In My Life

Truman G. Madsen

2009-05-28T21:06:00.001-07:00

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As Mormonism goes, there are some names outside the general leadership that resonate profoundly, with such recognition as to be assured immortality within the ranks of the membership, names whispered in church, in homes, on street corners across the globe, with a certain reverence.

Truman Madsen's name was just such a name.

I was a far too young honors student at BYU when I found myself seated in his Philosophy of Religious Language seminar. I can still picture the classroom in vivid detail, somewhere in the Joseph F. Smith building, and where I sat, and even what he was wearing on the day he said he believed we'd all be likely naked in the Celestial Kingdom. It was one of those esoteric discussions that came seemingly out of nowhere, and of course, the first thing I did was notice how he was dressed.

No one grew up in Mormonism a stranger to Truman Madsen, the man and legend, a scholar and philosopher, teacher, early motivational speaker. To come to a point in my own life where I was actually studying at his feet--it might as well have been Aristotle by reputation, but I was something of a giggly skeptic, wondering why we were speculating on dress codes in the hereafter. I'd done the foundational Philosophy course under David Paulsen when barely seventeen, and later went on to study under several others, including Existentialism with James Faulcouner, as part of my journey through the liberal arts offerings at BYU, but Truman Madsen was the most unusual and memorable of all the faculty members with whom I studied philosophy.

Like many of the courses I took at the time, the subject matter came to be far more profound in my later life than I ever imagined then. For me, then, Religious Language seemed to be as foreign, and superfluous, as Polish. The Philosophy of it? I couldn't imagine any particular relevance in my own young life in a religious tradition that didn't seem to focus on liturgy or language.

I was sad to see, this morning, that the great legend that was Truman Madsen was stilled, when he lost his recent battle with cancer.

It calls to mind another personal story he shared with the class, that of a young student and his wife who went off to Harvard and were counseled not to postpone having a family. They had that family, when young, and some few years later his wife had an unexpected hysterectomy. It was a poignant tale. He clearly treasured that wife, and those children.

Funny those are the things I remember, when my mind wanders back to days on the green grass of Provo, in front of the Harold B. Lee Library, walking across the quad, to a class, sitting half awake in a semi-circular classroom watching a legend at the podium discuss religious language and the esoteric speculation of the active mind.

Truman G. Madsen.

Truman G. Madsen, grandson of early LDS Church president Heber J. Grant, was emeritus professor of Philosophy at Brigham Young University and held the Richard L. Evans Chair of Religious Studies at BYU. He completed his education at Harvard University and authored many volumes on religion and philosophy. During his tenure at BYU he was instrumental in bringing members of several non-LDS faiths to campus for interreligious dialogue. He had been director of the BYU Jerusalem Center for Near-Eastern Studies, and was guest lecturer at Haifa University, Northeastern University and the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley. He was an individual of great stature, chiseled Charleton Heston good looks and sonic boom presence.

His influence is widely felt in the community that nurtured his faith, for countless have bought his popular books like "Eternal Man," listened to his audiotapes, attended his lectures, and will continue to hold his name in measured reverence in humble homes and hallowed halls.

Robert and Patricia Cronin

2009-05-08T17:19:00.000-07:00

I'll never forget the first time I met Bob and Pat Cronin, one cold November evening in Chicago at a Victorian mansion that had been transformed into an elegant restaurant. I was newly engaged, and they were long-time friends of my fiancé. As I made my entrance in a slightly abbreviated blue velvet dress that can only be described as bridging the gap between royal, navy and cobalt, they might have been dismissive, but they were gracious, warm and engaging, setting the tone for many convivial times together that followed.

In fact, in my entire life I never met any two people more gracious, refined, or elegant in their simplicity and warmth.

I can still hear Bob Cronin's laugh. Irish. A hearty and well founded chuckle, that arose from a place of knowing, the kind that mellows in dusty libraries rimmed with leather and crystal glasses filled with Irish whiskey.

Bob had attended college with my husband Larry at St. Mary's College in Winona, Minnesota. A fellow Chicago native, their fathers had gone to De La Salle Institute at the same time, then a Catholic preparatory high school for young men only. While Bob never attended De La Salle himself, he later served as President of their Board of Directors. It was a particularly easy choice for many Lasallians to follow the trail blazed by the Christian Brothers from Chicago to Winona and complete their education at St. Mary's. After graduation, Bob went on to study law and returned to Chicago, where he practiced initially as part of the firm Isham, Lincoln & Beale before going to Sidley & Austin in 1988.

It was his work with Catholic Charities in the Archdiocese of Chicago for which he is best known. He became a member of their board of advisors in 1958 and served as president from 1984-86. In 2001 he was awarded their Compassion in Action award for his work finding homes for the 'Peter Pan' children from Cuba and reuniting them with their families. He donated his legal services free of charge to Catholic Charities for over fifty years, participating in many adoption cases.

It was in Chicago's Catholic Charities that Bob met his bride, Patricia, after many years as a confirmed bachelor happily trotting the globe with fellow classmate James Casella. Bob and Jim both did the Hope and Crosby road-to-wherever tour for years before finally meeting the women of their dreams in Pat and Eleanor, both working at Catholic Charities, when Bob was nearly forty.

Patricia Cronin is well known in Chicago and beyond in her own right. A respected social scientist, Pat Cronin is renowned for creating texts and curricula in Catholic education, and for her studies on adolescent behavior particularly. More fascinating, however, is another high profile role she played on the American stage. When Joseph Cardinal Bernardin was presiding over the Archdiocese of Chicago, he created a groundbreaking oversight committee for investigating claims of sexual abuse in the clergy. Patricia Cronin served as chair of that committee for over nine years until her retirement from that position a few years ago. Ironically, it was that same committee Cardinal Bernardin created and Pat Cronin headed that was in place to oversee and investigate when claims were brought against Cardinal Bernardin himself.

Prior to the death of Cardinal Bernardin in the mid-1990's, I joined Bob and Pat Cronin and four other couples, including good friends Gene and Peggy Figliulo, several Decembers in a row as the Cardinal hosted the Catholic Charities Ball in grand Chicago venues like the Field Museum and Navy Pier. We'd snuggle amid the dinosaur skeletons and towering columns, dancing to grand orchestras by candlelight as the winter wind whipped outside.

Dinner in the company of Bob and Pat was never dull. As couples we took turns hosting dinners in places like the Four Seasons or the Drake, as eight of us assembled to enjoy good food, good drink, and good conversation on topics ranging from the Bell Curve to Louis Farrakhan. Occasionally it was just the four of us, and we'd trek out in the Chicago bluster to dinner and back to their home just up from the Drake Hotel on Walton Street, laughing all along the way.

They were lovely. There were as lovely as they had been when they came to our wedding. Patricia proclaimed it to be the most beautiful wedding she'd ever seen. I knew she meant every word. She was a forthright and fast friend.

Bob was elegant, and refined, knowledgable, personable, gracious, the perfect gentleman. He was, and always will be, an Irishman in the heart of Chicago, a servant of the people, who helped many. I never saw the Irish wolfhounds he walked for years on the Chicago sidewalks, but they were legend, and I could picture him out there, in trenchcoat, clutching one hand onto his Irish cap, walking a dog bigger than life.

Over the last several years, the place I most often saw Bob was at the Club International at the Drake, where he and Pat hosted us for dinner on many occasions. In recent years he had suffered the ravages of squamous cell carcinoma which had taken part of his face as well as an eye, but he never relinquished his optimism or his dignity. He continued to work long past retirement doing pro bono services, walked or took the bus to his office daily for many years, and regularly went to mass at the Cathedral or St. Peter's.

As we were hurrying to his hospital bedside in late October 2008, Robert Edmund Cronin finally succumbed to the disease he had so bravely fought for years, and was laid to rest a few days later following a suitable, and very Irish, mass at Holy Name Cathedral. In his lifetime he'd touched countless parents and children, friends and neighbors, students and teachers, and many lives are irretrievably altered by his presence, including my own. He set the bar as high as one can set it.

Robert Edmund Cronin. Patricia Cronin.

John Baptist de la Salle
PRAY FOR US
Live Jesus in our hearts
FOREVER.

Photograph of the Club International, Drake Hotel on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, where Bob and Pat Cronin graciously hosted many memorable meals.

Michael J. Lynch

2009-05-01T21:34:00.000-07:00

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As priests go, Michael was fairly unconventional.

Even before I moved to our community in northern Wisconsin, I'd heard about this Catholic priest, chaplain of the local hospital who caused something of a stir when he played the role of Professor Harold Hill in a community theater production of "The Music Man," which necessitated a kiss with the actress playing Marian. The Librarian.

Michael was filled with life. As a houseguest or travelling companion, he was gracious and entertaining. Many years he came on the mid-January wind to our home in Florida on his annual scuba diving excursion, arriving dapper and tanned, flowers in hand, the perfect houseguest. We'd whisk off to dinners, or the theater, or both, and he'd delight in being incognito in street clothing, no one the wiser that he was anything other than a bon vivant. He'd charm waitresses with his personable manner, greeting them by name, savoring every course. I recall well the night I asked him whether he'd prefer to go to the finest restaurant on Sanibel Island or see a live theatrical production of Funny Girl; without hesitation, his response was "Both!" even though the venues were over 45 minutes apart. And so we went.

That was Michael.

