Personal History V. Persons of Special Influence in My Life

Personal History V. Persons of Special Influence in My Life

Mozart C. (Moz) Burles
    He was the White Salmon Branch President during my teen years.
    From what I know, President Burles was raised in Provo, as a member of the Church and believe at some early point that he received the Melchizedek Priesthood.  As a young man, he left for California, and worked in the movie industry.  From things I have learned about him, I have assumed that he spent a number of years not living the Church’s standards.  More about that later.
    He arrived in White Salmon as an employee of the company that owned the movie theaters in Bingen and White Salmon, the Canyon and the Cameo, to manage these places.
    We knew him when he started to visit us about 1950.  It appears that he had assigned himself to be the home teacher for our family.  He came faithfully every month, as I recall, usually during the daytime, such as Saturday morning.  I do not think that he made an appointment, but we were usually home anyway.  And we loved his visits.  He was accepting and so very enthused about the Church and what was happening in the Branch.
    After he had been visiting us for a little while, he discovered that my mother and I were both compulsive readers.  He began to bring church books for us to borrow and read from the Branch Library.  The story behind these books was interesting.  A young man from White Salmon had joined the military. While in the service, he met another soldier who introduced him to the Church and he was baptized.  He came home on leave and introduced himself to the Branch.  At that time, Deseret Book or Bookcraft, publishers of books about our Church, were offering a “Book of the Month” program, in which they mailed out a new book every month, giving subscribers the option to read the book and keep it.  He was anxious to build for himself a good library of Church books, but he had a problem.  In his travels in the military, he did not have a place to store all his books.  Therefore, he made an arrangement with the leaders of the White Salmon Branch to send his books to the Branch library to keep for him until his term of service was completed.  He gave permission for persons in the branch to check out and read any of these books.  So, President Burles was able to have a constant supply of new Church books to bring to us, leave with us for a month or two, then return them to the Branch library.
    What a blessing.  My mother would leave them sitting on a table in the living room and since they were books, I would pick them up and read them.  At one point, I remember estimating that before I graduated from high school I had read as many as 40 Church books.
    I also saw President Burles at the Canyon theater many times during my teen years.  We had no movie theater in Glenwood, but one of the joys of playing on the various Glenwood high school sports teams was that our coaches often would indulge us, and as we were traveling back home from a game, particularly those in Oregon, like Cascade Locks, Dufer, or Mosier, where we had to cross the Hood River Bridge to head back home to Glenwood, we would pass the Canyon theater and they would let us stop for a show.  Typically everyone gbuy their ticket and would hurry through the lobby to take a seat in the theater.  Meanwhile I would go hunting for President Burles.  Sometimes he would be in the box office selling tickets, sometimes up in the projection room.  I would find him and we would talk Church for two hours.  It was so fun.  He always called me Robert, and shared some of the challenges he had as Branch President and we talked doctrine.  He just was a good friend and supporter to me.
    In the summers of my 15th  and 16th years, I worked in the haying all summer for Ollie Kreps.  He paid me in a lump sum in one check when the summer was over.  My parents helped me establish a checking account of my own to keep my savings.   Each year I wrote a check for tithing on my earnings and presented it to President Burles when I saw him next.  And he seemed so pleased.
    He was instrumental in helping me get baptized.  I was just 17 years old.  It occurred like this.  I had been praying since I was eight years old that I could be baptized into the Church.  On a Saturday, the day following my graduation from high school, President Burles, showed up at our house in Glenwood with an invitation.  “Next Saturday at 5 p.m., our branch has scheduled a baptismal service at the Hood River wardhouse.  Why don’t you and Dorothy come and be baptized?”  My mother persuaded my Dad to bring us to that service, and we were baptized.  And I was confirmed a member of the Church that night by President Burles.  
    I laid out of school for the next year and he was excited to learn I had been accepted to attend BYU in 1957.  I still was not attending church at the Branch regularly.  But before I left, he said, “We need to get you some priesthood before you go to school.”  I went down to the Branch again, and they sustained me to receive the Aaronic Priesthood and I was ordained a Deacon by one of the Counselors, Brother Bammes, on 5 Jun 1955.
