This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Granite High sophomore Tom Wharton had just made the staff of the Granitian, the school's student newspaper.
That allowed him to attend a daylong high school journalism workshop to hear lectures from Salt Lake Tribune sportswriters John Mooney and Dick Rosetta, among others, and then participate in a writing contest.
The next morning, he was awakened by his father who told him his name was in The Tribune. He was one of the winners and, as a result, got to be an honorary sportswriter for the paper and help cover the 1967 high school basketball tournament.
Thus began Wharton's five-decade-long journalism adventure. His coverage of the just-completed 2016 prep basketball tourneys, which now include girls' contests, concluded 50 straight years of high school sports reporting for Wharton.
He continued helping out on the tournaments during the remaining years of high school, mostly because he kept bugging Rosetta to let him.
Then, after a brief stint as a copy boy with the Deseret News (we've forgiven him for that) and a six-month separation from Utah with the National Guard, he landed back at The Tribune, where he has consistently covered prep sports even after his primary duties shifted to outdoor recreation, the Department of Natural Resources and as a traveling columnist who transported readers to the back roads of Utah.
With his late wife, Gayen, he wrote five Utah guidebooks — Bibles of sorts for travelers, spelling out chapter and verse about what to see in this pretty, great state. And he did all those without missing a beat on his Tribune beats.
Wharton is retiring this week, a joyous moment for him and a sad one for me, because it reminds me that nothing lasts forever, although Tom's saga comes close.
He and I grew up together at The Tribune, starting with my entry to the paper in the early 1970s. In fact, he was my first boss.
I was taking an advanced-reporting class at the University of Utah from Roy Gibson, who encouraged students to go on assignments with Tribune reporters.
Sports Editor Jack Schroeder and Wharton, then The Tribune's full-time preps reporter, allowed me to come in on Friday nights, covering the first half of a designated basketball game and then helping on the sports desk the rest of the night.
We worked on old Selectric typewriters using triple carbon paper to produce three copies of each story.
The sports desk included a cast of characters that would challenge the imagination of Gene Roddenberry. Most were crusty, cussing, chain-smoking cynics who had a talent for creating crisp copy and turning a phrase.
They argued about everything, while taking box scores and stories from stringers. Several constantly teased Marion Dunn, the desk's token Mormon. He just smiled and urged me, the newcomer, to "ignore those guys."
Wharton, who still carried that schoolboy aura, was the "Wally Cleaver" of the bunch.
He married while still in college and began having children. He was a dedicated family man as a 20-something journalist whose work often required long hours. But his single-minded devotion to his job sometimes landed him in trouble.
When he and Gayen were expecting their first child, Emma, it was during football season, and Tom told his wife to make sure she didn't have the baby on a Friday.
She didn't listen.
Wharton was covering three games, capturing just enough color at one game before heading off to another, and another, and then doubling back to snag the final scores and highlights. This was before cellphones, and he had been too busy to check in with her from a phone booth.
When he finally walked into the newsroom late in the evening, the churlish outdoors writer Don Brooks barked into a phone, "the dumb son of a [gun] is finally here," and handed the receiver to Wharton.
Gayen's labor pains were four minutes apart and she had finally gotten her parents to drive her to the hospital.
Wharton rushed to the labor room and got there in time, phoning in the game stories to the sports desk between contractions.
Of course, his career also offered him prime seats to memorable sporting events.
He covered the 1979 NCAA Final Four in Salt Lake City, featuring the iconic championship game pitting future NBA greats Michigan State's Magic Johnson against Indiana State's Larry Bird. He wrote about the 1993 NBA All Star Game and several events in the 2002 Winter Olympics.
But his favorite moments didn't make national or international headlines.
They include a feature he did on the West Desert High School basketball team in Trout Creek near the Nevada border. The school had 13 students and had to combine with Eskdale High, also out in the desert, to field a basketball team.
Then there were the stories on a tiny museum in Delta and Moore's Old Pine Inn in Marysvale, Utah's oldest continually operating establishment, now a bed and breakfast, that once was a brothel and boasts that ghosts of these past, ahem, "working girls" can sometimes be seen gliding on the swings out back.
Wharton recalls — and recounted for readers — the great hamburgers you can get at Ray's Tavern in Green River and the barn-raising-type effort by a state park ranger in Kodachrome Basin to erect a public restroom after legislators had denied funding.
While Wharton is officially retiring, printer's ink still runs through his veins. He cannot go cold turkey. You will see his byline from time to time between treks with wife Nancy to their condo in Mesquite, their visits to kids and grandkids and their eventual travels to Europe — the back roads, no doubt.