WASATCH ACADEMY REVERAND ARTHUR BOAND RECOLLECTIONS OF 1920S ~~~ (Taken from LouiseJohansen's Scrapbook)

 

HOME OF MONS MORTENSEN ROSENLUND AND WIFE KARNA LARSON

 

HOME OF JOSEPH JENSEN and wife ROSELIA ANN FARNSWORTH (from our archives)

 

 

 

HOME OF ANDREW KNUDSEN and wife MARY OLIVE NELSON ~~~ Researched, Compiled and updated by Tudy Barentsen Standlee

 

CHARLES A. LINDBERGH AND "SPIRIT OF ST. LOUIS" FLY OVER MT. PLEASANT

 

Charles A. Lindbergh courtesy of National Geographic

On May 20, 1927 at 7:52 a.m., Lindbergh took off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island for Paris, carrying five sandwiches, water, maps and charts, and a limited number of other items he deemed absolutely necessary. He decided against carrying a parachute and radio in favor of more gasoline. In his single-engine monoplane, he was an unlikely candidate to succeed in the transatlantic flight as other contenders opted for multi-engine planes and at least one other crew member aboard. He fought fog, icing and drowsiness (he hadn't been able to sleep the night before taking off) during the historic trip.

On May 21, 33 1/2 hours later, (10:22 p.m. French time) Lindbergh set the Spirit of St. Louis down at Le Bourget Field near Paris. He had flown over 3,600 miles and became the first to fly solo non-stop across the Atlantic.

Overnight, Lindbergh became an international hero. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and the first-ever Distinguished Flying Cross by the U.S. government, and received high honors from many other countries. 

A few months later he made  the 1927 "Lindbergh Tour" culminating with visits to 48 states and 92 cities, where he delivered 147 speeches, and rode 1,290 miles (2,080 km) in parades.^[26] At the conclusion of the tour, Lindbergh spent a month at Falaise, Guggenheim's Sands Point mansion, where he wrote the acclaimed "We", a book about his transatlantic flight published by George P. Putnam. (Wikipedia)

Add found in newspapers 1927.

Some who remember the flight over Mt. Pleasant say that he chose our city because he had relatives here.  However we have not been able to confirm this as fact.  We do know that he dropped a scroll which said: "Greetings to the People of Mt. Pleasant".  So where is that scroll today?  It was supposedly housed at the Carnegie Library, but no one in recent years seems to know anything about it or what has happened to it.

Charles A. Lindbergh and "Spirit of St. Louis" flying over Wasatch Academy.

(from Wasatch Academy Archives)

Hilda writes of Lindbergh's visit:

September 3, 1927, Colonel Charles A. Lindberg, aboard his famous Spirit of St. Louis, flying from Cheyenne, Wyoming, en­route to Salt Lake City, paused to greet the citizens of Mt. Pleasant. He arrived over the mountains east of the city.

Mayor Joseph Seely having received a telegram announcing his intentions, Mt. Pleasant had been gaily decorated for the oc­casion and all was in readiness to receive him. The massive plane from which a message of greeting was dropped, circled low sev­eral times over the city. After a stay of about fifteen minutes, he left by way of Fairview for Salt Lake City.

p. 203 History of Mt. Pleasant by Hilda Madsen Longsdorf

Courtesy of Utah Digital Newspapers


Researched  and compiled by Kathy Hafen

HOME OF NIELS JOHANSEN #1 and 2nd wife ANDERSINE ANDERSEN

 

 

 

HOME OF HANS NIELSON AND WIFE AMELIA SIMPSON ~~~ Researched, compiled and updated by Tudy Barentsen Standlee

 

 

 

ANSEL ADAMS' SON DR. MICHAEL ADAMS GRADUATED FROM WASATCH ACADEMY IN 1951

 

Ansel Adams ~ photograph courtesy of wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansel_Adams

http://anseladams.org/

WASATCH ACADEMY, Mt.Pleasant, Utah  

In 1948, Ansel Adams  and his wife, Virginia, enrolled their son, Michael into Wasatch Academy.  Mariposa High School, the school closest to their home was a 45 mile bus ride away from Yosemite National Park where the family was then living. Wasatch Academy was a popular alternative boarding school chosen by many National Park Employees at the time.

Dr. Michael Adams, Wasatch Academy Class of 1951, had two loves in life—flying and medicine. He was able to embrace both, becoming both a medical doctor and an Air Force pilot, eventually retiring as a major general. In 1969, he was selected as the Flight Surgeon of the Year for the United States Air Forces Europe.

