Blue Mountain Shadows: 
a dream becomes reality

Blue Mountain

"Blue Mountain Shadows first began as a dream in 1985. The dreamers were Janet Wilcox, LaVerne Tate, and Bob McPherson all of Blanding. Mrs. Wilcox had just come back from the Fife Folklore Conference with great ideas of collection projects she hoped to have her English classes do. She had been teaching at San Juan High School since 1983. For several years her students had been doing local research and participating in the State History Fair competition but very few people ever saw their results.

    LaVerne Tate had just recently been appointed as the first chairman of the San Juan County Historical Commission. She was very interested in preserving and collecting historical photographs.
    Dr. Bob McPherson was the resident scholar, teaching history classes at CEU/San Juan Center. He had hundreds of articles at his finger tips, that needed publishing. He had toyed with the idea of publishing a regional magazine before, but didn't have the resources
"After meeting several times and brainstorming possibilities we determined to publish a regional magazine which would collect and interpret history and folklore from San Juan County and the Four Corners area. We had the dream, the ambition, and lots of ideas that needed researching and writing. What we didn't have was any money!" --Janet Wilcox
In previous years Wilcox had worked with the Utah Humanities Council to bring in historical programs. She contacted Delmont Oswald, the executive director. He was very enthusiastic about the idea, and gave  several ideas and cautions. Even though he felt the humanities  board would approve such an idea, he made it clear that it would probably only be a one time grant, as they were "not in the publishing" business. With that in mind, she wrote a grant which was approved and they were off and running.  The initial grant provided funding for trainers, student researchers, and transcribes, as well as partial printing costs.

Original Staff

Interviewers:  Deniane Kartchner, Laura Shumway, Gipp Redd, Regina Yazzie, Bertha Parrish, Janet Wilcox, Bob McPherson, Annette Carroll, Ann Marie Nat,  and Bob McPherson.
 
 
Typists:  Beverly Brown, Deniane Gutke, Gipp Redd, Laura Shumway, and Kim Hurst. (Not shown Patrice Webb, Preston Blake
 
"We recruited eight people who worked for us the summer of 1986 as oral interviewers. We determined what our first topics would be and generated a list of questions. That first summer we collectively did 66 oral interviews and most of them were fully transcribed. We had to recruit additional students who worked as transcribers." --Janet Wilcox--
Research topics included:

Once the information had been collected, K.C. Benedict, CEU/San Juan Campus, gave a writing workshop giving the researchers helpful ideas on writing magazine articles. BMS also put together Writer's Guidelines for Blue Mountain Shadows. 
After many weeks of writing, revising, double checking facts, the students had their articles ready for editing and revision--then they began page layout using Pagemaker, and the 1st issue was printed the fall of 1986 at the San Juan School District Media Center.  High school students helped do the collating. It was truly a grass roots production. Only 500 copies were printed and we weren't sure if they would even sell. However, all 500 issues sold out within one month. It was a success.

Hooray! the dream became reality
Blue Mountain Shadows index

Ordering information and summary of past issues 


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