We took Sunday, June 6, 1971, off from traveling and, instead, visited old friends and haunts from when we lived in Salt Lake City.
We attended Sunday School and Church at Westvale Presbyterian Church. Mother kept the bulletin of the service so I can report that we read Psalm 130 in unison, with the evocative image "my soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning."
On Sunday afternoon, we visited with people whose names no longer sound familiar to me and drove by some of the old familiar places.
One of those familiar places was our old house. I've shared this photo, before, but I had the address wrong. Fortunately, Mother wrote it correctly in her trip diary: 3343 W 4630 S. It's now in West Valley City, but back then it was an unincorporated area known as Granger.
The house still stands - and still looks a bit odd on the block since the side wall, all brick, faces the street. The functional front of the house is on the right and is still covered by a large carport. Here's its Zillow entry: 3343 W 4630 S, West Valley City, UT 84119 | Zillow
One of my Facebook friends found this video from the last time that the house was on the market:
My earliest memories are in and around that house. It was a split level. The family room and my bedroom were on the lower level with windows high on the wall. We watched television in the family room. On Sunday nights, we watched Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color.
About a year after we moved to Missouri, the name changed to The Wonderful World of Disney, but it continued to be a feature of our Sunday nights and contributed to the reason that Disneyland was the first destination for a big family vacation.
This is Dale's memory of our return to Salt Lake City:
"I remember that we went back to Salt Lake City, and in two years everything had gotten smaller. I thought that about the house and the church, but especially about a climbing structure in a park / playground, resembling a rocket ship (right for the times) with ladders to the upper levels and probably a slide. When I was five, I think I climbed to the top and thought it was the top of the world. Two years later, we drove by it, and I was astounded how much it had shrunk."
We had supper at Scott's, the drive-in restaurant remembered in this nostalgic post: Days Gone By: Remembering Scott's Drive-In - Salt Lake County Archives (wordpress.com). Mother reported that the tacos weren't as good as she remembered.
About Joy Weese Moll
a librarian writing about books
