From Elizabeth Jensen’s fifth-grade eyes, the statue — covered by a piece of cloth — looked huge. But she found she wasn’t alone in her awe. When the cover was finally removed, she and the rest of the crowd let out a “big gasp.”
It was 1990, and Jensen, who at the time attended Ridgecrest Elementary School in Cottonwood Heights, was part of a group of students who had traveled to Washington, D.C., for the unveiling of the statue of television technology inventor Philo T. Farnsworth.
Students from the school had lobbied the Legislature throughout the late ’80s to approve Farnsworth’s placement in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the U.