More than half a lifetime ago, before she was a renowned bioethicist—in fact before she had ever heard of the word “bioethicist”—Peggy Battin wrote a short story about a husband and wife who make a pact to end their own lives, together, when they get old.

It’s a beautiful, chilling story, and the questions it raises go far beyond what we are now only marginally willing to discuss in America. This isn’t about a physician writing a lethal prescription for a terminally ill patient. This is about what bioethicists call “preemptive suicide.” If you want a close-up look at the kind of unflinching ethical questions Margaret Pabst Battin thinks we should ponder, her story “Robeck” is not a bad place to start.

Battin is Distinguished Professor of philosophy and adjunct professor of internal medicine in the Division of Medical Ethics and Humanities at the University of Utah. It was only after she moved to Utah in 1975 that she began to steer her career toward issues of death and dying, but in the short stories she wrote while still in graduate school, she had already begun to grapple with end-of-life issues, spurred in part by a question her own mother asked in the last, debilitating stages of cancer: “Why should it be so hard to die?”

In “Robeck,” the elderly wife—faced with the prospect of an even older age filled with “despair, decay, continuing loneliness”—still wants to follow through with the suicide pact she and her husband had made when they were younger. The husband—faced with the realization that dying as an abstract concept is not the same as actually dying—changes his mind.

“Robeck,” written in the 1970s, wasn’t published until 2005, when it appeared among the philosophical essays in Battin’s book Ending Life: Ethics and the Way We Die. On a November afternoon three years later, Battin’s husband, University of Utah English professor Brooke Hopkins, was riding his bike down City Creek Canyon and collided on a blind curve with another biker heading uphill.

Suddenly, like the characters in her short story, Battin came face to face with how complicated living and dying can be, much more complicated than even a philosopher can imagine.

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Here’s how she once opened a talk to a group called Compassion & Choices, which focuses on planning for end-oflife: by drawing a line that went straight across a chalkboard for a few inches then sloped relentlessly downward, dragging on and on until it thinly petered out. This, she told the group, is our typical life trajectory. In the modern world— with its ventilators and pacemakers, feeding tubes and chemotherapies—our deaths are often a slow decline, full of protracted suffering.

After Battin’s talk, a woman with ovarian cancer spoke up. She explained that she had done a dress rehearsal of her future death, using a method she had found on the Internet: Placing a turkey baster bag over her head. The practice run was awful, she said, so instead she had bought a gun.

The trajectory and the turkey baster bag: this, in some form or other, is the backdrop for current battles over physician-assisted suicide and other “right to die” legislation as we try to sort out our 21st-century deaths. It’s an issue that has become more pressing as technology has become even more advanced and the percentage of elderly people and health care costs rise.

Battin has long been a proponent of “death with dignity” laws that give people some degree of autonomy in how and when they die. That’s what made her husband’s accident, as she says, “so overwhelmingly ironic”—because the accident left Hopkins paralyzed from the neck down, and the bioethicist who had championed the right to die had to let the husband she deeply loved make up his own mind about whether he wanted to go on living.

“I don’t think anybody said this to my face,” Battin says of people on the other side of the right-to-die issue, “but I’m sure they thought it: she deserves this, this will teach her.”

But Battin has not changed her view that people should have a choice in the manner and time of their own death. Instead, she says, what Hopkins’s ordeal taught her was that the choices are “much more complicated than I thought.”

During the nearly five years that Hopkins lived following his accident, Battin witnessed a series of vacillating emotions and experiences: his gratitude at being alive, his pleas to let his life be over, courses in great literature that he continued to teach from their home, moments of excruciating pain, moments of transcendence, and eventually his final decision that he couldn’t go on any longer. She realized firsthand that a severely restricted life can also have many moments of joy, and that a loving wife might in subtle ways encourage her husband to keep on living when he might want to die.

When, on the last day of July 2013, Hopkins finally asked his doctors to turn off the five technologies that were keeping him alive, Battin lay next to him as the ventilator was dialed down and his breathing eventually stopped.

“As hard as it was for me to have him make this choice to die, you have to respect it,” Battin says in her soft, measured voice. “That’s what it is to love somebody, to try to see it through their eyes.”

