Chapter 3, “A Strong Arm to the Church”: Recreation Building Boom

We are very anxious to make this institution a real blessing to the men and women of this community, and at the same time to make it a strong arm to the church.

—Letter to bishops promoting the newly built Deseret Gymnasium (about 1912)¹

After the construction of the Deseret Gymnasium in Salt Lake City in 1910, its executives sought a creative method to advertise the existence of the athletic training facility. Deciding that the developing technology of motion pictures was optimal for their needs—viewers would actually get to see the action in the gym—they solicited several scripts for the short film advertisements. Each film had a different theme and highlighted a unique offering of the urban gymnasium; however, each of the advertisements referred pointedly to the Deseret Gymnasium as the “Temple of Health.” One short film entitled “The Champion,” for example, showed a “little comic man” getting thrown in the air for an extended period (with the help of “trick photography”) and then landing on a larger man and pinning his shoulders to the ground. The suggested wording to accompany the film advised not only wrestlers but residents of Salt Lake interested in recreation: “If you want to wrestle/Light in the right place/The Deseret Gym/The Temple of Health.” The Deseret Gym, built at high ^[105] cost to the church, was designed as the “right place” for Mormon adolescents and adults to land.

Taken together, the films showcased what LDS leaders believed were the main reasons for gym attendance. Another comical short film was directed at businessmen and the relationship between physical fitness and business efficiency. In “The Submarine,” a swimmer—mistaken for a submarine—gets knocked askance by a water ball thrown by an onlooker. Busy businessmen beset by economic torpedoes at the workplace might have been comforted by the film’s words: “Sometimes there’s a feeling of sadness/At the end of a long busy day/Why not convert it to gladness/By joining the Gym while you may/Special class for businessmen.” As always, the text was followed by, “Deseret Gym/The Temple of Health.” To contend with the explosion of white-collar workers in the early twentieth century, the gym was offered as a place where the businessman could increase his bottom-line efficiency by improving his physical stamina. As another film advised, “When business disregards the body, the body will disregard business.” The film showing the athletic achievements of young men was designed to “cause every boy who sees it to keep after his parents until he joins the gym.” The words accompanying that film recognized that the street was a dangerous place and advertised that young men would be safeguarded in the “Temple of Health” where a year’s fee cost less than a week’s doctor bill.² Whether it was boys or ^[106] businessmen, girls or their mothers, leaders of the LDS church and the Deseret Gym believed that it was necessary to provide Mormons with a “right place” to land. The construction of the Gym—merely the largest church-sponsored effort at creating supervised recreation space—highlights a recreational building boom that changed the face of LDS architecture and rearticulated the LDS concepts of sacred and non-sacred space. The programs that were designed to complement the newly constructed play spaces also offer unique insight into LDS gender roles during the early twentieth century.

Early Organization of Recreation Space

Gymnasiums—organized space for play, exercise, and recreation—were not unknown to the Mormon community in the nineteenth century. Families or community groups sensed the need for supervised exercise and equipped rooms in homes or rented space where a variety of physical activities could take place. The Lion House, built by Brigham Young in central Salt Lake City in 1856, included a gymnasium among its accouterments. Equipped with horizontal and straight ladders, horizontal bars, back boards, jumping ropes, wands, roller skates, and hoops, the Lion House gym must have been a beehive of activity with children drawing wooden swords to do mock battle while balls flew overhead and intrepid gymnasts rolled on exercise mats. To ensure that the play remained wholesome and constructive, an expert was ^[107] hired to teach the children the rudiments of gymnastics, fencing, and dancing.³ In 1896, the recently organized Mutual Improvement League began to emphasize “physical culture” and opened a gymnasium. Housed in the old Social Hall building in downtown Salt Lake City, the “first class” gymnasium contained “all the necessary apparatus designed for the perfect development of the human body.” Besides baths, bathtubs, and showers, the building contained a library and reading room that was open to the public six days a week.⁴

In addition to church leaders, civic officials (who were often leading members of the church) sensed the need to provide recreational facilities where wholesome leisure-time activities could be promoted. In 1909, the Utah legislature created a state library-gymnasium commission to oversee the construction and day-to-day activities of gymnasium complexes throughout the state. State officials, like president of the State Library-Gymnasium Committee Howard R. Driggs, saw the same social problems that concerned Mormon leaders and similarly pinned their hopes on rational recreation. In describing the need for library-gymnasiums—“a new center of culture for the community”⁵—Driggs first turned to the perceived problems: “A mighty demand is ^[108] being made today to do something to turn our misguided youth from the baneful influences of street loafing and the saloon.” Concern about juvenile misbehavior had boiled over into “righteous wrath” which would not dissipate until “that pernicious institution [the saloon] has been swept away forever from our midst.” Echoing the ideas of progressive reformers like Jane Addams, Driggs argued that merely removing the saloon was not enough. In its place, state leaders needed to plant “another institution that will cultivate manliness in the thousands of schoolless [sic], careless, but not necessarily bad boys.” That institution was the library-gymnasium which offered a unique amalgam of educational and physical pursuits for the potential delinquent. Driggs described the facilities in the most bucolic of terms: “Every city should establish a public home for its street-boys—a place where they can go of an evening to mingle freely in manly sports—to swim, to play wholesome games, to read good books and magazines; a place where they can have well-directed physical play and enjoyment free from the vice and vulgarity of the saloon.”

Driggs argued that the library-gym played an important educational role as well. For the athletically inclined boy who had shown little interest in education, the path to the athletic facilities led the young man through “a cheery room where good books and magazines invite[d] [him]” to pick them up and read. Once intrigued by the book, the boy will “discover that mental enjoyment is just as entrancing as physical sport.” That intellectual transformation accomplished, the boy’s mind would be turned from ^[109] “cigarettes, smutty yarns, and worse sins” toward intellectual development.⁶ Supported by a small tax—enough to pay for expenses including a play director and a librarian—these leisure-time complexes would become integral to Utah’s communities. By inviting loafers into the library, the positive social power of recreation could save youthful miscreants from the evils of the saloon and street.

Local organizations of the church likewise recognized the need to create a space where Mormons could pursue recreational activities under the watchful eye of church leaders. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century—following the reorganization of the Relief Society (1867), the formation of Retrenchment Societies (1869), and the organization of the youth-oriented Primary (1876)—many wards erected recreation halls and Relief Society halls. Built to house auxiliary programs and social activities, the buildings were simple vernacular structures built near the local meetinghouse. The construction of separate recreation halls continued into the 1920s. By the turn of the century, however, according to historian Martha Sonntag Bradley, it had become more common to house both the worship area and the recreational space under the same roof. Evincing a “flexible attitude toward the secular v. sacred nature of the chapel space” that had long been an LDS tradition, Mormons in the twentieth century worshipped in one area of the meetinghouse on Sunday and pursued amusement ^[110] and recreation in another part of the building during the week.⁷ In a typical articulation of church space, the Granite Stake Tabernacle placed worship services on the main floor and recreation space in the basement. Completed in November 1903, the Tabernacle’s basement floor contained a sizeable assembly room (64' x 64') with a large stage. In the available open space, a variety of amusements including sports, games, and dances could be pursued.⁸ Housed under the same roof, the chapel and the amusement hall remained segregated though both were designed to inculcate the principles of proper LDS behavior.

