The Walter Perry III family photo album is an archive in early traffic innovations in Salt Lake City.
Its pages document the introduction of the "shame car" and parking meters to enforce parking and traffic regulations in downtown Salt Lake City.Perry's father, Walter Perry II, worked for the Salt Lake City police from 1929 to 1937. He worked the parking division in the mid-1930s when traffic burgeoned as a problem downtown.
One photo in the album shows Walter Perry II writing what may have been the first parking ticket issued in the city. The city installed meters as an experiment to see if the newfangled devices, invented in 1935, could control downtown parking.
On Aug. 12, 1936, the Parkrite Corporation installed 200 parking meters on alternate sides of Main Street between South Temple and Broadway and on one side of Broadway from Main to State Street. The city gave the meters a 90-day trial that summer.
The meters gave motorists 60 minutes worth of parking for a nickel. The meters were not a hit - mostly because they seemed expensive.
A headline printed on the front page of the Deseret News that day proclaimed "Salt Lake Motorists Spurn Parking Meters." Several photos accompanied the story, including a pair showing opposite sides of Main Street. The meter-lined section was empty. The other, unmetered side, was packed.
The third photo showed F. Brown tying his horse to the newfangled "hitching post" and depositing a nickel in the device.
Police issued five tickets that day, creating quite a stir. A crowd gathered around Walter Perry II as he wrote one ticket.
The meters received mixed reactions from motorists, business owners and city officials.
"I think the meter idea is all right - it's the nickel that's the sticker," said L. R. Skidmore, a hat shop manager.
Police inspector O.B. Record predicted the meters would be a permanent fixture downtown. He called the machines the "finest parking remedy yet experimented with here" and the "only sure remedy" for "parking hogs" in the business district.
By the second day, police had ticketed 28 parking violators. But apparently the city dumped the meters after protests from residents and business owners.
They were reinstalled several years later and the city passed a formal parking meter ordinance in 1939.
Actually, parking meters were the second device Salt Lake City experimented with to control parking and traffic downtown.
In 1935 the police commissioned a "shame car" to "help" motorists and pedestrians obey laws. The "shame car" was equipped with a public address system, including two large speakers on its roof.
Walter Perry II worked the "shame car" with his partner Golden Haight, cruising downtown streets to point out parking violations to motorists and warn pedestrians about the perils of jaywalking.
A newspaper article called "the shame car" - "a modern example of the hand of iron, in a velvet glove."