Our Book (part 1)

The first post on any blog, I think, is the hardest to write. How do you go about explaining why you felt it necessary to write publicly about anything. However, some things are just too good to keep quiet about.

This all started when I randomly came across a couple of vintage photo albums on Ebay. What caught my eye was a picture of a bearded man painting a picture in what looked like Zion National Park. All the caption said was "Fairbanks". I thought, "What is the chance that that is one of the well known artists of that family name from Utah? Isn't that cool." The seller's description said something about girls from the University of Utah and a trip to Zion in 1920. I like Zion and the 1920s. It sounded like the perfect album to try and get. I showed the albums to my husband, John, and he agreed with me. So we placed a bid and were just thrilled when we won both albums. I anxiously waited a week for them to arrive in the mail. When the box came, I quickly opened it and looked at the photos. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I had to call up John right away. I was so excited. The photos were not just brownie snapshots but professionally taken photographs, and they were beautiful. The albums included newspaper articles about the trip these girls had taken to the national park. These co-eds had not just gone down to the park on their own time, but had been taken down by the Union Pacific Railroad to have their pictures in the new national park for the newspaper. There were articles from all over the country from Los Angeles to Chicago. This was so much more than I had expected. The photos gave me goosebumps, and it made me want to go on their trip, too. I couldn't wait to show them to John.