This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2012, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Secret Service agents must really love it when the president speaks to a national PTA convention.
It's a good place to meet women.
I wrote recently about Emily Sloan-Pace, a waitress at the Chez Michelle restaurant in the Hilton Garden Inn in Salt Lake City in 2005, who was constantly hit on by a bunch of drunk Secret Service agents in town to do advance work for President George W. Bush's visit to speak to the VFW national convention.
They ran up a $400 bar bill in the process.
That column was a response to the scandal involving Secret Service agents and prostitutes in Colombia.
Now comes Mary Hammond, a Utah PTA officer in 1983 who attended her first national PTA convention that year at the Hilton Hotel in Albuquerque, N.M.
President Ronald Reagan was the keynote speaker and his Secret Service advance team was in the hotel when the PTA representatives arrived for the convention.
She says Secret Service agents were hitting on PTA moms all day at the pool and hotel restaurants, constantly trying to get women to go to their hotel rooms with them.
Three moms that Hammond knows of, not from Utah, consented to go up to their rooms for drinks.
"It was quite the talk of the convention," she said.
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The good old days • If the public education micromanagers and hardcore liquor regulators in today's Legislature had been there in 1919, one class at Nephi High School might have gotten them so exercised that the Capitol's dome would have blown off.
Guy Holm of Salt Lake City found some old papers belonging to his grandmother, Hilda O'Leary, and came across her notebook from her "domestic science" class.
The notebook was filled with everything from proper table manners to where cuts of beef come from. It was also loaded with recipes and right between popcorn balls and "panouche" was a simple recipe for malt beer.
Her notes were very precise: "3 ounces of hops in a cloth bag, in 2½ gallons of water. Boil 2 hours; let cool, add 1 qt. malt syrup. 1¼ lb. brown sugar. Add 2½ gallons water. Boil 20 minutes. When lukewarm add enough water to make up 5 gallons and nearly one compressed yeast cake. Let stand 36 hours. Skim occasionally. Then bottle."
It was a perfect time to take the class. That was the year the country got prohibition.
I'll bet Hilda got an A.
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Public-private partnership: The conservative Utah Legislature is loathe, most of the time, to sponsor government services that directly compete with private enterprise.
But, hey, when it comes to snuffing animals, government-private sector competition is a good thing. It can't help but increase the net kill.
The Legislature this year passed SB87, sponsored by Sen. David Hinkins, R-Orangeville, which raises the cost of hunting licenses by $5 to give the state more money to increase the bounty on coyotes from $20 to $50.
With that extra incentive, officials hope hunters will kill at least 20,000 coyotes this year.
But that seems to compete with the annual contest sponsored by the Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife (SFW) and some private outdoor recreation marketers that gives contestants an incentive to kill as many coyotes as possible.
SFW President Don Peay lobbied heavily for the Hinkins bill, which requires hunters to bring their dead coyotes to the Division of Wildlife Resources to collect their bounty. But his organization's contest also requires contestants to produce their dead coyotes in order to get two tickets per coyote toward an annual raffle, held this year on April 2, to win a valuable rifle and other prizes.
So each year, hunters must choose one or the other, or, perhaps if they kill a whole bunch of coyotes, they can give half the carcasses to the state for the cash and half to the SFW for raffle tickets to win the rifle.
It's a win-win, unless you're a coyote.