The rationale behind the allocation of resources for church-sponsored gymnasiums appeared in a May 1911 Improvement Era editorial. President Joseph Fielding Smith made it perfectly clear that church-controlled gymnasiums had become an indispensable weapon in the organization’s arsenal against improper amusement. In the months immediately following the opening of the Deseret Gym, Smith contended that the establishment of the centralized gym was not enough. Local wards and stakes must likewise provide for their member’s recreational needs. The church leader advised: “Gymnasiums have become apparently a very urgent necessity of late, also places of ^[111] amusement. We must not only provide places of worship for the youth of Zion, as well as for their fathers and mothers, but also find places for the rational amusement of our children, in order that they may be kept under proper influences, away from the contaminating, degrading practices too common in the world with reference to and in connection with the amusement of the people.”⁹

Though many wards had the necessary space for a gymnasium in their amusement halls, most did not know what equipment was required to establish a working facility. Reacting to “numerous inquiries sent me from the country districts of Utah, and the general interest being taken by the Church, from Canada to Mexico, in adopting a course in physical education or athletics,” Professor E. J. Milne, the Physical Director at the University of Utah, published an article in the Improvement Era showing that a “crude though decidedly attractive room may be equipped where basket ball, hand ball and gymnastic work, can be given in every ward, at a comparatively small cost.” Milne first described how to set up a basketball court. Devised in 1891 by James Naismith, basketball was just a decade or so old when Milne put it within reach of most Mormons. Contending that basketball already was one of the greatest indoor games in the country (“especially in the state of Utah”), Milne explained that a large room (35' x 70') with screened windows and lights was necessary. Strips of hard wood placed six inches apart would protect the windows while a wire waste basket worked nicely to ^[112] shield the lights from errant balls. The dimensions of the court were illustrated in any basketball rule book, Milne advised, but the rims required specific instruction. The two rims should be made of iron about eighteen inches in diameter and placed ten feet above the ground on opposite ends of the court. Aware of his audience, Milne prescribed that if regular goals cannot be secured, “an old hay rake tooth will do nicely.” Nets, though not required, could be made from mason’s twine or small window-cord rope. An inflated rubber bladder with a leather cover served as a ball. In Utah, as was the case in most areas, Spalding’s rules were to be observed.

Like the playing surface, basketball players also had to ready themselves, according to physical director Milne. He dictated that each individual’s equipment should include “rubber-soled shoes (high tops preferred), long stockings, knee pants, jock straup [sic], and a one-quarter sleeve jersey.” Basketball was not the only physical activity that ward amusement halls should prepare for, however. Milne recommended a “few Indian clubs and dumb bells” as well as the procurement of a pair of flying rings (“one of the most attractive features of a gymnasium”) to round out the gymnasium’s offerings. Finally, if water systems were installed, each ward should create facilities for a shower bath. Not only hygienic, a bath after exercise, counseled Milne, was a “great preventive of colds after a vigorous hour or so in the gymnasium.”¹⁰ Where President Joseph Fielding Smith had provided the “why” behind the creation of local gymnasiums, ^[113] Professor E. J. Milne provided the “how.” Together, they set off a boom in the construction of LDS amusement halls and gymnasiums. The Mormon landscape—both religiously and geographically—would never be the same.

In northern Utah, the Cache Stake, under the direction of YMMIA Superintendent A. E. Cranney, made plans for a reading room and gymnasium in Logan. To acquire an appropriate site, Cranney contacted the general board of the YMMIA in Salt Lake City which arranged to have the Preston Block donated for the purposes of creating a recreational center for the community. Situated in the central part of town close to the business district, the YMMIA outfitted three rooms—reading room, game room, and gymnasium. The goal in creating the center, according to Superintendent Cranney, was to provide “an attractive rendezvous for the boys, especially those who are attracted from home influences to the alluring downtown districts.” He continued, “In our rooms we offer them not only good reading, clean and attractive games, associations under more favorable environment, but we endeavor in this way to encourage and help them to more fully understand that, for a ‘wise and glorious purpose we have been placed here on earth,’ and that ‘The man who wins is the man who does.’” Though young men were their primary concern, Logan’s leaders considered finishing another room for the exclusive use of the sister Saints. In the meantime, women were permitted to use the existing rooms. And rightly they should have been. It was largely through ^[114] bazaars and entertainments sponsored by the women’s auxiliaries that over $1000 was raised for the outfitting of the reading room.¹¹

In Hyrum, Utah, the members of the Second Ward followed a similar process in constructing a $12,500 recreation hall. Financed by volunteer contributions—including $5000 in donated labor and $1080 raised in a three-day “round-up”—the project “foster[ed] a spirit of unity” in the community. Moreover, social and spiritual ends were served. According to one participant, the people of Hyrum “now have a modern recreation hall where they can have dramas, dances, and other socials, free from the evils of privately conducted halls.”¹² A more striking example occurred in Panaca, Nevada where, under the leadership of Brother J. R. Smith, the young men created a gymnasium out of a former saloon building by equipping it ^[115] with wrestling mats, punching bag, and boxing gloves. Reporting this success story, the editors of the Improvement Era gushed with pride: “Where men once let whiskey rob them of their better selves, the young men are now rallying for healthful exercise and wholesome amusement.”¹³ The transformation of a whiskey den into a gymnasium in Panaca symbolized the hope that church-sponsored recreation areas would replace illicit activities with wholesome amusements and exercise. By the mid-1920s, Salt Lake City alone boasted more than sixty recreation halls in conjunction to LDS meetinghouses.

By the end of the progressive era, the local ward meetinghouse/amusement hall was the center of LDS spiritual and social life. Describing this social phenomenon, Levi Edgar Young, professor of Western history at the University of Utah and one of the First Seven Presidents of the Quorum of Seventy, noted that Mormons placed a value on leisure-time pursuits second only to spiritual prerogatives. “Interesting above all,” wrote Professor Young, “is the manner in which the ‘Mormon’ people make of their ward recreation houses social centers [sic]. Young and old seek amusements, and what amusements should be encouraged is a vital question for all people interested in the uplift of the youth of our land. Today, the Church is erecting beautiful places of worship all over the West. . . . These church buildings have their hall for divine service, but under the same roof is an amusement hall, where the boys and girls hold their dances, and give their dramatic performances.” Placing the multi-functional ^[116] meetinghouse/amusement hall at the hub of LDS society, Young concluded: “One passing a meetinghouse almost any night or afternoon, will find there either divine service or some stimulating social activity.”¹⁴ The activities that occurred in Mormon amusement halls—while not accorded the status of worship services—were acknowledged as a primary contributor to the physical, social, and spiritual welfare of church members. With that in mind, the general boards of the MIA directed that after April 1924 all “amusement halls” should be referred to as “recreation halls” since the latter term was “more appropriate . . . to the educational purpose of the Committees on Recreation throughout the Church.”¹⁵ Though the name change might seem insignificant, the modification of the nomenclature was indicative of the emerging notions of “rational recreation.” Where the use of the term “amusement” denoted undirected uses of leisure time, “recreation” implied a more concerted, directed effort at using free time in wholesome, constructive ways under the leadership of trained church operatives. Amusements wasted free time; recreation had an important “educational purpose.” Though the name change might appear largely semantic, it was symbolic of a change in attitude and approach.

