Muriel Zwick

Muriel Zwick comfortably wears the disparate mantles of journalist, labor organizer, and art connoisseur. Born in San Francisco, Muriel spent six years of her childhood on a wheat farm in Alberta, Canada, where her father homesteaded. But after three successive crop failures and watching his house burn down, he returned to San Francisco when Muriel was eleven to work for the city as a hydro-engineer. Muriel entered San Jose State College to study journalism when she was 17, and on graduating with an associate's degree in 1934 she took any job available during those depression years until she went to work writing for Fore and Aft magazine. Because she stood up and spoke out at a union meeting, she was hired as an organizer and worked as a trade union official until 1949 when she moved to Salt Lake City.

Muriel met Martin at a private party in 1949 while doing work for a symphony program. She ran into him later at an art exhibit. They were married in 1953 after they had both divorced.

While in Salt Lake, Muriel has been active in the arts. She served as president of the Ballet Society, the forerunner of Ballet West. She worked in public relations for the symphony guild for ten years, and later also in public relations for the Metropolitan Opera auditions. She also served on the Board of Directors for the Art Barn, the predecessor of the Salt Lake Art Center.

One of her first acts in Salt Lake was to join the Unitarian Church in 1949. She had attended the church in Berkeley, where she met the Salt Lake minister who was serving there at the time. Her most fun job was running Friendship Manor from 1969 to 1976, the first housing for the elderly to be built in the city under the Older Americans Act with funding from HUD.

Overwork brought on a heart attack and her whole life changed. She continued to do pro bono work in the arts and traveled quite a bit, but for the past dozen years or so her main interests have been the Unitarian Church, the Women's Alliance, and Humanists of Utah.

Reading Grapes of Wrath in the 1930's led her to both humanism and labor organization. Robert Ingersoll was also a great humanistic influence on her.

Her son, Patrick, by her previous marriage was 12 when she married Martin. Patrick not only took Martin's name but also followed Martin's career in the Utah Symphony. He is their only child but has given them two grandsons, the older of which is entering Stanford this month as a science major under a presidential merit scholarship.

--Earl Wunderli