    At first, President Burles answered to the President of the Northwestern States Mission in Postland, then latter to the Mid-columbia Stake President.  Sometimes he shared with me some of the dilemmas he had to keep the work going.  Once he said that “They tell me that I shouldn’t give callings or assignments to persons who are not fully living the gospel.”  I assume he was speaking about word of wisdom or tithing.  Then he said, “But if I didn’t ask them to do these things, they wouldn’t get done at all.”
    Maybe in some respects, he was speaking about himself.  Once he told me about getting his endowments.  The closest temple was Idaho Falls, and the Branch Presidency determined that they were going to take their youth there to do baptisms.  They made the long trip and the young people were getting dressed.  The temple president had greeted them, and then said, ”While your youth are in the baptistry, why don’t you do an endowment?”  President Burles explained that he had not yet received his endowments.  The Temple President said then he could go through the endowment session for his own self.  President Burles expressed that he did not have a recommend to get his endowments and he wasn’t sure he was worthy.  The Temple President replied, “If you are worthy to be a Branch President, you are worthy to get your endowments.”  So he received his endowments that day.
    He was very helpful and encouraging to me about serving a mission.  When I started my sophomore year at BYU I began to have feeling of indebted to the Lord for the blessings I had received by being in the Church, and that I should try to share these blessings by serving a mission.  Young men were being called at age 20 then.  When I came home for Christmas vacation I sought out Pres. Burles and discussed my feelings and desires.  I said that I thought with my summer job, I could stay and work about 6 months and have enough savings to support myself.  He said that they had never sent a missionary out before but promised he would find out all that was needed to do that.  And he did.  By midsummer he had all the forms and instructions, and we carried them out and I soon had my call.
    While on my mission, I learned more about President Burles background and history prior to being Branch President.  I was serving in the town of Dauphin, Manitoba, Canada.  We had Sunday School, but were a part of the branch that was at Brandon, 165 miles south.  About once a month, a member of the Brandon Branch Presidency would come to our Sunday School as visitors.  One of these times the visitor was one of the counselors and I found that this brother was raised in Cardston, and served a mission in the United States, in the Northwestern States mission.  Not only that but he had served in White Salmon, Washington.  It was 1948 and he and his companion were trying to get a Sunday School started for a few scattered members who lived in that area.  They were looking for a priesthood holder who could conduct the meetings.  He said that there was one who was an elder, a Moz Burles, a single man, who ran the theater and lived by himself in a what had been an old motel with a kitchenette.  He said that the man had a drinking problem and on Sundays they would go to his place early and work with him to “sober him up” so he could conduct the Sunday School later in the day.  Did I know him?  I was amazed to hear this.  It seemed unbelievable.
    After I had served my mission and again was at the branch, I visited with President Burles and as tactfully as I could, asked him about this revelation I had had from my mission.  He confirmed its truth.  He had this experience with the Sunday School that the elder s had provided, and just love it so much, that he worked at changing.  With every change, he loved the Church more and more.  He told me of an experience he had that put the final seal on his cleaning up his life.  He said he loved the church so much that that was all he wanted to talk about.  He was one of the businessmen in the town of White Salmon and they all had good relationships with each other.  Every business morning, about 45 minutes before they opened their stores they all met for coffee at the local restaurant.  He was sitting at the counter with a bunch of these businessmen, each with their cup of coffee, excitedly telling them how wonderful his church was.  He looked down at his own coffee cup, and thought, “This is not consistent with what I am telling my friends.”  He never broke the Word of Wisdom again.
    But he seemed to have this wonderful empathy for people and their struggles.  And he was so good for me, not pushing, but cheering for and reinforcing every positive thing I did in my life.

Paul T. McNutt
    Paul McNutt came to Glenwood for the last perhaps three years of my high school and served both as the head of our school musical program, bandmaster and choral director, but also as superintendent of schools.  The family moved to some other a coupe of years after I left for college and I had no further contact with them. 