I travelled with him and his brother, also a priest, to Ireland, along with a group of thirty or so pilgrims, and he was equally enmeshed in the living of life on those journeys. Whether we were in Dublin or Galway, the Giant's Causeway or the Cliffs of Moher, he was there, conducting the band. When our ragtag group found itself at the Old Bushmills Distillery in County Antrim, Michael and I snuck off to do some sampling, sans group, finding a way to successfully bypass the regular tour in order to do so.

He didn't want to miss anything. Anything.

As a host he was equally gracious. He opened his home on the lake many times a year, particularly during the summer months, to those who'd travelled with him, those who'd volunteered at the hospital under his direction, and those who'd become his close personal friends. The table was always well spread, the larder full, and the pontoon boat docked and ready for excursions on the lake. More than once we went with him on his "last cruise of the season" before putting that beloved boat away.

On a few occasions, we joined Michael and his family for holiday dinners, beautiful tables, great conversation, happy memories, that would always include his brother Denny, a priest in a neighboring community a half-hour south. Dennis was the contemplative, serious one, a foil for Michael's flamboyance, but we loved them equally, as well as Sister Sandy, a long-time friend who was always part of that extended family.

My memories will never lose the late afternoon we were in Galway looking for an older Irish priest, Tom Mannion, whom Michael and Denny had known in Wisconsin. As a youth, Tom had been very ill and told he couldn't be a priest, but ended up being taken under the wing of an American bishop and given a place and a parish, where he served happily in rural western Wisconsin for many years. Not long before our visit, he had retired and returned to the west of Ireland to live out his years with his nephew and family. He made annual pilgrimages to the Shrine of Our Lady of Knock nearby to give thanks to Our Lady for what he unfailingly proclaimed was her intercession in his illness and miraculous healing, allowing him to survive more than seven decades to be the strong and vigorous white-haired late septugenarian he was, once the kindly priest, now the kindly uncle, always laughing, bright eyed.

We were walking the streets of Galway that Irish afternoon wondering how we'd find Father Mannion, as Michael and Denny were invited to dinner at his nephew's, and oddly enough had made no arrangements for connecting with him except to "meet at the Cathedral later in the day." Vague enough. But there we were, crossing the street, my husband and I, Michael and Dennis, and were almost hit by a black Mercedes. . .driven by Father Mannion's nephew, and carrying the man himself. In a moment of characteristic spontaneity they invited us to join them, and quite literally, I rode sitting on the laps of Michael and Dennis those many miles through County Galway to the lovely modest home of the Mannions for a beautiful kitchen meal, salmon, potatoes, and I don't remember what else, nicely done by the nephew's wife while children were told to stay in their rooms, as Tom Mannion regaled us with tales of his youth in Ireland, and of his devotion to Our Lady of Knock.

It was a charming, magical evening. Crunched into a little Mercedes built only comfortably for four with a load of six, me atop two priests, brought no end of giggles. It was only because I knew both Lynch brothers so well that it was managed with grace and ease.

Michael was long the chaplain of the local hospital, and for many years I volunteered under his direction, visiting the sick and ministering to them, something I treasured. Occasionally we'd go to the mass he held at the tiny chapel there, just down the hill from our home, sitting in a small circle of chairs, and meet perhaps a lonely family member who was there because their loved one was dying of cancer, or had been in a tragic car accident. More than once we needed Michael in that hospital, when a loved one of ours was sick, or dying. He was always there with dignity and ministerial intercession, performing the rites of the sick, a calm and healing presence.

Many years earlier, my husband accompanied the Fathers Lynch to Egypt and the Holy Land, during which time he was making a prayerful journey to contemplate marriage. I received daily long-distance calls from Cairo, Jerusalem, Rome, wherever they were, while he was sharing board with the two priests. Seven months later we were all standing at an altar, where Michael and Dennis were two of the four priests happily concelebrating our marriage. It was a glorious occasion, with the entire group who travelled to Egypt and the Holy Land in attendance, and Michael's charming elderly father, a last minute addition to the celebration.

Michael J. Lynch.

I have many treasured memories of Michael, sitting up late into the evening in bathrobes and talking, with glasses of wine, and chocolates, or working together at the hospital, travelling across Ireland, sharing in a meal, Eucharistic or otherwise, but none more painful than hearing three years ago this month that he'd died tragically at home after falling down a flight of stairs, and had been alone there some time before anyone found him. A mutual friend called from Wisconsin to tell me the difficult news, and we both understood the weight of it, a young man in his early sixties, full of life, gone. I recalled the last time I had spoken to him, a month or so earlier, to tell him of the likewise tragic death of our parish priest who'd been killed in a central Wisconsin car accident upon returning home from the La Crosse funeral of our former bishop, John J. Paul. Michael took the news badly. It was a difficult conversation.

Father Michael J. Lynch, a son of Galway, minister to the sick, friend to many, was best known in his lifetime as a leading advocate for organ donation, a cause he championed. In 1999 he was given the National Gift of Sight Award by the Eye Bank Association of America for his efforts in ensuring that lives lost were not lives gone.

Photograph: interior of the Cathedral of Our Lady Assumed into Heaven and St. Nicholas, commonly known as Galway Cathedral, Galway, Ireland.

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The Rev. Michael J. Lynch

RIB MOUNTAIN, Wis. — The Rev. Michael J. Lynch, 61, of Rib Mountain, longtime hospital chaplain in Wausau, Wis., died Tuesday, May 16, 2006, after an accidental fall at home.

Father Michael was born Feb. 27, 1945, the son of the late Edward and Irene (Knapik) Lynch. He was ordained in 1971 for the Diocese of La Crosse, and except for an initial three-year parish ministry assignment in La Crosse, he served the church in Wausau for 28 years.

Father Michael’s greatest legacy will be the untold number of people to whom he ministered to as a hospital chaplain. His was a leading voice and presence in the development of hospice care and organ and tissue donation locally, statewide and nationally. But his pastoral care is best remembered and treasured by the countless numbers of patients and their families who were touched by his comforting presence. Because of a visit, a prayer, an anointing, an embrace or a story from him, pain was lessened and the future more hope-filled. Father Michael certainly was not able to remember all to whom he ministered, they will remember him with gratitude.

His family, Mary Lu (James) Flynn, Middleton, Ohio; Thomas (Reni) Lynch, Oshkosh, Wis.; Father Dennis Lynch, Stevens Point, Wis.; John (Katie) Lynch, Milwaukee; and Ann Lynch, Seattle; 10 nieces and nephews and their families, are all deeply saddened by his death and will deeply miss his wonderful spirit of hospitality and loving presence. Over the years, his home was the meeting place for family gatherings. Indeed, his home was always available to provide a welcome to both friend and stranger.

The funeral Mass will be at noon Wednesday, May 24, at St. Anne’s Catholic Church, Wausau. Visitation will be from 9 a.m. to the time of Mass at the church. Those who can are invited to join Father Michael’s family at St. Anne’s Parish for prayer, storytelling and nourishment, all essential components of hospitality. For those who cannot join the family Wednesday, please join them in prayer from wherever you may be. Burial will at a later date with immediate family.

In keeping with Father Michael’s ministry, the family asks that memorials be given directly to any of the following: Organ Donation Education Fund of Wisconsin; Hospice Ministry; Guest House, Rochester, Minn.; or HIV-AIDS Ministry of Catholic Charities.

Hayden-Buettgen Funeral Home, Schofield, Wis., assisted the family with arrangements.

Harold Isbell

2009-04-23T07:34:00.000-07:00

At that particular junction in the history of the settling of the American West where stockgrowing and finance meet, there came to the dusty windswept plains north of Denver three brothers from Burlington, Vermont, who in the waning days of the nineteenth century managed to set up the largest sheepgrowing operation in the state of Wyoming. About 1882, the two older brothers, John and Tom, started a herd with some seed money they'd saved running a freight line into Denver and soon built it into a vast empire running sheep on empty expanses of land spanning several states. By 1890 their brother James joined them in their sweeping enterprise, which by then had moved from early encampment with Mexican foreman Adriana Apadaca near Fort Steele, Wyoming, to headquarters closer to Rawlins.

While their sheep ranged much of the Wyoming landscape, their enterprising spirit began to do the same, as they established nearly fifty trading posts dotting the sparsely populated map. They made their first tiptoe into the waters of banking in Salt Lake City, purchasing the Commercial National Bank in 1903 and changing its name to the Continental National, which became lead bank for a chain of twenty-seven banking locations spread throughout the Rocky Mountains from the dusty roads of Idaho to the glistening streets of Denver, pioneering the concept of the chain bank in the Intermountain West.

By 1910 the herd had grown to 125,000 head and the Cosgriff Sheep Company had established itself has the preeminent sheep ranching operation in that corner of the blossoming Western new world, when the family decided to break up its partnership, leaving James E. Cosgriff the only brother remaining in the enterprise. Prior to that, the largest single shipment of wool ever had been sent out by Cosgriff Sheep Company from Fort Steele, Wyoming, to Boston, Massachusetts, a trainload of 800,000 pounds at 8 cents per pound in 1905. The Cosgriffs had established themselves as stockgrowers, landowners, businessmen and financiers. In the history of wool growing in Wyoming, there was no peer. Those sheep they didn't own personally they financed for other sheep outfits, large and small, supporting the sheepmen in four states--Wyoming, Idaho, Utah and Colorado.

Tom passed away in 1915, and John in 1917, both before reaching the age of sixty, but brother James stayed on to tend to the industry the brothers had started with that little bit of seed money all those years earlier in Denver, growing the Continental Bank and Trust Company a state away in Salt Lake City amid a banking industry dominated by the financial interests of the Mormon Church, who had introduced banking and currency to the area after Brigham Young ended his pioneering trek westward in 1847 to determine that the barren valley was indeed "the right place."

