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radio fame



>
> Not a Friday funny, but basking in the glory of my fifteen minutes of
> radio fame.
>
This happened to me yesterday; I was out picking up a collection
and on the way home was listening to the radio in the library van.
The program on the University's PBS radio station (KUER) was
about the MX missile, which some of you might remember was a
plan during the Carter administration to turn most of Utah into--in
the infelicitous phrase of an Air Force general--a "nuclear sponge."
This would have been via a race-track/shell-game basing mode
wherein the missiles would have been based on giant transporters
and shuttled around the West Desert (i.e. anyplace west of Salt
Lake City and east of the Sierras) from hardened shelter to
hardened shelter.  The Evil Empire's satellites, confused by the
shell game transporters, would have wasted their warheads by
trying to blow up the whole Great Basin and we could have
clobbered 'em.

Anyway, there was a big stink about it, and eventually the plan was
defeated after the LDS Church leadership said "thanks but no
thanks."  There was also a very vocal, local grassroots group called
the MX Information Center, which was based in the basement of
the Campus Christian Center, just off campus.  After the defeat of
the MX, they hung on, becoming a clearinghouse for expose's,
really, about every dirty trick of government and industry.  Finally it
closed and the founder/director donated the whole schmeer to us.
We dragged it all out of the basement, a really tight fit and a lot of
work.

And that gave rise to one of my favorite scenes, wherein our boss,
the director of Special Collections, told the donor all about how we
take such good care of collections, and on and on; then jumped
into his Vega hatchback (this was about 1985), into which we had
loaded a bunch of the boxes, and drove off with the hatchback
open, trailing papers and books all the way down University
Avenue. The donor just looked at us; whoops!  I worked on the
stuff, took me over a year to process it--back when I got to process
collections, sigh!--and after reading all those dirty trick documents
was I ever depressed!

So anyway--I apologize for the length of this tale, but it is Friday!--
there I am coming home yesterday and there's the program on the
radio, so I dashed into the library when I got back and called the
radio station; I wanted to go on the air and say Hey!  All that stuff
you've been talking about is documented in the papers, MS 527!!
There are almost 90 linear feet of documents!!  I spent a year of my
life on this!! Call on me!!  All I got was a brief mention at the end of
the program but oh well.

Back to work,


Roy Webb, C.A.
Multimedia Archivist
Special Collections
J. Willard Marriott Library
295 South 1500 East
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah   84112
(801) 585-3073  //  fax (801) 585-3976
rwebb@library.utah.edu

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