SUPer DUPer DAY AT THIS IS THE PLACE STATE PARK

On Monday, July 17, we held our annual pioneer days celebration at the This Is The Place park.  Held in conjunction with the Daughters of Utah Pioneers, it was truly a SUPer DUPer day.
The day started out with a bit of stormy weather, but cleared up to a beautifully mild evening.  We enjoyed all of the venues of the park, then gathered in the bowery, much as our pioneer ancestors did.  There we were entertained by the Days of 47 Royalty singing and then listened to Elder Jeffrey R Holland speak.  
The use of the Bowery proved a wonderful idea, being centrally located and spacious.  The Bowery was full and many sat on the grass to hear the events.
Elder Holland told of his ancestry.  “First, a comment about my Holland family, who clearly were not Utah pioneers,” he said. “They were a rowdy, but loveable, bunch of Roman Catholic miners born in Ireland who made their way to Montana and Colorado, ending up in Park City at the turn of the 20th century.”
Widowed at the age of 26 with two little boys, Elder Holland’s father being the youngest, his grandmother eventually made her way to Salt Lake City, where she was blessed by the friendship of John Fetzer, the kindly bishop of the old Salt Lake City 8th Ward.
“The rest, as they say, is history,” Elder Holland said. “My grandmother and my father, he by then a 14-year-old boy, joined the Church in 1924.”
Stricken by smallpox, he was taken out of school by his stepfather, “a loss of opportunity and a blow to his self-esteem that he never fully overcame,” Elder Holland related.
“But heaven had its hand on him when, as a Civilian Conservation Corps recruit, he found himself in southern Utah in the early 1930s during the Depression, where he met and married my mother.
“What a union! A gleeful, Irish dance hall piano-playing convert from Roman Catholicism who went through life with a smile on his face and a shine on his shoes marrying a very proper, stay-at-home, quilting and canning, canning and cooking, genuine and thoroughly domestic daughter of Utah pioneers. What a marriage!
“I am the product of that union!"