It was the mid-1930s and, speaking from KSL's radio studio, young Sandack was grateful to have a say - and a job.
It was the Great Depression, when banks and businesses failed, factories closed, a quarter of America's work force was unemployed and 2 million were homeless. Unless you held on to the farm, food was hard to come by. In Utah, the abundant city-operated soup kitchens were deemed "Hoover cafes" by an angry populace frustrated with President Hoover's fruitless efforts to stop the Depression.
A Chicago transplant, Sandack attended the University of Utah law school and worked odd jobs to make ends meet. One was in the state fairground's Coliseum food concession, where his boss, Tribune street sales manager Charlie McGillis, promoted greyhound races.
Sandack netted $12 a week to cover tuition, books and rent at Mrs. Cooke's boardinghouse on 322 University Street. Budgeting 90 cents for daily dining at The Coffee Cup, Ute Hamburger Stand, Joe Vincent's Famous Café and Scotties, he became a "purveyor of fine foods."
But it was the budding lawyer's penchant for mimicry that caught the ear of KSL's General Manager Earl J. Glade. Hired to parody the "March of Time," a traveling news format that dramatized documentary events, Sandack impersonated celebrity voices while anchoring the morning news. In between segments, he would pitch products from chewing gum laxative to pork sausage.
Celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Salt Lake Rotary Club in an address to the city, Sandack easily emulated the voice of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
"Roosevelt was everybody's father - incredible and credible at the same time," Sandack later recalled in interviews archived at University of Utah's Marriott Library.
"He restored the faith we had lost in America through the last days of Hoover's administration. He wasn't afraid to make the government work for the people: to stop foreclosures on farmlands and homes, close and reopen banks with guarantees for deposit, commence the Social Security program, generate jobs for the unemployed and put city kids into work camps to make menshen out of them."
In 1942, Sandack served in the Navy and in 1946 retired from broadcasting to resume his legal work. Energized by Roosevelt's efforts toward the "relief, recovery, and reform" of this country, Sandack went into politics as a "liberal Democrat and political activist" who wanted to "do some good."
Over the years he rose in rank. In 1952, Sandack was elected Salt Lake County chairman. By 1960, he was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. His evenings were taken up with political meetings, strategizing and platform writing.
"If you make up your mind to get into politics, there's no way you can really lose," he said, "because organizational politics is hard work and most people shy away from it."
In 1967, Gov. Calvin L. Rampton urged Sandack to run for the office of chairman of the State Democratic Committee. Acquiescing, the delegate found himself in another kind of coliseum in a different type of race.
"After I'd been nominated, a man stood in front of an audience of 3,000 people and charged that I should be disqualified," he said. A 1967 Salt Lake Tribune article reported the interloper requested "a recess for 20 minutes to consider that their nominee is a man who doesn't believe that Jesus is Christ."
"He didn't say I was Jewish," Sandack remarked, "and I wasn't frightened, but my head reeled."
Within moments, the article concluded, the offender "was hooted out of the coliseum, and Sandack was elected by acclamation."
Today, this grand man, 95 years old, suffers from dementia. Recently, his wife, Helen, found his typewriter and, under the platen, yellowed paper and the beginning of a story - his - waiting to be finished.
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* EILEEN HALLET STONE, oral historian, may be reached at ehswriter@aol.com
