But if his constituents get a little flustered at Rocky's emotions, a trip down memory lane shows the current mayor is not the first city executive to get feisty. Prior to Anderson, the most confrontational mayor was J. Bracken Lee, who served 12 years as mayor of Price, two terms as Utah governor and the 1960s as mayor of Salt Lake City.

Lee's most famous feud was with his police chief, Cleon Skousen, a battle that finally led to Skousen's dismissal. The two never got into a physical confrontation, but their war of words could be just as stinging as a blow to the chin. Skousen accused Lee of being soft on sin, allowing private clubs to engage in gambling and being lax on prostitution.

Lee, in turn, accused Skousen of an authoritarian style over his officers and of wasting the city's money with such frivolous endeavors as a hardcover departmental report with gold-plated lettering sent to associates of the chief, according to a Lee biography, Let 'Em Holler, by Dennis Lythgoe.

"A major point of contention concerned a specific night at the Ambassador Club when Mayor Lee was in attendance," Lythgoe wrote. "Part of the activities centered on a pari-mutuel horse race game, a clear violation of the law. After the game was over, police officers arrived to investigate, and the club owners frankly admitted the violation."

Lee also got into some high-profile battles with City Commissioner James Barker, who also accused Lee of being soft on prostitution, gambling and other areas of vice. After Lee was no longer mayor, he made an 11th-hour endorsement of 27-year-old Glen Greener in the city commission race, making several disparaging remarks about Barker, who lost his bid for re-election and later sued Lee for slander. The matter was settled out of court.

As mayor of Price in 1938, Lee personally supervised the arrest of two state liquor agents who earlier had shut down a tavern for liquor law violations, Lythgoe wrote. The agents were accused of drunkenness and resisting a Price police officer.

Former Gov. Calvin L. Rampton, who in the 1940s was an assistant attorney general, recalls Lee challenging him to a fight outside the Price courthouse after Rampton successfully defended a Utah Highway Patrol trooper who had been arrested for speeding through Price. Rampton said that as the two headed outside to settle their differences, a large man named Don Hacking, the assistant county clerk, put a hand on both their shoulders and told them to calm down.

"I was never so glad to see anyone in my life as I was to see Don Hacking that day," Rampton said. Later, when Rampton was governor, he named Hacking to the Public Service Commission. "Brack always said I gave Hacking that job because I was grateful to him for saving me from Brack."

Another flirtation with fisticuffs at city hall occurred in the mid-1970s when Greener, fellow City Commissioner Jennings Phillips Jr. and Police Chief Bud Willoughby decided to take over the city's personnel department after a lunch meeting at the Ambassador Club, where several Scotch and sodas were consumed. After their conspiracy was exposed and a special committee issued a damning report about their behavior, Willoughby appeared ready to physically attack an aggressive television news reporter pestering him about the scandal.

He then escaped the reporter's microphone by ducking into an elevator in the City and County Building.