Park City Magazine at 30
The first issue featured an all-in-one-night review of local bars, entitled “Crawling Tour of Park City.” The second issue included a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the “North American pot gut,” a ubiquitous, stupid ground squirrel with a self-destructive urge to run in front of moving vehicles.
It was an undernourished, oversized, black-and-white publication produced on low-grade newsprint. It sold for 50 cents a copy — assuming, of course, that anyone actually paid for it. It was brash, energetic and unpolished, a bit like Park City itself in those days. To call it a magazine — well, nobody called it a “magazine.” Everyone knew it simply as Lodestar.
Today, none of the 14 bars covered in that “Crawling Tour” is still in business. And pot guts are almost as rare in Park City as old-time mining families. But the publication? Hey, judge for yourself. You’re looking at the 30th anniversary issue.
Lodestar was the brainchild of a group of ski-bums-turned-journalists who filtered into town in the 1970s. Among them was Steve Dering, an East Coast refugee who had quit a job as a Defense Department systems analyst to wait tables (yep, not the other way around) before moving to Park City in the winter of 1973/1974. Dering heard through the grapevine that someone was thinking about starting a newspaper to compete with the staid old Park Record.
“I’d been here for two months and I was about out of money,” he says. “So I told them I was the editor of my high school paper and I wrote sports for my college paper.”
It wasn’t true. But it landed him a job as a reporter for the fledgling Park City Coalition.
If there was such a thing as venture capital in those days, it hadn’t ventured as far as the Park City Coalition. “I mean, we literally had to go around to the coin boxes and collect the coins to pay the vendors,” Dering remembers. “One time the truck broke down [at the printer] in Roy and I had to get towed back at, like, two in the morning, and I had to pay this guy in dimes and quarters.”
Inevitably, the Coalition folded, leaving the printer, Howard Stahle of Roy, with much of the debt. To recover some of his losses, Stahle approached Dering about restarting the paper. Out of those discussions came a new publication, The Newspaper.
Starting with its name, The Newspaper was a reflection of Dering’s quirky personality. Among the paper’s regular features were “interviews” with potholes and fabricated profiles of local dogs (which then roamed Main Street in packs). From Dering’s fertile imagination also came a weekly horoscope.
“And the way Dering worked, he would take two days that he would do nothing but sleep,” recalls Jan Wilking, who, along with Greg Schirf and Hank Louis, bought Stahle’s interest in The Newspaper in 1976. “Then he would party for two days and maybe three. And then he would work straight through for at least two days and not sleep. And by the end, he was so suffering from sleep deprivation and so kind of crazed, that’s when he’d start making up those horoscopes.”
But perhaps Dering’s most endearing — and enduring — innovation was The Newspaper’s April Fools issue. Part satire and part silliness, it became a tradition that continues to this day in the pages of The Park Record.
Another Newspaper tradition became known as the “tradeout.”
“I remember that summer that we took over the paper, we had sold lots of ads,” Wilking says. “We were so enthusiastic about it. And everyone would say, ‘Don’t worry, because in winter we’ll pay you.’ And so people owed us a lot of money, but we kept saying, ‘OK, as soon as the tourists get here we’ll get paid and we’ll be fine.’
“Well, that was the year it didn’t snow until January. And January 22, I think, was the first day of skiing. And that’s how the trades got started. No one could pay us. And we said, ‘OK, fine, then we’ll just take something.’” If the delinquent advertiser was a restaurant, the staff would stop in for a meal. If the advertiser was a bar, well, you get the picture.
“Literally, I couldn’t go to the grocery store,” Dering says. “I didn’t have any money. I had to eat out every night because we had a tradeout at all the restaurants.”
It was into this hand-to-mouth environment that The Newspaper staff launched a visitor guide to be known as Lodestar. The job of editing the publication went to Bettina Moench, another East Coast refugee who was working on a landscape crew in Park City in the summer of 1976 when she spotted a classified ad for a typesetter at The Newspaper.
“Having absolutely not one clue what typesetting was — I thought it was typing, and I could type really well — I thought, OK, this might be something I could do in the evenings. I could take it home with me,” Moench says. “So I went up there to The Newspaper office and inquired about the typesetting job.”
At that time, a reporter would compose stories on a typewriter, then give the typed pages to the editor. Using a pencil and recognized proofreading marks, the editor would make changes. Rearranging the story would mean cutting the paragraphs apart with scissors and reassembling them with Scotch tape.
The typesetter would take this jumble and retype it into a machine that translated the keystrokes onto photosensitive paper. That paper would then be developed by passing it through a photo processing machine containing special chemicals.
Those strips of paper, now miraculously containing columns of type, then had to be dried and run through a third machine that applied a coat of wax to the underside. Those waxed columns could then be pasted onto large lined layout sheets that were the same dimensions as the finished pages. Photos and other graphic elements were added separately.
None of these machines was foolproof, and none of them had hard drives, floppy disks or memory chips. So if, for example, the mechanical rollers on the photo processor decided to devour a few thousand words of type, the typesetter had to input them all over again.
