Continuum

From humble beginnings, the University of Utah theater program has grown into a major player on the collegiate stage.

Some of the cast of Eleusinia, the first production by a University of Utah theatrical troupe.

Photo courtesy Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of  Utah

While Utah, as a state, has a distinguished history of theater, in the early days of the University of Utah there was little money to support a theater program. That began to change in 1892, when Maud May Babcock became a member of the faculty. Besides starting the women’s physical education program and teaching elocution, Babcock lobbied for a University theatrical troupe and a place to stage productions. In 1895, her efforts paid off with a production of Eleusinia (a theatrical interpretation of an ancient Greek festival), held in the old Salt Lake Theater on June 6. The success of that production led to the formation of a University Dramatic Club in 1897, and from that time on, with only a few interruptions, the University of Utah has served as a center for amateur plays. Several have been staged each year, ranging from light comedies and musicals to serious dramas. Since there was no theater on campus initially, productions were held at venues around the Salt Lake valley besides the Salt Lake Theater, including LDS ward chapels, local high school auditoriums, and even outdoors on a specially built stage at Wandamere Resort (now Nibley Park). A major change in the University’s theater program came in 1913-1914, when control over the production of all plays was vested in a five-member Dramatic Council. This was followed in 1917 by the formation of the Varsity Players, and, that same year, a room in the Museum Building (now known as the Talmage) was converted into a small stage. The old Salt Lake Theater was razed in 1929, but University thespians finally gained a full-scale stage of their own with the completion of Kingsbury Hall in 1930. University theater flourished throughout this period, with a number of other troupes besides the Varsity Players featured, such as The Mummers, the University Musical Stagers, both “Boys” and “Girls” dramatic clubs, and companies from the U’s strong opera program. When Babcock retired in 1938, she was praised by The Daily Utah Chronicle (April 21, 1938), as “the ‘first lady of Utah drama,’ [who] has been continuous head of the speech department and has directed 41 varsity plays.” Shortly after her retirement, the University’s drama program was reorganized as the University Theater. Productions were suspended for the most part during World War II, but the tradition was kept alive by speech and drama professor Gail Plummer, and later C. Lowell Lees, who became head of the Speech Department in 1943. Other strong supporters of theater during the years after the war were Lila Eccles Brimhall, who taught speech and theater, and Keith Engar, former chair of the Theatre Department. In 1962, Pioneer Memorial Theater, a replica of the old Salt Lake Theater, opened, with stages named in honor of professors Babcock and Lees, giving the University’s performers (as well as the professional Pioneer Theatre Company) a home of their own and ensuring that the University of Utah will remain at the forefront of college and university theater programs for years to come.

—Roy Webb BA’84 MS’91 is a multimedia archivist with the J. Willard Marriott Library.

The U’s med school has grown from a collection of “frontier doctors” to become one of the world’s best academic medical centers.

Photo courtesy Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah

This turn-of-the century photo from the Ralph Vary Chamberlin collection might depict the first medical school class at the U to use a human cadaver. Chamberlin, a med student, once wrote, “At the time the teaching of human anatomy began [at the U, in the early 1900s], a knotty problem faced was that of securing cadavers, as there was then in Utah no law specifically providing for this need. However, the existing statutes seemed to empower the county physician to dispose of unclaimed bodies, and under a liberal interpretation of this power and the cooperation of the Salt Lake County physicians, a sufficient supply was secured to meet minimum requirements from the spring of 1905 through 1905-06 and the first part of the next year. It was an event when the first cadaver was received under this precarious arrangement .”

The University of Deseret, the predecessor to the University of Utah, had some practicing physicians on the faculty, but most of them were “frontier doctors,” self-taught or trained as herbalists. It wasn’t until 1905, a few years after the University moved to its present location, that the Board of Regents established a two-year program in medicine. Some 47 students enrolled in the first classes and upon graduation were awarded A.B. degrees in medicine. Within a few years, however, the medical program almost ceased to exist when most of the faculty resigned during an academic controversy in 1915, caused by what some felt was undue influence in the curriculum of the University by the LDS Church. The regents decided to rebuild the medical school faculty, and, as a result, the program flourished in the years just before World War I. Up until that time, medical classes had been held in various locations around campus. In 1907, the human anatomy lab was sited on the second floor of the mechanical engineering building, while classes were taught in the old Museum (completed in 1902 and later renamed the Talmage Building). In 1920, a new facility was constructed just south of the Normal Building (later renamed after Alfred Emery) at a cost of more than $75,000. Soon a nationwide movement calling for the abolition of two-year medical programs pushed the U’s medical school to expand to four years, which it did in 1942. The subsequent decades saw many prominent names in medicine at the U—pioneers such as Maxwell Wintrobe, Willem Kolff, Leo Samuels, Louis Goodman, and many others. The current medical school facility opened in July 1965; since that time, the University of Utah’s School of Medicine has continued to build a reputation as one of the premier teaching hospitals in the world.

—Roy Webb BA’84 MS’91, Multimedia Archivist, J. Willard Marriott Library

The first mention of a Snow Carnival (also known as Winter Carnival or Winter Festival) at the University of Utah appeared in an issue of The Daily Utah Chronicle in January 1937. This and subsequent carnivals set a pattern of holding various contests on campus, the election of a Snow Queen and attendants, and a ski meet at either Brighton or Alta, culminating in a big dance at which the winners of the various contests and the ski, skate, and snowshoe races were announced. The contests took place on the circle in front of the Park Building, or at Cummings Field, and involved snow sculptures created by fraternities and sororities, ice skating, races on barrel staves, and costumes. The Snow Carnival carried on into the first years of World War II but seems to have been abandoned for a few years after 1942, and it didn’t reappear until 1948. But even during the years in which there wasn’t enough snow on campus for snow play, other activities were improvised, such as mural painting in the dry year of 1951, and the ski races were still held, as was the big dance at the end of the week. Throughout the 1950s, the Snow Carnival was a four-day event, with hundreds of students participating. By the start of the 1960s, however, the Snow Carnival had shrunk to two days and was combined with the Women’s Recreation Association carnival. By the late 1960s, the Snow Carnival had disappeared from the pages of the Utonian yearbook and the Chronicle. Renamed Winterfest, the carnival appeared off and on through the ensuing decades, but it was never the same festive celebration that it had been in the halcyon 1950s. Just this winter, for the first time in many years, the U of U made plans for a new incarnation of the carnival, called Winter Fest, in January 2010, featuring ski tuning and waxing, avalanche safety training, and a vintage ski and snowboard outfit contest.

—Roy Webb BA’84 MS’91, Multimedia Archivist, J. Willard Marriott Library