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Articles by John Keahey |
June 7, 2003 Popular Bibliophile's Rebirth in Paris Is Suddenly Cut Short By John Keahey © 2003, The Salt Lake Tribune Salt Lake City native Kent Walgren, last fall at age 55, retired from his job at the Utah Attorney General's Office; divested himself of many of his possessions, and moved to Paris -- a continuation of his "kind of modern Thoreauvian experiment: 'Walgren Pond. ' " That comment, made in an unpublished column he proposed to write for The Salt Lake Tribune detailing his Paris experiences, is followed by: "This adventure may end horribly, but it could never match the agony of looking back at an unlived life." It did end horribly. Sometime over last weekend, Walgren, who turned 56 in February, died of a heart attack while sitting in his apartment, a short walk from the banks of the River Seine. His body was found the morning of June 2 by a Parisian mail carrier trying to deliver a large box containing two sets of Walgren's just-published masterwork, Freemasonry, Anti-Masonry and Illuminism in the United States, 1734-1850 (American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.) The two-volume bibliography is the result of Walgren's monumental, 12-year research effort, completed while he worked as a state assistant attorney general and ran, for 4 1/2 years, Scallywag's -- a small, eclectic rare-book store on 300 South in Salt Lake City. He sold his store's inventory in late 2001 to one of his best friends, Salt Lake City rare-book dealer Ken Sanders. The tome was long-awaited by researchers who expect it to become the definitive reference on the early years of Freemasonry in the United States. It is a compilation, an imprint listing, of all published materials on the subject, including books, periodicals, journals, and what academics call "ephemerae," or small runs of short-lived printed matter, such as posters, guidebooks, theater programs or two-page folded pamphlets. Walgren never was a Freemason. He became interested in the subject because of its connection to the early years of the LDS Church. He left the faith he was born into -- and served a mid-1960s Italy mission for -- in the late 1970s, but never abandoned a strong intellectual interest in the two doctrines. The bibliographic undertaking became much larger than Walgren had envisioned in 1990. In his Compiler's Preface to the masterwork, he wrote: "Had I known what I was in for, I would never have begun. But bibliography is like climbing a mountain without a map: the summit always lay just beyond the next rise; and, when looking back at how far one has come, turning back becomes unthinkable." The irony of the timing of his death -- just hours before being able to lay hands on the result of his intense labor, and, sadly, while awaiting the June 2 arrival in Paris of his daughter, Kirsten Walgren Tulsian -- is not lost on Sanders. Compiling the bibliography "became a lifelong obsession, a passion, for him," said Sanders. Walgren also leaves a son, Bret Walgren of Vernal. His parents, Ralph and Wilma Walgren, live in Holladay. The family has scheduled a memorial service for 2 p.m. Monday at Russon Brothers Mortuary, 255 S. 200 East in Salt Lake City. A second gathering in Walgren's memory is set for June 15 at 5 p.m., at Ken Sanders Rare Books, 268 S. 200 East, Salt Lake City. The death came as Walgren, who sold part and donated part of his large collection of rare Masonic books to the University of Utah, was beginning to ease back into the collecting business, Sanders says. Before leaving the country last Oct. 2, he had struck a deal with Special Collections assistant director Gregory Thompson to represent, for acquisitions, the U.'s Marriott Library in London and Paris. "No one in the country could touch him for knowledge of the [early] U.S. Masonic movement," said Thompson. "He traveled to all of the major, and most of the minor, libraries holding Masonic materials, and he went to the major Masonic temple sites that have libraries, and worked in those as well." Walgren's type of research "will never be done again," said Thompson. The bibliography "will absolutely become the guidebook for those interested in Masonic studies, and antiquarian dealers who market those books will use this as their bible." Another Mormon scholar and close Walgren friend, Salt Lake City attorney Michael Homer, says any serious student would now have "Walgren" on their bookshelf. "Everything he did was a labor of love," Homer said. "I bought a lot of books from him over the years and became his friend." Walgren is described by his former wife and close friend, Hanne Copier of Salt Lake City, as someone who "needed to experience something besides what he had here." "He wanted to live," she said. "He wanted to feel alive. He hated [being an attorney]. "He really needed an ocean to jump across, to leave behind the culture here." Copier says Walgren was "someone who had the courage to go after a dream, pretty much discarding all the consequences, going through the pain and the loneliness, and still deciding to go ahead with it. "That's what it meant to him to be alive. And then dying in the end. It's like a very sad movie." |