There are also articles about boxing, Jack Dempsey, bicycle racing, gambling, and pari-mutel betting, racing on the salt flats, skiing, horse-drawn sleighs, and fishing. This entertaining anthology treats sports first as a leisure activity—an escape from tensions—that increasingly grows into the professional, obsessive, and even the destructive results we have seen in modern times. The writers are well-chosen and the material fascinating.

Ogden Standard Examiner, Jared Page
No basketball? That can't be right. How can there be a book about sports in Utah without any mention of hoops, hardwood, or high-tops?

"I don't know the reason for that," said Stanford J. Layton, who compiled and edited the 14 short stories in the recently published Red Stockings & Out-of-Towners: Sports in Utah. And it takes a lot to stump Layton, who spent 29 years as managing editor of the Utah Historical Quarterly before giving up that post in 2002 to become a professor of history at Weber State University

"I've often thought, 'Wouldn't it have been nice if, somewhere during my 29-year tenure, we had had an article on basketball in Utah?'" said Layton, 61. "The Utah/BYU basketball rivalry when I was growing up in the late 1940s and 1950s, that was big-time stuff. Of course, we've had the Utah Stars and the Utah Jazz, and then the women's basketball Starzz. I'm really quite at a loss why some historian hasn't answered that challenge. I suspect that time is not too far away."

The lack of a basketball-related account in Red Stockings & Out-of-Towners isn't a criticism; it's simply a surprising actuality—one that's quickly forgotten once readers proceed past the table of contents.

The collection of favorite readings from the Utah Historical Quarterly provides a diverse look at sports in the state, from the Salt Lake Red Stockings baseball team in the late 1870s to the Salt Lake Seagulls football team in the 1940s, and from the athletic accomplishments of heavyweight boxer Jack Dempsey in the 1920s to ski jumper Alf Engen in the 1930s. That mix of team sports and individual events, Layton says, was a coincidence. "When we talk about favorite readings, we're talking about my personal favorites," he said. "These were not selected on the basis of any other criterion—not because they represented a wonderful cross section or anything else. It's just because they were first and foremost in my own heart.

"I close my editor's introduction in [Red Stockings & Out-of-Towners] by saying, 'The betting line says that my favorites will be your favorites, too.' The personal appeal is, I think, going to be very universal. The readability and the humanistic elements that appealed to me should appeal to almost anyone."

Third Down, Two to Go

Red Stockings & Out-of-Towners is the third installment of a planned five-volume series of stories published in the Utah Historical Quarterly, the journal of the Utah State Historical Society.

Layton also edited the first two volumes—Utah's Lawless Fringe: Stories of True Crime (Signature Books, 2001) and Being Different: Stories of Utah's Minorities (Signature Books, 2002)—and will continue in that role for the remainder of the series.

He is in the process of editing the fourth book, which will focus on children in Utah history, targeted for 2004 release. The series' final installment, likely to be published in 2005, will document the history of polygamy in Utah, Layton said. "The set seems to be well received by the public," said Layton, who grew up in Layton and now resides in Salt Lake City. "The fact that Signature continues to move ahead with this series ... suggests to me that the project has found a receptivity among the book-buying public." Assembling favorite articles from the Utah Historical Quarterly and releasing them in book form had been a long-time goal of Layton's and the publication staff at the Utah State Historical Society. Finding money for such a project, however, was a regular roadblock. "Just out of the blue three or four years ago, the people at Signature Books approached us with the idea of a publishing a collection of favorite readings," he said. "We jumped at that idea." According to Layton, selecting stories for Red Stockings and the other books in the series was the easy part.