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How many philosophers does it take to change a light bulb? It depends on how you define “change.”

Philosophers are notoriously parsers of language and logic, and this intellectual rigor is what first drew Battin to the discipline, from the very first class she took as an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr College in 1959.

The first day of class, the professor walked in, sat on the edge of his desk, and said “You know, I look around at the world and I think, ‘all is water.’ ” He went on at great length and was very persuasive that water is the material substrate of everything, Battin remembers. At the next class, he walked in, sat on the desk, and said “You know, I think I was wrong. I think it’s air.” On the third day it was fire.

“What he produced,” Battin says, “was a skeptic. It was one of the best and most engaging intellectual lessons you could possibly have.”

After college, she worked, married, had a first child, and moved to California. Two weeks after the birth of their second child, in 1969, she entered the University of California, Irvine, to get her doctorate in philosophy—and, simultaneously, an MFA in creative writing.

She explains the dual degrees this way: “I liked the intellectual rigor of philosophy, but you can’t read Spinoza all day long. I liked the inventiveness of fiction, but you have to make it meaning-rich and rigorous; you can’t just feed on someone else’s struggles with their inner confusions.”

She sent her fiction to literary magazines and got lots of rejection letters. So, with typical moxie, she flew to New York and began the rounds of publishers and agents in person. At first she still had no luck. Then she called The New American Review (publisher of literary giants like Gabriel García Márquez and Sylvia Plath) and asked to speak to the editor.

“After a few minutes of silence, the voice on the other end of the phone said ‘Mr. Solotaroff will be happy to see you. He has four minutes,’ ” Battin recalls. Luckily, she was calling from the phone booth in the lobby. Later that year, M. Pabst Battin’s “Terminal Procedure” was published in The New American Review. And the next year it was published in Best American Short Stories 1976.

By then, Battin was divorced and living in Salt Lake City, hired by the University of Utah’s philosophy department for a one-year appointment. She had written her doctoral dissertation on Plato’s theory of art, and she thought she was headed toward a career focused on the ancient philosophers and aesthetics. But as a new, temporary hire, she was assigned to teach Intellectual Traditions of the West (ITW). One of the other new hires for ITW was Brooke Hopkins, who had joined the U after five years of teaching at Harvard.

And then, three things happened: she fell in love; she gradually began merging her prior literary interest in issues of death and dying with her academic pursuits; and she won a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for Independent Study and Research, one of just six in the country, for work on the ethics of suicide. Within a week of the award, her temporary job became tenure track. She would eventually win the U’s most prestigious award, the Rosenblatt Prize.

“You know, people have been dying for a long time,” Battin deadpans. “And such a large percentage of them, too. So I’m not the first person who ever thought about death and dying.” But she was among the first, and the most prolific, thinkers in the emerging field of bioethics—a mash-up of theoretical ethics with the practicalities of day-to-day medicine and science.

Battin’s personality dovetailed with this practical approach. “She’s by no means an ideologue or inflexible,” says Arthur Caplan, founding director of the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University. “She’s always been a person who’s been tuned in to the specifics of a case.”

At the New York-based Hastings Center, which is often credited with starting the field of bioethics and where Battin is a Fellow, president Mildred Solomon describes her this way: “She has comprehensive talents you rarely see all in one mind.” Philosophers are well known for being analytical, Solomon says, and Battin is “deeply analytical.” But she is also able to see how logical arguments “play out in messy and emotionally rich human contexts. That’s very unusual.”

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If you could look inside Peggy Battin’s brain, perhaps it would look something like the inside of her house.

There are stacks of paper on each of her six desks (seven desks if you count the dining room table). On the stacks there are sticky notes, and there are sticky notes around every inch of the doorframe in the kitchen and inside each kitchen cabinet. Upstairs there are stacks of paper leading from one bedroom to another, a trail of research and pondering.

She keeps paper copies of every draft of everything she is writing or has written. In a stack on the windowsill is the 16th draft of a chapter she began in 1995; eventually it will be a book about the ethics of reproduction, tentatively titled Sex & Consequences.

“Sometimes I joke that what I really need is to move into an old motel,” she says, “so I could have a different room for each project.”