It was the right place for J. E. Cosgriff, his family and his business interests, which like the valley began to blossom like a rose. James' son Walter continued the banking business, and by 1947 the bank's assets were in excess of $34 million, and helped to finance Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel's new Flamingo Hotel in a bootstrap Las Vegas. Walter purchased a stake in the Bank of Las Vegas in 1954, and sent one of his employees, E. Parry Thomas, to Nevada to see firsthand if the struggling Vegas bank needed to be closed. The bank was not closed, but flourished, and Thomas, who was promoted to President of the bank on the death of Walter Cosgriff in 1961, became one of the pre-eminent bankers financing and influencing the casino industry of Nevada, confidant of Howard Hughes and ultimately mentor to Steve Wynn. The Thomas Mack Arena in Las Vegas bears his name. The little Las Vegas bank that Walter Cosgriff invested in went from equity of $250,000 in 1954 to over $400 million at the time of its purchase by Bank of America in 1992.

Walter and Enid Cosgriff, meanwhile, became known in the Salt Lake City area not only for their industry but for their generous philanthropy, which extended from the Catholic schools and hospitals to the University of Utah, and notably, to the arts. Ballet West and the ballet program at the University of Utah both owe their existence largely to the generosity of the Cosgriff family and Mrs. Enid Cosgriff particularly, who in addition to giving patronage to the arts became, at the untimely death of her husband in an auto accident, the owner and general manager of the Salt Lake Bees baseball team, the first woman in professional baseball to do so. The family established the J. E. Cosgriff Memorial Catholic School and endowed funds and scholarships in the Diocese of Salt Lake and elsewhere. After her husband's death, Enid Cosgriff was invested as a Lady of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre, an honor bestowed by the late Pope John Paul II in 1988. She passed away in Salt Lake City in 1997 at the age of 84. Walter, called by TIME Magazine in 1950 "a Republican who thinks like a Democrat," had mingled with presidents and served as a member of the RFC.

Half a country away on the banks of the Mississippi River, a son of Dubuque, Iowa, who thought he might become a priest left Loras College and continued on to Notre Dame to further his studies, where he became Writer in Residence after completing his Master of Arts and joining the English faculty of St. Mary's College. It was there in the 1960's he met the daughter of Walter and Enid Cosgriff of Salt Lake City, Utah, and was married to her in Salt Lake's historic Cathedral of the Madeleine. Instead of becoming a priest, he became a banker, starting on the ground floor as a teller in his father-in-law's Continental Bank in Salt Lake City, rising ultimately to the position of Vice-President of the bank at which his mother-in-law, Enid Cosgriff, was director following her husband's death.

Like his in-laws, Harold Isbell with his wife Lyn became actively involved in supporting charitable causes and the arts in Utah, raising four children in the state before the Continental Bank interests were eventually sold and the couple moved to San Francisco, where they continue to be actively involved in philanthropic efforts.

I knew Harold Isbell as my roommate's cousin when I was living in Salt Lake City. I adored his parents, Max and Marcella Isbell, who lived near the Mississippi locks in Bellevue, Iowa, not far from the antique shops and the Maid-Rite. After Max's death, Marcy moved to Dubuque where she lived quite independently for many years, passing away in recent months at the age of 97. She was, quite literally, the little old lady from Dubuque, who read the Mayo Clinic Health Letter and The New Yorker with equal enthusiasm.

Harold M. Isbell.

Harold Isbell is best known in recent years as editor and translator for a number of Latin classics for Penguin Books, including Heroides by Ovid and The Last Poets of Imperial Rome.

It is, perhaps, lightyears away from the three brothers in Denver who started a small herd of sheep after leaving Vermont, lightyears away from the commerce and industry of stockgrowing in Wyoming, lightyears away from the bright lights of Las Vegas and the building of a banking empire in Salt Lake City, lightyears away from Dubuque.

Photograph of Continental Bank Building in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah, now the Hotel Monaco.

Timothy Dolan

2009-04-08T10:46:00.000-07:00

I received many letters of love and concern during my husband's protracted and complicated hospitalization at Mayo Clinic in the last half of 2004, but none more touching or meaningful than one which arrived in early December of that year. As summer gave way to fall, and fall to winter, the march of months seemed incomprehensible, otherworldly, an enormous weight, as we fought for a life worth saving in our frozen corner of southeastern Minnesota.

The Christmas holidays were fast approaching when someone a state away, across the rugged and beautiful Mississippi River, chose to sit down and and pen a note of unconditional prayerful support on the Feast of Juan Diego, while attending a board meeting that my husband was missing on the bluffs overlooking La Crosse. As pen to paper, it was priceless, personal, and will be forever treasured for its ability to lift my spirits at a time of enormous adversity.

Opening that letter meant the world to me. Someone out there who wasn't compelled to write the note was moved to do so, actually cared, and was reaching out, straight to the heart of our difficult battle.

That person was Tim Dolan.

Timothy Michael Dolan was born February 6, 1950, in Saint Louis, Missouri, the first of five children. He studied at Saint Louis Preparatory Seminary and Cardinal Glennon College, where he studied philosophy. After receiving his Bachelor of Arts, he ventured across the sea to Rome to continue his studies at Pontifical North American College and the Angelicum.

In June 1976, he was ordained to the priesthood, and three years later began doctoral work at Catholic University of America. He has served as secretary to the Apostolic Nunciature in Washington, D.C., Vice-Rector of Cardinal Glennon Seminary, Adjunct Professor of Theology at St. Louis University, Rector of the Pontifical North American College in Rome, and teacher at Pontifical Gregorian University and the Angelicum.

He received his episcopal ordination on August 15, 2001, from Archbishop Justin Rigali in Saint Louis, after being appointed by Pope John Paul II to serve as Auxiliary Bishop of Saint Louis.

On June 25, 2002, he became the Tenth Archbishop of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a position he has held honorably these past seven years as a man of courage, conviction and compassion.

A week from today, on Easter Wednesday, April 15, 2009, Timothy Michael Dolan, firstborn son of Robert and Shirley Radcliffe Dolan, will be installed in Saint Patrick's Cathedral as Tenth Archbishop of New York.

Archbishop Timothy Dolan.

Never underestimate the power of a written note.

Ad Quem Ibimus. Lord to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.- John 6:68

Arthur Henry King

2009-04-01T21:11:00.000-07:00

At the top of the hill overlooking the Smith Fieldhouse at Brigham Young University is a little faculty office building known as, well, of course, the Faculty Office Building, or FOB, a unique little building where every office has an outside view. Many students might pass by it on their way down the steep steps to the Fieldhouse to work out in the early morning hours. They might bicycle past it on their way to yet another class. If they blinked twice, they missed it.

I had the great privilege of having an office in it.

One of the singular experiences of my college life was having an assistantship with Dr. Marion J. Bentley, a well respected and very talented theater and drama professor at Brigham Young. I'd first become aware of him as one of the directors of the BYU Honors Program, in which I participated, but at the time I came to work for him, he was Dean of General Education and Honors, or as we casually called it, "GE." At that time Dr. Bentley also taught Honors Seminars in Theater, periodically directed operas and plays for the Fine Arts Department, was writing a book on period costuming, all while crafting and fine-tuning a newly devised set of General Education requirements for the university.

Down the hall from my office was the office of a snowy haired wise owl of a man, a Shakespearean scholar who'd been recruited to help in the General Education re-envisioning process. He seemed out of place, both in GE and in Utah, but certainly wouldn't have been in the enchanted halls of Cambridge. He seemed dressing for a grander stage, his own quirky version of Innocents Abroad. He was, as people are wont to say, a character. A character larger than life who in many ways shrunk to life, he made his quiet way down the hall, despite a quick wit and a golden tongue. He was articulated, measured.

One would have to wonder, really, what he was doing there. I found him quite enchanting. Like Arthur's Merlin. Luke's Yoda.

Arthur Henry King.

Dr. Arthur Henry King grew up far from the provincial campuses of Provo, in the town of Gosford, Hampshire, England, son of Quaker parents. The Society of Friends was quick to come to his aid after his father died when Arthur was only nine, making sure he got the education he might not have otherwise. As World War II was raging across the European continent, Arthur was studying in Sweden, after completing his studies at Cambridge, and was awarded his doctorate of Literature in stylistics in Lund, Sweden, before the end of the war. For his involvement in writing anti-Nazi material, he was blacklisted, yet was able to continue teaching in Sweden.

In 1966, a widowed Dr. King married a second cousin, Patricia, who happened to be of a different faith, and persuaded him to convert to hers, Mormonism, a religion as unique to America as jazz and Dixieland that reached across Atlantic shores to attract converts from the British Isles and Scandinavia in its formative years in order to populate the American West with those for a yearning for a new and different Zion amid the seagulls and sagebrush.

Eventually, it pulled him, too, and in 1971 he left an esteemed job as Assistant Director of the British Council in charge of Education, a position that had taken him throughout Europe, Persia and Pakistan in order to accept a teaching position in the English department of the LDS Church's flagship university named after Mormon prophet Brigham Young, an hour south of Salt Lake City in Provo, Utah. There he became an icon, an institution, a singular scholar in Shakespeare, a legend of linguistics.