    Dr. McNutt helped shape in several ways in my educational development and also the shaping of my understanding of life itself.  He presented to me a model of an educated Christian man.  Education-wise I remember him saying that her held two doctorates, one in music and the other, I assume, in educational administration.  I am not sure why a man with these attainments would come to Glenwood, but I think he was a sort of an adventurer who wanted to experience, along with his family, a wide variety of things of this life.  He had a wife and five children, three teenage boys and two younger girls. The oldest boy Ron was in my class, and we became friends.  I am not very sure of Dr. McNutt’s history, but know that the boys were his sons from an earlier marriage.  How he came to have custody I do not know, since their mother had remarried and was living in California.  I did a little research and found this record for the original family in 1940:
     1940 U S Census for Webster, Hamilton, Iowa (Sheet 2B, hh# 38, 5 Apr)
Street: 856 ½ First
Residence in 1935: Salina, KS
Paul T McNutt        Head M W age 28 Md  Ed: 4 years college  b.KS  Music teacher, Public School
Thelma H McNutt  Wife F W age 26 Md   Ed: 4 years HS   b.KS 
Ronald J McNutt    Son M W age 3    b.KS
Charles N McNutt  Son M W age 1    b.IO
Michael N McNutt  Son M W age 3/12 b.IO
    Apparently, soon after this time he volunteered for the military and served most of the war years in the Coast Guard.  He married Margaret, his wife that we knew, in Florida in 1944 and they had two younger daughters.  What happened to the first marriage to Thelma and how or when the care of his boys became his I do not know.  When we knew them in the 1950s, they seemed to be a happy and united family of seven.
    The first couple of years in Glenwood the family lived in what we called the Teacherage, a house next to the school grounds supplied by the school district.  Then during a summer he and the boys built a home for themselves.  Seemingly he was trying to make sure that his sons learned the manual arts and I recall them saying that they had the family goal to build a new house for themselves wherever they lived.  I was impressed that Dr. McNutt valued and combined both academic and manual learning.  Here was this “larger-than-life” person with two doctorates, who knew everything about music and most other subjects, giving equal value in his life to sawing boards and hammering nails.  This suggested to me that all forms of labor were perhaps of equal value.
    I was grateful, even fascinated, for the insights about music I got from Dr. McNutt.  One significant idea was that a person’s religious experiences was enhanced through sacred music.  Music appeals to one’s feelings and emotions and therefore may deepen a person’s faith and spirituality.
    Dr. McNutt was a member of the Presbyterian Church and  a believing and practicing Christian.  He is the only non-LDS person I have ever known who paid a full tithing.  The family quickly fit into the Glenwood Church, which was nominally Presbyterian, and he began to try to help in its work.  He volunteered to use his choral music training to create a youth choir in the church and brought several young people from the school choir into participation who normally didn’t attend church meetings.  I participated also and became more appreciative of the religious nature and value of historical choral music.
    He and his wife also initiated a Christian youth program for the church.  It followed a structure of programs found in other larger Presbyterian congregations.  It was called Westminster fellowship.  It was for older teens and we met monthly in the McNutt home.  In these meetings, we discussed Christian behaviors and commitments and morality at a teen level.  I found it interesting and perhaps reinforcing for living a life that was clean and full of service.
    At one point after a church meeting, Dr. McNutt found me and asked if I would like to be baptized in the Presbyterian church.  He said this in a gentle and  non-pressureful sort of way.  I responded, “No thank you. I intend to be baptized in the Mormon church.”   Thinking back, I am not sure why that response came to me so clearly but I think it helped me to clarify this objective.
    I took his question as a friendly gesture, and he did not seem offended by my response or endeavor to press me further.
    Overall, I think it was valuable to me to see in Dr. McNutt an intelligent, educated person who also was sincere believing Christian.  His approach to religion helped me to respect positives in the faith commitments by persons of other religions.  And he also set an example of caring and respectfulness to me personally.

Paul C. Child
    President Child was my major mission president, and played a sort of Grandpa role in my life.  He helped me particularly with my mission finances when my personal savings account ran out of money, taught me a love of the scriptures and how study them, and gave me a closer personal understanding of those in general Church leadership.  After my mission, I visited him and Sister Child several times in their home, and he performed my marriage to JoAnn in the Salt Lake Temple.
