The Golden Dream

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  At the age of nineteen, or after he has completed one year of college, every young Mormon male begins his required two years of missionary work. After two months of intensive training—often in a foreign language—he departs for one of the Church’s many far-flung missions around the world (avoiding Catholic countries, where Mormonism is anathema). He is expected to survive on a stringent allowance of $160 a month, which the Church will pay only if he cannot. When he returns, his standing in the community will depend on how many converts to the faith he has been able to collect. Mormon youth, in other words, is programmed to such an extent that there is almost no time for intermingling with Gentiles, other than in missionary work. And, it has been noted, when young Mormons return from their long months in the field, that a distressing number of them require psychiatric help. There is also a high rate of youthful suicide and, ironically, a disturbing number of drug-related deaths. A Mormon’s life, after all, is not intended to be easy.

  Though many Mormon families have become very rich, their way of life is generally Spartan. Mr. Obert J. Tanner, for example, one of the town’s richest men—his fortune was made in the jewelry business, with college rings and fraternity pins—lives comfortably but without frills in a modest suburban house on the southeast slopes, and drives his own car. Mormon frugality has managed to rub off on the Gentile community, and most forms of conspicuous spending are frowned upon in Salt Lake City. There are only eight Rolls-Royces in the entire Salt Lake Valley, and the most popular family car is the four-wheel-drive Jeep. Mr. George Eccles (non-Mormon) is something of an exception. He is president of the First Security Bank and keeps the only Mercedes limousine in town. Mr. Obert Tanner’s one extravagance is his fondness for giving fountains to the city; among others, he has donated the fountains in front of the Federal Building and his own headquarters.

  As part of their religious regimen, Mormons are required to keep a two-year supply of food and staples in their homes as a form of insurance against what they believe will be an inevitable holocaust; at any time, without notice, a family may be ordered by Church elders to live for a specified period on its stored goods alone. Gentile families deplore this sort of hoarding, but at least one Salt Lake housewife—non-Mormon—says that Mormon marketing habits affect her own. “When I see a Mormon woman with her supermarket basket filled with hundreds of rolls of toilet paper, I think I’d better load up on toilet paper too—in case there’s going to be some sort of shortage.”

  Among the great Mormon families of Salt Lake are the Kimballs (Spencer W. Kimball is the current president of the Church as well as a prominent banker), the Tanners, Larkins, Youngs (descendants of Brigham), Smiths (descendants of Joseph Smith, the founder of the church), the Romneys, Vancotts, Cannons, Whitneys, and Marriotts (of the hotel/restaurant chain). The leading Gentile families would include the McCormicks, Cullens, Hanauers, and Walkers (who came to the valley as Mormon converts, but later left the Church). Over the years, the town’s leaders on both sides of the religious fence have mingled to a limited extent within the confines of the Alta Club, a men’s social club modeled on San Francisco’s Union Club. Originally, the Alta Club was strictly a Gentile club. But as it evolved into a social arm of the Salt Lake City Chamber of Commerce, it became impossible to exclude Mormons from membership since they represented the most powerful commercial force in the city. Still, during lunch hour at the club, Mormons and Gentiles tend to eat at separate tables.

  It strikes many outsiders as curious that, as the Salt Lake suburbs have expanded for miles in a southeasterly direction from the center of town, the citizenry have ignored the natural phenomenon of the Great Salt Lake itself, which lies to the northwest. It is the largest body of water west of the Mississippi and the largest saline lake in North America, measuring fifty by seventy-five miles and surrounded by a wild and ruggedly beautiful shoreline. It is also an ecological curiosity in that the southern arm of the lake has a water level almost two and a half feet higher than the northern arm, a result of the higher degree of salinity in the northern half. Still, aside from the chemical companies that mine the lake for Salt Lake shrimp (used in pet foods), table salt, and other minerals, no one in Salt Lake City has ever quite known what to do with it. A few suburban areas, such as the northeast ridge called “Pill Hill” (many doctors live there), have views of the lake shimmering in the distance, but most Salt Lake citizens visit their lake—and then reluctantly—only when out-of-town visitors insist on being taken to see it. The lake is disparaged. At certain seasons, to be sure, the lake has a strong briny odor, quite different from the smell of the sea. “It smells as though someone should flush it,” says one Salt Lake City man. And there is the problem of the brine flies, which bite. But from the rocky hills and promontories along the shore there are breathtaking stretches of blue water and white “sand” beaches—not really sand, but the pulverized shells of prehistoric sea creatures which once inhabited the original Lake Bonneville.

