United Press International is in danger of folding, after 85 years of lively newswriting and feature reporting throughout the world.
The wire service has a colorful history. In its heyday the Salt Lake bureau occupied offices in the Tribune Building and fielded ten full-time staffers. Later, as UPI cut staff, this bureau covered six states.Today Lance Gurwell, working out of his home in the Rose Park area only 20 hours a week, is the last UPI presence in Utah. His area of coverage has shrunk to not much more than Salt Lake City.
After the suite in the Tribune Building closed around January 1991, UPI shifted its office to a press room in the Capitol. Then last October, "they closed the bureau down as a full-time bureau," Gurwell said.
He moved UPI equipment to his house, "30-some years worth of stuff, and stored it in my garage - computer equipment, file cabinets and all that.
"Then over the next several months I shipped most of the good electronic terminals back to them," to UPI regional headquarters in Los Angeles. He kept a few terminals and computer modems at home, which he uses in filing stories.
Mostly, Gurwell tries to keep the broadcast wire operating for radio and TV stations. "I believe that the Deseret News was probably the only operation left in Salt Lake that still is getting the (local news) print service," he said.
"Of course, there was no way I could do print reporting as well as all the radio stuff on 20 hours a week."
That UPI might collapse has been a possibility for years. But when the news came that this time it seemed almost certain, that was "sort of like getting punched right in the stomach," he said.
"It knocks the wind out of you. You realize, hey, how do I take care of my family? How do I take care of my house payment?"
Although a 15-year veteran journalist, Gurwell is having trouble landing another job. "Put a plug in there," he said, before news came that UPI might have found a buyer. "If anyone wants a good journalist or graphic artist, I'm available."
Ralph Wakley was one of the last to leave. He started with UPI in June 1970 and left in November 1990, serving for a time as bureau chief.
Wakley remembers the "tremendous camaraderie," both in the Salt Lake and Los Angeles bureaus.
"They were always worried about money . . .. There were times under various owners when things were better, and things were worse."
Salt Lake City was a big bureau, and its reporters were busy covering forest fires, mine disasters, the winter Olympics issue, basketball and golf tournaments.
"They gave you a chance to cover the really big news in the world, or at least in our region of it," said Wakley, who now staffs the Salt Lake office of the Ogden Standard Examiner. "You don't get that with a lot of (news) companies."
One Saturday a fire broke out in the Tribune Building. "They evacuated the entire building, including the Tribune news staff - but they never came up and told us there was a fire in the building," he said.
By the time Wakley and the few others working in the office smelled smoke, the firefighters had arrived. The "Unipressers" decided to stay on the job.
"We had a good operation in Salt Lake, always," he said.
"I always felt that when I quit it would be like you lost your best friend. But when I finally did, I felt a relief."
It was relief from incredible pressure for peak performance under relentless deadlines. UPI writers tried "not to do just good enough work, but to do better than good enough," Wakley said.
"You had to write it quickly and get the important elements in the lead, and get it out quickly." Breaking news had to be sent out fast, because somewhere in the world a paper would be going to press at that moment.
Janice Perry, now the community relations director for the State Tax Commission, recalls, "We never had much of a dress code at UPI involving how you show up to the office," although a dress code was in effect about meeting the public.
Once a delegation of high-priced, well-dressed lawyers from a utility showed up to complain about a story a reporter had written. He "was there in cutoff shorts and no shirt, glistening with sweat, listening to these lawyers."
Ken Connaughton, executive news producer at KTVX TV, worked at UPI for six years starting in 1972. "We had a lot of pride, a lot of esprit de corps," he said.
"Morale was high. We were very, very confident. We felt we were the best wire service in the world, and there was a lot of evidence to back that up."
For thousands of UPI reporters, the work experience deteriorated with brutal rapidity. Joyce Cutler, now with the Bureau of National Affairs in Livermore, Calif., worked for UPI from 1985 to 1988. Then the service, in the throes of financial problems, laid her off with three hours' notice and five months' severance pay.
"We had to write radio, broadcast and newspaper copy," she said. UPI was "understaffed, underpaid, overworked, hectic. We loved it."