25 I was able to find employment with John Clawson, an architect in town, and spent a couple of years there. I had an opportunity to go from there to work with Don Panushka, which I enjoyed and found Jim Christopher there again. It was a very small firm at the time. I remember being paid the amazing wage of a dollar an hour. Then I was able to join up with Boyd Blackner. Boyd was an interesting fellow. He had recently come back into the city, having worked for a well-known architect back east, Victor Lundy. He was intrigued with the use of interesting shapes using glulam beams. That was quite what set him apart from most of the architects in town at that time. I worked with him for two or three years. That’s when my life took quite a turn. Two good friends of mine from the University of Utah, Ralph Evans and Albert Christiansen approached me, wondering if I’d be interested in being a part of a small firm that they were going to organize. And that was really exciting to me. We were in the attic of the Aviation Club building on South Temple, way up at the top. There we were working, and trying to find work, and having What type of work? Well, whatever came our way, honestly, Ab (Albert) was quite interested in commercial work and government work, so he was able to get a few things in that area. Ralph loved doing residential work and found some of that. That’s where I lean, in the residential end of the practice. But way back then, Wally Wright came to us indicating he was interested in turning the old bus barns into a shopping center and would we be interested in that? There things began to grow. We moved from the Aviation Club building into the top loft space in the old trolley barns. One Monday morning, I got a phone call at home telling me that Ab had passed away the day before. He had been mowing his lawn and had a heart attack, and he was gone. He really was the glue that held everything together. Ralph and I looked at each other and said, “What do we do now?” But we were blessed, and we kept at it. Ab had just started doing a home for Robert Redford at Sundance. I remember the days when Mr. Redford and his wife would come into our conference room. And because our conference room could be seen by the Trolley Square shoppers, it was interesting how quickly 50 people would be congregating around our conference room, trying to behave like they were just shopping. Not too long after Ab had passed away, Redford called me and asked, “Would you take over the project?” And I was delighted to do that. I was already pretty busy with what I was doing, and his project became extremely intense. I was going back and forth to Sundance three and four times a week, trying to keep up with everything. We survived that and Trolley became a pretty successful place. Trolley had leased up all of the space they had, and we were in a pretty prime spot with our office. Wally came to us one day and said, “Guys, I can make more money leasing your space out to retail than you want to pay. Can you think about moving somewhere?” We found six bays of historic space on Exchange Place. We took a big gulp, and John Pace and I bit the bullet and bought them. Ralph was having some difficulty with his work and asked if he could be excused. In 1985, John and I created what we called Babcock Pace. After five or six years with John, we decided to go our separate ways, and that’s when it became Babcock Design Group, which it is today, even without me. Talk about the nature of your work and how that evolved over time. I was drawn to residential projects. I love the relationship I created with the client. I loved the opportunity I had to do something that changed their lives in a positive way. I found that the most important thing in the successful practice of architecture was to create and maintain relationships. I never saw myself as a great designer. I never saw myself as being given awards and things. But I love that we could create relationships that went on and on. One day I had a call from a real estate agent, a friend, who said, “Fred, I have a client that I’d like you to meet.” I was introduced to a wonderful Jewish couple from New York who had purchased a piece of land in Park City and wanted a home. They interviewed me and decided we should work together. That became a life-changing experience. We did that home, and he called me one day and said, “Fred, are you ready to start over with another one? The one you just did, I’ve only been in it for six months, but a guy knocked on my door and wanted to pay me twice what I have in it. I just can’t turn that down. So, we got to do it again.” He found another piece of land, and off we went doing another wonderful home for him. Then he said, “Fred, how would you like to do a building at Tufts University?” And I said, “Well, how would I? But how can that ever happen?” He said, “I want to introduce you to the rabbi of the Hillel at Tufts.” Well, here I am, a Mormon architect from Salt Lake, going back to Boston to meet with the Jewish rabbi and not knowing then what a Hillel even was. My friend, Marty Granoff, had decided that he was going to donate the money to build their Hillel at Tufts, and he wanted me to be the architect. I had no idea what would lay ahead. I met Jeffrey Summit, the rabbi, and spent the whole day going all through New England looking at every Hillel we could. A Hillel, I found, was very much like an LDS Institute of Religion on our campuses here. It is a place for parents to have their kids go off to school and to feel like they’re going to be protected and nurtured and taken care of, and that intrigued me to be involved. I had to meet the Dean of Tufts University, who was the head of construction. He wanted to meet with me and see our preliminary sketches. I was as anxious and nervous about it as any meeting I had had up to that point. I went into his office, and the first thing he said to me was, “What do I need with an architect from Utah?” And there was a part of me that had to agree. I got in my car, and I called my friend Marty,
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