He was twice decorated by the Queen of England for his service to crown and country, as Officer of the British Empire (OBE) and Commander of the British Empire (CBE). He was a published poet of some considerable renown, whose primary influences were claimed to include Eliot, Yeats, and primarily, Andrew Marvell. He distingished himself as a leader instituting programs teaching English as a second language abroad. He was a founding member of the Vetenkaps Society in Sweden and longtime member of the British Atheneum Club.

I think of him in his little office down the hall from mine, quoting Shakespeare. An owl in his tree.

Dr. Arthur Henry King retired from teaching at Brigham Young University in 1997 due to increasing ill health from Parkinson's disease. He died in 2000 at the age of 89.

Painting of Arthur Henry King by Nathan Florence, oil on canvas, hangs in the Humanities Reference Department, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.

Rachel Anderson Scherbel

2009-03-26T07:36:00.001-07:00

There are places I go in my dreams, when I can't get there in real life. If I close my eyes, I can leave the home of my childhood in the tiny little town of 500 people, cattle and oil, in southwest Wyoming, and wander two blocks up the street to the corner where the drug and hardware store were, turn left down the main street, past the post office and library, the florist, and the old Gaiety Theater, and turn right at the grocery store, Burney & Company. The main street, the only paved road in my childhood, makes a couple of switch turns until it comes to the place where I went to high school.

And right across the street, was the Scherbel home.

The Scherbel home was the first home I remember being in as a child, other than my own, and my grandparents' next door, growing up in Big Piney, Wyoming. Paul Scherbel was the County Surveyor, and he and his wife, Rachel, had four children, a son Paul A., daughter Annette, and two sons Scott and Marlowe who were closer to my age. Rachel and my mother took turns babysitting for each other when I was younger, and I would go over and stay and play with Marlowe in their enormously warm, comforting and fascinating home, central to which was a wood-burning stove in the kitchen. It was the first wood/coal-burning cooking device I'd ever seen in a kitchen, since we cooked with gas. There was a comfy banquette in the corner of the room near the stove, and conspicuously absent from the home was a television, any television. As children we knew that the Scherbels didn't eat cold cereal like lots of other kids did, and they didn't watch, or own, a television. But somehow we didn't really feel sorry for them, because they were extraordinary kids. The boys were all Eagle Scouts, exemplary in the community, and leaders in school. The home was well furnished in rust-colored wool carpeting, built-in woodboxes in the livingroom, board games and books and puzzles, things to keep us occupied well into the night when the youth would gather for the end of a progressive dinner over the holidays. They had a wonderful oversized swingset in the backyard, and Annette would push me and Marlowe higher and higher in the swing, overlooking river, and cottonwoods in my mind's eye, ladybugs everywhere. Across the lawn, just steps away, was the surveying office, filled with maps and charts, the smell of mimeograph ink and work, to delight a child's imagination.

In the kitchen were peanut butter and honey sandwiches, glasses of milk, tomato soup, stepstools to be pushed when no one was looking, corners to explore in a child's free time.

The Scherbels are firmly fixed in that childhood memory, from birth through college, swimming trips to Jackson Hole and the Hoback, church trips to Salt Lake City, sitting between Paul and Rachel in the front of their car, dozing off, on the way back from Utah, or riding with Scott on the way home for the weekend from college, hitting a steer on open range on the Cumberland Flat late at night in a Ford Torino, wrapping chains on tires going up Emigration Canyon in the snow, having lunch in Jackson, ending up with Scott in a hospital with tick fever, riding on the back of their tandem bicycle, watching Scott play chess at Scout Camp near New Fork Lake, singing with Marlowe in church about the hills of Tennessee when he returned from his mission there, making homemade ice cream with rock salt in their ice cream freezer, waiting on the steps of the church for Mutual, or getting up at the crack of dawn for early morning Seminary. Which their mother taught.

There was a funeral earlier this week in my hometown of Big Piney, Wyoming, which I wanted to get to, but couldn't, so I'm going there in my dreams.

That funeral was for Rachel.

Rachel Anderson Scherbel.

As much as anyone growing up, Rachel was enormously good to me. Of course, like most children, it took me years to fully appreciate it. As a Seminary teacher she was extraordinary, knew her material, and every morning just after six o'clock. we were all huddled together in the chilly linoleum floored meetinghouse to study it. Now that I think of it, we should have had Seminary in their home; more kids would have attended. But the handful of us high school students who did attend learned a lot from Rachel, more than Scripture Chase, more than the history or theology of the church of our pioneer ancestors.

I think of Rachel always with her fashionable wing-tip heels and pumps, far too fashion forward for rural Wyoming, and her crisp suits, her Katherine Hepburn/Annette Bening good looks, and her New England sensibility. She'd occasionally substitute in the schools when one of our regular teachers was sick. I remember her being a frequent fill-in for my English teacher Harvey Graham. She knew her stuff. She knew how to keep a classroom in order. She commanded respect with her copper well coifed hair, her striking features, her presence.

I knew she had a brother who was a physician in Salt Lake. I'd visited their home once with Scott when for some reason we couldn't get anywhere else. I knew Rachel was well educated, had studied and taught outside the area, places like Cornell, the University of Vermont and the University of Utah, and had a view that extended beyond Big Piney, where her husband Paul N. was frequently mayor, or Sublette County, where they were both well respected, or even the western slice of Wyoming, where their hands and tools had touched much of the landscape, measured and charted it. Other people we knew had worked for Surveyor Scherbel, people like Rulon 'Shrimp' Woffinden and Maurice Zardus. When Annette married, her husband Bob Priddis came to work for Surveyor Scherbel, and later, Scott and Marlowe returned to work with their father as well. Now everyone is gathered back in the area, from Star Valley to Big Piney, continuing the legacy, a legacy that at last count includes 32 grandchildren and 42 great-grandchildren, who combined can speak over 17 languages, and who came to a little church in southwest Wyoming earlier this week to honor her.

I will miss Rachel. And I must pay tribute to her. I don't think of her as much older than I am now, a woman permanently frozen in my mind between her thirties and her fifties, striding confidently into church, well groomed, head held high. Paul N. always made sure everyone found a seat in our little hodgepodge of cold metal folding chairs and hymnbooks, then took his place comfortably in the rear to survey the congregation.

When I was younger, Rachel showed me books to read, and gave me odd jobs, like cataloguing them at the church library, to make extra money in a family where money was a more precious commodity than I at that time realized. She'd come frequently to my grandfather's house to borrow the odd book from him that had been acquired at Sam Weller's Bookstore in Salt Lake, or pick his brain. She'd send me notes of encouragement growing up to help me stay focused on what was important. She gave me a copy of 'W' magazine that had the most obscure article on "Quality" in it, and the notion and meaning of quality as it related to aesthetics. That single act had a more profound influence on me than most people will ever know or appreciate, as it came at a time in my own formative consciousness where being able to discern things of quality, and sharpen a critical eye, was important. Wool carpet. Parquet floor.

Rachel was a person of quality, a force of nature, a beloved wife, a revered mother, a cherished grandmother, a treasured friend, mentor and teacher. She will always remain in that place in my dreams, making ice cream, and sandwiches, walking into church, or school, arms around us all.

Suzanne Stensaas

2009-03-23T22:26:00.000-07:00

When I think of Suzanne Stensaas, I picture her with a brain bucket.

Every Friday around lunchtime during the years I worked at the University of Utah, the staff, residents and medical students in the Neurology Department of which I was a part would gather up their lunches and head to brain cutting--literally--where various interesting brains from (yes) dead patients would be sliced for viewing and scientific research.

Suzanne was the neuroanatomist in the department. Brains were her thing. Neurologists thought nothing of doing this over lunch.

Parkinsons brains. Alzheimers brains. Brains with bleeds. Normal brains. Abby Normal brains.

Suzanne was well known as an enthusiastic, larger than life character, extremely proficient in her field.

Suzanne Stensaas.

In 1986, a few years after I knew her, Suzanne gave up scientific research for teaching, and in 1990, she left the University of Utah, where she had been since 1969, and headed to New York City to teach at Cornell. She served on the medical college faculty at Cornell University until 1999, when she returned to the University of Utah to direct the neuroscience block in what was then the new curriculum of the medical school. She has remained in Salt Lake City at the University of Utah Medical Center since.

Suzanne was instrumental in the creation of the Slice-of-Life project, a multimedia medical education and information sharing project spearheaded at the University of Utah, and for over twenty years travelled the globe giving Slice-of-Life workshops to multimedia developers and medical science educators. She is also on the board of directors of the Health Assets Education Library (HEAL).

Over the years she has published numerous articles in medical journals on neuroanatomy, neuropathology, medical education and multimedia, and is well known and respected internationally as an authority, educator and speaker on the same. She has made an enormous contribution to the University of Utah health care system and neurological education, as well as the use of multimedia in the health care sciences.

Me, I always think of her at lunch. On Fridays.

Adriel N. Williams

2009-03-19T18:43:00.000-07:00

In the rural countryside of southwest England lies an airfield, long abandoned, where decades ago rows and rows of C-47 Dakotas lined up for parts unknown.

There's little left to mark the spot. A few of the original buildings are still there. The Jaquet Weston Plant memorializes those who previously called it home. A local pub fills pints and bellies not far away.

One of the great honors of my life was to be the dinner companion of a handsome, well spoken gentleman at a celebration in St. Louis, Missouri, a dozen or so years ago in the company of several hundred others. The ballroom of the hotel was filled with round tables of eight as far as the eye could wander in any direction, men and women in their finery gathered together in common purpose.

