Obituaries: A champion for LGBTQ rights, a Western historian, a pioneering lawyer, a fire captain, a money manager, a tiger and a bear

I’ve mentioned here before the challenge of writing an obituary: Crystallizing a person’s life, detailing their major accomplishments and the reasons they’re newsworthy, in a single article. Here are some people whose obituaries I had the honor of writing in the last few months:

• Brett Mathews, who took the U.S. military to court to get his honorable discharge after being drummed out of the U.S. Air Force because he was gay, was also a subject of “Family Fundamentals,” a documentary that screened at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival. Mathews died Aug. 24, at age 49, in an accident at his home in Tooele.

• Will Bagley was one of the pre-eminent historians of the American West — and his masterwork was his 2002 book “Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows,” which updated the available body of knowledge about the murder of 120 California-bound Arkansas settlers crossing southern Utah in 1857. Bagley died Sept. 28, at age 71, in Salt Lake City, of complications from a stroke.

• Henry Lee Adams was the first Black person to graduate from the University of Utah’s law school, and the first to serve as an assistant attorney general in the state. Adams died Oct. 15, at age 86.

• Merrill Bone was a 35-year veteran of the Salt Lake City Fire Department and Salt Lake County’s Unified Fire Department — where he was a captain when he died from complications of COVID-19. His death is considered in the line of duty, because he was a paramedic and could have contracted the virus from someone he treated on the job. Bone died Oct. 31, at age 61, at Intermountain Medical Center in Murray.

• Sam Stewart was an investment manager who founded Wasatch Advisors (now Wasatch Global Investors), building the firm up to $17 billion in assets, specializing in small-cap companies ripe for growth. Stewart, whose wife Diane is an arts maven and operates the gallery Modern West Fine Art, also was an avid arts patron whose Stewart Family Foundation supported a vast array of nonprofits. Stewart died Nov. 23, at age 79, at his home desk in Salt Lake City.

I also ended up writing obituaries for two nonhumans this fall: Cila, an Amur tiger at Utah’s Hogle Zoo; and Bart the Bear II, the movie-star bear who lived in Heber City.

Festival of Trees, the annual Primary Children's Hospital fundraiser, generates a pair of heartwarming holiday stories

The Festival of Trees — the annual collection of elaborately decorated Christmas trees, auctioned off as a fundraiser for Primary Children’s Hospital — was an online-only affair for the second year running, because of the COVID-19 pandemic. But it still generated a couple of heartwarming stories.

• My Salt Lake Tribune colleague, photographer Francisco Kjolseth, interviewed Patti Peterson, a longtime volunteer for the event. She lives in Las Vegas, so she usually creates her goods from a distance. She got involved with the festival while she was receiving treatment at Salt Lake City’s Huntsman Cancer Institute. Peterson expects her “cancer journey” will be ending soon, and she wanted to see the event in person once before she dies.

• One of the decorated trees, made by volunteers at the Intermountain Foundation in honor of a three-year-old girl who died from cancer at Primary Children’s, set a record with a $50,000 bid.

The Aces, preparing for a fall tour, talk about getting back to live music after a year off because of COVID-19

In 2020, I got to meet The Aces, the four-woman indie-pop band originally from Orem, Utah. They were cool, and I became an instant fan of their catchy music.

This year, I got to talk to the foursome — lead singer Cristal Ramirez, drummer Alisa Ramirez, guitarist Katie Henderson and bassist McKenna Petty — as they were preparing for their first tour since the COVID-19 pandemic started. (They played in Salt Lake City, their old stomping grounds, on Nov. 26 — Black Friday. I had bought tickets in June, but got a bad cold that weekend and missed the show.)

They talked about making a playlist, having their songs remixed, and the thrill of playing for audiences again. Here’s the article from that interview, for sltrib.com.

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Speaking of bands with Utah roots, I also wrote about Neon Trees (which used to play Provo’s Club Velour, as The Aces did in their early days) releasing a Christmas song — and filming the video at Encircle, the nonprofit support group for LGBTQ+ youth.

