THE ENTERPRISING LIFE OF J FRANK: FULL CIRCLE

Pictured: Antique glass magic lantern slide. Unidentified.

Flip the switch. Kill the lights. Save for a solo beam dispatched to cut the dim and tell a story written in still imagery in the Payson Lions Club’s Spring Lake den temporaire. Family picture slides will rotate full-circle before the projector’s lens by night’s end and, in the end, club members will have unintentionally made connections criss-crossing time and two Payson phenoms: The near-century-old Lions Club charter and the weekly newspaper’s founder J. Frank Pickering and apparatuses fated to technology's persistent rotation.

A blank slide illuminates the pale across a movie screen brought out for the Lions Club's mid-April entertainment.  "It’s a snowstorm," jokes Ross Huff as he opens his narration and sets it in tune with the cardboard framed 35mm slides held in procession in a vintage projector.

“Click! Click!” Huff’s pictures reflect a sublime chapter from his family’s story that could be titled "Explorations in Utah’s High Uintas." History glides through the projector onto the screen. Faded blue jean relics give away the period. Signature Seventies.

A pre-teen son Rhett clutches silver finned catches connected with fishing line. Dad on horseback. Mom Pat is tending the camp.

Last month's Lions Club slide show was akin to the enterprising J Frank, Payson newspaper founder, and the storybook chapters he projected with his magic lantern slide shows.