Dr. Michael Adams

The following  comes from:

Deseret News

By Dave Gagon, Visual Arts Writer

Published: Sunday, Nov. 26 1995 

TOWARD THE END of his life, photographer Ansel Adams compiled a set of 75 images representing what he believed to be his best work.

Ansel Easton Adams was born February 20, 1902, in San Francisco, the only child of Charles and Olive Adams. Reared on the windswept sand dunes that overlooked the Golden Gate, Adams was an enormously curious child.While gifted in many areas, Adams was largely unsuccessful at school; the rigid structure of public education was not to his liking.

At 14, Adams visited Yosemite National Park. Astounded by the scenery, and armed with the Kodak #1 Brownie his parents had given him, Adams recorded the beauty that surrounded him. It was here that his love for nature and photography blossomed, sparking an interest that would make him return to Yosemite every year for the rest of his life.

Wanting to become more than an amateur photographer, Adams studied the popular technique of the time: soft-focus negatives to bromoil prints, which made the photographs look like charcoal drawings.

Having mastered this technique, he began working towards more clarity in his photography and a way to depict the detail and emotional majesty of the mountains and natural landscape. A conscious, artistic decision to achieve more optically accurate pictures led him to experiment with lighting.

Through his exacting efforts to capture reality, Adams developed two important theories still used by photographers today: visualization, which is to plan before the exposure is taken how the final print will look, and the zone system, which ensures correct exposure for nearly every composition and light situation.

In April 1927, Adams produced his first acknowledged masterpiece, "Monolith, the Face of Half Dome." On a cool spring morning, Adams, his fiance Virginia Rose Best and a couple of friends climbed to the Diving Board, a small terrace adjacent to Half Dome. Having used all but one of his 6-by-8-inch glass plates, he took the picture.

"This photograph," Adams said, "represents my first conscious visualization. In my mind's eye I saw the final image."

In 1932, disgusted with the dominance of pictorialism (soft-focus pictures) in fine-art photography, Adams and his contemporaries Imogen Cunningham, Henry Swift, Sonya Noskowiak, John Paul Edwards, Edward Weston and Willard Van Dyke gathered to discuss how to promote what they called "straight" or "pure" photography. They called themselves Group f/64, referring to the smallest aperture setting common on view-lens cameras - a setting that gives great depth of field and maximum sharpness throughout the photograph.

In 1935, Adams published his "Personal Credo," and by 1941 he had fully developed the "Zone System." He went on to become one of America's most celebrated and influential photographers.

The first image that greets the viewer in "Ansel Adams: The Museum Set" is the breathtaking "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico" (1941), perhaps Adams' best- known masterpiece. The photograph emerged from a moment of combined serendipity and immediate technical recall. In the east the moon was rising, and in the west the late sun shone over the cloud bank, flashing brilliant light on the graveyard crosses. "I will never be so exact with my thousands of moonless pictures," Adams said of the photograph.

Many of Adams' photographs border on the abstract, as in "Frozen Lake and Cliffs" (1932). In explaining these works, Adams said, "I prefer the term `extract' over `abstract' since I cannot change the optical realities but only manage them in relation to themselves and the format. For photographic composition I think in terms of creating configurations out of chaos, rather than following any conventional rules of composition."

One photograph (this reviewer's favorite) depicts well the depth-of-field, sharp focus ideas of Group f/64: "Mt. Williamson, Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar" (1945). In the foreground are rocks and boulders, the background is a mountain range with sun-drenched clouds hovering overhead. From the closest pebble to the farthest cloud swell, everything is in critical focus.

While every photograph is a work of art, Adams' oeuvre also documents the wilderness, whose existence today is seriously imperiled. Although Adams said he never made a photograph expressly for the conservation movement, he was glad to put them into service for purposes of environmental awareness.

In his catalog for the exhibit, Roger Newbold, director of photography at the Salt Lake Art Center School, said, "It is difficult to think that one individual could do so much to enhance the quality of life for so many. Ansel Adams freely gave of himself so that we, through his eyes, could begin to build our own sense of aesthetics, environment and understanding. His life and photographs are like a stone cast into water - the radiating rings in ever-expanding orbits continue to influence us."

It was Adams' intent to produce 100 editions of the 75-piece museum portfolio. Unfortunately, he was only able to complete seven sets before his death in 1984.

