November 2019 | Vol. 19 Iss. 11
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BEETDIGGERS’ TRADITIONS CHANGED SOME IN 112 YEARS, BUT STILL HOLDS STRONG By Julie Slama | julie@mycityjournals.com
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n the Jordan High wall honoring famous alumni, including astronaut Don Lind, world middleweight boxing champion Gene Fullmer and PGA golfer Don Collett, is former Midvale City Mayor JoAnn Seghini’s plaque. Seghini, who attended Jordan in the 1950s, can recall a thing or two about the high school back in the day. “It was a time where everything was changing,” she said. “Many of our friends who lived on the west side were told they had to go to Bingham because the population was growing so fast. It was the end of an era and the beginning of the next.” Jordan and Bingham high schools have been tied together from the start, when Bingham was formed a year after Jordan originated in 1907 as the only high school in the southern part of the Salt Lake Valley. Then, in 1958, when Jordan Board of Education changed Bingham’s boundaries to include Herriman, Riverton, Bluffdale, South Jordan and West Jordan, the former Beetdiggers found themselves in the Miners’ camp. “However, many traditions remained the same at Jordan,” Seghini said. “We had wonderful athletic programs; we always won. We had dances; I wore a poodle skirt, sweater and saddle shoes back in the day like everyone else. I was on the debate team and wrote for the school newspaper.” And she is a proud Beetdigger. “We were called the Beetdiggers because there was a lot of agriculture, sugar beets, in the surrounding fields. It was an important crop then. Students would have a couple weeks off to go harvest beets for the West Jordan sugar plant. These were big ugly things, but they were sweet and used for sug-
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Jordan High students support their sugar beet tradition by wearing “Our hearts beet as one” T-shirts. (Julie Slama/City Journals)
ar,” she said. The crops eventually subsided as manufacturers found sugarcane as an alternate source. Since those days, students no longer are excused for weeks to harvest sugar beets, but they have kept that strong bond to their roots. Students now re-enact the topping of a beet with a sugar beet knife, which has a hook for stabbing and lifting the beet from the ground, and a sharp cutting edge used to chop off its
leafy tops. Nick Hansen, class of 1997, remembers as a student body officer traveling to Idaho to beet farms where they dug up beets and chopped off the tops and ate them as a commitment to their namesake. “It was considered a field trip, but it was an important thing we had to do,” he said. This year, the beets were Continued page 9
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