The growing importance of LDS recreation halls emerges most prominently in a fund-raising brochure for the new recreation facility to be built in connection with the ^[117] Twenty-Seventh Ward chapel in Salt Lake City. Situated on the corner of Fourth Avenue and P Street, the proposed $60,000 hall was advertised as an up-to-date community center that would house the most important social activities of men, women, and children. Fundraisers hoped that this magnificent structure would become the heart of the community. The advertising brochure claimed that the new recreation hall would provide for the social, physical, and spiritual needs of community members. First, and perhaps most importantly, the hall offered a “modern, elegant, and attractive place for dances, parties, games, and other forms of recreation” where all activities were “conducted under proper supervision.” Moreover, a “Little Theatre” for plays, moving picture shows, debates, and oratorical contests would be open to all members of the community. A Boy Scout area—complete with trophy room, athletic space, and showers—meant a new home for Scouts in local Troop 39. The potential pitfalls that awaited boys on the streets provided a major impetus in the push for the new building:

What is it worth to you to have the lives of your sons or grandsons, or the boys of the community generally, filled, through their critical years, with these wholesome activities? The beauty and dignity of the building will add to the value of all property in this part of the city. To have available a high-class place of amusement, a wholesome social center will help young folks to keep off the streets. Do we not owe it to the youth of our neighborhood to provide for them this community recreation center.^16 [118]

The problems of adolescent aberrance, however, were not the only reasons for constructing the recreation complex. The adjacent chapel, as always, was available for funerals at no charge, regardless of religious affiliation. The recreation center thus provided a place of gathering for all members of the community in all seasons of life. This expansive and expensive social hall represented a significant departure in form (if not in function) from the auxiliary halls built fifty years earlier. Recreation had been exalted as the church’s premiere social program; new social halls and gymnasiums throughout the church provided a fitting throne.

Although recreation halls were designed to be a location where leisure activities could uplift and train young people under the watchful eyes of church leaders, it was not always possible for Mormon officials to control what occurred inside the centers. In some cases, the competition for control of the church hall came from outside commercial interests vying specifically with church programs for member’s interest. Despite prescription and proscription from church leaders, recreational activities often took on a trajectory of their own.

Traveling shows, in particular, interfered with recreational activities in the first decade of the twentieth century. The YMMIA General Board reported that it was becoming commonplace for ward MIA activities to adjourn so that the amusement hall might be leased out to traveling theatrical companies. In order to create revenue to meet ward expenses, the local leaders favored the income from renting out the hall over the spiritual and social impact of the weekly MIA meeting. Amusement halls, in ^[119] keeping with the LDS tradition of multi-functional space, could improve financial bottom lines as well as morals. General church leaders, however, found this a “very poor excuse.” Rather, the leaders instructed, “the ward organizations should come first, when it is the question between the appearance of a transient show company, or even a local show company, and a religious meeting.” Nevertheless, arrangements were permitted which allowed MIA members to attend both weekly religious meetings and theatrical shows. For example, associations could hold their meetings early enough in the evening to allow theatregoers the opportunity to attend the theatre after their MIA meetings. Local leaders were likewise instructed to make arrangements with the “show people” to begin their programs after the weekly church gatherings adjourned. In no case, warned the general board, should the religious meetings be abandoned.¹⁷ The various forms of commercial and church recreation, as experience had shown LDS leaders, could not be contained strictly by general pronouncements. Local arrangements had to fit local needs—within certain parameters. Local societies were not free to do as they wished, but they were given enough freedom to construct programs that would best succeed under local circumstances.

Recreation hall activities spun out of control in other unanticipated ways. For example, one church-sponsored athletic event turned tragic for participants and viewers in the winter of 1927. In a facility that combined the chapel and the recreation hall, a ^[120] large crowd turned out to see a basketball contest between the LDS teams from Turner (Idaho) and nearby Central. As the game progressed, the lights in the recreation hall went out and someone (perhaps T. James M’Cann, the custodian of the hall) went into the basement to investigate the power failure. To get a better view of the situation, he lit a match. Immediately a large explosion rocked the building causing the walls at the rear of the structure to crumble. With ceiling plaster inundating the crowd, there was a rush to the front exit. After most fans and players safely reached the outside, the front walls of the structure gave way. At least six persons were killed, including M’Cann, two of his children, his brother Brigham M’Cann, and two players on the Central squad.¹⁸

The articulation of interior space that placed Mormon recreational and religious activities in close quarters reached its crescendo in the years from 1949 to 1955 when architect Theodore Pope’s designs came into widespread use. In some of the approximately 300 buildings designed by Pope, architectural historian Martha Bradley notes “the first use of the juxtaposition of the recreation hall area to the rear of the chapel in order to achieve a more flexible expansion of the assembly space for large gatherings.” Bradley argues that the creation of a continuous flow between chapel and recreation area accelerated the secularization of wardhouse space. “Many wards opened the doors between cultural hall and the chapel,” Bradley writes, “joining them together and creating an easy flow from formal sacred space to informal secular space and in this ^[121] way inevitably changed the relationship of each member to the space in which he worshipped.”¹⁹ There is an alternative way to view the changing spacial orientation of LDS meetinghouses. Rather than segregate church structures into “formal sacred space” and “informal secular space”—the chapel versus the gymnasium—it is more fruitful to discern the evolving definition of recreational activities from non-sacred toward sacred. If “sacred” activities are defined as any that bridge the gap between humanity and divinity, then early twentieth-century Mormons could certainly make a cogent argument that properly directed recreational activities qualified as sacred. Though organizational and spiritual power still separated the bishop from the basketball coach, it was commonly agreed that they were waging the same war. If evil (social and spiritual) was the ever-present enemy, then sacred activities could range from sacraments to shuffleboard, from sermons to Scout meetings. The curtain that separated the chapel from the recreation hall did not create a barrier between sacred and non-sacred space in LDS chapels; it merely separated sacred worship space from sacred play space. ^[122]

To the local Mormon landscape, the addition of separate amusement halls alongside meetinghouses and the eventual inclusion of recreational space within church buildings meant that recreation was accorded official status within the religious organization. Second only to worship rituals, church-sponsored recreation, as evidenced by the building boom that saw recreational buildings blossom across the LDS geographical domain, changed the very shape of LDS meeting places. The advent of rational recreation also changed the definition of sacred and secular activities for many church leaders and members. Looming over the LDS recreation landscape at all times, however, was the church-sponsored Deseret Gymnasium in Salt Lake City. By understanding the rationale that led to the gym’s construction and analyzing the various social and athletic programs sponsored by the institution, we can gain a deeper appreciation of how integral recreational activities were to Mormon society in the Progressive era. Furthermore, a close examination of Deseret Gym programs reveals in sharp relief the prescribed gender roles of Mormon men and women in the early twentieth century.