Moench remembers Wilking handing her the manual for the Compugraphic typesetting machine and then disappearing for the weekend.
“And being the dutiful person that I am, who doesn’t want to disappoint,
I spent the whole weekend completely screwing up. I would type for, like, an hour and then I would go into the darkroom and all of it would be ruined because I didn’t know how to develop it right.”
But she persevered. She took journalism classes at the University of Utah and moved from typesetter to reporter and, eventually, to editor. Was there a demand for a new visitor guide? Who knew? “They [Wilking and Dering] just dove into projects, and they didn’t ever wonder if they could be successful,” Moench says. “They just assumed they would be.”
They already had a staff. How hard could it be to produce another twice-a-year publication?
Wilking once described himself as “one of these persons who just starts something and lets someone else make it work.” That description applied to his weekly work habits on The Newspaper. Once the ads had been sold, the stories written and production was underway, Wilking would often announce that he was going home to change his shoes, not to be seen again until the next day. And, Moench says, when he and Dering held a meeting to announce plans for the new visitor guide, The Newspaper staff had no illusions about how the process would work.
“I remember everybody just sitting there rolling their eyes and saying, ‘Jan [Wilking] is going to go home and change his shoes and the rest of us poor slobs will be left working on it.’”
It was Moench who came up with the name for the new publication. As explained in the first issue, Lodestar means “a star by which one directs his course; especially the North Star” or “a guiding ideal; model for imitation.” She says she also liked the name because of its mining connotations. Moench describes producing that first issue as “an amazing feat of endurance because we laid it out right after The Newspaper. I actually put in 90 hours one week between the magazine and The Newspaper. I remember that our celebration when we got finished was, of course, to walk across the street and have a drink at Mileti’s [now Bistro 412].”
Besides the “Crawling Tour of Park City,” that first issue included a glossary of mining terms entitled “What The Muck” and a story on the early plans for a glitzy new ski resort to be known as Deer Valley. The cover was the work of local artist Marianne Cone, who was also on the publication’s graphic design team. Among the contributing writers was Nan Chalat, now Nan Chalat-Noaker, the longtime editor of The Park Record.
The second issue, produced in the summer of 1978, included Dering’s “potgut” story as well as an illustrated Park City walking tour by local artist/historian Patricia Smith. The staff list on the title page included this jab at Wilking: “Office Albatross — Hans Winkling.”
In the summer of 1980, Lodestar abandoned its oversized format in favor of a traditional 8-1/2-by-11-inch magazine design. A higher quality paper replaced the old newsprint. And the cover featured the magazine’s first use of color — a photograph by Park City photographer Pat McDowell.
Moench credits these changes, and many others to follow, to Terry Hogan, whose first job at The Newspaper was to run the small printing press used to produce small pieces such as flyers and brochures. Hogan was one of a few staff members with previous publishing experience — he
had spent four years in the graphics department of the University of Minnesota daily newspaper.
“I’m sitting there watching these guys stand at these [page-layout] boards, pasting this stuff on with no kind of real plan,” Hogan recalls. “And so I finally said, ‘You know, I think I might have some ideas that might make this process a little [better].’” He laughs. “Six months later I was general manager.”
Under Hogan’s guidance, the magazine began using color on its inside pages in the winter 1981 issue. By today’s standards, those carefully chosen pages seem modest. But to the staff of the time it was a breathtaking accomplishment.
Rather than simply delivering the new issue to The Newspaper office, Moench and Hogan invited the staff to Wilking’s home. There, with great fanfare, they distributed a copy to each person. Slowly and reverently, staff members moved through the magazine page by page, savoring each color layout as if it were an exotic delicacy at an expensive restaurant.
A cause for celebration? You bet. Most people are fuzzy on the details of that first all-night Lodestar party. But everyone seems to agree that this party — much like the ones that followed — ended up with 14 or 16 bodies cheek-to-cheek in the hot tub on Wilking’s back deck.
“Oh, my God,” laughs Sharon Pain, who joined the magazine’s production staff about that time. “There was, like, this much water left in the hot tub (she holds her hands about eight inches apart) there were so many people in it.”
There have been many more changes since then. The Newspaper merged with The Park Record in the spring of 1983. Moench left the magazine in 1986 and now lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In the past 20 years, under Don and Cha Cha Weller, the magazine’s art directors, and Dixie Geisdorf, now the publisher, the publication has reached a level of quality that its founders couldn’t have imagined. The arcane Lodestar name has been dropped in favor of Park City Magazine. And Wilking recently sold the magazine to Jack Theimer of HPJ Media Ventures, who also owns multiple publications in Aspen, Miami, Santa Fe and Vail/Beavercreek.
Moench, who has a copy of every issue of the magazine, says she still looks forward to receiving the latest copy in the mail. “It gives me such a thrill every time I see it,” she says. “It was this big, horsy, newsprint magazine in black and white,” she says. “And now look at it!”
She points, in particular, to the quality of the cover art that has been the magazine’s trademark since the first issue. “We were able to get these incredible people to do the covers for us. They elevated the magazine so much,” she says.
“Everybody who works on it should be very proud of what it is now and what they inherited.”
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