Ogden wasn't always an urban train wreck. In its glory days, it was a booming railroad town and, by anyone's standards, but especially Utah's, it was wild. There were two towns, really — the one above ground and the one under it. You could go to an ice cream parlor on the street level and then go to the basement and visit opium dens and prostitutes, bars and speakeasies, all connected by tunnels underneath the sidewalk.

Al Capone is reputed to have said the town was too wild for him.

"It was the Bourbon Street of its day," says Godfrey.

It was all fueled by the millions of railroad passengers who came through the 25th Street railroad station. The economy thrived. Stores, banks and businesses prospered.

But in the late 1950s the diesel locomotive arrived on the scene, and that was the beginning of the end of Ogden's heyday. Because the locomotive engine allowed trains to travel longer distances, they no longer needed to stop in Ogden to reload coal and water for their steam engines.

A decade later, the interstate highway system opened and railroads lost much of their business to trucking. Thus began an exodus of businesses, manufacturers and banks.

"There were decades of decay all the way through the '90s," says Godfrey.

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After the tour of the city and his pet projects, Godfrey drives to his home, a brick rambler on a tree-lined street in an old, middle-class neighborhood a few minutes from his office. It's the middle of the afternoon, and his wife, Monica, is in the kitchen making jam, with the help of a couple of their five children, whose ages range from 4 to 12.

Several years ago, her husband walked into the house at the end of another day of work and announced that he wanted to run for mayor.

"I was shocked," she says. "It was nothing we had talked about, ever. After I picked myself up off the floor, we talked about it and he explained why. I knew he'd be great. I've seen his passion for things, and he has a lot of business sense. I knew he'd maximize every dollar because he's frugal."

Monica met and married Godfrey when she was a freshman at Weber State and he was a junior just returned from a church mission in Venezuela.

Godfrey, a 5-foot-6, 118-pound distance runner, graduated from Weber High School and accepted a track scholarship at Weber State, where he became an All-American in the 3,000-meter steeplechase and the Big Sky Conference indoor mile champion.

He proved to be nothing if not enterprising and industrious. At one time, he was running track, completing classwork simultaneously for bachelor's and master's degrees, delivering pizzas in the evenings, serving as an adjunct professor in the business department and operating a budding real estate business in which he borrowed money and bought apartments and small houses to rent.