That gentleman, my dinner companion, was guest of honor.

The men in that room had all served under his command, fifty years earlier, in the fields of England and France in World War II. Men like Hal Read, and Marty Wolfe. Bill Elmendorf. Gale Ammerman, and Larry Riordan.

Adriel N. Williams.

Born in Shelby County, Kentucky, in 1916, Adriel Newton Williams went directly into pilot training following his high school graduation, received his wings in 1939, became an officer, and in 1942, assumed command of the 436th Troop Carrier Squadron (79th, 80th, 81st and 82nd Squadrons) of the Army Air Corps, a position he held through the end of World War II.

Primarily towing gliders and dropping paratroopers into combat in battlefields of England and France, the 436th TCG participated in major operations of the European theater, including the Invasion of Normandy (D-Day), Operation Market Garden (Nijmegen-Eindhoven), resupply of the 101st in Bastogne, and crossing the Rhine.

Following the end of the war in Europe, then Lieutenant Colonel Williams returned with the 436th Troop Carrier Group to the United States awaiting reassignment to the Pacific, but during their time back in the States the war happily ended, and the 436th was inactivated.

Colonel Williams subsequently attended the Air War College, graduating in 1953, and the National War College, graduating in 1959, assuming command along the way of several assignments, stateside and in Japan. In 1961 he was promoted to Brigadier General and served from that time at the Pentagon, rising to the position of Director of Transportation, U.S. Air Force Headquarters in Washington, D.C. in 1966.

Brigadier General Williams was decorated during his military service with the Legion of Merit with two oak leaf clusters, the Distinguished Flying Cross with three oak leaf clusters, the Air Medal, the Presidential Unit Citation, the French Croix de Guerre with Palm, and the Most Exalted Order of the White Elephant, Thailand.

He was witness to some of the most moving and profound events in recent human history. He was there for D-Day. He was there for Market Garden, when the eyes of Dutch schoolchildren turned upward to witness a sky filled with Allied paratroopers floating earthward. He was there for V-E Day. He was there for hundreds of young men to lead them into dangerous missions far away from the warmth of home and hearth, in the cold hills of southwest England, huddled in tents in France. Membury. Melun. Paris was a whispered promise away, on liberty, with bottles of champagne and daredevil pilots, French farmers who'd trade eggs for rationed cigarettes.

I am happy for the life of General Williams, happier still that he was there for those men of the Second World War, and happiest of all that a half-century later I had the great honor of becoming acquainted with him, sharing his stories, and seeing him be rightly honored by the men of the 436th--pilots, navigators, radio officers, businessmen, husbands, fathers, grandfathers--who paid tribute on that memorable autumn evening in a glittering ballroom in St. Louis.

For further reading about the 436th Troop Carrier Group, I can highly recommend two books written by members of the 81st Squadron:

First, from Martin Wolfe, a radio operator during WWII: "Green Light: A Troop Carrier Squadron's War from Normandy to the Rhine," 1993, Center for Air Force History (U.S), and

Second, from Gale Ammerman, a glider pilot during WWII: "An American Glider Pilot's Story," Merriam Press, Military Monograph MM65.

William Kent

2009-03-16T09:40:00.001-07:00

When I knew Bill Kent, he was a Safety Officer aboard Princess Cruises. Somewhere on board the Pacific Princess in Tahiti, I first remember him standing in dress uniform in one of the ship's bars regaling others with tales from cruising and a life at sea. I remember him recasting anecdotes--misbegotten burials at sea that involved sacks of potatoes, ships' propellers, and the inevitable persons-who-go-missing-from-ships-and-are-never-seen-again. As a Safety Officer, he was in a position to have seen and experienced just about everything there was to experience at sea. Somewhere between French Polynesia and the Hawaiian Islands there was Valentine's Day, a luminous full moon, and the requisite Crossing the Line ceremonies when we passed over the Equator.

The last time I saw him, it was Alaska aboard Sky Princess in the last days of summer 1992. We spent an evening in a bar in Juneau together after the ship's two senior officers, David Lumb and Roger Knight, couldn't agree on something. On a rainy Juneau night, Bill escorted me into town and we had a lovely evening standing up at a downtown tavern watching others shoot pool. Bill was first class company and a lot of fun. I remember him trying to protect me from the rain as I clip-clopped my way back to the ship in blue suede heels, magnificently inappropriate footwear for the Juneau rain.

William Kent.

William (Bill) Kent, of Lincolnshire, England, joined P&O (Peninsular & Orient), Princess Cruises' original parent company, in 1974 as a deck cadet, and served on a number of P&O/Princess ships over the years following. After training in Liverpool, he was promoted to the rank of Third Officer, and moved up the chain of command from there. As Safety Officer, he was in charge of passenger and crew safety drills, abandon ship procedures, crew safety training, and supervision of ships' tenders.

Since 2004, he has been elevated to the position of Captain aboard Princess Cruises, taking his first command aboard the Regal Princess. He holds the rank of Commander in the Royal Navy Reserve, specializing in amphibious operations and surface warfare. Currently, Captain William Kent has command of the Royal Princess as she does her 2009 World Cruise.

Caroline S. Mark

2009-03-15T20:40:00.000-07:00

If you wander halfway up the globe from the Equator, then a quarter way around the globe from the Prime Meridian, 45' N 90' W, you find yourself nestled in the pines of north central Wisconsin in a community that might be a million miles from anywhere, a place where lumber barons established empires and insurance companies dot the landscape, where dairy farmers mingle with industrialists.

Wausau. The faraway place.

It was in that faraway place, on a quiet street atop a hillside overlooking the city, that I became familiar with a tall, stately woman who would change the landscape of the community forever.

Caroline Schumann Mark.

Caroline could be unassuming, but she was compassionate, powerful, a force of nature, a force for good. She was the widow at the end of the street, and we frequently enjoyed her company for cocktails with mutual friends, now gone. There, perched above the twinkling lights of the city in little jewel boxes, we'd talk about times past, people past, ice in cocktail glasses on crocheted coasters, little bowls of nuts. Deer grazed beneath picture windows. Spring gave way to fall.

Sadly, Caroline is also now gone. But her legacy in the community is permanent.

Caroline Schumann Mark was born to Florence Ford Schumann and John J. Schumann, Jr. of Montclair, New Jersey. Her father was president of General Motors Acceptance Corporation, and her mother's father was one of the founders of IBM. Together, her parents formed The Florence and John J. Schumann Foundation (now the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy), whose primary stated purpose is to renew the democratic process through cooperative acts of citizenship. One of the directors of that foundation has been journalist Bill Moyers, who has served as its President. Caroline graduated from The Madeira School for Girls in Maclean, Virginia, in 1936.

Like her parents, Caroline's legacy is one of committed philanthrophy, unparalleled in the community. Along with her late husband, William (Bill) Mark, they worked tirelessly for the local Red Cross, the Boys and Girls Club, and countless other organizations in Wausau and elsewhere. The Wausau Conservatory of Music, the Performing Arts Foundation, and the Community Foundation were all enriched by her generosity. There's a Caroline S. Mark Recital Hall at the Conservatory, a Caroline S. Mark Gallery of Art at the Grand Theater, and a Caroline S. Mark Center for Students with Disabilities at Northcentral Technical College.

In the shadow of Rib Mountain, at the confluence of rivers, a community will never be the same because of one woman, whose name is literally everywhere, and whose memory, hopefully, will never be forgotten.

Caroline Schumann Mark, 1918-2002.

(Special thanks to the Wausau Daily Herald for the Caroline Mark photograph.)

Mary Kay Stout

2009-03-12T05:10:00.000-07:00

It's amazing the number of places a person can live in during college days. . .dorm rooms with six people, dorm rooms with two, apartments off-campus, hanging off of hillsides or just around the bend, basement apartments in old brick homes, and nice duplexes a drive away.

I did all of that, at one time or another, harvesting a number of fascinating roommates.

I won't soon forget the first day I met Mary K. Stout. She was living already in an apartment where I moved in, sort of a basement for five, six if you really pushed it.

She had a room filled with shoes. Imelda Marcos truly had nothing on her. And she had a yellow duvet cover on her twin-sized bed, with butterflies on it. The room smelled of shoes and duvet. She seemed an unlikely candidate for any particular fame, but she was clearly a lovely person, a few years older than I, working on an advanced degree in organizational behavior and business.

I didn't take much particular notice until another roommate told me that I should pay attention to Mary Kay's purse.

Her purse?

It was a Coach bag. I'd never seen one before, being a neophyte from the sticks of Wyoming, where I'm sure at that time Coach bags were a fairly endangered species. Wait. To be endangered they'd have to have been there at all. Pretty sure that wasn't the case. Wyoming was then a Coach-free zone, I can almost with surety swear.

Anyway, roommate #2 said Mary Kay's father had been someone famous, part-owner of the California Angels, a famous attorney, and Mary Kay was reasonably well heeled.

I wouldn't have known it. I was lost in a maze of shoes and duvet.

But, as I said, Mary Kay was lovely, salt of the earth. Would take her shirt off for you if you were cold. Would pay for an airline ticket for you if your father was dying, and not expect repayment.

Yes, Mary Kay. I haven't forgotten.

Mary Kay never really seemed Provo. She was really all East Coast meets California, but not the places in-between. Washington, D.C.? Yes. LA? Yes. But not Provo.

