Camp Kearns: Documents offer new glimpse into life at dismantled WWII base

Few signs of it remain. But 65 years ago, it was Utah's third-largest community. Movie stars toured it regularly. Harry Truman visited. Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole played to huge crowds here. So did the Metropolitan Opera's star baritone of the day.

The local amateur baseball team included residents who were former players for the New York Yankees, Brooklyn Dodgers and St. Louis Browns. Some soon-to-be-famous artists were working there, but they were merely painting street signs or walls.

The community of 40,000 boasted what was maybe the nation's largest dental facility. It also had a 1,100-bed hospital. And unlike most Utah communities, it had a gas-warfare training range, a huge firing range and even a stockade.

It was Camp Kearns, an Army Air Forces base during World War II. It was razed after the war, and the Salt Lake County suburb of Kearns grew in its place to provide much-needed affordable housing for ex-GIs. The growing town utilized the base's abandoned streets, water and sewage systems and electrical lines.

A few Army buildings were converted to civilian uses that still survive. A theater for "colored personnel" became part of Kearns Junior High School. A base chapel is now part of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church. The base train station is a day-care center. A cannon that had stood next to the headquarters' flagpole now decorates the corner of 40th West and 54th South.

The Deseret News just obtained through the Freedom of Information Act some once-classified, partial histories of the base from the U.S. Air Force. These materials, supplemented by other data, help show the base's missions, reveal some famous people who once served (or visited) there, and help give a flavor of what life was like.

A city overnight

Two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the Army chose 5,000 acres of wheat fields in the Kearns area for a basic-training site for future pilots and ground crews. Documents say it was chosen because it was far from enemy danger on the coasts and because Salt Lake Valley had good rail, highway and air connections.

In just a few months, nearly 1,000 buildings were completed for what at first was called "Basic Training Center No. 5." Some construction workers included young Japanese-American men being shipped to internment camps but who were temporarily diverted and hired.

"From wheat field and waste land has blossomed Utah's third largest community," housing 40,000 soldiers, said a proud base history written in November of 1943.