near the Arizona/ New Mexico border).
According to Rod Rothrock, of the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department, Chad William Wright, was reported as a “missing person” the previous summer. Investigators had no clue as to the whereabouts of the young man until his body was found by hunters early in January.
Wright reportedly lived with his father, John William “Bill” Wright, Grantsville, until the previous summer when he accepted a job in Wyoming for the summer. He told his father that he would return to Grantsville when school started in the fall.
Jan. 18-21, 1972
Ernest G. Mantes, Tooele, had been named a TIME Magazine Quality Dealer Award winner for 1972.
Mantes, who was president of Mantes Chevrolet Company, 23 South Main in Tooele, was one of only 75 dealers in the entire nation selected for the TIME Magazine honor.
As a TMQDA winner, Mantes would be honored at the convention of the 1972 National Automobile Dealers Association in February in Las Vegas.
He was nominated for the honor by the Utah Automobile Dealers Association, of which he was a past director.
Later in the week, Tooele County was a proposed site for an inland spaceport, according to the executive director of the University of Utah Center Economic and Community Development.
The director spoke at the Tooele County Chamber of Commerce Installation and Past Presidents Banquet.
“I don’t have great hopes that Utah will be given the first nod, but we have made enough of an impact on the planners to believe that a second spaceport could be located here.” Utah’s proposed location was on the Great Salt Lake Desert near Dugway.
Jan. 14-17, 1947
W.A. Green, age 45, was still alive after lying out two nights with a broken leg in the desert land of Skull Valley.
An employee of the Deseret Livestock Company in Skull Valley, Green had started out on Friday by horseback to join a sheep outfit, when his horse fell on him and broke his leg.
He managed to crawl around enough and get some brush together and start a fire Friday night, but by Saturday his clothes were soaked and his matches worthless, so he lay out all Saturday without fire until searchers found him on Sunday.
Later in the week, temperatures dropped to 22 degrees below zero at St. John on Thursday, Jan. 14 and 10 below at Stockton.
That was the coldest weather in Tooele since 1942, according to Amos Bevan, official observer and the coldest at St. John since 1938.
Jan. 20, 1922
The volunteer firemen of this city (Tooele) scored another big social hit in their annual banquet and ball in the Fraternal Hall Wednesday evening.
Everything went off like clockwork. Dancing made up the first part of the evening’s enjoyment at 10:30 sharp. The call was sent from the banquet hall and over 110 guests were seated at the tables and served in three courses with the best of the land.
During the feast, fine Hawaiian music and songs were furnished by Mr. and Mrs. E.E. Bush. The banqueters showed their approval through constant encores.
After the entertainment, the crowd assembled in the ballroom and danced until the wee hours of the morning.
Sport Editor Mark Watson compiled this report.