Well, I had a lot of adventures with Mary Kay, and she was very much like a big sister to me for the time I knew her. But that was a lifetime ago. I learned a lot observing her. She wrote the numbers on her own checks, so not to pay a monthly service charge. She was the first person I knew who had a money market account. She knew who was consulting for Mars, and how they were paying for their homes. She had a brother-in-law on the Anthropology Department faculty at BYU, for whom she frequently housesat. And paid bills in their absence. She worked on handicapped accessibility for businesses. She was a good friend to those who knew her.

Mary Kathryn Stout.

There's a scene from the movie "About a Boy" that always reminds me, in the oddest of ways, of Mary Kay. It's the scene where Hugh Grant's character admits that his claim to fame, and his means of support, is that his father wrote a very famous Christmas song, "Santa's Super Sleigh."

I randomly associate that fictitious anecdote with Gene Autry, who was for all practical purposes Mary Kay's godfather, since her father, attorney Clair Stout, was Gene Autry's personal attorney and business partner, famous in both D.C. and L.A. at one time or another, vice-president of The Autry Foundation.

Mary Kay disappeared from my life. Last I knew she was in L.A., doing consulting. Her mom had built a huge new home.

But perusing the pages of a Salt Lake City newspaper some months ago, I came across this article, about a woman, celebrating her 100th birthday: "Spry, Stout Lady Marks Milestone." The story was later picked up by USA Today.

It was my Mary Kay's mother, Iris Stout. Mary Kay, if you're out there, I wonder, like I do about the star, where you are. I'm here. And I'm okay.

Oh, and I know a lot more about Coach bags now. A lot more.

Lisa Orme Bickmore

2009-03-04T05:44:00.000-08:00

When I knew Lisa, she was part of a set.

A newlywed. Lisa Bickmore. Part of Steve and Lisa Bickmore. Salt and pepper shakers.

Part of a set.

Inseparable.

One never saw the one without the other. One never thought of the one without the other.

Of all the people who made up that wild assemblage of characters I loosely refer to as the "Fifth Floor Study Group" from my college days in the late '70's, Steve and Lisa were the only couple we thought of entirely in the singular.

Lisa was married to my roommate's cousin. Although they were both studying English, they seemed an unlikely pair. Lisa was far more bohemian, and Steve was all about Vegas.

The most notable thing about Lisa was always her irreverence. For the time and place, it was striking.

I still have a very vivid image stuck forever in my mind of her telling all of us what her new favorite word was, a four-letter word that was very out-of-place for the the university in which she'd chosen to study. To hear it now in the wider universe might not be as jarring, but there, in the late 1970s, in Utah County, Utah, it was a pistol shot. It wasn't The Big Lebowski. It was Provo. She was audacious, and amazing.

I remember the last time I saw Lisa, with her Steve. I had one piece of a mystery, and they had been given the other, by the same person. Apparently, the person who shared half-a-gossip with them didn't count on them running into me with the other half-a-piece. Mystery solved. Was that cryptic enough for you? I hope so. There were baby carriages, and state fairs, and literature, and stories.

Lisa's personality seemed to me far too large for the salt-and-pepper set, far too large even for the corner of the omniverse she inhabited. She should have been in the Village during the Beat Generation, or San Francisco in the Summer of Love, Paris as an expatriate.

She left the set. But not the name.

Lisa Orme Bickmore.

Lisa Orme Bickmore is a published poet, especially well known for her collection of poems published as "Haste" in 1994 by Signature Books. Her works have appeared in scholarly and literary publications, including Quarterly West and Mudfish. She is a professor of English in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Lovely bohemian. Lovely Lisa.

I still remember your favorite word.

Sterling Jenson

2009-03-03T12:18:00.000-08:00

Less than three short weeks after my seventeenth birthday, I gave the valedictory address at my high school graduation in Wyoming.

Two weeks later, I was off to college four hours away, as a very young freshman studying Interior Design and Philosophy at BYU, green, naive, impressionable, and very wide-eyed about being on a campus of 25,000 students when I had just graduated top in a class of 29.

I was a last-minute addition to summer term that year, having been awarded a scholarship to come early, in addition to the Presidential Scholarship they had already given me (at the time, the top scholarship, historically named after the current LDS Church President, was offered only to men, much to the chagrin of my father).

On the recommendation of a friend, I moved into an apartment at Campus Plaza for the summer, just off campus, where six of us, two from Boston, two from Salt Lake, an Arizonian and I, were crammed together in a very small space, with four beds in one bedroom and two in the other. One of my roommates, somewhat older, had graduated from Hillcrest High School in Salt Lake City, and thought it would be a splendid idea if I'd write to a friend and former classmate of hers from high school who was at the time serving as a missionary in in upstate New York, Rochester and Palmyra.

She pulled out her yearbook and showed me a picture. He seemed nice enough, with strong, chiseled features and piercing eyes; her description of him as a friend was equally persuasive, and I was happy to oblige.

I enjoyed the letters exchanged for the next few months. Sterling was a gifted writer and a faithful correspondent, and clearly had leadership skills. He was at the time assistant to the president of the mission, and when then LDS Church President Spencer W. Kimball made a visit to the mission, Sterling had much to do with the arrangements. I still recall his words from that time.

Sterling returned to BYU after his mission and completed his studies, active in student government. He went on to get a master's degree in business and entered the world of finance.

Sterling Jenson.

In his lifetime, Sterling has been a financial analyst for Ford Motor Company and Portfolio Manager for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Investment Department, in addition to managing trusts and investments for various other firms. He is currently Regional Managing Director for Wells Capital Management, a division of Wells Fargo & Company, responsible for over $4 billion in combined assets under management. He is recognized as a leading investment and finance authority in the Intermountain West.

LaVell Edwards

2009-03-01T07:31:00.000-08:00

At the corner of US Highway 189 and the main street in my hometown of Big Piney, Wyoming, there's a garage that opened in 1912 or thereabouts, when only two motorcars had even made their way to that particular corner of the sagebrush, A. W. Smith's Pierce Arrow and Gull Whitman's Ford.

In its strategic location at the corner of the two most important roads in the community, it served a growing population of those who'd given up four-legged transportation for that powered by the treasured fossil fuels under their feet.

Along the way, one of the proprietors of the Big Piney Garage was Irwin Covey, who'd taken over from Walter Yose, Sr. after he'd taken over from the original owners, Lawrence Bess and Gull Whitman. Along with his wife Louise, he ran what we all affectionately called "Covey's" at 101 Front Street.

At some point, he offered his son-in-law the chance to join him in his business, but his daughter Patti's husband decided to take a teaching job instead in a Utah school district, and the rest, as they say, is history.

La Vell Edwards.

Saying the name "LaVell Edwards" in Utah is like saying the name "Vince Lombardi" in Wisconsin. In 1972 he was offered the head coaching position at BYU football, a role he filled until 2000. At the time of his retirement, the team ranked sixth in all-time victories. He moved the BYU Cougar football program into a passing-dominated game, and had such notable quarterbacks as Jim McMahon and Steve Young under his wing. He completed the 1984 season 13-0, and was named National Coach of the Year that year after he led the Cougars to a National Championship. Prior to his final game in 2000, the BYU football stadium was renamed LaVell Edwards Stadium in his honor.

LaVell could have joined his father-in-law at the garage in Big Piney. But he chose a different path. College football will never be the same.

Johnny Whitaker

2009-02-26T11:38:00.001-08:00

Mention the name Johnny Whitaker to most people, and they recall fondly the television series "Family Affair" from the 1960's, a warm and fuzzy show headed by Brian Keith as a bachelor uncle who ends up raising two nieces and a nephew after they're unexpectedly orphaned.

Johnny Whitaker was 'Jody' of 'Buffy and Jody' on that show, a smiling, freckled, tousle-headed boy who charmed his way into the hearts of millions.

Prior to that show's run on network television from 1966 to 1971, Johnny had appeared in a couple of small roles, including as a very young Scotty Baldwin on the ABC soap opera, "General Hospital." During his time on "Family Affair," he had a memorable appearance as "The Littlest Angel" in the made-for-television special of the book, and after the end of his on-screen life as Jody, he famously appeared in the 1972 film "Napoleon and Samantha," co-starring a likewise young Jodie Foster. He teamed with Foster again in the starring roles of the 1973 musical version of "Tom Sawyer," which was nominated for three Academy Awards. It was from Jodie Foster that he got his first on-screen kiss.

Johnny appeared in numerous television shows and films over the next several years, including guest appearances on network shows like "Gunsmoke," "Marcus Welby, M.D.," "Bewitched" and "Green Acres." In 1973 he starred in the Sid and Marty Krofft series, "Sigmund and the Sea Monsters" as Johnny Stuart.

After graduation from high school in southern California, Johnny came to Utah to study at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and prepare to leave on a mission for the LDS Church, which is where I met him in the late 1970s. Like all young prospective missionaries then, Johnny needed to take the MLAT (Modern Language Aptitude Test), which at the time I administered weekly as part of my responsibilities at the Missionary Training Center, a place where missionaries came to spend several weeks doing intensive language and missionary training prior to departing for various corners of the world, domestic and foreign. One's performance on that particular test generally was a significant factor in determining where the missionary would ultimately be sent (those who did better on the test generally, but not always, tended to be sent to locations where language was more difficult). Afterward, I would score those tests and send them to the appropriate authorities for screening.

Johnny came up and visited with me for a while after the test, concerned about how he did. Happily, he did well, evidenced by the fact that he was sent to Portugal for two years on his mission.

