It was the winter of 1929, and Ellis Fox needed a job.
He heard about a company that was looking for workers to build a natural gas pipeline from southwestern Wyoming to the Salt Lake Valley. So he and a buddy showed up at the company before daybreak, hoping to be first in line."I was the second man they hired on the job, and it was in January," said Fox, 91, of Orem. "They paid 50 cents an hour. It took us all day to dig a hole about four feet long, to get under the frost."
This was the beginning of construction on the pipeline -- a project that ended with a celebration 70 years ago Tuesday.
The company that ran the pipeline has evolved over the years into Questar Corp., a $2.1 billion energy services organization that is headquartered in Salt Lake City and serves some 670,000 customers.
But back in 1929, Questar's predecessor -- known as Western Public Service Corp. -- had just 18,265 customers. And natural gas was not taken for granted the way it is today, said David Hampshire, Questar director of communication programs.
Hampshire recently finished more than eight years of research and writing that resulted in the book "No Western Parallel: The Story of Questar Corporation." He spent hours conducting interviews and digging through Questar's archives, he said, and came away with a deeper appreciation of the 1929 project.
"Today, it's kind of a yawner. But 70 years ago, it was a novelty to have natural gas," Hampshire said. "Then, most people were burning coal and wood. . . . At that time, (natural gas) was more expensive than coal or fuel oil."
Salt Lake City did have gas before 1929, but it was made from coal at a plant near 100 South and 1000 West. And Hampshire said that did not dampen enthusiasm when the pipeline was finished. Newspaper accounts from 1929 indicate that the party to celebrate the pipeline's arrival in Salt Lake City drew about 15,000 people, "which is almost as many people as we had on the system," he said.
In addition to the Aug. 17 celebration in Salt Lake City, the arrival of the pipeline was marked by similar ceremonies on Aug. 20 in Evanston, Wyo., and Sept. 7 in Ogden.
Hampshire said building the pipeline was an amazing feat worthy of celebration.
"They started building it in January through the Wasatch Mountains, and that year, if you look back at the weather records, we had about 50 percent more snow than normal, and we had unusually cold temperatures," Hampshire said. "Even though the papers at the time say it (was built using) the latest technology, looking back from our perspective, it was pretty crude."
Fox said the frost was more than a foot deep.
"They finally decided to blast it," Fox said. "So we would shovel the snow off, drive a tapered rod into the ground and then put in a stick of dynamite to crack the frost. . . . And that's the way we dug her."
Fox said he eventually moved out of a digging job to work in the "cook shack" and later drove a truck to shuttle men and supplies back and forth along the pipeline.
"They sure hired a lot of people," Fox said.
Even with the end of winter, the job did not get any easier, Hampshire said. Spring temperatures melted the snow and left all of the workers and equipment wallowing in mud.
"If you look back at the technology of the time, people hadn't been building long-distance welded pipelines for more than about five years when they got started," he said. "We were still learning a lot about how to construct it, how to protect the pipeline. A lot of mistakes were made in the process, but the end result was that the gas arrived when they said it was going to arrive."