This
is one of several stories in the
November 2005 issue of
folio:
We’re Outta Here:
Patrice Press
Moves to Utah
Gregory M. Franzwa
There was a
similar headline in our issue of November 1991, only it announced a
move from St. Louis, our home for forty-one years, to Tucson. Now,
fourteen years later, we’re moving again, to Tooele, Utah.
Pronounced too-ILL-uh. A town of about 28,000 people some forty
miles southwest of Salt Lake City, and right on the 1919-27 route of
the Lincoln Highway.
That’s a clue to
the move. We will be right on the Lincoln Highway, the subject of
all of our Lincoln Highway books and right at the terminus of the
Mormon Pioneer Trail. (We’re planning on interrupting the Lincoln
Highway series right after the publication of our The Lincoln
Highway: California to research, write, and publish The
Mormon Trail Revisited. Both books should be in print in 2006,
along with two or three more of our contract publishing books.
But there’s more
to the story. Kathy, a native of the state of Washington, misses the
four seasons. As you know, she is a bona fide history nut. Plus,
we’ve found zero interest in our trail books in the Southwest. So
we’ll be closer to our markets up north. The archives of the Utah
State Historical Society, along with LDS collections, where dozens
of pioneer diaries are housed, will be made available to us.
Plus, we have many
wonderful friends up there—friends since the founding of the
Oregon-California Trails Association in 1982 and the Lincoln Highway
Association in 1992. I’ve talked to the Utah Westerners three times
so far—who knows, they may ask me again.
And the
history—overflowing with it! We’ve followed the Donner Party down
Echo Canyon, up Weber Canyon and agonized as they spent weeks
chopping their way down to the Salt Lake Valley. And the Mormon
Pioneers, who sailed right over the same tracks, a year later, in
1847. And we’ve followed Heinrich Lienhart and the “five German
boys” as they fought their way over the bitter Great Salt Lake
Desert to the spot later named Donner Spring.
We followed the
Lincoln Highway as it headed down Skull Valley to the present Dugway
Proving Ground, and then over the Goodyear Cutoff. We followed it as
it coursed just a few blocks from our new home in Tooele, heading
south to Fisher (Johnson) Pass and Willow Spring. We followed the
final version along the south shore of the Great Salt Lake.
And we followed
the Pony Express as it passed through the city and down to Camp
Floyd, to the southwest, and then past Fish Springs.
This, my friends,
is a western historian’s heaven.
And we’ll miss
Tucson, just as we missed St. Louis. Especially the Adobe Corral of
the Westerners—a good forty fast friends. And my sister and her
husband, Candace and Charles Johnson. And especially my stepmother,
Jane Franzwa. We definitely will not miss the stickers,
rattlesnakes, or scorpions.
The new address is
319 Nottingham Drive, Tooele, UT 84074. We will have a new local
telephone number but for the time being at least the toll-free
number will stay the same: 1/800/367-9242. There will be a new fax
number as well, to be announced in the next issue and also on our
website, patricepress.com.
And I guarantee
you, we’ll be dumping AOL on the day we leave Tucson, Dec. 2, 2005.
The new e-mail address will be announced to everyone in our address
book a day or so earlier, and also on our website.
We expect the next
folio to be right on time, and LHA members can expect the
Winter number of The Lincoln Highway Forum shortly after the
first of the year. Non-subscribers who would like a complimentary
copy of this issue should send a snail address in the next couple of
days.
Wish us luck!
Gregory & Kathy Franzwa
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