For my local (or formerly local) readers, as well as anyone who may want a taste of the Utah action, here are a few interesting tidbits you may not have heard about:

First comes the amusing news that former child actor Gary Coleman of Diff’rent Strokes fame has abandoned the smoggy enclaves of California and moved to a small town in Utah County, a.k.a. “Happy Valley,” the most Utahiest place in all of Utah. I can’t find an article about this to link to, but there have been rumors about it for a couple of months now, and Fox-13 News went looking for his new house on last night’s broadcast, so I believe it’s for real. (They interviewed a teenage girl who works at a Subway he allegedly frequents; she says he’s a really nice guy who favors turkey and bacon sandwiches. She also says she’s never seen Diff’rent Strokes, but her parents have told her about it. Oy. Kids these days.)

Gary is reportedly looking for someplace quiet where he can live in peace, unencumbered by the “Whole LA Thing.” Utah County certainly fits that bill, although I wonder if he won’t soon find it’s too quiet down there even for his needs. I mean, hell, Anne and I were turned away from a UC Sizzler once because they were already closed for the night… at 8:30. On a Friday. And that was in Orem, one of the more metropolitan parts of that region, not out in the sticks where Gary is supposed to be. After a couple of experiences like that, Mr. Coleman might reflect that open-all-night LA has its charms, too. Best of luck, though, Gary, and welcome to the state.

Turning to people I’ve actually met, I was saddened earlier this week to hear of the death of Sandra Lloyd, who was a well-known figure around my hometown of Riverton for a good part of my life. She worked in the town hall for years — I remember my mother and she having many gossipy, small-town-type conversations while Mom paid the water bill and I fidgeted around, regretting that I’d said “yes” when asked if I wanted to tag along on the errands-run. Later, Sandra became the mayor of Riverton just as our small country town was beginning its painful metamorphosis into a sprawling suburban bedroom community. She was in a bad position during those years, caught between very large forces that no one individual could do much to control. As a lifelong resident, she wanted to retain as much of the old Riverton as she could. As mayor, it was her responsibility to craft a vision of the new Riverton, one that was inevitably going to be very different than it had been. A lot of her decisions and initiatives were not popular, and I myself didn’t like every idea she came up with. But I respect her for doing her best, for really trying to find compromises and workarounds, and for genuinely caring about what the town once was and what it was going to become.

Her biggest achievement, as far as I’m concerned, was spearheading an initiative that saved my old elementary school from the wrecking ball after the school district abandoned it. Built in the 1920s with several additions over the years, the school served generations of kids, including my own grandmother, who attended high school there. The district shut it down about ten years ago because, they said, it would be too expensive to bring it up to earthquake-safety standards. (Personally, I think that was just an excuse. It seems to me the district has implemented a policy of “all-new, nothing old”; like everyone else in Utah right now, these folks are obsessed with shiny novelties and to hell with our historical treasures.) In any event, Mayor Lloyd lobbied hard to convince the town council and the citizenry that Riverton should buy the old school and turn it into something that would be of use to the whole community. The end result — after a big debate, a helluva lot of money and a year-long renovation and remodeling project — is the Riverton City Civic Center, which now houses the city offices/town hall and various public facilities. I have my quibbles about the details of what’s been done to the building for its new use, but I’m glad that it survived in any form. It’s one of the few historic structures left in a town that never had much notable architecture to begin with, and which has lost just about everything else we old-timers remember.

In one of those sweet final gestures that always get to my sentimental heart, Sandra Lloyd’s body will lie in state Friday night in the old school building she fought so hard to preserve. I think she would’ve been pleased by that.

And now finally, as long as we’ve been discussing development and the transmogrification of my old rural stomping grounds into pre-packaged suburban sameness, I’ve just heard the horrifying news that a big chunk of Riverton’s neighbor to the north, South Jordan, is about to become a big open-air shopping center called — get this — “The District.” (No relation to the district I was just grumbling about, I’m sure.) If that name leaves you underwhelmed, consider that this new mall will be designed and constructed by the same people that brought downtown Salt Lake its first open-air mall, which goes by a similarly non-striking name: “The Gateway”. Just as South Jordan has never had any “districts,” and thus no historical precedent for this silly, pretentious name, Salt Lake’s Gateway isn’t really a gateway to anything. It’s located in a slowly gentrifying warehouse district right smack in the middle of the east and west sides of town, built on the site of an old rail yard. (I suppose you could say that the rail yard and its accompanying train stations was a gateway into the city, except no one ever referred to them in this manner, at least not that I’m aware of.) I don’t want to go too far down this tangent, but I’ve got to say that I really hate the yuppie-sounding place-names that developers tack onto their projects, names that have no relation to anything historic or individual about the location. I also hate how so many new developments are called something-Pointe, with an “e” on the end. There’s always an “e,” because you know that a terminal “e” makes the place fancier than calling it a plain old “point.” Not that anything built at the bottom of a big flat bowl of a valley has any right to be called a “point…”

All my Grumpy Old Fartiness aside, however, I do have to grudgingly admit that this new shopping center actually will be a good and necessary thing. The old farming towns on the southwest side of the Salt Lake Valley are booming, and if the growth in Herriman and South Jordan isn’t enough justification, there’s also an entirely new city literally rising from the dust out that way, too. If I lived in one of those places, I’d be pretty unhappy about having to drive all the way across the valley to go to a movie or buy clothes. Still, it’s very difficult for me to imagine something so huge going up on the south end of the valley, where nothing has ever been huge except the arch of the summer sky. The site that will soon be home to The District isn’t far from where my friend Keith used to live, and it’s precisely where my dad used to pick up a few extra bucks in his spare time by cutting and baling hay. And a year from now it will be covered by a Target, a grocery store, a variety of “midsize” retail outlets — whatever that means — a 20-screen movie theater owned by local magnate Larry Miller, and its own “Main Street.”

Like I said, hard to imagine…