Johnny and I enjoyed talking about the fact that at the time we both drove the same car. In fact, I'm fairly certain we had the only two Renault 5 ("Le Car") GTLs in the area. To have a chic little French car in Provo was, well, fairly unique. Mine was brown with a gold stripe and a sunroof, and had "Voulez vous Le Car Avec Moi" displayed prominently in the tiny rear window. Nice little car, that. 54 mpg. Long gone.

He was a really great kid, and I met him at a very interesting juncture in his life. It was not long after the horribly tragic death of his beloved "Family Affair" co-star, Anissa Jones, who played Buffy and had struggled with the challenges of surviving child stardom.

Two roads diverged.

Johnny came back from his mission and completed his studies at BYU, got a degree in communications, then formed his own computer consulting firm and worked in a Los Angeles talent agency, Whitaker Entertainment. He teamed in later years with psychiatrist Dr. Ron Zodkevich for a radio talk show, "The Dr. Zod and Johnny Show" broadcast on the Cable Radio Network. He has been actively involved in issues involving addiction and child stardom, and is a certified addiction counselor. He is President and Founder of Paso Por Paso, an organization whose primary focus is helping Spanish-speaking addicts receive treatment and enter recovery.

Like many child stars, John had his bumps in the road, but he's happily still with us.

Johnny Whitaker.

Enid Greene

2009-02-21T12:22:00.000-08:00

Back in the day when people still did that sort of thing, I met a young Enid Greene at an airport seeing off a mutual friend.

A few years later, she was married and elected to Congress as Representative from the State of Utah, only the third woman to ever achieve that distinction, and the first to do it as a Republican. Suddenly, she was splashed all over the newspapers.

Her campaign was accused of violating finance violations, and her husband, Joe Waldoltz, disappeared. When he suddenly surfaced, it became apparent that he had embezzled several million dollars of campaign funds. During his disappearance, she held a press conference to announce she was suing for divorce and custody of their daughter, and returning to use of her maiden name.

Her ex-husband pleaded guilty to federal charges and went off to prison. Enid rehabilitated herself in the Utah Republican Party.

Enid Greene.

After divorcing Joe Waldholtz and returning to her maiden name, Enid Greene agreed not to run again for Congress, and worked her way back up in the Republican Party in Utah, becoming Vice-Chair of the Utah Republican Party in 2003. In 2004, she unsuccessfully ran on the Republican ticket for Lieutenant Governor of Utah. She has remarried, and has her own radio show on a KSL radio. Her story is chronicled in the book "Blind Trust" by Lee Benson.

She is now Chair of the Republican Party of the State of Utah, and one of that state's electors.

Generose Gervais

2009-02-16T08:52:00.000-08:00

About a month into my husband's complicated and difficult hospitalization in the fall of 2004, some good friends, Stewart and Kathy Laird of Minneapolis, came to visit us at St. Mary's Hospital of Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where Larry was in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit.

Stew, a former hospital administrator in Wisconsin and Minnesota, wanted to visit a friend of his who lived at the hospital, a Franciscan nun, and he and I set out to find her while Kathy stayed behind in Larry's room to pray.

We wandered down the halls of the Mary Brigh Building to the corridors of the older Domitilla Building, until we were past the main visitors' cafeteria and just outside the sisters' dining room, where we came upon an older woman in hairnet and apron putting jars of homemade pickles on a cart.

"Excuse me," Stew asked. "Do you know where I can find Sister Generose?"

It was Sister Generose.

Despite her unassuming appearance on that particular occasion which might have given rise to any patient, visitor or unknowing staff passing her by, Sister Generose is the life and heart and history of St. Mary's Hospital and the Franciscan alliance with Mayo Clinic.

Not everyone knows that Mayo Clinic, a world class health care institution, came to be because of a tornado in a cornfield in August of 1883, a tornado that wiped out much of the town of Rochester and left many seriously wounded and in need of medical care. The Sisters of St. Francis were called upon by a local physician, Dr. William W. Mayo, to take in the sick and wounded and care for them. The sisters, trained as teachers, not nurses, cared for the patients through the crisis, and when it was over, Mother Alfred Moes, the spiritual leader of the Rochester Franciscans, recognized the need for a local hospital and enlisted Dr. Mayo to help her in creating it. The sisters would work to acquire the land, and open the hospital, and provide nurses for it, she explained, if Dr. Mayo would staff it with doctors.

It was then that St. Mary's Hospital, and Mayo Clinic, were born, and an alliance was formed between the Sisters of Saint Francis in Rochester and the Doctors Mayo, an alliance that continues to this day.

From the time of Mother Alfred Moes, there began an unbroken chain of Franciscan sisters who were administrators of St. Mary's Hospital--Sisters Joseph, Domitilla, Mary Brigh,

and Generose.

Generose Gervais.

Sister Generose Gervais was the last Franciscan administrator of St. Mary's Hospital.

Like the great women who went before her, there is a building a St. Mary's that bears her name, the most recent addition, which houses Mental Health and Addiction Services just across from the main hospital.

There are fewer than two dozen Rochester Franciscans who continue to live in community in the convent at St. Mary's Hospital of Mayo Clinic in Rochester. They wrapped their arms around me during the difficult eight months that we were there for Larry's prolonged hospitalization and fight for his life, took me in, prayed with and for me and him, and gave me strength I would not have had otherwise. Some of these women were at St. Theresa's College in Winona, Minnesota, at the same time my husband Larry was a student at St. Mary's, and some knew him later at a time he served on the boards of both St. Mary's and St. Teresa's. When I needed them, they were there for me, and I will never forget their loving presence, or underestimate the power and strength of the Rochester Franciscans.

Sister Generose Gervais continues to be a larger than life presence in the Mayo/St. Mary's/Rochester community. She works tirelessly for the efforts of the Povarello Foundation, which enables those who are less fortunate to be able to receive health care at Mayo despite an inability to pay.

And she makes world class pickles.

Mark Haddock

2009-02-07T04:15:00.000-08:00

For most of my childhood, there was only one grocery store in Big Piney. Burney & Company sat at the end of the only paved street in our town, at a curve in the road about a block from the high school, and when I was younger it was dark, with lightbulbs hanging from chains, and a single pot-bellied stove near the center where locals would gather to chew the fat. Thursdays we got produce, lettuce and tomatoes, which we eagerly awaited. Many townspeople charged their groceries for months at a time; the ranchers would come in before snowfall to buy supplies for the winter, and many wouldn't be seen again until spring if things got bad enough. As kids we'd run into Burneys during our school lunch hour and buy candy bars for a nickel and charge them to our parents' accounts.

Then one day, everything changed. The Haddock family moved to town, and decided to open a second grocery store at the other end of the street. There was a community contest to name the new store, and the winning entry became a fixture in our community--Haddock's Food Fair. The Haddocks were from Idaho originally as I recall, and moved into a house just a block down the street from ours toward Highway 189, the main route from Salt Lake City to Jackson Hole, the Tetons, and Yellowstone Park. It might as well have been a million miles from anywhere.

For a child growing up across the street from a power plant, barbed wire fences to keep cattle in and dogs and people out, and the occasional stray moose, there was no life except the constant subverted struggle between cattle and oil, the knowledge that the ranching dynasties of the community tolerated, but often resented, the presence of the more transient members of the community who came in by way of the petroleum industry, many of whom lived in subdivisions created by Belco Oil and El Paso Natural Gas for that purpose.

Because my father worked for a small, independent oil and gas company, we lived in town. We were among the fortunate few.

What I saw from that window was not just the sun rising over the Wind Rivers to the east, but the barbed wire fence across the street to the south, the alley way to the north where we burned garbage and played on propane tanks, and lots and lots of gravel roads, the occasional pine tree, and cottonwoods. Lots of cottonwoods.

For the winds of change to bring anyone else into that setting was something of a miracle. It wasn't just that there was competition in the grocery business. It was that change was coming. It was in the air, on the breeze floating like Forrest Gump's feather.

It was there.

Mark Haddock came on that breeze.

Mark was one of two children the Haddocks had with them when they came to town who were just older than I was, a young teenager at the time blossoming out into a world of possibilities. Mark wasn't a dime-a-dozen cowboy, or a roughneck's son, or a football jock. He was everything that world was not.

He was a drummer.

He belonged to that other-world of the interesting and relevant and not at all mundane, people who thought, and cared about political causes, and listened to music other than KMER, and somehow touched that consciousness beyond small town Wyoming. It was the world that only beamed into my bedroom at night after sunset when we could finally get the radio waves from Oklahoma City--KOMA --bringing the Bee Gees, and Carole King, and Rod Stewart into my store of permanent memory. It was the world I watched on television late at night after the rest of my family had gone to sleep, inhabited by the Dick Cavett Show. Mark dared to have longer hair, and be a musician, and think, and read, and hang out with friends he chose. In another place, he might have been a victim of redneck ignorance, but Mark was very popular and extremely well liked. He played the drums in band and stageband, and was the best drummer I'd ever heard. Ludwig drums and Zildian cymbals. He'd practice for hours, sometimes at the Legion Hall across town, with other musician friends who eventually formed a band. One of the greatest escapes in my life was to listen to that. I could escape the small town, and the four walls around me, and be free.

Mark had a John Cusack wit, and a SNL sense of humor. I loved being around that. I hoped my sensibility was sponge enough to soak up some of it, whether in the back of a school bus coming back from a school trip, or hanging out with his sister, Karen, who became a friend.

