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I'm tramping through 1933 Utah right now. It's a vastly different place from the state we live in today, but oddly also much the same. I'm not sure if that's comforting.

There's no time machine involved. It's a hobby/obsession. If I'm not blowing stuff up with Sonny, or playing with my grandkids, I'm scrolling through the black and white world of digital newspaper archives.

For me, history is infinitely more real than the $#%@ passed off as screen reality today. I wouldn't even blink if every Kardashian, loudmouthed rapper, crap Survivor or Idol suddenly fell over dead. I'm way more interested in the stories of people who already are.

In 1933, Utahns were deeply concerned about the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt's inauguration, unemployment, Hitler's saber-rattling, hanging onto prohibition, rising crime, and trousers on women.

Yeah, women wearing pants. It was unthinkable, yet I'm seeing them on the pages of Utah's newspapers doing just that. Bobbed hair and pants. Proper women were aghast at the "mannish look."

The trouser attack on female propriety didn't start in 1933. It began creeping in right around the time of the first World War. First it was culottes, "in the style of the French," eventually followed by a direct adoption of male garb.

If it wasn't the mannish look winding up proper society in Zion, it was the way-too-feminine look. A March 1933 letter to the editor decries women in movies basically wearing no pants at all.

"It is a direct slap at the good taste and the finer sentiments of the people of Salt Lake," he writes. "Where is the censorship that is responsible for a situation of this kind?"

The specific movie isn't mentioned, but the writer could have been complaining about the 1933 film "Flying Down to Rio," in which Dolores del Rio became the first major female star to appear on screen in a two-piece bathing suit.

Know what else was of dire importance in 1933 Utah? Working women. Regardless of how they were dressed, if a woman had a job outside the home during the Depression, she was taking money away from family men who were unemployed.

Obviously we were going down the drain fast 82 years ago. It's a wonder that we aren't all in hell this very moment.

Scrolling through the frets and fears of 1933, I wonder what my Mormon pioneer ancestors thought about Salt Lake City when they entered it 82 years before.

The church had been established in Utah for only about five years then. Did they pause at the pass overlooking the Salt Lake Valley and ponder the prospects of building up a kingdom of good taste and finer sentiments?

It's a cinch that they didn't consider the possibility that their great-granddaughters would be wearing pants in public and swimming practically nekkid.

I'll tell you what, they damn sure didn't see the day of Jackie Biskupski coming.

I'd bet my own pants that Brigham Young, when he foresaw the building up of God's kingdom, never imagined that the capital of Zion would one day have a pants-wearing, single-parent, lesbian mayor with a black son.

Makes me wish I could stick around 82 years to see what we shouldn't be scared of now.

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley.