TAYLORSVILLE — Considering that 77 is the new 55, you can’t exactly call Gary Swensen old, but you can say he’s been around long enough to remember when you could drive your John Deere tractor along Redwood Road from Taylorsville to Riverton and not get cussed at.
When he was growing up in the 1940s and '50s, his hometown of Taylorsville was mostly “just farms, meadows and pastures.”
Now it’s mostly not.
But amid what amounts to a half-century of urbanization in the heart of the Salt Lake Valley there stands a spacious, beautiful public park — acres of fields, courts, diamonds and trails — that represents just how much one man has meant to a community and how much that community has meant to one man.
The Gary C. Swensen Regional Park is named after, well ….
The movement to rename Valley Regional Park at 5100 S. 2700 West started in spring 2014 when Taylorsville resident and former Salt Lake County Commissioner Brent Overson sent a letter to the Salt Lake County Council suggesting the change.
He explained that Swensen, with the exception of a three-year LDS mission to California, has lived in Taylorsville his entire life, and that throughout that life he has been a tireless champion of sports, recreation, parks and youths of all ages.
He recounted Swensen’s 20 years as superintendent of the Salt Lake County Recreation Department, when he oversaw the development of dozens of parks and rec centers throughout the Salt Lake Valley. He cited his 16 years on the Granite School District Board and his term on the Utah State School Board. He talked about his passion for the sport of volleyball and the teams he coached and mentored through the years.
The proposal was forwarded to the city of Taylorsville, where the City Council announced it would hold a public hearing on the matter.
The night of the hearing, the room was so packed it was as if everyone in Taylorsville showed up — everyone except Gary.
Purposely kept out of the loop, he never saw this coming.
Swensen’s ears should have been ringing, at the very least. At the hearing, Overson’s idea met with approval that was not only enthusiastic and widespread, but also unanimous.
“There wasn’t a single objection, not one,” Overson said. “That’s rare in this day and age. I was amazed at all the people who showed up to lend their support. I’m grateful it was something I was prompted to do. Gary’s had such a substantial impact.”
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Gary Swensen’s path as a developer of youths and recreation began with just one simple goal: to get out of farm work.
“I’ll tell you what he didn’t like, he didn’t like farming,” affirms his son, Jason.
Gary seconds that without dissent. “You try being a farm boy with hay fever,” he says.
The farm was owned by Rell and Mabel Swensen, Gary’s parents, who welcomed him to their 60 acres of sugar beets, alfalfa and onions just as the Great Depression was on its way out in 1938. Gary grew up doing the usual farm chores alongside his father and younger brother Val. “I think my dad was a masochist,” he says. “He’d always say, 'If you go to college you don’t have to do this.' ”
As soon as Gary graduated from Granite High School he enrolled at the University of Utah.
He thought he’d major in journalism and become a sports writer, but his life course was changed when he took a speech class taught by professor Royal Garff.
Petrified to speak in public — “there’s shy and then there’s bashful,” he says, “I was bashful” — he took the class only because he had to; it was a requirement.
Not only did Garff make Gary stand up and speak in front of everyone, Garff then proceeded to publicly point out Gary's flaws.
“I hated that class, I wasn’t going to go back,” remembers Gary.
But he did go back, and not just to that one, but to every class Royal Garff taught. He graduated four years later in speech.
Swensen credits Garff, next to his father, with being the biggest influence in his formative years. A point of view, he points out, the professor did not disagree with.
“After college, I’d run into Royal Garff from time to time,” says Gary. “He’d always say, ‘He’s made a success of himself, but you should have seen him before I got hold of him.’ ”
The net result: mission accomplished. Gary never did go back to the farm. A few years later, Rell and Mabel sold their 60 acres to real estate developers and the three-generation Swensen farm became the Majestic Meadows Mobile Home Park.
Such transformations were occurring all over the Salt Lake Valley in the 1960s. Places that once housed sugar beets now housed houses, or shopping malls, or — thanks in no small part to Gary Swensen — ballparks, playing fields and swimming pools.
That’s because his first job after the U. was with the Salt Lake County Recreation Department, where he was hired to be the land acquisition coordinator. It was his task to identify and recommend parcels of land the county should purchase for recreational purposes.
The first sale he negotiated was for a big block of land in Taylorsville located about a 15-minute tractor drive from where he grew up — at 5100 South 2700 West.
Along with acquiring real estate, he was also asked to handle PR for the recreation department. He made friends with the media. He made friends with everyone. His career trajectory was straight up. In 1967, when Paul Rose stepped down as parks and rec superintendent, he was selected to replace him at just 29 years of age.