The Temple of Health

In February 1907, church president Joseph F. Smith attended the celebration of Domestic Arts Day at the LDS University in Salt Lake City where he made the momentous announcement that at long last the church had finally extricated itself from debt. Dating to the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 which forbade the church from owning any property over $50,000, the church had been forced to borrow money to ^[123] maintain its organizational infrastructure. That debt had placed a heavy burden on the Saints for several decades, forcing church leaders to forestall expansion in favor of paring down the principal owed to creditors. Now that the church was completely out of debt, announced President Smith, it was time to use the income that had been earmarked for debt service for other purposes. After describing the annual savings of $30,000 to $60,000 that had previously been made in interest payments, President Smith announced to the LDSU audience that he would “like to see a part of this means expended for the building of a gymnasium for the University.”²⁰ At a later date, President Smith expanded on the reasons for building the gymnasium as part of the church school system:

“Physical education” as a part of school training in the latter part of the nineteenth century had become an integral and indispensable part of education, and before the end of the first decade of the twentieth century had become, in many colleges, the dominant factor. In our Mutual Improvement organizations and Church schools, athletics and physical training were also features of considerable importance, and many of the brethren felt that through such activities the youth of the Church could be controlled and trained in proper habits and sportsmanship as well as receiving the exercise needed for the proper care of the physical man.²¹

The problems inherent in city life also propelled the construction of the new gym. Underscoring the concept that “it is a part of [the Mormon] creed that the most ^[124] efficient Latter-day Saint is the one who is well balanced mentally, morally, and physically,” one article writer noted that opportunities for physical development in urban areas were sorely lacking. Rather than growing up healthy and strong—perhaps in contrast to the robust youth of agricultural areas—youth in the city had a tendency to “grow up hollow-chested and weak-eyed.” Therefore, church authorities provided a site where young Mormons could improve their physical stamina through exercise and athletics under the “direction of our own people.”²² The need for physical exercise under LDS supervision may have seemed particularly pertinent after the construction of a new Y.M.C.A. building in downtown Salt Lake City in 1904. Situated on the corner of First South and First East, the centrally located facility certainly drew its share of Mormon customers. Until the construction of the Deseret Gym, LDS church leaders could offer no realistic alternative to the comprehensive programs at the Y.²³

Great social, spiritual, and physical results were expected to flow from the gymnasium. Those employed by the Deseret Gym spoke in high and holy tones about the aims of the institution. A letter from the chairman of the gymnasium and LDS apostle Hyrum M. Smith and gym secretary Bryant S. Hinckley informed LDS bishops of the great potential found in the activities at the facility. A letter sent to each area bishop during the early years of operation reassured bishops that the gym leaders were ^[125] “very anxious to make this institution a real blessing to the men and women of this community, and at the same time to make it a strong arm to the church.” The letter then asked bishops to explain the advantages of the gymnasium to their ward members at a suitable time.²⁴ On another occasion, Secretary Hinckley reminded “friends” of the gymnasium that the ultimate aim of the recreational complex was to help young Mormons live “nobler and better lives.”²⁵ In the words of the leaflet newspaper published by the institution—the Deseret Gymlet—physical development was a “serious purpose.”²⁶ More than eight decades after the organization of the church, there was finally a permanent facility dedicated to the physical well-being of the Saints. Though amusement halls had long been familiar sites in Mormon communities, the construction of the Deseret Gym affirmed the religious organization’s interest in physical fitness. By constructing a “Temple of Health,” Mormon leaders supplied a suitable location for LDS members to care for their physical bodies. If, as Paul described, the body was a temple, progressive-era Mormons worshipped at the Deseret Gym.

Opened on 20 September 1910, the Gym was hailed as “the largest and best equipped institution in the intermountain district.” Before finishing their plans, the ^[126] designers of the building—architects Lewis Telle Cannon and Ramm Hanson and engineer A. P. Merrill—traveled the country and visited the newest and best gymnasiums. The final product represented an amalgam of the structures they encountered in their travels.²⁷ Ninety feet wide, one hundred fifty feet long, and three stories high, the Gym cast an imposing shadow on the block just east of Temple Square. The building’s immense ground floor housed offices for the director and instruction staff, a barber shop, six standard bowling alleys, handball room, private exercise room, two rooms for visiting teams, twenty-three private dressing rooms, locker room complete with one thousand three hundred steel lockers, and a private locker room. Special accommodations were made for a “ladies’ hair-drying room.”²⁸ The swimming pool was flanked by twelve showers and a wash room with toilets. Shower baths were required of all swimmers. The 30' x 60' pool’s depth ranged from four and one-half feet on one end to eight feet at the other; slate steps and brass ladders led into the water and a springboard was attached at the edge of the deep end. Bowing to the demands of modesty, a unique floor plan allowed workers to isolate the pool and the two female locker rooms from the rest of the building. With the pool ^[127] reserved for women at regular intervals, this allowed for private swimming while activities continued in the rest of the building.²⁹

The stairs on either side of the entrance hallway led to the main gymnasium, the wrestling room, and the physical examiner’s office. The large gymnasium—or Main Hall—was the central feature of the building. A “splendid room,” the gym measured 71 by 146 feet with a 32-foot high ceiling.³⁰ Indian clubs, dumb-bells, and chest-weights lined the perimeter of the room and ladders were attached to the walls. Gymnastic devices included jumping and vaulting standards, parallel bars, horizontal bars, horses, and mats. The middle portion of the room was taken up by four basketball courts, flying rings, traveling rings, trapezes, and rope ladders. Medicine balls, rowing machine, neck, wrist, and leg machines and other apparatuses filled the room’s ample space. Complete with a polished maple floor, the hall could quickly be transformed from a gymnasium into a dance hall. A large sky light crowned the structure and made the interior pleasant and inviting. A third floor spectator gallery surrounded the main room and accommodated crowds of more than one thousand for games and exhibitions. Suspended above the gallery was a cork running track (fourteen and one-half laps to the mile) wide enough for two runners. In two corners of the main room, athletes could slide down to the main floor via brass rods. The Salt Lake Temple may have been the ^[128] most prominent structure on the city’s skyline, but the Deseret Gym was certainly the most up-to-date facility in the city.

Though monumental in its initial appearance, the popularity of the gymnasium required regular additions to the physical plant. In 1913, three handball courts and a spectator’s gallery were added to meet the demand for this popular sport. The $6000 cost was offset primarily by public subscription. Five years later, and at a cost of $30,000, a women’s gymnasium opened with a separate locker room, showers, steam room, and hair dryers. Additional sports were added to the gymnasium’s offering when the gym took over control of Wandamere Park and built the Wandamere Golf course. The golf course was subsequently sold to Charles W. Nibley. The year 1926 witnessed a significant addition to the gym when a $50,000 construction project provided seven handball courts, visitors’ gallery, wrestling room, shop, and an additional entrance for boys. By 1928, the athletic institution had been enlarged to over 51,000 square feet.³¹

The gymnasium’s proximity to the Salt Lake Temple and the advertisement films depicting the athletic complex as the “Temple of Health” both spoke to the growing importance of religious recreation in the Mormon church. When guided into proper channels, recreation assumed religious significance; athletics, socials, and even Scouting activities took on a holy tenor. Elder Brigham H. Roberts, Mormon ^[129] theologian and longtime member of the First Seven Presidents of the Seventy, enunciated the theological place of athletics in LDS religious thought. In an address delivered at the Salt Lake Tabernacle in October 1912, Elder Roberts built an ideological bridge across Main Street connecting the Temple of the Lord and the Temple of Health. Speaking from the Tabernacle, Roberts analyzed the activities that occupied both LDS landmarks:

I do not wish to appear over-bold and certainly not sacrilegious, in any respect—but I do venture this assertion, that after this six-spired building [the Salt Lake Temple] here, on this square, and the other temples of God builded [sic] by Latter-day Saints, which for us are the holy of holies, the temples of God, but after the temples of God, I say there is no holier building erected by our hands than this other temple within shouting distance of us, which is devoted to the physical training and development of our youth, the gymnasium that the Church has established under the guiding vision and by the aid of the presidency of the Church.