  In the early 1900s, the lake was used for recreation. On summer afternoons, Salt Lake City families used to board the little trains—one open, for those who preferred the sun, one closed for those who liked shade—that chugged slowly out to Saltair, a huge Victorian pleasure dome on the lakeshore that offered swimming, boating, and other outdoor delights. But the trouble was—and is—that the shoreline of the lake keeps changing due to the rising and falling water level. In years of heavy rainfall, an increase of just a few inches in the water level can extend the area of the lake by miles, and in years of drought the lake shrinks just as drastically. The Saltair resort found itself either standing on its pilings in the middle of the water or standing high and dry with the water miles away. By the late 1920s, Saltair had fallen to rot and decay.

  Various proposals have been put forth for controlling and stabilizing the water level of the Great Salt Lake through dredging, dams, pumping, and so forth. Both the Disney and the Marriott organizations have offered plans to turn the lake into a recreational area again. Developers have drawn up plans for suburban housing in the hills of the south shore. One particularly ambitious plan envisions converting Antelope Island—connected by a causeway to the shore—to a “Living Great Basin Museum,” and repopulating the island with the animals that roamed the Great Basin before the arrival of man. State Senator Haven Barlow is the principal booster for this project, which he conceives as “a tremendous tourist and recreational attraction,” and “something that people could get enthusiastic about—seeing buffalo, elk, antelope, mountain sheep and goats, and a wide variety of birds all in their natural habitat. Driving anywhere else in the state you’ll rarely see an elk, and never a buffalo.” Visitors would be able to tour the game preserve from the south, and swim at the northern beaches. “Antelope Island’s beaches are the best in the lake,” says Senator Barlow.

  But nothing can seem to overcome Utahans’ innate antipathy toward their lake. Bills for lake development in the state legislature get bogged down in committee, and nothing seems to happen. The beautiful lakeshore is still bereft of houses, hotels, or anything that would draw a human to it. The lake remains bare of sailboats, abandoned to the brine flies. Controversy over what to do with it has raged fitfully over the last twenty years, and the lake continues still and silent, except on stormy nights when huge waves gather. It has been noticed that every proposal or discussion of the future of the lake falls apart inevitably along religious lines (Disney vs. Marriott, for example). If it is a Mormon notion that is under consideration, the Gentiles are opposed to it, and vice versa. And so the rift between Mormon and Gentile—between Saint and Sinner—remains as wide as the Great Salt Lake itself, or as wide, at least, as Salt Lake City’s wide, wide streets.

  MIDWEST

  4

  Connecticut on Lake Erie

  In the new vernacular of citizens’ band radio enthusiasts, it is known as “Junk Area,” or “The Dirty City.” From as far west as Omaha, the call “Heading for the Dirty City, good buddy,” heard over the airwaves,
means only one thing to CB-ers: Heading for Cleveland—the city where rivers have been known to catch fire and burn. Poor Cleveland.