A dozen alums from the University of Utah's ballet program wrote letters to point out problems there. Here are their stories.

Tori Johnson, left, and Ellie Bresler, above, are alumnae of the University of Utah School of Dance’s ballet program, who talked about problems they encountered while enrolled there (Photos courtesy of Tori Johnson and Ellie Bresler.)

In July 2021, I got an email from an alumna of the University of Utah School of Dance’s ballet program. She and other alums had collected letters that detailed complaints against the program.

The complaints involved issues of authoritarian teaching practices, body shaming, intimidation, and microaggressions of racism and bias. The letter writers also said that when they tried to complain to higher-ups in the program, the complaints went nowhere.

Over several months (in between my regular daily assignments), I talked to several former ballet students about the problems in the program. Their stories, and the response from the department, are in this article for sltrib.com.

How the Broadway Centre Cinemas reopened, after 19 months shut down because of COVID-19

One sign that the COVID-19 pandemic was reaching a conclusion — or at least a point where people have decided to try to live normally, in spite of case counts and possible infection — has been the return to movie theaters.

In Utah, one of the last theaters to reopen was the Broadway Centre Cinemas, which stayed closed for more than a year and a half. It reopened on Oct. 22.

I talked to Tori Baker, the executive director of the Salt Lake Film Society (the nonprofit that runs the Broadway and the historic Tower Theatre), about why she kept the theater closed longer than her commercial counterparts — and how SLFS stayed afloat during the closure. Here’s the story, in sltrib.com.

Playwright Ellen Simon brings her play 'Ass' to Pioneer Theatre — so her friend, Karen Azenberg, can help get it on its feet

Ellen Simon and Karen Azenberg go way back. They met as girls, because their fathers worked together: Neil Simon was the Tony- and Pulitzer-winning playwright who created “The Odd Couple” and “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” and Manny Azenberg produced Simon’s plays for decades.

Karen Azenberg is now the artistic director of Salt Lake City’s biggest professional theater group, Pioneer Theatre Company. Ellen Simon is a playwright, who brought her latest play, “Ass,” to have its world premiere at Pioneer in October.

The main reason Simon brought “Ass” — the story of the rocky relationship between a famous sculptor and his son — to Utah was so Azenberg could apply her talents as a director to get the show up on its feet.

I interviewed Simon and Azenberg for sltrib.com, to talk about their friendship, their collaboration, and about “Ass.”

FanX returns, with thousands of fans in masks, whether they are cosplaying or not

Back in September, I covered the 2021 edition of FanX Salt Lake Comic Convention — the first gathering of Utah’s fandom tribes since the coronavirus pandemic began.

Everyone — even those not cosplaying — was required to wear a snug-fitting mask, as part of the event’s COVID-19 protocols. They must have worked, because the event was not reported to be a super-spreader event after the fact.

Even the celebrities in attendance were impressed with how well fans embraced the protocols. Voice actor Bret Iwan, who’s Disney’s official voice of Mickey Mouse, put it well: “It’s just kind of great and comforting to see everyone’s willingness to act in the sense of the better safety overall.”

Here’s my report from FanX, for sltrib.com.

COVID-19 in Utah, continued: What comedian Patton Oswalt has in common with doctors, the Utah Symphony and Counting Crows

As the COVID-19 pandemic grinds on through its second year, one of the topics that has occupied much of my recent reporting is this: Can we still go out on a Saturday night?

The reason that question looms is that several Utah arts organizations and venues have decided to require ticket holders to show a proof of vaccination, or proof of a negative COVID-19 test result, before getting in the door.

So far, that list includes the Utah Symphony and Utah Opera, and the booking agency that handles the Eccles Theater’s concert schedule. The Eccles, Abravanel Hall (where the Symphony plays) and Capitol Theatre (Utah Opera’s home) are all operated by Salt Lake County — and state law doesn’t allow government entities to set a vaccine requirement. However, the county has contracted out their venues to private groups (Utah Symphony | Utah Opera, and MagicSpace Entertainment, the booking agency for the Eccles), so they’re not covered under the state law.