Red Stockings & Out-of-Towners: Sports in Utah contains these stories:

"The Best in the West? Corrine: Utah's First Baseball Champions"
"Deserets, Red Stockings, and Out-of-Towners: Baseball Comes of Age in Salt Lake City, 1877-79"
"Coming Home: Community Baseball in Cache Valley"
"The Salt Lake Seagulls Professional Football Team"
"A Visit to the Champ's House"
"The Rise of Tex Rickard as a Fight Promoter"
"Tennis in Utah: The First Fifty Years, 1885-1935"
"Bicycle Racing and the Salt Palace: Two Letters"
"Utah's Gamble with Pari-mutuel Betting in the Early Twentieth Century"
"These Bloomin' Salt Beds': Racing on the Bonneville Salt Flats"
"It's All Downhill from Here: The Rise and Fall of Becker Hill, 1929-1933"
"Winter Fun in Northern Utah Valley: A Pleasant Grove Example"
"A Winter Acquaintance with Timpanogos"
"Joe the Fish Lake Guide"

Pros and Rookies

As a fan of both history and sports, coaching Red Stockings to bookshelves was a fun project for Layton, and he hopes readers find the book equally enjoyable."We want to remember that sports history is social history," he said. "A person doesn't have to be a sports fan to find good, worthy history here. ... I think we have a range of articles in all these books [in the series] that would appeal to folks of all interests, all ages and both genders. There should be something for everyone."Most of the stories in Red Stockings were written by Utahns, and a high percentage of them were authored by professional historians. One of Layton's colleagues, WSU history professor Lee Sather, falls into both of those categories.

Sather, who lives in South Ogden, authored "It's All Downhill from Here: The Rise and Fall of Becker Hill, 1929-1933," which documents Ogden's short-lived winter sports program featuring dog-team races and ski-jumping competitions.

Other stories, Layton said, were written by "history buffs who got turned on to a particular topic, researched it and wrote about it." One thing all of the authors have in common, Layton says, is they did a "first-rate job."

"Every one of these articles went through a very rigorous refereeing process by the editorial staff and the editorial advisory board of the Utah Historical Quarterly," he said, "so these articles were held to the highest professional standards. They should stand up under the scrutiny of anyone. To me, they're not only favorites, but they're a great source of personal and professional pride."

Selecting an MVP

To earn a spot on the 14-story roster of Red Stockings & Out-of-Towners, authors had to make a pretty favorable impression on Layton, especially since he had 29 years' worth of candidates. Still, there's one particular article that Layton says ranks as the best of the best—the MVP of sports in Utah stories—at least in his opinion.

At just a little more than three pages long, "A Visit to the Champ's House" is the shortest of the historical accounts in Red Stockings, but in telling the story of his childhood experience with Dempsey, author John Farnsworth Lund made a giant impact on Layton.

"It's just a most engaging reminiscence by a young boy sizing up this great heavyweight champion and having his life touched," Layton said. "It's written with the sense of a vivid wonderment as only a child looking at a champion can."

Layton also appears to have an increased interest in the subject matter of "A Visit to the Champ's House." When asked if he'd ever considered climbing into the writing ring, he said it would be Dempsey and Utah's boxing history that would inspire such an endeavor.

"I've often thought that I might some day undertake a history of Utah's leadership in boxing and focus on Dempsey, Rex Lane, and Gene Fullmer and do something with that," he said, "but, thus far, I haven't. I might have to retire from teaching before I find that kind of time."

And after that ... well, there's always basketball.

Salt Lake Tribune, Martin Naparsteck
The old ballgame: Collection of 14 sports-related articles from the Utah Historical Quarterly analyzes sports as part of society at large

From the sociology of baseball to a daughter's warm and admiring portrait of her father, Red Stockings & Out-of-Towners, seesaws between interesting and informative. The book consists of 14 sports-related articles that originally appeared in the Utah Historical Quarterly. It is edited by Stanford J. Layton, the Quarterly editor for 29 years. The primary criterion for selection of these articles, Layton tells us in his introduction, is that they "are personal favorites." After reading the book, most readers are likely to conclude Layton is a man whose judgment can be trusted.