The topics she has published about include: death and dying, age-rationing of medical care, ethical issues in organized religion, the ethics of religious refusal of medical treatment, drugs and justice, disability, aesthetics, and ethical issues about infectious diseases. That’s a total of 20 books authored, edited, or co-edited.

Battin’s latest book is The Ethics of Suicide: Historical Sources, published in the fall of 2015. It’s 720 pages in teeny type—but even that wasn’t enough to handle all the research amassed by Battin, her 46 consulting editors, and 27 research assistants. So she proposed a partnership between the book’s publisher, Oxford University Press, and the University of Utah’s Marriott Library in what became a first-of-its-kind publishing venture. While many books have associated digital archives, this is the first time QR codes have been embedded in each entry in the print edition, linking directly to expanded primary sources and interactive features online.

Battin didn’t set out to write such an exhaustive investigation of suicide. When she started the project four decades ago, she was simply filing away photocopies of interesting historical references. “You can’t just throw them away— they’re too interesting and too hard to get ahold of (this was, of course, pre-Internet)—so you put them in a file drawer,” and eventually the file drawer goes from ancient Egypt to the present. “And then you say, well, what about Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, Islam? So now there are more file drawers. And then you say, what about these oral cultures that didn’t have written records, the Maya, the Aztec, the Inca?”

The book, notes Battin, “takes no sides” in these historical debates about suicide, instead presenting primary sources that give a variety of pros, cons, and neutral discussion on topics that include suicide as sin, suicide as heroic choice, physician aid in dying, Buddhist monks who immolate themselves to protest a war, and jihadists seeking martyrdom. The book, she argues, “challenges monolithic thinking about suicide.”

Battin has spent 39 years, off and on, working on this book, and even longer immersed in thoughts about death and dying. She has never been suicidal herself, she says, which makes it possible to devote so much time to thinking about what others might consider morbid topics.

She is, she says, an optimistic person. More than four decades after writing “Robeck”—which has now been turned into a play by Salt Lake City playwright Julie Jensen and will be produced by the Salt Lake Acting Company in the fall of 2016—she can imagine an America in which everyone “has a full range of choice about how they’d like their own deaths to go.”

Or, at least, “that such an outcome would in principle be possible.”

—Elaine Jarvik is a Salt Lake City-based journalist and playwright and a frequent contributor to Continuum.

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As a girl growing up in rural Shasta County, California, a scrappy Lynne Roberts had to earn her first points in basketball by shooting high-arcing jumpers over her father and two older, taller brothers. She recalls dejectedly watching her shot attempts being blocked into a nearby cow pasture. A girl on a street full of boys who let her humbly hike the ball during pickup football games, she used the omnipresent good-natured sibling ribbing—that she wasn’t big, strong, or fast enough—as motivation to relentlessly work on her many games, earning 12 varsity letters in high school sports. Those countless hours of two-on-two in the family’s driveway and always playing “catch-up” with the boys in her life were the seeds of a competitive streak that grew and has propelled her through the arc of her personal and professional trajectory.

Now Roberts, 40, stands in her office as the newly minted head coach of the University of Utah’s women’s basketball team, marveling at how the space is bigger—more than 900 square feet—than her first home as an adult. Her office—like men’s basketball head coach Larry Krystkowiak’s—is in the new 101,000-square-foot Jon M. & Karen Huntsman Basketball Facility, with views of the Wasatch Mountains to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains out west across the Utah campus and Salt Lake Valley. They both have a fireplace, a 60-inch retractable television, and a private bathroom with a shower. Each space is equally impressive and a reminder to Roberts, despite her past successes as a coach in college basketball, that she still needs to earn some respect as a head coach in the Pac-12, where the Utes women’s team so far hasn’t made a lot of noise since joining the conference in 2011. Roberts started making her own noise at Enterprise High School in Redding, California, excelling in tennis, volleyball, softball, track, soccer— “I did them all”—and, of course, basketball. She earned a scholarship to play basketball at Seattle Pacific University, where she admits she cared at first more about sports and socializing. As a senior, she was named to the NCAA West Regional all-tournament team, and by that time she had settled down academically to finish in 1997 with a degree in history, following in the foot-steps of a mother who taught history at a junior high. (Her father was a vice president for berry grower Driscoll’s.) She stayed at Seattle Pacific to get a master’s in athletic administration in 2000. “It was the first time in my life that I was passionate about school,” Roberts says. Her coach, Gordy Presnell (now head coach of the women’s team at Boise State), told Roberts she would be good at coaching, and she became his assistant in Seattle from 1997- 2001, advancing each season to the NCAA Division II tournament.

