The Mudled Male

The Hitchhikers

By Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male



         Devils Slide, where I lived for most of my growing-up years, was a small cement plant town located up Weber Canyon at the junction between what is now Interstate 84 and highway 158 to Croydon.  The town lay nestled in the bend of the Weber River just downstream of its confluence with Lost Creek.  The town was one block wide and three blocks in length with one side of the three blocks bounded by the Weber River and the other side by the Union Pacific railroad.  The name “Devils Slide” came from a rock formation that looks like a giant slide on a facing mountain northwest of the town and on the other side of the railroad tracks and the river.  The town was owned by the cement plant, and the houses were rented only to families where at least one family member worked for the plant.

 

         Devils Slide is a ghost town now and most of the buildings are gone, but in its earlier days it was a baseball town.  I don’t mean just a baseball town, it was a BASEBALL TOWN.  Some said that the plant hired workers based on how well they played baseball.  Others claimed that the plant hired baseball players that could do some kind of work at the plant.  Either way, they had a great ball club.  The company even built a ball diamond in the middle of a lush pasture in a wooded area just east of the plant.  Besides a legal ball diamond, they built a concrete dugout for their team, the Red Devils, and another concrete dugout for the visiting teams.  The company also built a grandstand right behind home-plate to hold all the townspeople who came to cheer for their team.  The Red Devils played teams all over the area until they reached their peak in 1940.  That year, although the Red Devils had been rated as underdogs, they worked their way up the win column to finally beat the Denver and Rio Grande Team from Salt Lake to take the Utah State Semi-Pro Championship.

 

         Fast forward to the late forties.  As companies are wont to do, budgets are cut and things that used to be worth the cost go by the wayside.  Maybe the championship was the peak and everything was downhill from there.  Maybe the good players of the earlier years had gotten older and could no longer play at a semi-pro level.  Whatever the reason, the ballpark in the pasture was in disrepair and no longer in use.  But kids still liked baseball and the County had set up a County youth-league with ball teams organized in all the little towns around the County, including Devils Slide.  The games were played at the fairgrounds in the County seat, ten miles down Weber Canyon from Devils Slide.  Each team was responsible for their own transportation.  The Devils Slide team barely fielded nine players, we had no coach, and sometimes no transportation.  Our weekly practice was the league game we played each week at the fairgrounds, and our transportation often was our thumb.  Nine thumbs to be exact. 

         Imagine that it is the late 1940’s and you are driving from Evanston toward Ogden, traveling on what was then a little, narrow highway winding through a series of canyons alongside the Weber River.  You have just driven through Henefer and reached the turnoff to Croydon and Devils Slide.  As you crest the small hill just past the turnoff you see nine boys strung out along the highway that leads to the County seat and then on to Ogden.  They are striding quickly with their thumbs sticking out in the universal sign that says, “Please pick me up.  I will be late to my ball game if you don’t give me a ride.”  A couple of the boys are carrying baseball bats, some have baseball cleats with shoelaces tied together and hanging around their neck.  All are carrying mitts and wearing baseball hats, and one boy (me) is wearing a catcher’s mask.  Somehow, every week we made it in time for the game, although we might have to start warm ups before the stragglers managed to get to the park.

         If you were driving that route in the 1940’s, which of the boys would you consider picking up?  If you were one of those boys, into which car would you have been willing to climb?  Luckily the 1940’s were a time before kidnappers and serial killers, so neither the drivers or the boys worried.  Occasionally the boy would notice that a driver had been drinking and declined the much needed ride while thanking the driver for stopping.  The biggest worry we had was that we were never able to play up to the standard of the Red Devils.  Today if I start to bemoan that fact to Ann, my wife, she will comfort me by saying, “Quit whining, you may not have been able to play as well as the Red Devils, but being from Devils Slide you certainly qualify as a devil.”  It is times like that when I have to remind myself that she was a farmer’s daughter from Porterville and probably didn’t understand baseball.  She only married me for my hot, leaded-in, underslung, 1939 Ford and my cool Zebra skin shirt.