Most of the informative articles tend to analyze sports as part of the larger Utah society. The first three, all about baseball, are examples. In "The Best in the West?" Larry Gerlach, professor of history at the University of Utah, examines the 19th-century rivalry between teams from non-Mormon Corinne and heavily Mormon Salt Lake City. The games were not pitchers' duels; in one game the score was 72-23; in another it was 42-31. Fans sometimes saw the games as theological battles, but, as Gerlach notes, there were Mormons on the Corinne team and non-Mormons on the Salt Lake City team. Winning was more important than theology. The title of the article refers to the claim by the Corinne team to be the best in the Western United States.

In "Deserets, Red Stockings and Out-of-Towners," Kenneth L. Cannon II, a Salt Lake City attorney, explores similar themes later in the same century. "The subcultures attracted by the Deserets and Red Stockings," he writes, "included the baseball community, those interested in betting, and groups of Mormons and Gentiles who supported the two clubs and felt vindication at the victory of the 'Mormon' team or the 'Gentile' team." But team names can be confusing. Cannon notes that at one point "The Deserets were entirely Gentile ... and the Red Stockings were almost completely Mormon."

While the Gerlach and Cannon articles might suggest baseball can be divisive, Jessie L. Embry and Adam Seth Darowksi explore the sport's unifying effect in "Coming Home: Community Baseball in Cache Valley."

Embry, who teaches history at Brigham Young University, and Darowski, who recently graduated from the school, write, "The story of the Cache Valley Baseball League provides a case study of how the game strengthened communities throughout the United States."

They lament the changes in community baseball: "Weekly baseball games were ... important until the 1960s when a shift took place with more focus on the national scene and professional sports. Until then, baseball was one of the elements that held the small communities in northern Utah and southern Idaho together." More pointedly, they later add, "The glory days of-town baseball have disappeared from Cache Valley, taking with them some of the sense of community that once united town residents."

In his introduction, Layton makes a similar point more broadly, citing a theory from Richard O. Davies' book, America's Obsession: Sports and Society Since 1945, Davies, Layton writes, "sees sports in America as readily divisible into two eras. The pro-modern era provided participants and spectators with leisure activity—a type of escape from the tensions and worries of life. The modern period ... is much less benign and has, in fact, tended toward the obsessive (and sometimes destructive) for growing numbers of Americans."

If that reads as if it was dipped into nostalgia before it turned into ink, it's only appropriate that some of the most interesting articles in Red Stockings are fond reminiscings. Lea Nielson Lane opens "Joe the Fish Lake Guide" with "The man 'who never got skunked,' Joe Nielson, my father, was a professional guide on Utah's Fish Lake for forty-five years. Getting skunked meant not catching a fish, and he was well known for finding the big ones."

John Farnsworth Lund, in "A Visit to the Champ's House," recalls the time when, as a boy, he went to the home that future heavyweight boxing champ Jack Dempsey bought for his mother in Salt Lake City, "a bungalow on Center Street just north of the triangle separating North Main and Center." Lund was there to pick up food for charity that Dempsey's mother was donating. Lund notes "Jack did not look muscular in a street suit because his muscles were not bulky. They were supple and elastic and carried the kick of a mule."

In "The Best in the West" Larry Gerlach, professor of history at the University of Utah, examines the 19th-century rivalry between teams from non-Mormon Corinne and heavily Mormon Salt Lake City. The games were not pitchers' duels; in one game the score was 72-23; in another it was 42-31.

Other articles tell about the Salt Lake Seagulls, the state's only professional football team (in the '40s), Utah's brief experiment in the 1920s with legalized gambling on horse racing, setting speed records on the salt flats west of the Great Salt Lake, downhill skiing, bicycle racing, tennis, and ice climbing at Mount Timpanogos.

There are no bad articles in the collection, and the best of them—the three about baseball—help us understand how the role that sports play in American life has changed, and not always for the better.