Tom Wharton, who traveled practically every inch of Utah as he wrote guidebooks and covered sports and the outdoors for The Salt Lake Tribune over a 45-year career, has died.
Wharton died Thursday at a care facility in Millcreek, according to friends and family. He was 74.
From 1970 to his retirement in 2016, Wharton wrote full time for The Tribune. His work encompassed two passions: sports, particularly at the high school level, and the outdoors.
Wharton “just knew Utah inside and out,” said Tribune Sports Editor Aaron Falk, whose career as a sports writer was starting as Wharton’s was ending. Falk said Wharton could tell you about “every high school field with a breathtaking view — and the best place to get a burger on the way there.”
Wharton’s first assignment at the newspaper was covering high school sports, starting in 1970 — although his interest began before that. As a student in 1967 at Granite High School, where he was editor of the student paper, he won a Tribune-sponsored writing contest. The prize was to be a guest reporter, covering that year’s state high school basketball tournament.
That tourney started a streak, Wharton said, of him covering high school sports once a year for more than 50 years. Even after he retired in 2016, he volunteered to cover one game each year. Only in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down sporting events, did the streak end.
Covering games, becoming a father
Former Tribune columnist Paul Rolly, in a 2016 article, recalled that when Wharton’s wife, Gayen, went into labor with their first child, Tom was covering three high school football games on a Friday night. Before the days of cellphones, he hadn’t checked in from a phone booth — so he didn’t know that when Gayen’s contractions were four minutes apart, she had her parents take her to the hospital.
When Wharton returned to the newsroom, crusty outdoors writer Don Brooks was holding the phone.
“The dumb son of a [expletive] is finally here,” growled Brooks, handing the receiver to Wharton.
According to Rolly, Wharton made it to the hospital in time for the birth of his daughter, Emma. Between contractions, he phoned in his game stories to the sports desk.
(The Salt Lake Tribune) Tom Wharton is seen in 1999 in southern Utah.
As a sports writer, Wharton was on hand for the classic 1979 NCAA men’s basketball final at the University of Utah’s Huntsman Center — when Magic Johnson led the Michigan State Spartans over Larry Bird’s Indiana State Sycamores. Wharton also was part of a team that covered the 1993 NBA All-Star Game, the Utah Jazz’s 1997 NBA Finals run and the 2002 Winter Olympics.
Wharton was inducted into the Utah Sports Hall of Fame Foundation in 2023.
“Tom is a storyteller in the greatest sense of that word,” the hall’s website states. “He always believed that whatever game or subject he was writing about was very important, and he had a knack for presenting it well.”
For the first 21 years of Wharton’s Tribune career, he also served in the public affairs unit of the Utah National Guard. He served stints in South Korea, Germany and Central America.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Former sports reporter Tom Wharton stands with his family as he is inducted into the Utah High Schools Circle of Fame in 2023.
His popular travel books
When Brooks — who labeled himself the “dead fish editor” — retired in the late 1970s, Wharton took the job of outdoors writer, which he held for 30 years. One of his favorite assignments, he said, was a 1991 series of articles, “A Year With the Great Salt Lake,” that examined various aspects of the endangered lake, including recreation, mineral extraction, wildlife habitat and more.
Wharton wrote his first of five books, “Utah: A Family Travel Guide,” in 1987, inspired by the experiences traveling with Gayen and their four children around the state. Tom dedicated the book to his wife, who died in 2004 of ovarian cancer.
“There were a lot of places we’ve gone we shouldn’t have been able to afford,” Tom Wharton said in 1991. “But we’ve learned how to travel economically with a family of six.”
They packed canned food and fresh produce in the car. When they got to a campsite, they cooked on a Coleman stove that they received as a wedding present. On the last night of the trip, the family’s traditional meal was “Surprise Stew” — a combination of canned beef stew and whatever was left of the other groceries.
For a follow-up book, a general travel guide to Utah under a “Discover America” series, Tom and Gayen were co-authors.
Gayen said in 1991 that her writing style was “creative,” while Tom wrote “like a newspaperman. … We actually complemented each other. We found in editing one another that we helped the final product.”
The guide was published in the early 1990s and regularly updated; a sixth edition came out in 2005. For years, The Tribune made the book a weekly prize to readers of the paper’s recreation section, given to whoever could correctly identify the Utah location in a photograph printed in the paper.
Thomas Michael Wharton was born Nov. 9, 1950, and attended Granite High School. He married Gayen Bennett, his high school sweetheart (even though she went to Skyline High School), on June 17, 1972. They had four children. After Gayen’s death, he married Nancy Aposhian in 2008.
Wharton is survived by his four children with Gayen — Emma, Jacob, Rawl and Bryer — as well as his wife, Nancy, two stepchildren and a dozen grandchildren, his brother, Derk, and sister, Lori.
A celebration of life is scheduled for Wednesday from 6 to 8 p.m. at Starks Funeral Parlor, 3651 S. 900 East, Millcreek. A funeral mass will be celebrated Thursday at 11 a.m. at St. Ann Catholic Church, 450 E. 2100 South, Salt Lake City. Interment will follow at Salt Lake City Cemetery, 4th Ave. and N St.
The family asks that, in lieu of flowers, people contribute to the University of Utah’s Wharton Family Scholarship, for freshmen students interested in journalism, or to the Outdoor Writers Association of America.