Elder Roberts also proclaimed that the gymnasium symbolized the Mormon belief in the sacredness of the human body. The sports and games that went on in the gymnasium, according to Roberts, could help young men maintain clean hands and a pure heart. Keeping in mind the common wisdom early in the century that masturbation caused men and boys to lose their physical vitality, Roberts’s thinly veiled message seems clear: “Pride in manly strength leads the boy to despise and turn away from the things which in his adolescent age would undermine his strength, bow his head and compel him, shame-faced and eyes cast down to the ground to move along his fellows a conscious weakling and a coward!” Roberts found the solution in physical exertion. “Through outdoor sports, through inviting to contests of strength and of ^[130] skill,” the general authority argued, “we hope to infuse into the youth of Zion this pride in manly strength, physical strength, which shall fell courage and enable a man to face the duties and the responsibilities of life with his forces unimpaired, including—pardon me for saying it—no, you need not pardon me, I ask no pardon, it is proper to say it—including his duty, not only as a citizen, but his duties and responsibilities as husband and father; the most solemn duties that a man can face.”³² Just as attendance at the Temple of God promised spiritual blessings and renewal, participating in games at the Temple of Health prompted physical renewal. One temple cared for the spirit, the other tended the body. Both were necessary appendages to a Mormon theology concerned with the spiritual, physical, and social welfare of humankind.

From the very beginning, the Deseret Gym offered an ambitious physical exercise program for members. The first major advertising campaign for the health institution—a pamphlet entitled “The Wise—For Health on Exercise Depend”—outlined the facility’s programs and the rules that governed member participation. The main attraction for gym goers (and the major initiative for gym workers), as the title of the pamphlet indicated, was increased health. And finding health was no narrow labor focused merely on building strong muscles and healthy appetites. Rather, borrowing a quote from J. J. Pope, “health” received the widest berth ^[131] possible. Health, according to Pope, was “not mere freedom from pain or sickness” but encompassed “an entire soundness—a wholeness or holiness—an integrity of every structure, embracing in its true extent both mind and body, and demanding, therefore, a perfect harmony in the play of every function of the living organism.”³³ As both an ideological statement and advertising technique, a crusade for holiness (stemming from the interconnection of body and spirit) played a central role in LDS hopes for the Deseret Gym.

As the pamphlet describes, the athletic complex bustled with activity. Based on a foundation of strict rules that ensured social order within its ladder-laden walls, the gym offered a variety of programs to meet the gamut of physical needs. Opening each year on 1 September, the gymnasium’s season of organized activities ran throughout the winter and closed the first of May. For the 1911–12 season, annual fees varied from seven dollars (including a one dollar locker fee) for boys and girls (ages 12 to 14), twelve dollars for students attending Salt Lake High School, fifteen dollars for intermediate (ages 16–18) men and women, and eighteen dollars for men and women over age eighteen. Business men paid twenty-five dollars for full gym privileges. The youngest boys were admitted to the gym just two afternoons a week while the intermediate boys could participate any afternoon until six P.M. Senior men could use ^[132] the facilities at any time except when it was occupied by women. Women controlled the gym each morning (except Saturday) and on Monday and Thursday evenings. The gym reserved Thursday afternoon for women as well.³⁴ A fifty-percent discount applied to young men and women who were “faithful in attendance in Sunday School and either Primary, Religion Class, or Young Ladies’ Mutual Improvement Association.”³⁵ Thus the Deseret Gym insured that the physical development of Zion’s youth would not outpace their spiritual growth.

Each individual who applied for membership underwent two examinations. A “physical examination” determined physical needs so that a proper exercise regimen could be devised “to remedy any physical or organic defect” in the applicant.³⁶ Secondly, a medical examination tested the heart and organs of the applicant to make sure they could withstand violent and strenuous exercise. Prospective members could either present a certificate from a reputable physician or be given a complete physical examination by gymnasium officials, free of charge. Once the battery of physical tests had been satisfied, gym members were required to follow specific behavioral guidelines while using the facility. For example, clothing regulations kept members in clean, functional garb. Whether this represented a democratic leveling of gymnasium apparel ^[133] or an authoritarian grab for clothing control, the Deseret Gym was no place for the display of sartorial splendor. The “regulation suit” prescribed for men included white sleeveless shirt, rubber soled shoes, leather belt, and “Turner” trousers; black socks and knee pants differentiated the men from the boys. Girls and women received fewer guidelines—they were instructed merely to wear “regular gymnasium suits.”³⁷ Appropriate gym apparel was available through the gymnasium at a discount. With rules governing what went on the body firmly in place, gym officials turned to controlling unruly mouths. Two of the myriad gymnasium rules specifically proscribed language that came out of members’ mouths and intoxicants that went into them. Rule 13 advised, “PROFANE OR INDECENT LANGUAGE, LOUD TALKING, WHISTLING OR UNNECESSARY NOISE WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. Quiet and orderly behavior will always be expected from members and visitors” [emphasis in original]. Loud, raucous, gymnasium-type antics would not be tolerated. Rather, an attitude of reverence—befitting a Temple of Health—should pervade the atmosphere. The next rule declared that “Smoking or the use of tobacco or intoxicants in any form is strictly forbidden in any part of the Gymnasium.”³⁸ From the LDS perspective, good health and the Word of Wisdom required such a rule. But respect for the physical body was not the only reason to prohibit tobacco use. The gym was, in essence, a holy ^[134] building that would be defiled by the use of worldly intoxicants. Though not required to remove their shoes at the entrance of the shrine to physical health, once inside, everything from footwear to foul language was regulated.

Following a demanding physical workout—or perhaps in place of traditional exercise—gym goers could receive treatment from a “first class masseur and medical gymnast,” Mr. Erland Druselius, M. Ph. C., late of the Stockholm Royal Medical Institute. Druselius came to the gymnasium with impeccable credentials. A graduate of the school of Massage and Medical Gymnastics of Dr. F. P. Lindblom at Upsala Medico-Mechanical Institute in Sweden, Druselius had worked as an assistant in Histological Anatomy at the Medical Department of Upsala University and in various hospitals in Brussels. A former masseur at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, Druselius came to the Deseret Gym from Augustana Hospital in Chicago.³⁹ Most interestingly, the techniques of “scientific massage” were offered not only as a recuperative therapy but as a “curative treatment.” Explaining how an “educated masseur” differed from a “common ‘rubber,’” the pamphlet explained that the wise would not depend only on exercise, but on massage as well. “If scientifically given,” read the advertisement, “the massage alone is a highly valuable means of maintaining a good healthy, physical condition, and of restoring health, either as a direct curative, or as an adjunct and auxiliary to the physician’s special treatment. No claim is made for massage as a ‘cure ^[135] all,’ but when applied by a scientific masseur will not only relieve and cure a number of physical ailments but prevent them also.”⁴⁰ Treatment would only be applied after consultation with the patient’s physician. Massage was thought to be particularly well suited to the physically disabled or those disinclined to physical activity.

Validation of the gym’s approach appeared in a series of letters published in the advertising pamphlet. Extolling the success of the businessmen’s activities sponsored by the gymnasium, each letter emphasized that the wise did depend on exercise to improve their health. One participant reported, “Since joining the gym my health has improved wonderfully; have increased in weight; reduced my waist measurement; and am entirely free from occasional headaches and dull sensations which gripped me occasionally in previous years.” Another asserted that he felt happier, looked better, weighed less, and had more friends since joining the gym. Four inches had fallen from his waistline. The praises of the gym were sung by another participant who advised readers: “All who want to enjoy life, to eat well and sleep like a child, join the Gym . . . have a game of volley, basket or baseball with a jolly lot of boys, then a shower bath, and a plunge and swim in the pool, a rub-down and you will say with me, ‘I feel like a new man.’”⁴¹ During the progressive era—when a premium was placed on professionalization—testimonials from businessmen must have carried particular ^[136] weight as an advertising tool.⁴² Judging from these experiences, the church had succeeded in helping members to live “nobler and better lives” through gymnasium work.