On her own as a head coach, the 2014-15 West Coast Conference Co-Coach of the Year has proven her mettle, racking up an 86-33 record while head coach at California State University, Chico, from 2002-06, and becoming the California Collegiate Athletic Association Coach of the Year for two years in a row (as well as the 2004-05 WBCA West Region Coach of the Year). From 2006-15, she turned around a losing University of Pacific team in Stockton, Calif., taking it into the first round of the WNIT the past two years, and was also named the conference coach of the year in 2012-13.

Photo by Stephen Speckman

Utah Athletics Director Chris Hill MEd’74 PhD’82 is hopeful that Roberts, who signed a six-year, $1.65 million deal, will be the change the Utes need after releasing coach Anthony Levrets last spring. “I think we have a high expectation for our women’s basketball team,” says Hill. “We have a great history, and we weren’t attaining what we thought we could. We’re fortunate enough to have hired someone who we think is going to be really, really good—and we’re excited about it.” He describes Roberts as “smart, personable, and someone who has a lot of connections with recruiting.” Now that his department has set up Roberts in a new basketball facility, which Hill notes is a “tremendous recruiting tool,” he says it’s time to stand aside and let her build the team into a perennial top contender. “It’s going to take a while, because it’s a rebuilding process, just like it was with Coach Krystkowiak on the men’s side,” Hill says. “We anticipate that in five years we will be the type of team that’s in the NCAA tournament quite a bit and having a chance to advance in certain years and get to the Sweet 16 and be a major post-season player. But that’s going to take a couple of years.”

Hill says Utah Athletics has given the financial backing Roberts needs to build her staff. She wasted no time assembling her coaching staff after she was hired last April, bringing on board former Utah State player and coach Danyelle Snelgro, who also coached at Fresno State University and Texas Christian University, and Wesley Brooks, who coached at four schools including the University of North Texas, where he was the past four seasons. She has also brought on new marketing and video production hires to help her amp up excitement. But her first acquisition was Assistant Coach Gavin Petersen, who for the past two seasons had been an assistant to Roberts at Pacific. Petersen says it was an “easy” decision to join Roberts at Utah. “We work really well together,” he says. “We complement each other.”

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Petersen calls Roberts a “competitor,” someone who “prepares hard” and uses humor to maintain a balance and a kind of “family” atmosphere. Illustrative of the effects of that balance, he points to a game toward the end of last season, with Pacific going into hostile territory on Gonzaga’s home court, on Senior Night, in front of a sold-out audience. The perennial West Coast Conference champions earlier in the season had beat the Tigers on Pacific’s own court and had already sealed a top seed in the playoffs, and Pacific was vying for a second or third seed. “We ended up winning—it was awesome,” Petersen says. “She’s tough, passionate, those type of things we want our kids to take on…. It happens slowly, but it will happen.”

Emily Potter, the talented 6’6” forward from Winnipeg, Canada, who redshirted last season with a knee injury under Levrets, comes back eligible for three more seasons under new coach Roberts. “It’s definitely been an adjustment—I think for all of us,” Potter says. “None of us have gone through anything like this before—so, it’s kind of like uncharted waters. But it’s been going well so far.” Potter says she likes that Roberts was “honest” with her from the start and asked for her trust with regard to the direction she wants to take the team. Potter also describes the team as a family playing in a conference where they haven’t yet gained respect. “It really motivates us all,” she says. “We have a little bit of a chip on our shoulders.”