    In the early 1920s, President Child was serving as a Bishop in the Pioneer Stake on the south and west side of Salt Lake City and called Harold B. Lee as his counselor.  Soon after President Lee was called into the stake High Council, and then as Stake President, calling President Child as one of his Counselors.  This stake was hard hit by the Great Depression, and these stake leaders aggressively built a welfare program.  Presidents Lee and Child were asked by the President of the Church to give leadership to build the welfare program in the general church and their stake program  became the model for the Church-wide program in 1936.  Elder Lee was then called as an apostle and President Child served a term as President of the Pioneer Stake.  President Thomas S. Monson grew up in that stake.
    An anecdote from a conference talk by President Monson illustrates President Child’s love of the scriptures.  Pres. Monson reported:
    “As I approached my 18th birthday and prepared to enter military service in World War II, I was recommended to receive the Melchizedek Priesthood. Mine was the task to telephone President Paul C. Child, my stake president, for an interview. He was one who loved and understood the holy scriptures, and it was his intent that all others should similarly love and understand them. As I knew from others of his rather detailed and searching interviews, our telephone conversation went something like this:
    “Hello, President Child. This is Brother Monson. I have been asked by the bishop to visit with you relative to being ordained an elder.”
    “Fine, Brother Monson. When can you see me?”
    Knowing that his sacrament meeting time was 4:00 and desiring minimum exposure of my scriptural knowledge to his review, I suggested, “How would 3:00 be?”
    His response: “Oh, Brother Monson, that would not provide us sufficient time to peruse the scriptures. Could you please come at 2:00 and bring with you your personally marked set of scriptures?”
    ...It was a long interview, but I have never forgotten it. At the conclusion, President Child put his arm around my shoulder and said, “You are now ready to receive the Melchizedek Priesthood.” Remember that the Lord blesses the person who serves Him.”
(Thomas S. Monson, “Our Sacred Priesthood Trust,” April 2006 General Conference)
    “Perusing the scriptures” was so President Child.  I heard that phrase many times.  I think it meant to study in-depth, to compare these verses with other verses, to make notes and cross-references.  His standard works were filled with his cross-reference entries.  Missionary lore said that he wore a set of scriptures out from use and notations every five years.  Then he copied all his cross-references and notations into a new set, and willed the older set to one of his children.
    We understood that these voluminous cross-references had been developed in concert with Harold B. Lee, then in 1958 one of the senior apostles of the Church, when he and President Child were in Bishoprics and Stake Presidencies together.  We had heard that these two men had lived in an era when a person could take their scriptures with them to the temple.  They viewed the endowment as a fifth standard work and studied it in connection with their scriptural study.  The left their scriptures in their lockers while going through a session and then were able to arrange for a place to study together.  Part of their study, according to more of our missionary lore, was to cross reference the temple ceremony wording with the other standard works.  I myself recall President Child in a missionary meeting speak of the endowment, and saying, “The ministers of other churches don’t know it, but its all there,” as he patted his Bible with his hand.
    We missionaries experienced what might be called “scripture envy” when we saw his standard works.  They didn’t lie flat.  The outer edges of his pages were raised an inch or two wider than at the binding.  Then some missionary discovered how we could make our standard works look like the President’s.  You would need to go through each book page by page and crush each single page with your hand.  Soon every elder’s scriptures looked just like the President’s.  We said this would also help us find scriptures more quickly, if we were in a discussion with someone else.
    President Child’s connection with Elder Lee blessed us one year as Elder Lee was the general authority who toured our mission.  We were privileged to have him testify of the experience which gave him an apostle’s witness of the Savior, and also to have a personal interview with Elder Lee, who we were pretty sure would soon be the President of the Church.
    As President Child performed our marriage, he gave me some important specific advice that has informed my personal actions and influenced my understanding of moral principles.  As he spoke to us prior to performing the ceremony, he spoke directly to me saying that until this time I had been free to have a romantic interest in a variety of women, but now, in marriage, my desires needed to be only to my wife. 