Gender Roles and the Deseret Gym

Sports skills and exercise plans were not the only subjects being taught at the Temple of Health in downtown Salt Lake City. In the process of learning about medical gymnastics and the rules of handball, gymnasium members were also schooled in the expectations surrounding gender roles in the Mormon community. Because little has been written on the historical process that created gender expectations among the Saints—or about the relationship between leisure-time activities and gender role prescription—the activities at the Deseret Gym and the gender-laden messages that they transmitted to generations of Mormons open new vistas in our understanding of how gender roles were replicated among the Mormons.

The Deseret Gymnasium float entered in the Pioneer Day parade in 1941 captured the gendered messages that the gym had been teaching since its inception. Aboard the gaudily decorated float as it cruised down Main Street stood three prominent groups: muscled male body builders posing in trunks; stately women ^[137] modeling swimming suits; and young boys wearing track singlets.⁴³ The groups on the float (however unrepresentative of LDS society they actually were) in many ways symbolized the gender role lessons that gym members would logically take away from the courses offered by the gym. Gym activities taught men to be strong (in the physical “waist line” as well as the fiscal “bottom line”), women to be smooth and svelte of figure, and boys to be constructively engaged in physical activity rather than the destructive behavior of the streets. Young women—taught largely along the same lines as their mothers—seem to be subsumed in the floating category of bathing beauty.

As far as the Deseret Gym was concerned (at least as it appears in various forms of advertising), all men were businessmen—chained to a desk, chasing the bottom line. Progressive era “men on the make” comprised the main target for the gym. In order to attract the business of businessmen, the gymnasium’s advertising and exercise programs centered on the concept that physical fitness contributed to business efficiency. One advertising booklet sold businessmen on the physical-fiscal connection. “Are you all tired out,” asked the pamphlet, “ready to drop at the end of the day’s work, or do you walk along the street with your head up and chest out, as if you owned the town? The Deseret Gymnasium offers to every businessman in Salt Lake City, thru their businessmen’s classes, the opportunity of putting himself in that superb physical condition that is evidenced by a good carriage of the body (head held high and chest out), and which ^[138] will make him feel like doing a full day’s work every working day in the year.” Increased efficiency, bolstered bottom lines, and an improved appearance all resulted from the “hygienic exercises, recreation and relaxation” available to the city’s business professionals. Over 550 men had enrolled in the previous year and, according to the booklet, the consensus of the group was that participation “pays” [emphasis in original].⁴⁴ No greater inducement could have pried busy men away from ledgers and contracts to pick up dumb bells and medicine balls. Physical health and business health went hand in hand. A poem directed to the “Busy Man” advised: “Now wipe your pen/ And close your desk/’Tis time to go to Gym. ’Twill rest your brain/Improve your health/ Increase your business vim.”⁴⁵ In many respects, to paraphrase a well-known phrase from the 1920s, the business of the Deseret Gym was business.⁴⁶

Businessmen were instructed to take advantage of their “Business Partner, Gym.” In a booklet by that title, written by Samuel Hopkins Adams in Collier’s Weekly, and reprinted by the Deseret Gym, a fictional businessman became involved with his ^[139] local YMCA gymnasium to improve his health. Owing to his new found energy and clarity of thought, the man’s business prospered. With “new vitality,” problems were more easily solved and his business efficiency soared.⁴⁷ Salt Lake businessmen merely had to substitute the Deseret Gym for the YMCA. The stock of homilies connecting physical performance with business success seemed without end. A pamphlet entitled “Dividends,” probably produced in the early 1930s, contained a plethora of pithy quotes extolling exercise to urban professionals. Though perhaps convincing at the time, today they read like a Saturday Night Live skit—“Deep Thoughts for Deep Knee Bends.” Consider a few:

The man who has not cultivated two habits—that of saving and investing—will not only miss many of the best things in life, but will finally be overtaken with bankruptcy. There is no form of bankruptcy more serious than physical bankruptcy; no failure more tragic than health failure.

The man to be envied is the man who has upon his cheek that proof of a sound digestion.

Proper exercise not only adds to one’s efficiency but to the sweetness and satisfaction of living.

There are better ways of keeping fit than the ways of the teaspoon.

You can’t be right on the job unless you are on the job right.^48 [140]

The terms employed were obviously meant to appeal to the sensibilities of businessmen. Saving, investing, bankruptcy, soundness (be it digestion or currency), and efficiency all speak directly to the business experience. It was as though the scientific management of the body (recall the “scientific massage” techniques of Erland Druselius) had been added to the managerial techniques bringing efficiency to industrial production. As one gymnasium director told the members of the Salt Lake Executive Club in 1938, “Sound health is sound business.”⁴⁹ Such had been the lure to attract men customers to the gym since its inception.

Though the message stayed the same, myriad programs were instituted to meet men’s needs during the first several decades of the century. Initially, the gym fashioned itself as a “well-equipped resort” for urban men who could not make it to the seashore or mountains. “After the hot, hard hours of work” at stores, offices, and factories, businessmen were invited to the “unbounded pleasure” of the gym’s athletic fields and tennis courts.⁵⁰ The game of handball was likewise trumpeted as an easy exercise option for “Busy Business Men.” One gym advertisement called attention to the fact that “any businessman in Salt Lake City can leave his office, play a lively game of hand ball, have a shower, swim, dress and return to his office within an hour. Four ^[141] courts means no waiting.”⁵¹ The gym’s highly advantageous location in the middle of the city’s business district meant that businessmen did not have to wait until the shop was closed to visit the gym. One advantage touted by the gym was not found in its hardwood floors or abundance of exercise equipment. Rather, businessmen were lured to the gymnasium to sun bathe on its ample roof. A newspaper article, complete with an aerial view of sun bathers on the roof of the gymnasium, praised the virtues of sun-seeking with a special appeal to businessmen: “Sun bathing promotes health in young or old. Every man can now take his daily sun bath and swim or shower without going to the beaches. On the roof of the Deseret Gymnasium . . . right in the heart of town . . . just one-half block from Main and South Temple Streets. . . . Facilities have been provided for business and professional men to relax with a sun bath, shower and swim in an hour’s time, or less, for only a few cents a day. No need to go to the beaches for such a luxury. Where else can you find such an opportunity?”⁵² The variety of activities available at the gym—handball, volleyball, swimming, weight lifting, calisthenics, and sun bathing, to name just a few— made it easy for businessmen to pursue physical fitness. Moreover, the gym promised that physical fitness led to fiscal fitness in the workplace; the body and business were closely correlated. The answer was clear to purveyors of physical exercise. If a businessman had become “sluggish from ^[142] too much swivel chair duty” or if they “lack[ed] confidence, [were] easily bluffed, or [were] not sure of yourself,” there was “only one worth while remedy—exercise.”⁵³

The model for Mormon men promulgated by the Deseret Gym’s advertising is strikingly clear. According to their view, Mormon men were businessmen—pursuing profits during the day and chasing a handball during their leisure hours. At a time when Americans were beginning to regain respect for the titans of industry (after many had fallen out of favor in the “trust-busting” fervor at the turn of the century) and when urban professionals were laying the foundation for a “new middle class,” the Deseret Gym sought to erect the standard of the LDS businessman and to attract customers by portraying the gymnasium in business-friendly terms.⁵⁴