  But the elegant suburbs of Cleveland to the east of town—Shaker Heights (now largely Jewish), Cleveland Heights, and the rural, horsy towns of Hunting Valley, Pepper Pike, and Gates Mills—are far from dirty. Though many of the old Cleveland families—Mathers, Cases, Hannas, Humphreys, Gwinns—have “escaped across the border to the Philadelphia Main Line,” and though the Rockefellers deserted Cleveland long ago, the families who constitute what might be called the working wealthy are all in the suburbs. But, like Grosse Pointe, the Cleveland suburbs have managed to shrug off the city that spawned them, to blink at Cleveland’s squalor, and to concentrate, instead, on their own immaculateness. The great mansions still line the length of Shaker Boulevard with an air of self-satisfaction so complete that the local joke is: “Nobody really lives in those houses. You never see anyone go in or out. There’s never a sign of life from any of them.”

  Younger, more adventurous souls, meanwhile, have ventured farther afield—into the rolling hills of Summit County, south of Cleveland, where, oddly enough, it is possible to find a perfectly preserved old New England village. It happened this way. When, in the eighteenth century, the Crown was dividing up territory among its American colonies, the colony of Connecticut felt cheated. After a certain amount of haggling, Connecticut was mollified by being given a wide strip of land along the southern shore of Lake Erie, stretching over 120 miles from the Pennsylvania border as far westward as Sandusky—three and a quarter million acres in area. This so-called Western Reserve of Connecticut remained technically a part of the New England state until as recently as 1800, when it was ceded to Ohio. The region was largely settled by Connecticut families, who established Western Reserve University in the town of Hudson, which had been settled by a Connecticut man named David Hudson (alleged to have been a descendant of Henry Hudson) and incorporated in 1799. Later, when the university moved to Cleveland, its handsome old brick buildings in Hudson, built between 1820 and 1840 and reminiscent of Harvard Yard, were taken over by Western Reserve Academy, a private college-preparatory school.

  Western Reserve, both as a college and as a prep school, attracted the wealthy from Cleveland and nearby Akron, and in the years immediately following the Civil War, little Hudson became the “secret” retreat of Cleveland and Akron millionaires who had made money in steel, coal, and rubber products. Here they purchased and restored the quaint New England salt-box houses and Federal mansions that were charmingly clustered around a New England village green. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Hudson received a boon in the form of an endowment trust fund from a Cleveland coal tycoon named Ellsworth, who also erected a memorial clock tower to himself on a corner of the green. Mr. Ellsworth’s gift was designed to preserve the town intact, but there were a couple of strings attached: All power lines had to be buried, and the town was to be dry. The former stipulation has been honored, but not the latter. Although Ohio has state liquor stores, the town of Hudson has one of the few privately owned liquor stores in the state.

  Today, Hudson is still small—population around five thousand—and considers itself a very special place, where it is important to own a “century house,” one that is at least a hundred years old. Its residents include remnants of the community’s Old Guard—Mark Hanna once had a house there—who live on inherited money, and prosperous young executives who commute thirty minutes to Firestone and Goodyear in Akron, and forty-five minutes to Republic Steel in Cleveland. Life revolves around the Hudson Country Club and the one “social” bar in town—the Reserve Inn. The Daughters of the American Revolution have an active chapter there, and the Hudson Library Historical Society and the Garden Club are also socially important. Every year, the town turns out for the Annual House and Garden Tour, which is followed by an “ice cream social” on the green. There are no Jews and no blacks in Hudson (black day help is imported from Twinsburg, down the road) and there are virtually no Democrats. It is rumored that some people in Hudson feel that the National Guard did the right thing when it opened fire on students at nearby Kent State University several years ago, and a number think that a few more bullets sprayed around would have been a good idea.

  As an Andorra and an anachronism—a New England village where a New England village has no real business being—Hudson, Ohio, presents a series of contradictions. Although most of its residents are wealthy, the town is said to be “a collection agency’s nightmare” as far as the paying of bills is concerned. According to Mr. James Bonbright Anderson, who made his home in Hudson for several years, the town is “strait-laced, staid, and stuffy—and yet everybody is screwing everybody else. When I lived there, everybody was getting a divorce—including me.” Not long ago, the head of the school board divorced his wife and married a neighbor across the street, whose husband married another woman, whose husband married the ex-wife of the head of the school board. For all its emphasis on New England quaintness, Anderson says, “Everybody was seeing a psychiatrist, everybody was smoking dope at parties, everybody was popping pills. One doctor—in order to keep a woman’s husband from finding out about her pill habit—used to hide her prescriptions for them under a potted palm in the lobby of the movie theater.” Hudson likes to use the words “peaceful,” “serene,” “charming,” “Old World,” and “quiet” to describe the community, and when freights carrying ore and coal thunder through town on the Pittsburgh & Cleveland line, people treat the noise as though it did not exist.

