Tom Wharton, who practically traveled every centimeter of Utah while writing guides and covered sports and the outdoor of the Salt Lake Tribune during a 45 -year career, died.
Wharton died Thursday in a care establishment in Millcreek, according to friends and family. He was 74 years old.
From 1970 to his retirement in 2016, Wharton wrote full time for the gallery. His work included two passions: sports, especially secondary, and outdoor.
Wharton “just knew UTAH inside and outdoors,” said the chief sports editor of Tribune, Aaron Falk, whose career as a sports writer began when Wharton ended. Falk said Wharton could tell you about “each high school field with a breathtaking view – and the best place to get a hamburger on the way”.
Wharton’s first assignment in the newspaper was to cover high school sports from 1970 – although his interest started before that. As a student in 1967 at High School Granite, where he was editor -in -chief of the student, he won a writing competition sponsored by Tribune. The prize was to be a guest journalist, covering the basketball tournament of the state High School of this year.
This tournament has launched a sequence, said Wharton, covering high school sports once a year for more than 50 years. Even after his retirement in 2016, he volunteered to cover a match each year. It was not until 2020, when the COVVI-19 pandemic closed sporting events, made the end of the sequence.
Cover the games, become father
The former columnist of Tribune Paul Rolly, In a 2016 articlerecalled that when Wharton’s wife, Cheerfulentered work with their first child, Tom covered three football games in high school on Friday evening. Before the time of mobile phones, he had not registered in a telephone booth – so he did not know that when Gayen’s contractions were four minutes apart, she took her to the hospital.
When Wharton returned to the editorial room, the open -air crisp writer Don Brooks held the phone.
“The stupid son of one (explanative) is finally there,” growls Brooks, putting the receiver to Wharton.
According to Rolly, Wharton went to the hospital in time for the birth of his daughter, Emma. Between the contractions, he called in his game stories at the sports office.
(Le Salt Lake Tribune) Tom Wharton was seen in 1999 in southern Utah.
As a sports writer, Wharton was on site for the classic NCAA male basketball final at the Huntsman Center at University of the University of the University of the University – when Magic Johnson led the Spartans of the State of Michigan about the Sycamores of the State of Larry Bird. Wharton was also part of a team that covered the 1993 NBA Star match, the UTA Jazz NBA final in 1997 and the 2002 Winter Olympic Games.
Wharton was inducted In the foundation of the temple of the UTAH sports fame in 2023.
“Tom is a storyteller with the greatest sense of this word”, the Hall website States. “He always believed that whatever the game or the subject he wrote was very important, and he had a talent to present it well.”
During the first 21 years of the Wharton tribune career, he also served in the public affairs unit of the Utah National Guard. He served stays in South Korea, Germany and Central America.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) The former sports journalist Tom Wharton stands with his family while he was inducted into the Utah high school circle in 2023.
His popular travel books
When Brooks – who labeled “dead fish publisher” – retired in the late 1970s, Wharton took the post of an outdoor writer, which he held for 30 years. One of his favorite missions, he said, was a series of articles from 1991, “a year with the Grand Salt Lake”, which examined various aspects of the threatened lake, including leisure, mineral extraction, wildlife habitat and more.
Wharton wrote his first of the five books, “Utah: a family travel guideIn 1987, inspired by experiences traveling with Gayen and their four children in the state. Tom devoted the book to his wife, who Died in 2004 Ovary cancer.
“There were a lot of places we left, we shouldn’t have allowed ourselves,” said Tom Wharton in 1991. “But we learned to travel economically with a family of six.”
They wrapped canned foods and fresh products in the car. When they arrived at a campsite, they cooked on a coleman stove which they received as a wedding gift. The last night of the trip, the traditional family meal was a “surprise stew” – a combination of canned beef stew and all that remained of other grocery stores.
For a follow -up book, a general travel guide of Utah under a “Discover AmericaThe series, Tom and Gayen were co-authors.
Gayen said in 1991 that his writing style was “creative”, while Tom wrote “like a newspaper. … We have completed ourselves. We found by showing that we helped the final product. ”
The guide was published in the early 1990s and regularly updated; A sixth edition was released in 2005. For years, the gallery has made the book a weekly prize to readers of the Journal leisure section, given to anyone could correctly identify the location of UTAH on a photograph printed in the newspaper.
Thomas Michael Wharton was born on November 9, 1950 and attended granite high school. He married Gayen Bennett, his high school darling (even if she went to the Skyline high school) on June 17, 1972. They had four children. After the death of Gayen, he married Nancy Aposhian in 2008.
Wharton is survived by his four children with Gayen – Emma, Jacob, Rawl and Bryer – as well as his wife, Nancy, two Beaux -Children and a dozen grandchildren, his brother, Derk, and his sister, Lori.
Plans for commemorative services have not yet been announced.