    I pondered the meaning of this direction.  I understood that it was my responsibility and my capability to channel and focus all of my romantic and sexual desires toward JoAnn and JoAnn alone.  And it seemed to assure me that I had the power personally to accomplish this, through faith and through my own agency and mental strength (my own Mindful Awareness or Impartial Spectator).  If ever I had different thoughts I was to immediately dismiss them as being unworthy or inconsistent with who I was or intended to be and with the promises that I had made.  And I would not allow these kinds of thoughts to in any way define my own identity.  I applied these insights in my general understanding professionally of human nature and capability.

Louis Poore
    Louis Poore when our Bishop when we bought our home and moved to Taylorsville.  In his professional life, he was a math instructor at SLCC.  He was strong and humble with a lot of wisdom.  “You can’t get to the temple on left-over time.  You need to make plans to be sure to do what is important.”
    He was very organized and on top of every administrative matter.  He was my model for good Bishop.  Later he served as a counselor in the Stake Presidency with President Lindsay, at the same time I served as Stake Executive Secretary.
    His wife was also strong and capable.  I recall a time, as I served as Stake Young Mens President, when I interviewed her along with some other parents of Eagle Scouts.  I was asking about what these parents had done to support their boys in scouting, and why.  She gave a very significant response.  She said that she and her husband had been raised in the farm country near Oakley, Idaho.  She said that they had done everything right as they were taught.  They went to Church, they obeyed the commandments, Louis served a mission, they got married in the temple, he got an education and then a good job teaching.  They had some children, including two boys.  One day they both realized they were stumped in how to raise their sons to be strong men.  How could they teach them to work, to be unselfish, to serve others.  They both agreed that the only pattern they knew had to do with farming, working alongside their dad.  But they were living in the city.  She said that she and Louis fasted and prayed and sought for answers.  How can we raise our sons to be good men in a city?  Then one day the answer came to them both: “Scouting.”
    I believed her and had the same answer.

Richard Barker
    We moved to a new home in Taylorsville, Utah in 1969, and three weeks later I was called as Elders President in our new ward.  I discovered that the Stake President, Richard Barker, had a very serious and elaborate strategy for generating high quality home teaching in his stake, and it provided me with great respect for his commitment and leadership.  We had over 100 families assigned to our quorum. Under this program, we achieved nearly 100% of families visited each month and I believe a relatively high level of ministering relationships.  Here are details:
    1) Home teachers averaged about four families each.  In the quorum presidency, we divided the supervision of about 30 home teaching pairs into three districts of about 10 each.
    2) The stake took most of the responsibility for overseeing that all home visits were made.
        a) Every weekend of the month, at about 9 pm on Saturday, I received a call from the High Councilor assigned to our ward, in which I was expected to report on which families assigned to my quorum had already been visited.  He had a current copy of a list of all our families and checked off the ones I reported.  In order to make that report, I and my counselors needed to have made contact, probably earlier in the day or week, with all the senior home teachers we supervised to get information about the status of their visits to their families.
        b) Early on Sunday morning there was a meeting in which these High Counselors reported the month’s home visit progress to President Barker.
        c) This process continued weekly until the full month’s visit report was made.
        d) The goal was 100% of families visited.  Occasionally, our Quorum Presidency made these visits as a back up.
    3) Members of our Quorum Presidency were expected to conduct an accountability interview with each Home Teaching pair monthly.
        a) We generally did these on about the second Sunday, before or after Church, at the churchhouse.
        b) Our quorum secretary arranged the appointments.
        c) We allocated about 15 minutes time for each interview.
        d) Contents of the interview included prayer, discussion of needs of the families, and  identifying goals for work with each family and actions the home teachers planned to take to reach these goals.
        e) We had a small pre-carboned form that the member of the presidency used to take notes on needs, goals and action plans, and shared a copy with the home teachers.
        f) Follow-up meetings, of course, included discussion of progress on goals and plans.
        g) The stake required a report at the end of each month on accountability interviews conducted and expected 100% compliance.
