"The Skeleton in Grandpa's Barn"

And Other Stories of Growing Up in Utah

 The loft of Grandpa’s barn in Salt Lake City was “off limits,” the trap door padlocked. For boys like Zack Lund, Grandpa might as well have hung out a large “welcome” sign inviting them to break in and see what was hidden there. In Parowan, young Nevada Driggs decided to discover for himself whether Captain Fremont had really slept in his grandma’s bed. Fae Decker Dix tells of how her father refused to accept the church’s newly censored version of a nineteenth-century hymn. To her embarrassment, he sang the original hellfire lyrics to O Ye Mountains High as loudly as he could above the rest of the congregation. All told, this new anthology features sixteen priceless stories: quirky and fun, informative and serious, but all engaging—nostalgic for when Utah was little more than a wide spot in the road, or as Robert Mikkelsen remembers, when both sides of the tracks were the “wrong side.”