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Before "Saturday's Voyeur" there was the "Temple Follies."
And if you wonder where "Saturday's Voyeur" creator Nancy Borgenicht got her talent for satirical irreverence, you need look no further than her mother, Helen Frank Sandack.
"You would never have to explain women's rights to Helen Sandack," said longtime friend Dan Berman. "She was the embodiment of it."
Helen Sandack died Sunday at the age of 93 after living an extraordinary life as an actress, a writer, a rock in Salt Lake's Jewish community, and a matriarch of the Utah Democratic Party for four decades.
She was the wife of A. Wally Sandack, chairman of the Utah Democratic Party in the 1960s and one of the nation's leading labor lawyers.
Wally Sandack is known as one of the great liberal firebrands of the 1950s and '60s. Friends and family say Helen was his inspiration and greatest ally.
"When Wally was running for Democratic state chairman, an opponent stood at the podium and said we don't want a non-believer of Christ leading the party," Berman remembered. He added that one delegate, a Mormon, came charging down the aisle as though he wanted to beat the speaker to a pulp for that remark. Helen "just touched my arm and said, 'It's OK. We don't have to worry about this sort of thing.' "
She was like many women married to famous, highly successful men, her loved ones say. She was his foundation.
While Borgenicht's satire often pokes fun at Utah's dominant religion and culture, Helen Sandack's satire was aimed at her own Jewish faith, and she used it to raise money for her synagogue.
Her son Rick Sandack said that, years ago, there were two synagogues in Salt Lake City, one for Reform Jews and one for conservative Kosher Jews.
The city, he said, couldn't support two Synagogues, so they had to merge. But how could there be harmony between the Reform Jews and the Kosher Jews?
"Mother wrote a satirical follies about the merger and it was such a hit, so funny, that everyone came together and the merger worked."
She also wrote follies for Democratic Party events, the Utah State Bar and for Pioneer Memorial Theatre, to help raise money.
She acted in many plays at PMT, and when she played the Matchmaker Yenta in Fiddler on the Roof, "she was the only Jew in a cast of gentiles," said Rick Sandack.
Growing up in Davis County, her parents, Arthur and Bertha Frank, were Russian Immigrants. Her father founded the well-known Arthur Frank clothing chain.
She attended the all-female Mills College in California, where she acted in numerous Shakespearean plays, usually playing male roles.
Back in Utah, she met Wally who, before his career as a lawyer, was a baseball radio announcer. He helped her put together a demo reel and she got a job at KDYL writing ads, then acting as the voice-over for the ads. She eventually left radio to raise her five children. As her family grew, she became immersed in acting, the synagogue and Democratic Party politics.
In the past few years, she had been the primary caregiver for her 97-year-old husband, whose health has been in decline. But that didn't stop her from winning a bridge tournament a few months ago.