Logan native offers smiles to everyone
He’s been nicknamed “Logan’s Goodwill Ambassador.” He owns arguably the best hat collection in Northern Utah. He has carried the Olympic torch, repeatedly biked to Brigham City, held the same girlfriend for ten years and the same job for 25.
But he’s best known as the guy who just bikes around Logan, and honks and waves to traffic. His friends call him Brent. Brent Carpenter.
Born with a form of palsy, Carpenter, who recently turned 58, can be hard for strangers to understand. But born with an unrelenting smile and good nature, to Carpenter, few people are strangers. He waves to you, doesn’t he?
He waves to everyone. And everyone, it seems, has something to say about him.
Geraldine Gardner, who teacher special needs classes at the Logan LDS Institute at Utah State Universtiy, said Carpenter sets an example for how to live.
“He has a great spirit about him,” Gardner said. “He’s just full of love for everyone. He’s just a Christ-like example of how to live. He gives happiness to everyone.”
Happiness and newspapers. Gardner said that Carpenter brings copies of The Utah Statesman to Institute and hands them out to everyone in his class.
“He just loves to share, and that’s something he can share with everyone,” she said. “I’ve asked him not to hand them out during class, though. It’s kind of disruptive.”
Carpenter’s love of newspapers is evident in the small, swelteringly warm apartment where he lives by himself. The walls are fraught with a menagerie of clippings, attached neatly with Scotch and electrical tape. Some are about Carpenter, or his friends, but most of the headlines span time and issue. “Russians Rethinking Abortion,” says one. Over the toilet, “OutKast, 50 Cent, R. Kelly: The Best Albums of 2003.”
If he likes it, on the wall it goes.
And Carpenter doesn’t stop giving out newspapers when Institute is over. He takes stacks to the Deseret Industries, delivers them to friends, and to the offices of The Utah Statesman itself.
“He gets excited about giving things to people,” said his sister, Linda Carpenter. “You should see him at Christmastime. You could say in a previous life he delivered newspapers. And he thinks he’s done you a real favor, too.”
He’s been doing that favor for his friend MaryAnn Crockett for years. Crockett, who is the assistant manager of the Junction Cafeteria where Brent works, has known Brent since the 1980s when she was a cook there, and she said he has brought The Utah Statesman to her house religiously every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Crockett said one day, alone in the house and forgetful that Carpenter would be visiting, she settled in for an afternoon in the bubble bath. Carpenter, accustomed to his routine, walked in the house to give her the newspaper.
He found her, in the tub.
“There I am in all my glory,” she said, laughing as she recalled the day. “I had candles on the toilet, candles on the sink, candles everywhere. And he said, ‘Oh! MaryAnn! No clothes!’ So I threw a washrag at him and told him to get in the front room.”
Crockett said that had anyone else walked in on her, she would have felt violated. But with Carpenter, everything was fine.
“I felt safe,” she said. “He wasn’t really shocked or anything, and he couldn’t really see anything. There were bubbles.”
“We’ve just been friends for a very long time,” Crockett added. “He’s been so good his whole life. He’s always been good to people.”
Linda said Carpenter has always had that “wandering spirit” that pedals him all about town. She said he got lost when he was little because he wandered off, and people all over his hometown of Preston, ID went looking.
“Even then, at a young age, he didn’t want to sit still,” she said. “He wanted to travel around.”
She said in his younger days Carpenter would ride his bike to Preston, or to Brigham City, but that he doesn’t do it anymore. He has three bikes, adorned with stickers bearing themes that range from “Bush/Cheney 2005” to “Recycle,” and the requisite horn with its familiar honk is mounted on all three pairs of handlebars. Carpenter says the Dr. Pepper bike is his favorite, maroon with images of the soda splashed down its frame, but that he likes them all.
Mayor Randy Watts said he’s watched Carpenter riding those bikes, and has known him since Carpenter would come into his family’s building supply years ago. He said Carpenter used to come in and say hi, and give everyone “that Carpenter wave that he has.”
“He’s just one of those really outgoing people,” Watts said. “There are people with all of their faculties that could learn from Brent.”
-jenbeasley@cc.usu.edu