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Excerpts
THE EARLY YEARS
I arrived as a Mortal Being on my parent’s bed in their
modest two-room sawed log home located in the southeast corner of Monroe,
Utah, on May 10, 1932. My mother and father (Marva "Mom" and Aaron "Pa")
were already the parents of my sister Rhea who was born on April 29, 1930,
in a different small home one block west and one block north from my birth
place. Rhea was two years old when I became the new son of my proud parents.
My grandfather Henry Nielson helped my father build our new home in 1931
while my folks were living where Rhea was born. My father Aaron was a farmer
and my mother Marva was an excellent homemaker. "Pa" had cut, sawed and
hauled the needed lumber to build his new home using wagons and teams to
transport the needed lumber from the Henry Torgerson Sawmill on Monroe
Mountain to his new home site during the prior summer. Read more in
the book. . .
My father limited himself to only five gallons of
gasoline per week for his automobile. If the gas was used up before the week
was over, the car was parked and we had to walk to town, located one mile
away from our home. There were several stores down town and only essential
items were purchased for our needs. Sometimes farm products were traded for
sugar, flour or any other essential food products; money was scarce! The
flour came in white cloth bags and this material was washed and made use for
dishtowels or other cloth items after the flour was either poured into a
flour bin or used up. Read more in the book. . .
To build a new home or remodel an old home was a long, tedious hard
process. There were no power saws or nail guns, every board had to be cut
using a handsaw and every nail had to be driven with a hammer. Also there
was no plaster board at that time and the plastering was preformed with
sand, water and a large 50 gallon drum of lime usually sitting on the floor
somewhere in the house. The men used large hand trowels and had to be very
strong to perform this work, very few were available in Monroe. Read
more in the book. . .
THE WW II YEARS -1941 to 1945
On the morning of December 8, 1941, I was standing on the
stairs leading to the upper floor of our elementary school house when my
class mate Melvin R. Collings told me that Pearl Harbor had been bombed the
day before. Because none of our family had listened to our small radio on
Sunday night, I knew nothing about the attack. There was no radio reception
in the daytime and only a few stations that could be received at night. Also
there were no telephones in the homes at that time for us to be appraised
about that terrible event. . . .
Our local draft board kept track of all of the Sevier
County men who potentially could be called up for the military. 1 A was the
highest eligible draftee and 4 F was not eligible for the draft at all. My
father’s classification started out as 3 D but as the war lingered on his
classification changed to 3 C. He had very poor eyesight and was a sheep
farmer with two children. Some farmers were exempt because sheepskin and
wool was highly needed for the military, especially for the men flying in
bombers where they experienced extremely cold conditions at high altitudes.
Monroe had a population of about 1200 people in the 1930s and early 1940s.
Some 350 men and women from the Monroe area ultimately served in the
military.
Read more in the book. . .
HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATION - GRADES 10 to 12
After the war was over the school district hired Mr. Garn J. Olsen to
teach music and create a new band. I was still a freshman in Junior High and
decided to take a band class because I had always wanted to play a saxophone
in a dance orchestra like my uncle Emery Nielsen. Mr. Olsen brought some
used band instruments to school for the students to evaluate and possibly
buy. I selected a gold alto sax and took it home for my folks to see; it
cost $140.00 and I was not sure if our family could afford it. The folks did
purchase it for me and I learned to play in the band and also in our school
orchestra along with 11 other band members. I was in the 9th
grade at that time and played with other students ranging up to and
including seniors. . . .
Several of my classmates later became Air Force pilots continuing in the
military for several years between the Korean War and the upcoming Vietnam
War. This time was known as the Cold War with Russia. Ballard Larsen was one
of my schoolmates, went to college and became a Lieutenant in the US Air
Force after graduation. He began training as a jet fighter pilot and
advanced to being a pilot of one of our most secret fighter planes, the
F-104 Star Fighter. There were only 100 of these planes in existent at that
time and Ballard was a pilot of one of them! Read more in the book.
. .
A HISTORY OF THE PARSON’S MOUNTAIN GROUND-By Kent
& Connie
The land Parsons cabin was built on was bought in 1940 by
Aaron Parsons for $5.00 an acre and included 120 acres of pastureland.
Aaron, Kent, Dick Bell, Royce Dalton, Elson Hall and Ray Sydall built the
fence around the pasture in the summer of 1941. Aaron owned 80 acres and
Stanley owned 40 acres. Aaron later purchased 40 more acres of adjoining
mountain land (the upper 40 acres of Manning Meadows) from Dr. Ellsworth, a
physician who had lived in Monroe and was moving. Aaron, Kent and Morris
Burr rebuilt the complete fence in 1955 to insure our cattle would remain on
our private land during the summer months. Read more in the book. .