  Outwardly, Hudson seems to present a solid, conservative front, with citizens toiling one for all and all for one for the betterment of the little community. Actually, the town is sharply divided within itself. The north side of town, for example, is the most desirable, with the east side of East-West Road coming next. (The two main thoroughfares, East-West Road and North-South Road, come together at the village green.) No one who is anybody would live in the south or the west part of town. As in many small towns, there is another wide social gulf between the men who belong to the Rotary Club and the men who belong to Kiwanis. “Rotary always attracts the bankers and the upper-management men,” says one resident. “Kiwanis is for shopkeepers.” It is impossible to belong to both. The Lions occupy a social level between Rotary and Kiwanis. There had always been a rift between the pupils at the public school and the day students who attended Western Reserve Academy, and when, not long ago, in an effort to be modern-minded, a Montessori school was established, it created a third division. The Akron Firestones helped endow it and sent their children there, and it became very chic to serve on the board of the Montessori school. Soon, however, along Hudson’s thriving gossip grapevine word spread that the school was being used for other purposes and that its rooms had from time to time become the scene of after-hours extramarital carryings-on. Police interest was aroused and then for some reason faded. The school, meanwhile, became the target of teen-age vandals, of whom Hudson seemed to have more than its share.

  Perhaps when a town such as Hudson becomes so enisled, so encapsulated, so inverted, so smugly proud of its architecture and unusual history, it loses all sight of reality. While maintaining its dreamlike “character,” it begins to live the dream. How else can one account for the things that seem to go so wrong in enclaves like this? Why, for example, when a drug rehabilitation program called Head North was instituted for local high school students, did students from the third and fourth grades of the elementary school show up? Why did a respectable executive start painting murals on vans? Why don’t Hudson people pay their bills? Why did an elegant “piping party,” with Scottish bagpipers, end up with guests drunkenly trying to peer under the pipers’ kilts? There has even been some odd municipal behavior. Though Hudson is known as a fiscally conservative, even tight-fisted, town—and a town where there are no buildings more than three stories tall—why did the town fathers splurge not long ago on an expensive piece of firefighting equipment with a snorkl
e that would extend eleven stories into the air?

  Is it possible that living in a community that is too perfect, too controlled, can inflict a kind of paranoia on its citizens? Perhaps, in a town where everybody lives like everybody else, one tends to feel like everyone else—anonymous—and people start to wonder who they are. One former resident of Hudson describes it as “a little like living in colonial Williamsburg, or Disneyland. I began to feel as though I had to get away to summer camp or something, to start making bird feeders and lanyards.” Perhaps, in a community where everything is too rigidly standardized, where there is so little diversity, where there are no real problems, artificial or at least synthetic problems—such as drugs—must be created. In order to create the racial balance that it wanted, for example, Hudson’s Montessori school had to import black students from Twinsburg. They have not done too well.

  Perhaps it is dangerous to overidentify with a place, its history, its tradition, its architecture. When Levittown, Long Island, was first developed a number of years ago, from a handful of floor plans that were reversed from block to block, it was cheerfully predicted that Levittown would one day be a slum. But this has not happened. Over the years, the once stupefying sameness of Levittown houses has all but disappeared, as Levittown home owners have added to their houses, individualized them with landscaping, knocked down walls and added pools and patios. The “planned” look of Levittown is gone and, today, Levittown is a pleasant, prosperous middle-class suburb where many of the original owners still live and have raised their families.