That “chip” is partly what drew Roberts to Utah. “As a competitor, I want to have a chance to win at the highest level,” she says. “This job just fit my personality. There’s kind of a blue-collar, underdog, chip-on-your-shoulder mentality here with the team that resonates with me. I love coaching that. We’re the new guys in the conference, and people kind of pat you on the head and say, ‘Yeah, yeah, you’ll get there someday.’ I love that. That motivates me like nothing else.” Utah Senior Associate Athletics Director Nona Richardson oversaw the search for a new head coach and likes Roberts’ intensity, “basketball savvy,” the respect she gained at Pacific and Chico State, and that she knows how to surround herself with the right people. “You can’t do it alone,” Richardson says. Roberts, she adds, has her “pedal to the metal; she’s still working her way upward,” and is poised to bring “relevance” back to a program that through 2014 has the 14th best all-time winning percentage in Division 1 women’s college basketball. Comparisons by Richardson and others, of course, lead to former Utes head coach Elaine Elliott, who in 27 seasons at Utah amassed a 582-234 record (Elliott retired from the U and is now an assistant coach at Salt Lake Community College). Their style of play, Richardson says, is more upbeat, faster tempo, and their approach to the game is to recruit the right kids, be disciplined, run hard, and “approach every day as if it’s your last.”

“What she did here is so cool,” says Roberts, who mentions the long line of proud former players who still feel like it’s “their program.” She talks about how the game has changed and how, ironically, the players these days are bigger, stronger, and faster—traits her brothers teased her about as a child. “Recruiting is everything,” she says, pointing to assistants with strong ties to deep reservoirs of talent in Texas and California. “It’s a great time to be at Utah,” she adds, referring in part to the new basketball facility that she calls the best in the country. “All of those things add up,” Roberts says. “That said, we’re going to have to work our tails off as coaches to get some street cred out there.”

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By the end of this past summer, Roberts was settling nicely into Utah. “I’ve been so impressed with the people here. There’s like a familial feel to it.” And with the mountain ranges out both directions from her office, “I’m still blown away by the beauty,” she says. She might even find time in her office to kick back on the new furniture and read a book. Roberts prefers reading about great leaders—not necessarily in sports—like President Harry S. Truman, who she points out faced the difficult task of how to end a world war. “I think his story is a great story of leadership.”

Instead of following her brothers into medicine to become a doctor, her father into the berry business, or her mother into teaching, Roberts has herself become a leader on and off the court, mentoring her players to also focus on academics. In 13 years as a head coach, she’s never had a player be ineligible because of grades, and 100 percent of her players have graduated from college. “I feel like I have a pretty good balance with the academic piece,” she says. “Even if any of these guys go on to play professionally, they’re not going to sign a $90 million contract with Nike. They’re going to have to, at some point, hang up the high tops and do something else to pay the bills. As a coach, I do take that responsibility very seriously.”

One of Roberts’ most important messages to players? “Find something you love, that you’re interested in and think you might want to do, and pursue it—and let basketball be a way that you can really enhance your collegiate experience, and get it paid for. But at the end of the day, get your degree in something you care about.”

—Stephen Speckman is a Salt Lake City-based writer and photographer and a frequent contributor to Continuum.

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THOMAS CARTER started out just wanting to play the fiddle. As a teenager in Salt Lake City in the early 1960s, he’d been drawn to folk music of the kind performed by Peter, Paul and Mary and The Kingston Trio, and as he dug deeper into the genre, he found his way to the music of the Appalachian South. He was hooked by the New Lost City Ramblers, who did several shows at the University of Utah during those years. “They played old-time fiddle tunes, and banjo in the old drop thumb, or claw hammer style,” he says. He and his buddies decided to start their own band in that vein, “and by default I became the fiddler.”

His love of that music took him to other paths besides fiddling, however. It eventually led him to study folklore, and then histories, and then to a long career examining how historical buildings reflect the culture of the people who built them. “I had always liked old buildings, for like the old fiddle tunes, they connected me to a pre-modern rural world that somehow seemed more ‘authentic’ than the suburban neighborhood I had grown up in,” says Carter, who is now a professor emeritus in the University of Utah’s College of Architecture and Planning. “I’ve spent a lifetime collecting and recording handmade rather than machine-made music and buildings.”

After graduating from high school in Salt Lake City, Carter attended Brown University in Rhode Island, where he studied American history. But he says his “transformative experience” came in an ethnomusicology class. He wasn’t doing well in the class—quite likely because he kept going to Vermont to attend old-time fiddlers’ conventions—and his professor suggested he write his term paper on the fiddlers he’d met there.