Venues on the University of Utah campus — such as Red Butte Garden and Kingsbury Hall — are covered under that state law, at least when the venues are also the booking agency. That’s why the rock band Counting Crows canceled its Aug. 26 concert at Red Butte, and it’s why comedian Patton Oswalt canceled a gig on Jan. 7, 2022, at Kingsbury. (Oswalt’s case is peculiar, which I explain in the article.)

Meanwhile, the FanX Salt Lake Comic Convention has announced that all visitors, vendors, guests and staff must wear snug-fitting masks while inside the Salt Palace Convention Center. (The Salt Palace is also a Salt Lake County-operated facility, and also exempted from that state law because FanX is a private group renting the place.)

Here are more COVID-related stories I’ve worked on recently:

• I wrote about Dr. Marc Harrison, CEO of Utah’s largest hospital system, Intermountain Healthcare, who is himself immunocompromised because of multiple myeloma (which is in remission). He talked at the governor’s COVID-19 briefing about the importance of wearing masks to fend off the spread of COVID-19 — information that was later undercut by Gov. Spencer Cox at the same podium. (Cox has since walked back those remarks.)

• I assisted Tribune health care reporter Erin Alberty on a story about COVID-19 testing, and a rash of complaints that getting tested is becoming more and more of a hassle.

• I worked with Tribune breaking news reporter Scott D. Pierce on a story about how Utah hospitals and health officials were reacting to the news that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had given full approval to the Pfizer version of the COVID-19 vaccine.

• And I covered the announcement from Dr. Angela Dunn, executive director of the Salt Lake County Health Department, that she would institute a mask mandate for school kids from kindergarten to sixth grade. Two days later, I helped Tribune county government reporter Leia Larsen cover the Salt Lake County Council’s meeting to overturn Dunn’s order — done by a 6-3 vote along party lines, with all the Republicans agreeing with the loud, angry protesters inside and outside the council chamber, and all the Democrats agreeing with Dunn and the medical evidence.

Talking about Afghanistan, and the fall of the U.S.-backed government, with refugees in Utah and the widow of a Utah National Guard officer killed there

The end of a war will always produce stories, even far away from the fighting.

The end of the United States’ involvement in Afghanistan, with the collapse of the U.S.-backed government and the return of the Taliban, is no exception — and in the last couple of weeks, I’ve written three stories for sltrib.com about how those events have had an impact in Utah.

• I met Azim Kakaie, the first special immigrant visa holder from Afghanistan to arrive in Utah since the Taliban’s takeover. He was an air traffic controller at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan — and he tells a harrowing story of how he and his family got out of the country.

• I met several refugees from Afghanistan who have been in Utah for several years, and got their insights on what’s been happening in their former home.

• And I talked to Jennie Taylor, the widow of Maj. Brett Taylor, the former mayor of North Ogden, who was killed in Afghanistan in 2018 while on a deployment with the Utah National Guard.

Pioneer Theatre Company's managing director resigns, and reaches a settlement with the University of Utah.

In June, I wrote about Christopher Massimine, who was hired in 2019 to be managing director of Pioneer Theatre Company, Utah’s largest professional theater company. The subject was Massimine’s resumé and biography, which were riddled with fabrications and exaggerations — including claiming to win awards that didn’t exist, and credit for work on movies and video games with which he was not involved.

(Adam Herbets at Fox13 did the first investigative reporting about Massimine, and I added to it here. The day he issued his resignation letter, The New York Times wrote it own story about Massimine.)

After behind-the-scenes legal wrangling, Massimine resigned from Pioneer Theatre in mid-August. I wrote about the resignation, and the $175,000 settlement he made with the University of Utah that prompted that resignation, both for sltrib.com.