Stories by Ken Sanders: SLC's Book Trade, 1960s-70s Counterculture and Reciting Wendell Berry (Season 3, Ep. 12)

**Brad Westwood** (0:09)
Welcome to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history, produced by the Utah Dept. of Culture and Community Engagement. I'm Brad Westwood, Senior Public Historian. My job is to make the very best, the most interesting, the most accurate history of Utah accessible to the widest audience. If there's one place, one podcast to get your Utah history fix, I hope this is the place. If you subscribe to this podcast, or this is the first time you're listening, I hope you'll go back and listen to the dozens of other prior episodes. Please also rate and review Speak Your Piece on iTunes, Google, and elsewhere.
My guest is longtime book dealer, social critic, historian, and dear friend Ken Sanders.
We're going to be discussing today rare books, counterculture Utah, his life and his interaction with so many other people here in Utah for over, how many years?

**Ken Sanders** (1:10)
Almost 50 years. I've been in the book trade now, Brad.

**Brad Westwood** (1:15)
I've asked Ken to just speak about these things and whatever else he finds interesting. So thank you so much, Ken, for being here.

**Ken Sanders** (1:24)
It's my pleasure, Brad.

**Brad Westwood** (1:26)
First question I want to ask you is, you got into this gig of rare book dealing and collecting as a young boy. Tell us that story.

**Ken Sanders** (1:35)
Well, I always read books. I just devoured books. I had to have books. And it was a pretty driving factor in my life. So back in grade school, I'd read every book I could get my hands on. I used to live for the weekly reader and the scholastic books once a month.
And I would trade in soda pop bottles for nickels for...

**Brad Westwood** (2:03)
And did you get the books at school? Did they have book fairs where you could bring your money?

**Ken Sanders** (2:07)
We didn't do book fairs in my day, Brad, but they had a monthly shipment that came. And so the teacher would call, you know, far less than half the class even bought books.
And usually it'd be a book or two books. I was always the last kid called because there was an entire box of books for me.

**Brad Westwood** (2:31)
Well, and did you, did you, where did that love of reading transfer into some kind of retail experience?

**Ken Sanders** (2:39)
Well, I was a real comic book collector in my youth, although my mom in the 50s only allowed me to read. We had a subscription to Walt Disney Comics and Stories.
But all the good stuff, you know, the superheroes and the science fiction and the horror, you weren't really allowed that at that age. So I would found that I could kind of horse trade comic books. And, you know, if I could buy one for a nickel and sell it for a dime, it wasn't so much I was in business. But that meant now I can have two more comic books in my collection.

**Brad Westwood** (3:11)
Well, and so comic books, you, as a voracious reader, also kind of were very much aware of what was going around around you. I mean, this was a time of great change in Utah.

**Ken Sanders** (3:25)
Oh, my goodness. I grew up in South Salt Lake. They've rebranded themselves from the city of industry. I forget what the new slogan is on the water tank out there.
When I was a kid, there was no interstate 15 or 80 I recall vividly them tearing the neighborhoods up, just blocks from my house, to shove that interstate 80 freeway from State Street all the way up Parley's Canyon. The old way used to be you went up 21st South until it turned into Parley's Way. And then on the old US 40, you crisscross the canyon high up on these rickety bridges. It took you back and forth until you reached the summit, which was much, much higher than today. I'd say 50 feet, at least higher.
And other than Flinders Mountain Meadow Ranch, the ruins of the Old Pony Express and the Wales Fargo buildings, and one old ranch that's still there on the right hand side, there weren't any buildings between Parley Summit and Silver Creek Junction.

**Brad Westwood** (4:35)
That's an interesting memory, really, and in that time, you also were seeing a lot of post-war families moving in, the suburban sprawls going on across the creek.

**Ken Sanders** (4:51)
I grew up on Blair Street, just off 27th South and South Salt Lake. There was an open ditch that ran down the south side of the street, and every spring and fall, there were thousands and thousands of sheep that were herded down out of the mountains to, I have no idea where they went to the west.