“I located one old guy, Neil Converse of Plainfield, Vermont, and he let me record him,” Carter says. “The paper wasn’t really very good, as I recall, but it got me through the course, and in the process, I discovered the one thing I could do, which was fieldwork.”

Tom Carter has played the fiddle for years and in the ’70s recorded LPs with the Fuzzy Mountain String Band. (Photo by Austen Diamond)

At Brown, Carter also met the American folklorist Archie Green, who introduced him to that field and told him about a good program getting underway at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After receiving his bachelor’s degree in American history at Brown, Carter visited the Chapel Hill campus on his way from a fiddle festival in North Carolina. The folklore program director, Dan Patterson, offered him an assistantship working to set up the North Carolina Folklore Archive, and Carter went on to receive a master’s degree in American folklore. He wrote his thesis on a fiddler from Allegheny County, North Carolina, named Joe Caudill. “I also played in the Fuzzy Mountain String Band, which became quite influential in the folk music revival, due to a couple of LPs the band released in the early ’70s,” Carter recalls.

Patterson put Carter in touch with Indiana University’s Folklore Institute, where one faculty member, Henry Glassie, was a banjo player as well as a writer on material culture and folk housing. During his tutelage in Indiana’s doctoral program, Carter and his then wife, Ann Kaedesch, spent a year living in an 1850s farmhouse in the Blue Ridge Mountains, with Carter focusing on the arrival of the banjo and how it affected the early fiddle music of the region in North Carolina and Virginia. He recorded as many musicians as he could. “My recordings never became a dissertation—I got sidetracked by architecture—but I did produce a series of LPs called the Old Originals, the title referring to the ‘old original’ folk music of the region, as opposed to newer popular music that superseded it,” he says.

For his dissertation, Carter instead chose to examine the early Mormon folk housing that still existed in Nauvoo, Illinois. Carter began working with Jan Shipps, a professor of religious history at Indiana University who would become his mentor on historical architecture and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The fiddle, she says now, “could have been his life. He’s that good. But there he is, having this incredible ability to look at a house. He was curious and able to figure it out.” Carter says his move from folklore to architectural history and preservation seemed quite natural to him. “I was better at analyzing buildings than I was at analyzing musical scales,” he says. “I found I could easily substitute houses for fiddle tunes.”

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Carter and his wife decided they wanted to return to the mountains of Utah, so he shifted the focus of his doctoral study from Mormon architecture in Nauvoo to that of Utah’s Sanpete County, home of the Manti Temple and, he says, “the best collection of early Mormon buildings.” Unlike Salt Lake City, where many old buildings had long been demolished to allow for new growth, Sanpete contained the largest number of early buildings anywhere in Utah. “I wanted to study the 1847-1890 period, and more importantly, the whole Zion-building process,” he says.

So he and his wife lived in Sanpete County, where she taught dance at Snow College while he did research for his dissertation. (Along the way, they also had a son and a daughter, who he says recall vacations filled with him stopping to photograph or draw old buildings.) “Folklore is really the study of everyday life, a kind of populist inquiry that was highly attractive to many of us coming out of the cultural upheavals of the 1960s,” he says. “So while I liked old stuff, whether fiddle tunes or houses, they were only a means to the larger end of doing cultural history.”

Tom Carter, doing architectural fieldwork on a pioneer house in Utah’s Sanpete County. (Photo courtesy Thomas Carter)

He became the architectural historian at the Utah Division of State History in 1978, a position he would hold until 1990. “In the 1970s, many states were beginning, under the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, to survey their historic buildings, so there was work,” he says. And in 1984, he received his doctorate from Indiana University in American folklore, with a minor in Western American history, and began teaching vernacular architecture classes as an adjunct instructor at the University of Utah.

During those years, he worked closely with Peter L. Goss, a U architectural history professor, and together they wrote Utah’s Historic Architecture, 1847- 1940: A Guide, published in 1988. “Peter saw that I contributed something very different, and that together we made a good team,” Carter says now. “He knew the architectural vocabulary, and the architect-designed buildings, and I was all about the common stuff and knew how to get into people’s houses to draw up the floor plans. So we combined our talents on the Utah guidebook, which was the first of its kind really to combine architectural styles and building types in a single work.”