•  

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AAdams_The_Tetons_and_the_Snake_River.jpg

Niels Christensen and wife Karen Johansdatter Home ~~~ Researched, compiled and Edited by Tudy Barentsen Standlee

 

Home of Moroni Seely and wife Emily Alice Barton (from our archives)

 

 

 

HOME OF MORONI SEELY AND WIFE EMILY ALICE BARTON (From our archives)

 

 

 

LEE R. CHRISTENSEN"s 50th HIGH SCHOOL CLASS REUNION ~~~Wasatch Academy 1990

 

Lee R. Christensen (water boy)

Coach Brunger and Lee

~~~

Water boy Christensen In the Middle

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Lee's additional comment:   Again I’m attaching the photos intended to go with page 320 of “Buddy”.  Little or no improvement.  When your eyes are closed improvement is nil and  the dark dullness remains but if usable along with the story  they are yours .     lee

Lee R. Christensen 

Lee R. Christensen

January 19, 1922 to June 2, 2018

He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.

Lee Christensen (Buddy) became suddenly ill last week and passed away at the hospital on Saturday. He was very healthy physically and mentally right up until a few days before his death. He died peacefully and without pain.

Lee was born in Chicago, Illinois, where his father was attending law school at Northwestern University, on either November 19, 1921 or January 19, 1922 (dependent on whether you go by the date Lee's family celebrated or his birth certificate). After his father's graduation from Northwestern, the family returned to Mt. Pleasant, Utah, where Lee was known as "Buddy." Lee spent his summers either working on his grandfather's sheep ranch or on a summer project assigned by his father (e.g. minding a cow and selling milk, growing and selling potatoes, chopping down trees and selling the firewood).

Lee played in the marching band at Hamilton grade school, and initially attended North Sanpete High School. During his junior and senior years, Lee attended Wasatch Academy, where in his 1939 yearbook, it was noted that, "he has the type of mind you can sharpen your own on." Lee graduated from Wasatch Academy in 1940 as vice-president of his senior class.

Shortly after graduation, Lee enlisted in the Army, where he was selected to attend Officer Training School in 1942, and was sent to Europe to serve on the front lines of WWII. Lee participated in the invasion of Normandy on D-Day IV, where he was wounded in battle on August 1, 1944 on the outskirts of Percy, France.  He was back in action on December 15. If you're a WWII buff (like Lee) you will remember that Hitler had planned his Ardennes offensive (Battle of the Bulge) to begin on December 1.  Per Lee, "Hitler was trying to start it before I could get back to the front. Hitler failed and the rest is history..."  Lee was discharged from the Army on December 26, 1945 as a First Lieutenant.

After the end of the war, Lee continued in the Army Reserves (making rank of Major) and was a life-long amateur historian in WWII. He completed his bachelor degree in Political Science at UC Berkeley on the GI Bill, and was then hired by the federal government to work for its relatively new "start-up" – the Social Security Administration. Lee spent his entire career working for the SSA, helping ensure individuals understood social security and received their benefits. Lee retired from the SSA as an assistant regional commissioner out of the Seattle office.

Lee was an outdoor enthusiast and summited Mt Rainier twice.  He loved all animals and never met a dog that didn't love him. Lee had a very rich Mormon background. All of his grandparents were born in Utah. He had great-grandparents in Nauvoo, Illinois, and all of them migrated to Utah by 1860, some as early as 1849. His father served a two-year mission in Norway from 1909 to 1912. Despite this, Lee was not a Mormon; although he studied genealogy and his family history (in the days before the internet, when everything was on paper records!)

Lee met Barbara Davis at Berkeley, and they married in December 1949.The couple divorced after raising three daughters (Kitty Christensen, Tracy Trick, and Robyn Christensen-Sandfort). Lee is survived by his three daughters and two grandchildren (Thomas Lee Sandfort and Maya Zichun Sandfort), and four sisters (Ruth Klass, Ginger Keville, Sally MacArthur, and Dottie Smith).

Per Lee's wishes, there will be no service. Brookside Funeral Home is assisting the family. Lee will be cremated and his ashes spread on the ranch in Yakima, WA, overlooking the hills and mountains that he loved.

 In lieu of flowers, please donate to one of the following organizations:

-          PAWS:  https://www.paws.org/support/donate/

-          America's VetDogs: https://www.vetdogs.org/AV/HowtoHelp/AV/HowToHelp/howtohelp.aspx?hkey=677506ac-919b-46bf-8ca8-52a79662f43d

-          Wasatch Academy: http://wasatchacademy.org/giving/

HOME OF MARTINUS NELSON ~ for the Women's Home Missionary Society

 

Dr. Duncan J.McMillan ~~~ Wasatch Academy ~ Founded April, 19, 1875

 This page is taken from Louise Johansen's Scrapbook.

FEED STABLE

 

 

~~~~~~~

Unfortunately, Wasatch Academy did not appreciate the history of this building. 

Unfortunately the above feed stable

has hit the dust.

