Out of the Gulch, Onto the Mountain Top

Book excerpt: Born in a small coal mining town in 1931, Frederic Marsh Civish, Jr. lived through things most people nowadays would consider history. For example, he is older than the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Hoover Dam. On Pearl Harbor Day, he was duck hunting with a 12-gage shotgun. In the 21st century, he was a substitute teacher, author of the historical novel The Sunnyside War about the 1922 United Mineworkers Strike. He also wrote “a truly workable diet book” titled Losing Weight for Life: Eating What you Like on the RMR Diet. He is still extremely active and involved in numerous social and charitable activities. Growing up in Utah, “I felt the state and everybody in it could be described with two words: I called the state ‘sticks and people hicks.’ After joining the Navy during the Korean War and living in several California cities, in 1962, for various reasons, I decided to move back to the sticks and become one of them ‘thar’ hicks. I lived in Salt Lake until 2012, when I got tired of the traffic and the smog, and moved north to Ogden, Utah, where my current home is about a quarter of a mile from huge mountains reminiscent of those where I was born and raised.”