He held that post for 20 years, keeping pace with a post-World War II era dominated by emerging baby boomers who had more leisure time on their hands than ever before. Under Swensen’s direction, great chunks of land was purchased and set aside for parks, open space, trails, multipurpose centers, equestrian arenas, softball and baseball diamonds and golf courses. Many of the valley’s enduring crown jewels of public recreation — the Cottonwood Softball Complex, the Salt Lake County Equestrian Park in South Jordan, Wheeler Farm, among them — came to pass on his watch.
Swensen’s carefully cultivated relationship with the media helped push things along in a positive, taxpayer-approved direction, as did his close collaboration with the county’s four school districts — Salt Lake, Granite, Jordan and Murray. He persuaded the districts to open their school facilities in the summer to the rec department. The public got the pools, gyms and playing fields that were idle. In exchange the schools got to use the county landfill for free. Everybody won.
Mike Peterson, a member of the Salt Lake County Parks and Recreation Advisory Board, was tapped by Swensen fresh out of college in 1971. He remembers a man who knew where he wanted to go and who built the bridges to get there. “He had the foresight to acquire significant land that the county could set aside for recreation and parks before developers got to them. And in a business where collaboration and partnership is what it’s all about, he was the epitome of that.”
“He just had a manner about him, very affable, able to get along with everybody,” says Overson, who oversaw the county recreation department during six of the eight years he was a Salt Lake County commissioner.
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The rec department was Swensen’s day job. The rest of his time was devoted to being with his wife, Irene — they met, appropriately enough, at a basketball game when Irene was a Murray High School cheerleader — and raising their four boys — Gordon, Jason, Matthew and Christopher. Whatever was left beyond that, more often than not it went to volleyball.
Gary discovered the game in junior high, falling for it when it was far from a mainstream sport in Utah. He played in recreation leagues for decades, and when he wasn’t playing he was coaching. In his late 20s he assembled a team of teenagers at the LDS Church’s Taylorsville 1st Ward. None of the boys knew a volleyball from a beachball. Four years later, they won the 1970 All-Church Volleyball Championship at the Deseret Gym over a team from Hawaii.
Members of that team of country kids who upended the defending All-Church champions from a noted volleyball hotbed are in their 60s now. At the public hearing about the name change, one of them, Kelly Maxfield, a vice president of Questar, was quoted in the Salt Lake Tribune as saying: “What stands out is not so much that we won, but that Gary always taught us the value of hard work. He taught us that being honest and having integrity and being fair were more important than winning.”
Another member of that team, Jamie McQueen, remembers a coach who insisted that his players call fouls on themselves, whether the official saw it or not.
“If you got messed up in the net it was your honor to raise your hand and tell the ref that ‘Hey, I got the net.’ We were in the title game and one of our guys bumped the net and it wasn’t called. So he raised his hand. I looked over at Gary and he was going, ‘Not now! not now!’
“It’s taken me years to understand how he got a bunch of kids who worked the farms in summertime, hauled hay, thinned beets, to show up at 5 a.m. on Saturdays to practice volleyball. What he’d do is go around and tell you what you needed to do to improve. He met me in the locker room one day and he said, ‘You know McQueen, if you’d just do this I think you’d be the best setter on the team.’ He was such a neat guy you didn’t want to let him down. He went around and individually built everybody up and encouraged them. What he did was he built people, he didn’t build a team.”
Yet another member of that championship squad, Rick Hall, who recently retired as managing editor of the Deseret News, remembers taking his grandkids to Valley Regional Park a few years ago. He looked around at the softball diamonds, the Frisbee golf course, the 3K running path, the soccer fields and basketball courts, and mused that whoever was responsible for all this deserves a big thank-you.
Only when he learned about the movement to rename the park did he realize that the person responsible was none other than his old Taylorsville 1st Ward volleyball coach.
At the Taylorsville town hearing, Rick told the council: “In May of 2013, now as a grandfather, I began attending grandchildren’s activities — soccer, flag football, swimming, basketball — at the Valley Regional Park. For me it was a trip down memory lane as I saw there remnants of the open space of my youth. I thought to myself, someone did a really smart thing in preserving so much of this area.
“I honestly had no idea of Gary Swensen’s involvement in procuring that land. As a kid under Gary’s tutelage, I knew he worked for the county recreation department, but to be honest, I never really knew what he did!
“One of the great blessings of living in Taylorsville for the first 19 years of my life was the seemingly endless acres of open space to roam and explore. Another great blessing of my time in Taylorsville was the influence of Gary Swensen. I can think of a no more fitting tribute to such a deserving man, who has done so much, than to name the park he preserved in his honor.”
At 77, Gary’s comfortably retired these days. He and Irene live in a home in the heart of Taylorsville, a stone’s throw from the farm where he grew up. They have a spacious yard for their 12 grandchildren, with plenty of trees and open space, all of it surrounded by a large, beautiful green lawn.
He lets somebody else cut the grass. Hay fever, you know.
Email: benson@deseretnews.com