Mormon women, on the other hand, were presented with a traditional model of feminine activity that prescribed physical fitness primarily to enhance physical beauty. Although some consideration was given to the “new women” of the 1920s—working women with an aroused feminist consciousness—the general trend was toward maintaining a “trim figure”; any muscles developed at the Deseret Gym were to be used ^[143] only to increase women’s power within the traditional confines of the “domestic sphere.” One of the earliest attempts to motivate women to attend the gymnasium made it clear that “mothers and housewives” were “women who have watched over and taken care of others at the expense of their own health and beauty.” “Corrective work” available in the “Matron class” included floor gymnastics, swimming, and a weekly “demonstration on some practical vital household subject” like cooking, sewing, or personal hygiene.⁵⁵ By the 1920s, the virtual motto of the gymnasium combined fitness and feminine physical appearance; to women and girls the gym promised “to preserve health and beauty to those who already possess it” and “to give health and beauty to those who seek it.”⁵⁶

To proponents of the Deseret Gym, health and beauty (with some housework thrown in) formed the core identity for most Mormon women. A poem from the mid-1930s elaborated on the gymnasium’s approach to female participants:

You gotta bend down, Sister, bend down, Sister
     If you want to keep thin.
No more messing with French dressing,
     Sister, bear it and grin!
You can flirt with noodle soup,
     Sniff, but don’t give in. . . .
Throw your strudels to the poodles,
     Sister, bear it and grin! ^[144]
Ev’ry mouthful that you eat,
     Adds another chin!
You gotta bend down, sister, bend down, sister,
     If you want to keep thin.⁵⁷

On another occasion, women’s exercise classes were touted for their contribution to feminine beauty. “Try this one, some of you plump girls,” ran the caption to a photo spread in the Deseret News, “it is highly recommended as a flesh reducer.”⁵⁸ Both of these examples seem far removed from the testimonials of many businessmen extolling the virtues of the gymnasium that had helped them to gain weight! Viewed not as a method to increase business efficiency, exercise for women was marketed as a way to maintain physical attractiveness—presumably as a lure to attract or keep male suitors interested. This campaign, then, reworked a Biblical injunction by teaching women to reduce and multiply. Helping women increase their sexual attractiveness to men was the keystone in the gym’s effort to attract women.

Female beauty may have been the main selling point, but the Deseret Gymnasium also offered women an opportunity to improve their overall quality of life through exercise and athletic participation. There was some suggestion that female beauty went deeper than tight skin and trim waistlines. For example, a twenty-lesson course in dancing sponsored by the gymnasium demonstrated that “dancing is for the ^[145] purpose of beautifying the soul.”⁵⁹ Physical beauty, though at times allied with more meaningful issues, remained central among the myriad virtues available through gymnasium attendance for women. An advertising letter sent out by gym manager H. C. Mortensen in 1940 detailed the variety of reasons why women might attend the gym. “How would you like to have overflowing health, keen enthusiasm, vivid life? How would you like to keep that lovely figure? How would you like to be thoroughly well, youthful in looks and activity, physically perfect, mentally keen?” Prospective clients who answered any of these questions affirmatively were invited to the gym for “wholesome, exhilarating exercise” including floor classes, swimming, tennis, and badminton.⁶⁰ Women workers in the Relief Society—presumably suffering from the stresses of motherhood and church service—received a poetic invitation to “Park Your Worries at the Deseret Gymnasium”:

Got any aches, got any pains?
Fallen arches, varicose veins?
Muscles relaxed until they sag
Legs can’t hurry, seem to drag?
Pep you used to have all gone
Hardly strength to carry on?
We have a cure for all such ills,
Better than tonic, powders, or pills—
Try exercise and learn to swim
Park your worries at the Deseret Gym. ^[146]

Offering more than “relief” to workers in the Relief Society, the gym promised “health and happiness/Relief from mental strain/We offer joy of living/Offer youth again.”⁶¹

While health and beauty remained the premium feminine virtues advertised by the Deseret Gym, by the 1920s the gym began a concerted effort to reach out to the growing community of working women. Learning lessons from World War I—that women could “do their share of the world’s work and that “the promise of an intellectually, physically fit, democratic people” rested with American men and women—gymnasium advertising targeted the “new women” of the postwar decade. These “new women” brought a new attitude about their role in society and were less likely to succumb to the marketing ploys centered on domestic activities. “The women who picked up the commercial gauntlet laid down by the men when war called them,” one gymnasium pamphlet advised, “will not silently slop back into the old domestic condition.” Rather, bolstered by their success in dealing with the industrial problem during the war, these women looked to futures in business and industry; lessons in home economics no longer satisfied. The future, according to gymnasium literature, would see women marching “shoulder to shoulder with their men . . . into the new world of Democracy—into their Land of Promise.”

To succeed in this much wider field of activity, women would need to cultivate physical fitness. Women were warned to “resist against being weighed down with an ^[147] unsightly burden of degenerating fat; refuse to be a flat-chested, stooping, puny apology for a woman—refuse to carry a handicap of bodily feebleness; resist against your languidness, against being stiff in muscles, short of breath, easily tired; against being considered anything else than a real live, vital, worthwhile woman if you wish to hold your place in the sun.”⁶² Women in this new industrial age had a new role to play and like their male business counterparts, they needed to stay in shape to fight the economic battles that faced them. Unlike the gym’s appeal to businessmen, however, there remained a fixation on feminine beauty. Whereas men were instructed that tight muscles led to sharp minds, women were reminded that “degenerating fat” was unsightly and that a small chest measurement made females an “apology for a woman.” The message was largely the same for both genders—physical fitness results in industrial success—but the messages directed toward women continued to connect physical health and feminine beauty.

Though charged with the important task of improving the physical fitness level of Mormon women, Deseret Gym advertising writers maintained a sense of humor. They realized that while exercise brought beauty, the rough-and-tumble world of the gymnasium did not always immediately improve appearance. Rather than emphasizing ^[148] modifications in strength and stamina provided by gym attendance, one anonymous writer catalogued the various “changes” of another sort experienced by regular gym-goers:

It’s time for you to graduate
So—this is your “degree”—
A charley-horse, a broken nose
A crippled shin and knee.

A nice sprained tendon, one black eye
Some knuckles minus skin,
Your fingers with the joints all out,
My—what a shape you’re in!

I’m sure that just to glance at you,
Most anyone would say—
“I wonder where these girls all go
To get to look this way?”

The Deseret Gymnasium
Has kept its word to you—
No matter how the job was done,
It’s made a change in you! [emphasis in original]⁶³

Perhaps in the long term physical beauty was enhanced, as the gym promoted; however, the short term was often a much different story complete with bruises, broken bones, and loosened teeth. Such irony surely was not lost on contemporary gymnasium goers.

The Deseret Gymnasium was a place where men learned to be men and women learned how to be women. As shown through their advertising campaigns and exercise programs, LDS gender expectations more or less mirrored the “cult of domesticity” ^[149] that flowered in the nineteenth century, separating the world into a feminine domestic sphere and a masculine work world.⁶⁴ Though this bifurcation applied to any American social group in only the most limited fashion, as an ideology it continued well into the twentieth century, as the Mormon experience shows. Proponents of the gym, however, were not slavishly tied to an antiquated definition of gender roles. When women entered the workforce in greater numbers during the First World War, gym advertising reflected the emerging attitudes of America’s “new women” without completely celebrating her role outside of the home. Even though some new attitudes were forming in the early twentieth century, the overwhelming message emanating from the Deseret Gym was that men were supposed to work outside of the home (and exercise in ^[150] the gym to increase their business efficiency) and women were primarily to remain in the domestic sphere as mothers and wives (and exercise in the gym to maintain their sexual attractiveness).

