“Pat Bagley is the reason I stayed in Utah.”
As Trib cartoonist Pat Bagley retires after over 45 years, Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall proclaimed May 31, 2025, “Pat Bagley Day.”
“Pat Bagley is the reason I stayed in Utah.”
That’s what a successful business owner told me shortly after The Salt Lake Tribune became a nonprofit.
We’d invited a bunch of folks to talk about where we were headed and why we needed their help, and I was honored to meet him as I was a regular customer.
Pat was responsible for hundreds of jobs staying in Utah, I thought, as I left the conversation.
Which is not necessarily the goal of a political cartoonist. But then, Pat has always occupied a unique role in Utah.
Pat’s been at The Tribune for 45 years. After a long and successful career, he has decided to leave full-time work as a political cartoonist so he has more time to do what he wants to do, such as travel.
The good news: he’ll continue to draw Utah cartoons for Tribune readers after retirement, just with a bit more flexibility in his days, working as a freelancer.
Today, Salt Lake City honored The Tribune cartoonist with his own day — Pat Bagley Day, or May 31, 2025.
Pat’s cartoons “have spared no one — from state legislators to American presidents to politicians across the world,” Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall proclaimed.
Mendenhall’s proclamation — which states it was made in part to “possibly to avoid being doodled into a future cartoon” — said that Bagley’s work “has been featured in such obscure publications as The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The Guardian,” though she specified “his dependable cartoons for ‘the Trib’ hold the most special place in our hearts.”
Pat Bagley: Take to the Barricades!
In 2014, Pat was a finalist for The Pulitzer Prize in the Editorial Cartooning category, “for his adroit use of images and words that cut to the core of often emotional issues for his readership.”
For Salt Lake City’s 2002 Winter Olympics, he released “a series of cheeky commemorative pins” that are still popular among collectors, the mayor’s proclamation mentioned. The commemorative and humorous art can still be found on resale pages and as keepsakes among Utahns.
Bagley recently depicted Mendenhall in one of his illustrations. In the cartoon, the mayor is holding new official flags Salt Lake City adopted an effort to comply with a new Utah law banning pride flags from government buildings and schools.
He also depicted the mayor in 2023 when she successfully ran for reelection against former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson.
“We gather today to celebrate not just Pat Bagley the artist, but Pat Bagley the chronicler, the conscience, and the champion of wit,” Mendenhall proclaimed.
— Tribune reporter Brock Marchant contributed to this story.
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