.
SECTION II
A STRUGGLE FOR TELEVISION
An autobiography and eyewitness account of the adversity
rural people endured for the right to receive local broadcast television
signals. This is a documented story of my personal account of this 53-year
chain of events that continue to transpire to this day.
This is how I remember the events with some of the
information being recovered from minutes of the Sevier County commission
meetings, some are original newspaper clippings copied from the "Richfield
Reaper." most are from my own documents and memory.
PART – 2 A GENERAL HISTORY OF TV IN UT
The Federal Communications Commission adopted a
television standard for the United States in the Communications act of 1934.
This is still the standard television we have used for the past 73 years and
is known as analog TV.
The first television display exhibits were demonstrated
at the World’s Fair in Chicago, Illinois in 1939. World War Two interrupted
further advancements of this new service until the war ended. However,
through the development of radar and other technology electronics were
continuing to be developed that also helped the advancement of the needed
information relating to our present day television service. The development
of television was interrupted by World War II and did not continue until
after the war. I was nine years old when the war broke out in 1941 and was
13 years old at the end of the war.
After the war, development of television continued and
Channel 4, located in Salt Lake City, began broadcasting to the general
public in 1948. Because the station was located on the valley floor, many
viewers in Ogden, Provo and Salt Lake City received poor or no reception.
Channel 2 and 5 began operation shortly thereafter and all three stations
were relocated to the Oquirrh Mountains, west of Salt Lake City, at the 9400
feet level.
By 1946 the FCC was issuing TV licenses to most large
cities and the FCC granted an experimental television license, for KDYL in
1948, with call letters W6XIS. This station began operating on Channel 2 to
viewers located within a limited area around the center of Salt Lake City
and was the first Utah station to go on the air and was located on the
Walker Bank Building on Main & First South Streets. They were the first to
broadcast the 24th of July parade live from this location.
Because of the downtown location of the transmitter, the
coverage was very limited and many viewers on the outskirts of the city
along with the other cities of Provo and Ogden were not able to receive this
new wonder. The first commercially sponsored broadcasts were on August 1st
1948.
It was not until 1952 the transmitter was moved to Mt.
Vision in the Oquirrh Mountains west of Salt Lake at 8700 ft. AMSL. The
programming was now able to transmit from the valley studio, via microwave
transmission, to the new mountain top location and the FCC now allowed the
station to operate with 50,000 Watts of transmitter power. This move
provided television signals to Tremonton in the north and Salina to the
south, if very high home receive antennas were used.
The Federal Communications Commission adopted a
television standard for the United States in the Communications act of 1934.
This is still the standard television we have used for the past 73 years and
is known as analog TV.
The first television display exhibits were demonstrated
at the World’s Fair in Chicago, Illinois in 1939. World War Two interrupted
further advancements of this new service until the war ended. However,
through the development of radar and other technology electronics were
continuing to be developed that also helped the advancement of the needed
information relating to our present day television service. The development
of television was interrupted by World War II and did not continue until
after the war. I was nine years old when the war broke out in 1941 and was
13 years old at the end of the war.
After the war, development of television continued and
Channel 4, located in Salt Lake City, began broadcasting to the general
public in 1948. Because the station was located on the valley floor, many
viewers in Ogden, Provo and Salt Lake City received poor or no reception.
Channel 2 and 5 began operation shortly thereafter and all three stations
were relocated to the Oquirrh Mountains, west of Salt Lake City, at the 9400
feet level.
By 1946 the FCC was issuing TV licenses to most large
cities and the FCC granted an experimental television license, for KDYL in
1948, with call letters W6XIS. This station began operating on Channel 2 to
viewers located within a limited area around the center of Salt Lake City
and was the first Utah station to go on the air and was located on the
Walker Bank Building on Main & First South Streets. They were the first to
broadcast the 24th of July parade live from this location.
Because of the downtown location of the transmitter, the coverage was
very limited and many viewers on the outskirts of the city along with the
other cities of Provo and Ogden were not able to receive this new wonder.
The first commercially sponsored broadcasts were on August 1st
1948.
It was not until 1952 the transmitter was moved to Mt. Vision in the
Oquirrh Mountains west of Salt Lake at 8700 ft. AMSL. The programming was
now able to transmit from the valley studio, via microwave transmission, to
the new mountain top location and the FCC now allowed the station to operate
with 50,000 Watts of transmitter power. This move provided television
signals to Tremonton in the north and Salina to the south, if very high home
receive antennas were used.
Local Utah townspeople began experimenting with mountaintop repeaters in
the early 1950s to provide TV to un-served rural communities beyond the
reach of the direct TV signals from the primary station. It had become
evident that the repeaters had to be located on high mountaintops.
Read more in the book. . .