Men and women were not the only ones who learned proper behavior from gymnasium programs. Adolescent boys—whose free time might otherwise have been spent loafing on street corners or in other delinquent activities—prompted great concern among Mormon recreational leaders who saw the Deseret Gym as a haven where misguided boys could be given lessons in wholesome leisure time activities. Much like settlement houses in other urban areas, the gym would fill the boy’s time with meaningful and uplifting activities.⁶⁵ Summer courses, vocational training, and myriad recreational options sufficed to occupy the spare hours in any young man’s life. The gym’s appeal to parents and other social and religious leaders emerges in a letter written just after the athletic facility opened. “Experience shows that a gymnasium can do more to help a boy at a certain age than any other institution can,” argued the letter. “Its purpose is to take boys from the streets and give them something to do which is both recreative and educational, to establish him in habits of cleanliness and self respect, and thus to start them on the royal road of life.” If used properly, as the early experience of gym-goers had seemingly proven, the gym ^[151] was of “inestimable value” to a young man’s life and future. “Physical training increases the boy’s efficiency. It adds years to his life and life to his years.”⁶⁶ In a letter to “Parents of Real Boys,” gymnasium secretary Bryant S. Hinckley proposed that membership in the Deseret Gym would provide boys with specific lessons and opportunities. Hinckley’s list included furnishing the boy “with the best of associations,” cultivating his “play instinct” and “teach[ing] him to play on the square and to work on the same plan.” In general, the gym would provide the boy with a “sound body, a clean mind and a clear head.”⁶⁷ To worried parents and church leaders, this represented a new approach to keeping wayward youths in line—send then to the gymnasium where physical defects would be corrected and social dysfunction avoided.

The gym took its calling to aid the youth seriously. If there was a program that might interest young men and direct their energy in a wholesome direction, the institution sponsored it. For example, in February 1912, a letter to be read in Sunday Schools announced that the gymnasium was organizing a band and orchestra for boys and young men. Classes in violin, trombone, clarinet, cornet and other band instruments were taught by Clarence J. Hawkins, a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music. Gymnasium members paid fifty cents per month while non-^[152]members paid one dollar.⁶⁸ For those more interested in outdoor activities, the gym hosted a nine-day summer excursion to “Camp Saratoga” in 1912. Nestled along Utah Lake, the camp contained an athletic field, baseball diamond, grand stand and open-air mess hall. Fine fishing, beautiful lawns, beach facilities, and a large swimming pool of hot sulphur water rounded out the area’s attractions. Moreover, the camp offered “manly supervision” and the knowledge that their young man was “in a much safer place than if he were on the streets of his own city.” Gymnasium members paid five dollars for the camp; the six dollar fee charged to non-members needed to be accompanied by a recommendation from “some reliable person.”⁶⁹

In addition to providing for a summer camp far from the mean streets of the city, the Deseret Gymnasium held annual summer courses to “help boys who have nothing to do during their vacation.” Founded on the concept that “there is nothing so detrimental to a boy’s welfare as idleness, and one of the serious problems which confronts parents in the city is to find a suitable employment for their boys during summer,” the gym offered a wood working course for boys aged ten and above beginning in 1912. Meeting for three hours each morning, the course not only kept ^[153] boys from the street corners but taught them a useful skill as well.⁷⁰ The annual summer school program continued for several decades. In 1914, the Vacation School was part of a cooperative effort between the gymnasium and the Young Men’s Christian Association.⁷¹ One summer, the Manual Training Department of LDS University and Deseret Gym sponsored a summer course that focused on manual training in the morning followed by an hour of exercise, a shower bath, and a plunge in the swimming pool. Hands and minds—the “open doors through which flows the evils and follies of boyhood”—were kept busy as boys learned how to work and how to play.⁷² Future summer courses, such as the school held in July 1922, furthered the trend toward “recreation of a highly practical character.”⁷³ That summer, boys were trained in cabinet work, lathe turning, radio construction, auto mechanics, and home electricity. Through programs such as these, the Deseret Gym turned summer from a season of idleness into a time of “pleasure and profit” for the young man.

Though proportionally fewer programs were created to meet the needs of young women, a variety of activities was available. Like their male counterparts, girls could ^[154] participate in summer courses designed to teach practical skills. While boys were learning the rudiments of wood working, girls received instruction in dressmaking and millinery. If interested, younger girls could enroll in courses teaching first aid, tennis, swimming and dancing.⁷⁴ In the summer of 1935, the gym and the Lion House cooperatively taught girls the practical household arts and the basics of dancing and swimming. What girl could resist the siren song of the course’s advertising flyer:

Come girls let’s go to the Lion House
And learn to sew or knit a blouse—
And then we’ll run into the gym
And learn to dance and have a swim.

Not only would each girl make something useful and beautiful, she would “work and play with the finest and best companions.”⁷⁵ Nevertheless, at times the male bias of the gymnasium was unmistakable. According to Elsie Ellen Hogan Van Noy, general secretary of the church’s young women’s group, there were times that groups of LDS girls had to use the swimming pool at the YWCA because “it seemed the Deseret Gymnasium was so busy with the Boy Scouts that we had a difficult time working in swimming classes at the Gym for our Bee-Hive girls.”⁷⁶ Other courses—including an ^[155] amazing array of dance courses—combined boys and girls on the floors of the gymnasium.

In addition to special programs that appealed to young men and women, the Deseret Gym was the mainspring of recreational instruction and athletic exhibition in Salt Lake City during the first half of the century. Free dancing lessons for area bishops, regional meetings of the National Recreation Association, indoor golf school, and fencing lessons made up only the smallest fraction of what went on in the gym. Exhibitions of world-famous sports teams and athletes brought hundreds of thousands of visitors to the gym each year. The Harlem Globetrotters, championship rounds of church athletic tournaments, and tennis exhibitions that included Fred Perry were among the regular attractions at the gym. Some lesser known acts also found their way to the Deseret Gym. In 1940, five-year-old muscle marvel Billy Withers bent steel bars across his throat and lifted fifty pounds with his baby teeth for an audience at the gymnasium. Two years earlier, a crowd had gathered to watch champion boxer Gene Tunney get in shape on the gym’s squash court. The annual events at the gym ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous and then back again. If the Salt Lake Temple was the spiritual center of the Mormon faithful, perhaps the Temple of Health can be seen as the social and athletic center.

Over the years, the church-sponsored gymnasium expanded to meet the increasing needs of church members and Salt Lake City residents. By the 1950s, however, it became clear that the original gym had outlived its usefulness. In 1963, the ^[156] church constructed a new facility one block to the north and razed the old Deseret Gym to make way for a new church administration building. An important chapter in Mormon social history was ended. The new gym would have its own stories to tell.

The Deseret Gym, like the recreation halls that dotted the Mormon landscape, evidenced the growing importance accorded recreation and athletics within the LDS church. The redefinition of recreational activities as sacred culminated with the construction of the Temple of Health in 1910. Within its hallowed walls, Mormons learned not only the rudiments of wholesome recreation but also the gendered expectations of life in LDS society. In the early twentieth century, holy spaces occupied both sides of Main Street in downtown Salt Lake City. ^[157]