It was where the

  First Utah National Guard

Calvary Unit

kept their horses.

Wasatch Academy bought the site

and housed storage there for several years.

It is said that they now will have a parking lot there.

Turning the Hearts of the Children to Their Fathers

In 1926 the 222^nd Field Artillery Battalion, Battery D, Utah National Guard was organized.  Prior to this time, the local National Guard was a Calvary Unit  

This new battalion consisted of young men, some of them not yet married. The photo above represents just a few of the children who were born much later and who are very proud of their fathers because of their many accomplishments

The photo they are holding is  Battery D, 222^nd .FA.  It was taken at the annual summer encampment held at Jordan Narrows every summer. Their commander was Lee R. Christensen Sr.  The accompanying photo was reproduced from one that is displayed at Utah National Guard Headquarters in Draper.  The donor of the picture is Lee R. Christensen Jr., who now lives in Washington State.  Lee had it reproduced, framed and sent as a contribution to the Mt. Pleasant Relic Home. He, himself joined the group in 1937, just shy of his 16^th birthday.  He has told us that it was standard practice back then to join during your sophomore year in high school.  Lee tells us that Elmer Fillis and Billy Hansen joined at the age of 14.

The brass label on the photo says this group of young men were an Honor Battalion and here is why.  They earned Silver Cup for appearance, discipline, sanitation, quality of mess, speed and accuracy in firing works, control of instruments, close order drill, customs, and ceremonies of the service.  In 1927 this group was also honored for having   best program at the camp and for the greatest percentage of attendance.  First Sergeant A. W. Peterson was awarded a cash prize for general efficiency during the encampment and  Earl Beck was awarded a small loving cup for boxing.  Captain L. R. Christensen was highly commended for the splendid showing of Battery D. 

The men mustered into the charter group were:  Officers, L. R. Christensen, Chesley P. Seely, James F. Jordon.   Enlisted men were: Morris C. Pollard, Waldo M. Barton,   Evan A. Beck, Alden V. Borg, Milo Brewer, Arthur W. Brewer, Ray C. Brotherson, Ernest G. Brunger, Guy L. Candland, Grant Coates, Alvin H. Christensen, Harold Q. Christensen, Earl G. Christensen, Andy J. Draper, Robert L. Ericksen, Harold E. Frandsen, Othello P. Hansen, William Hansen, Harold Glen Johansen, Peter Jordan, Theron L. Jorgensen, Cannon Jorgensen, Drannen Kolstrom, Farrel Larsen, Ervin (Chris) Larsen, Joseph Larsen, Evan McArthur, Perry F. McArthur, Kent Nielsen, Edgar E. Olsen, Seymour J. Olsen, Mont Olsen, William M. Orrock, Axel W. Peterson, Ferry W. Peterson, Ray Primera, Francis J. Rackman, Que E. Rasmussen, James Howard Rasmussen, Paul F. Reynolds, Peter W. Reynolds, John H. Rosenberg, Hyrum Carlton Seely, Harry Simpson, Gordon Staker, Alden C. Syndergaard, Fern Truscott, William Radford Wagstaff, Daniel LeRoy Wall, and William M. Williams.

 A quote from the Mt. Pleasant Pyramid, our local newspaper, in 1927 states “Battery D is trying hard to be your protection and your pride in times of trouble.  It expects you to give it support and encouragement in times of peace.  ….. With scarcely an exception fathers and employers of these boys said to them, ‘We will make the sacrifice, you go to camp’. “Battery D  extends to those fathers and those employers its sincerest thanks.”  And from a 1933 Pyramid we quote, “During the past eight years’ competition for the regimental merit cup, Battery D has won the coveted honor five times, the last three years in succession.

 Mt. Pleasants’ National Guard Unit Btry D was called up for Federal Service 3 March 1941 and ultimately fought for our nation in World War II.       

Our Mt. Pleasant Community can be very proud of these men for generations to come.  Mt. Pleasant Pioneer Historical Association and Relic Home appreciate Lee R. Christensen’s very meaningful contribution.

Home of Moroni Seely And His Wife Emily Alice Barton

 

WASATCH ACADEMY and LIBERAL HALL ~~~ Researched and Compiled by Tudy Barentsen Standlee

 

Businesses Once On 52 South State Street ~~~ Researched, Compiled and Updated by Tudy Barentsen Standlee

 

LIBERAL HALL/ WASATCH ACADEMY/PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH ~~~Researched and Compiled by Tudy Barentsen Standlee

 

Dr. Duncan J. McMillan~~~ Founded Wasatch Academy Jun 18, 1879~~~Louise Johansen Scrapbook