Carter became an assistant professor in the U’s Graduate School of Architecture in 1990 and director of the U’s Western Regional Architecture Program. As a newly minted professor, he received a grant from the federal National Endowment for the Humanities to further study Western vernacular architecture. The work entailed what Carter has always loved: summer field trips that took him and his students out to draw buildings around the West. He also developed a master’s program on preservation and established an archive of 500 to 600 drawings in the West.

His friend Jack Brady BS’92 MAr’94, an architect in Layton, remembers those days of Carter and his students “crawling around basements and attics and understanding details on structure and organization of space.” Carter and his students also drew the elements they saw, and many made their way into summer booklets. “You don’t understand it unless you sketch it on paper,” Brady says. “That’s the discovery process. You learn about the culture the builders had in mind.”

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In 2005, Carter and co-author Elizabeth Collins Cromley published Invitation to Vernacular Architecture: A Guide to the Study of Ordinary Buildings and Landscapes, a book that has come to be considered a main introductory text for the field of vernacular architecture studies.

Cory Jensen MS’94, now the architectural historian at the Utah State Historical Society, was one of Carter’s many students. “His enthusiasm for and love of architectural history, particularly in vernacular architecture studies, was contagious,” Jensen says. “Buildings can be read like a book, and Tom has one of those minds that is always looking at different angles on how vernacular architecture can tell us about our society and culture.”

The U’s Western Regional Architecture Program in 1996 was awarded the Paul Buchanan Prize from the Vernacular Architecture Forum for its significant contribution to the history of American architecture. And in 2011, Carter received the Vernacular Architecture Forum’s prestigious Henry Glassie Award for a “lifetime achievement in vernacular architecture studies.”

Over the years, Carter has researched and written on subjects throughout the United States, including the Japanese-American shop houses in Fresno, California; a folklife survey of Italian- American building traditions in Nevada and Utah; and Basque rooming-houses in Nevada. His latest book, Building Zion: The Material World of Mormon Settlements, was published this past March by the University of Minnesota Press. “I started this book at the beginning of my teaching career, and I am finishing it in my academic twilight years,” he writes in the preface. “Had I completed it earlier, however, I believe I would have missed much of what’s important. My central theory is that rather than competing with each other, or stemming from deep inconsistencies or contradictions within the culture, the two sides of the Mormon, the temple and the house… were creatively combined to give the Latter-day Saints two elements essential for their survival: from the temples came the otherness that staked out a distinctive and decidedly Mormon religious identity, and from the houses… came an orthodoxy that allowed them to fit rather seamlessly into mainstream American culture.”

Tom Carter sketches a Gothic-style house in Salt Lake City’s Avenues neighborhood that was built during the 1860s. He documented the house, originally owned by William Barton, for a study of Mormon housing in Utah. (Photo by Austen Diamond)

Carter retired from full-time teaching in 2010. Now a professor emeritus, he continues to work on writing projects, including a book on vernacular design that uses his Utah fieldwork, as well as another book, Sagebrush Cities: The Industrial Landscape of Cattle Ranching in Elko County, Nevada. He’s also busy organizing the 2017 meeting of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, which will be held in Salt Lake City. The event is a joint effort of the University with the Utah Heritage Foundation, the Utah State Historical Society, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and will include fieldwork-based tours showcasing Utah’s architecture. But this summer, Carter also made time for fly fishing in Idaho and Montana, and he loves backcountry skiing in the winter.

“In some ways, I guess I have used these old houses as a backdrop for the style of unconventional life I have wanted to lead,” he says. “My whole life, I have sort of lived in the past. My music, the way I dress, my cars (I drive a 1962 Mercedes Ponton, but it was old Volvo 122s before that) have been old ones, and my houses, too. … This fascination between things and the ideas that produced them and made them useful and attractive to people has been what drove me forward. I have been a good fieldworker, but I also have been a good student of American culture.”

—Peg McEntee is a former longtime journalist with The Salt Lake Tribune and Associated Press who now works as a Salt Lake City-based freelance writer.

Note: The print edition references a bachelor’s degree from the U for Cory Jensen. His bachelor’s degree is from Brigham Young University. He has a master’s degree from the U. That reference has been corrected here.

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