When Bill Coleman and his wife Karen moved to Park City in 1972, the sidewalks were still wooden. The streetlamps had blue mercury vapor lights, there was trash in vacant lots, and the locals made a pact as more folks, like Bill, were moving to town.
“Don’t sell any more homes to those long hairs.”
Bill has a roll call of names from that era, collectively landowners, the police chief, a female lawyer, the mayor. Tommy Mathews had just landed in town after he helped create Common Cause, the political action group in Washington, D.C. He owned a flophouse and bar on Main Street named, The Bucket.
“Perfect place,” Mathews proclaimed, “for an alcoholic.”
Jim Patterson had started a funky little summer art festival where local hippie artists sold their wares. Lloyd Evans was still working in the mines long before he became a cop and later the Chief of Police. Bill says he had a brief stint as a waiter at the Claimjumper. “I was the worst waiter ever. I never got a tip… and I never deserved one.”
Terry Janauex owned a bar on the top of Main Street, Alamo Dave was a bartender at…The Alamo (now the No Name Saloon) and T.C. Lee was the snowcat driver on the mountain.
Where Java Cow is today on Main Street was a place called Solid Muldoons. Bill worked there as a bartender along with Dick Miller. They sold beer and peanuts and booked bluegrass bands to come play. Eventually, Bill bought the building/bar.
Ely’s Garage was still fixing cars on the corner of Park and Heber Avenues. Bill Kimball, a San Francisco businessman with roots in Ogden and Park City, bought that garage to become a community center. The Greater Park City Company was owned by Warren King, of the Park City Resort. And the new owner of that Resort, in the mid 1970’s, was Nick Badmai, who also owned the ski area Alpine of Meadows of Tahoe. To support the community effort, Badami donated the last $90,000 needed to be able to close the deal and donate the building to the new non-profit. It later became the Kimball Art Center.
Bill remembers rugby was the sport of the non-ski season. At the end of the rugby season, a guy named Mawa, dug a pit in the dirt that is now the location of the Doubletree, and he created a celebration pig roast. There was another guy Bill remembers fondly, named Heime, who had three-armed bandits on Main Street, where you could still gamble away some coins.
The town was kind of lawless. Or… it was a simpler time.
But it was also a place where couples like Bill and Karen had little reason to put down roots. It was an unregulated place without enough full-time residents or businesses. Which Bill observed, also made it full of potential.
By 1980, Bill had decided to be part of the solution and became a city council member. He helped hire the first full-time City Manager for Park City, a woman named Arlene Loble.
Jerry Howells, who had a giant paint business in Salt Lake City and who later helped bring the New Orleans Jazz to Salt Lake as the Utah Jazz, decided Park City was ready for a Rotary Club. Bill, along with David Krajeski, Rob Morris and Bill McComb, helped gather members.
About this time, the Mormon Church decided they should enter the developing real estate game, and they created the Holiday Ranch Ward. Bill said that level of commitment from The Church helped the funky hippie town, in a sense, grow up. It also broke up the land holdings of Greater Park City Company and created an estate zone. That zone allowed three homes per acre, so ranchettes could exist. Bill and Karen bought one of those, and now Bill’s son, Todd lives there and farms the land in an organic fashion.
Still, most of Bill’s closest friends didn’t think they could raise children here in those years.
Bill remembers zoning laws were determined by practical matters. The “no building taller than three stories” rule came about because that was as tall as the tallest ladder truck the fire department owned at the time.
Bill says, “it was safe to say we weren’t hung up on aesthetics or long-term progress.” Soon, Holiday Village was built, along with the Snowflower and Claimjumper condos, which opened it up for more people to live in Park City full-time.
“When Deer Valley came along-it was a different game. Development was a good word back then. It meant we were trying to create a livable community,” Bill recalls.
In the 1960s and 70s, and even into the 80s, Bill remembers most folks would decide each spring if they would leave or try to stay for another year. “It was a commitment we renewed each year, for a lot of years, until we could start to see a future for the town and for ourselves.”
Being a parent in Park City during this time was treated with the same spirited enthusiasm as the rest of the community building. “We were not helicopter parents. More like free-range parents. And there was no social media, and the range of television choices were limited. It released us from the tyranny of such things we fight now.”
One of the final pieces to the transformation of the off-the-beaten-path to the old silver mining town was the creation of a connection to the new interstate Highway I-80. Suddenly, the state highway that had often been closed to deep snow and was deeply rutted in the spring, disappeared. It was re-routed and properly paved with multiple lanes and a designated off-ramp- right into Park City. The two-lane dirt road with the giant dips in it, that had stopped traffic twice a day so the Osguthorpe’s dairy cows could cross to the milking barn, was now a nonstop route into town.
Overall, Bill remembers those years as “a time when we had shared ideals, and we made up a town. Together.”
This summer, Bill fell off his back porch during a home repair project and broke his neck. He exited that crisis with a newfound respect for his current age and life chapter. He says he is filled with gratitude and appreciation. And yes, he is working on yet, another, new real estate project, where a growing community of families and businesses can experience four-season living in a resort town.