    4) Our Quorum Presidency met monthly with the Bishopric to discuss the needs of our families and strategies for filling these needs, with an emphasis on the quality of the visiting and ministering to our families.
        a) This meeting was usually held mid-month.
        b) It would typically last at least an hour.
        c) It was separate from administrative meetings such as ward council
    5) We were instructed and tried to minimize failure by home teachers.  We recognized that some home teachers had capabilities and limits different than others, and would not be as successful with so many families.  “It looks like in your situation right now having only two assigned families will work best.”  We also recognized that almost every family knew the expectation of at least a monthly visit by their home teachers, and possibly would interpret the lack of visits as not caring, making a ministering relationship more difficult to achieve.   Therefore we did not allow the lack of visiting of a family to continue more than a couple of months, but would reassign these families and give different home teachers a fresh start for building the desired rapport with their assigned families.
    6) I found the atmosphere for working with home teachers under this arrangement comfortable and satisfying.  We were able to counsel home teachers and see them grow.  It seemed to help create a climate in the ward that was positive and supportive.
    I was very impressed with the power of this program, with the high level of commitment to quality efforts in Church programs that this represented.

Richard Lindsay
    When we took a Division of Family Services state office job and moved to Taylorsville in the Fall of 1969, Richard P. Lindsay was a Counselor in our new Stake Presidency.  He was also the Director of our Department in the State government.  I don’t think that had much or any relationship to our decision buy a home in Taylorsville.  Someone I worked with directly in the state office suggested that area as a place in Salt Lake Valley that had safe neighborhoods and reasonably priced homes.  And that was where we found a place to buy.
    President Lindsay had a Ph.D in political science and soon left for a position at the University of Utah, but I formed a closer relationship with him through my Church callings.  And in a few years, he became our Stake President.  At that point I was given a calling as Stake Executive Secretary and worked with the Stake Presidency in this capacity for several years.  He also ordained me a High Priest at the time of my calling.
    He later was called to be a member of the First Quorum of Seventy and he was the main speaker at our Michael’s funeral.
    Although he had good academic credentials, was a student of the gospel and authored at least one Church-related book, but his primary strength, or so seemed to me, was with people and relationships.
    I recall one Tuesday evening when our Stake Presidency was meeting.  We were in the high council room and the door to the Stake President’s office was open.  President Lindsay had just given me an assignment.  He said that it had been a while since he had had the opportunity to visit personally with members of the stake family, that is, persons who had stake callings, such as High Councilors, clerks, auxiliary presidencies, etc.  He gave me a couple of times and dates when he would be available, and asked that call each of these persons and schedule appointments with each one, at 5 minute intervals.
    At that moment, the telephone rang in the Stake President’s office that adjoined the high council room.  President Lindsay arose and went into the office to answer.  While he was gone, President Poore, who seem to always be in charge of administrative discipline for the stake, leaned over to me and said, “See if you can get him to change the length the length of those interviews to 15 minutes.  In 5 minutes, he won’t even have gotten down to asking how the dog is doing.”  We got him up to 10 minutes, but this illustrated a point about his human relationships  and how much he cared about other people.
    I remember at other times meeting him in the hall at the stake house.  He would ask, “How are you doing?,” listen carefully to my response, then ask, “And how is JoAnn?  Then systematically ask about each child in our family in turn. 
    I finally decided, not really facetiously, that he had a computer-like function in his brain that maintained a listing of everyone he knew, in families, probably in age-order, and with the name stored a description of the last event in each person’s life that he had been made aware.  “How is Alison?  The last I heard she was attending BYU and doing thus-and-so.”  When we answered it was like he was updating the latest fact in his brain person data base.
    I concluded that he really cared about a lot of people, and had this wonderful memory capability that facilitated this caring, that I could only envy.

Douglas Brewster
    Douglas Brewster was the Stake President when I was called as Bishop.  I don’t have a lot
 to report except how kind and supportive he was of me, and the high level of trust in me that he communicated.  That helped me a lot as I tried to meet the demands of my calling.  I could wish that every person had that level of positive support.