To this day I remember a lot of conversations I had with Mark, and many situations involving him, flashes of memory tucked away. He had a beautiful Irish Setter named Major, as I recall--Major Danny Boy Fitzpatrick--who'd run down the road in front of our house. Mark also had a motorcycle, a blue Kawasaki. Larry Vickrey had a similar one, different color maybe. Mark ended up dating a girl from Pinedale, but married a local girl, a few years out of high school. He went on to study music, then acquired several advanced degrees in business. Eventually he settled in Colorado, where he has made his home for the last several years, drumsticks still firmly in hand.

Mark became one of the founding members of the band Due West, and is now drummer for the Walker Williams Band.

Mark Haddock.

Mark was one of the most talented and interesting human beings I had the privilege of knowing, growing up in that small Wyoming town. I always knew he could do anything he wanted. And he did.

Barry Morgan

2009-02-06T02:09:00.000-08:00

My memories of Barry Morgan are all somewhat blurry and run together. He will forgive me for that, I think.

I mostly remember him in high school, driving around in a copper-orange car. Playing a trombone, and well, in high school band and stage band. Playing electric guitar in a rock band. Pax. I must have been fifteen then. Sixteen maybe.

But mostly, I remember that he was Becky's boyfriend, one of several she had over our teenage years. Becky was my dad's youngest sister, who lived next door to me growing up. She dated Barry Morgan for a while, so the lens through which I viewed him was primarily, during that time, "Becky's boyfriend."

I think of those as Vietnam years. Guys I knew just a few years older than I was were getting drafted and sent to war. Several were hoping to avoid the draft one way or the other. No one was particularly happy about the war that we watched on our television sets every night around dinnertime. Barry was one of those people who was hoping to avoid it.

He had an older brother, Steve, and together they moved into an apartment on the main street of our little Wyoming town with some other guys, mostly musicians, including drummer Mark Haddock. I seem to remember that they had a black labrador. I want to say his name was 'Nig.' But really, as I said, it's all something of a blur.

Barry was enormously talented. Like so many of us who grew up in that small town in Wyoming, he moved out, and on.

Happily, he continued with his music, and now lives and writes on the Oregon Coast. After being told six years ago he had only eighteen months to live, he has written, collaborated on and recorded over three hundred musical offspring.

Barry Morgan.

Never did I dream that that blur of memories would translate so exactly to Barry's music. But it does.

Lynne Cheney

2008-09-21T15:55:00.000-07:00

In fairness, Lynne Cheney and I have never met in person.

We are both Wyoming women, girls from the sagebrush of the windswept prairie and desert, whose lives have been significantly impacted by the oil and gas industry that competes for attention with the cattle ranchers of the Equality State.

But most importantly, we share a common ancestor, Ebenezer Peck of Rehoboth, Massachusetts, which makes us distant cousins. Our own respective Peck ancestors became Mormon pioneers and crossed the plains. Her favorite to cite is Fannie Peck; mine is Martin Horton Peck, who was part of the Nauvoo Brass Band in the glory days of the Mormon settlement, and later became the first blacksmith in the Salt Lake Valley.

Lynne Ann Vincent Cheney.

Lynne Ann Vincent was born in Casper, Wyoming, and attended college in Colorado. She is an author, historian, and from 1986 to 1993 served as Director of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

She is currently Second Lady of the United States, a position she has held since January 2001, and married to the Vice President of the United States,Vice President of the United States, another Wyoming native, Richard Bruce Cheney.

Marty Dread

2008-09-19T17:35:00.000-07:00

Many years in the month of March my husband and I found ourselves on the beautiful island of Maui.

And many times, in those many Marches, we found ourselves at the Sacred Hearts School festival in Lahaina, supporting the local parish school with its annual fundraiser, where we went to eat local food, listen to local musicians, get chair massages, buy silliness and seriousness, and participate in the silent auction. It was always a good time.

Rows and rows of picnic tables lined up behind the church next to tends of food provided by local restaurants and merchants, island food, served island style, and accompanied by island music. We always met the most interesting people at those tables.

One year, we sat down in an empty space at a table across from a man in a crocheted cap, with two little girls. One was obviously his daughter, and the other, apparently was her friend. They were gracious, warm and friendly. We sat and visited about the school. The daughter attended there, with her friend, and the dad was along to support.

At some point in the conversation, it somehow seemed appropriate to ask him about himself, what he did for a living.

His daughter snickered. "What does he do?" she replied, giggling, as though I should know. "He's Marty Dread!"

He suddenly stood up and removed his cap. Dreadlocks cascaded to his shoulders, and he shook his head.

Marty Dread.

That was how we came to meet Marty Dread. He was performing at the fundraiser, with his band, later that evening, a very famous (although we didn't previously know it) Hawaiian reggae performer in the spirit of Bob Marley, and a Rastafarian who sent his daughter to Catholic school and supported the school and the local community.

We stayed to hear him sing, and he was glorious. We went out next day and bought his CDs so we could have his music with us when we returned to the mainland.

Now, when we return to Maui, we go to the Hard Rock Cafe on Front Street in Lahaina on Monday nights, where Marty Dread can be found performing with his band when he's not touring elsewhere. And we remember that great night so many years ago when we first met him over some mixed plate, with a couple of little giggling girls.

Anne Osborne

2008-09-12T14:05:00.000-07:00

Shortly after college, I worked for two years in the early 1980's in the Department of Neurology at the University of Utah Medical Center in Salt Lake City, where I met and worked with a number of fascinating people who had an impact on my life.

One of them was Annie Osborn.

A graduate of Stanford Medical School, Anne Osborn was a neuroradiologist at the University of Utah, and as such, had a lot of overlap with the Neurology Department. She was at the time a single woman in her mid-thirties and a rising star in her field, well respected by her colleagues and by the medical students who trained there. She had a memorable persona, and a singular laugh that would echo down the hallway. Although not particularly old by any means, one wondered if she was likely to marry, and simply thought of her as being single, and very much a professional. The fact that she was an LDS woman, a professional, and single, was at the time somewhat noteworthy, and she was included in LDS Church publications writing on the very subject of being single in 1977.

Anne went on to write the definitive textbook on the subject of neuroradiology, and became the first female president of the American Society of Neuroradiology.

Anne G. Osborn.

Annie Osborn, the well respected, dynamic, neuroradiologist later married a General Authority of the LDS Church, Ronald Poelman, after the death of his first wife, and went on to have a successful career as an author, not just of numerous medical texts, but of religous and autobiographical works as well. Her book, The Simeon Solution: One Woman's Spiritual Odyssey, is her own account of her life and journey.

She continues to be on the staff at the University of Utah, and is well respected as an educator and author.

Brett Parkinson

2008-09-07T14:23:00.000-07:00

I was on an airplane coming back from who-knows-where in June 2002 when I picked up that day's copy of USA Today and saw a photo of Brett Parkinson directing volunteers in an organized search for missing Utah teenager Elizabeth Smart.

Brett Thomas Parkinson.

To his brothers, he was Tommy.

Everyone has that one indefinable person in their life; for me, that person was Brett Parkinson. I doubt his memory of our first meeting has faded any more than mine has. We were in Larry Best's Honors Freshman English class; I'd just read for the class my essay on Muffin Miller about my exploits as a 16-year-old cooking for a hay crew on a cattle ranch in southwestern Wyoming, and Brett, intrigued by the whole thing, pressed me to skip my next class, Poetry Writing, with Elouise Bell, to hang out with him in a booth in the Cougareat.

He was a bad influence. But lots of fun. I won't soon forget the first time he took me up to the Sundance Summer Theater in a VW he borrowed from his brother, and predictably ran out of gas. I won't forget doing laundry late at night with him and Thayne Larson. I won't forget our taking over Lorna Nielson's English class one day in her absence to read Woody Allen's "The Whore of Mensa" to the class.

Brett went off to Brazil by way of San Diego after our freshman year at BYU. I had the distinct privilege and great honor of seeing him off at the Salt Lake City Airport with extended family and friends and being his personal correspondent for the next two years. I won't forget that his aunt, Jackie Nokes, was "Miss Nancy" from Romper Room (I'd actually been a guest as a young child). I won't forget when he left. I won't forget when he returned, or the years that followed with a wider circle of ragtag friends at BYU. It's all fairly impressed in vivid memory.

Those were formative years.

The missives from Brazil were precious treasures--tales of Ipanema, and Copacabana, running on the beach, getting unauthorized tans, sipping much-too-bubbly guarana, waltzing on the edges of Carnival, noting the poverty of the Brasilian people perched on the mountainside in glaring contrast to the wealthy lower down, unfortunate and unexpected calamities, and of course, the colorful mission president who was a former Methodist minister, Helio da Rocha Camargo--sometimes accompanied by photos, or interesting cards, and the occasional highly entertaining and not easily forgettable audiotape, and all signed off in the same memorable signature. They contained much love for the father and mother he adored, a progressive, fit and well travelled physician father he greatly admired, and a strikingly beautiful and talented mother who reminded him of a young Marlene Dietrich.

I won't forget walking around the Joseph Smith building discussing the latest issue of Dialogue, singing Saturday's Warrior tunes, spending late nights at Perkins Cake and Steak, babysitting Aerie and Miel, or driving to Ogden to see our mutual friend Diana Sather. I won't forget him sitting outside the communal bathroom in our girls-only Heritage Halls apartment while I was soaking in the bathtub, which for BYU, seemed fairly provocative at the time. One of our first late night walks outside Deseret Towers mused on topics mixing the urbane and the theological in ways that were decidedly consciousness raising for a 17-year-old, and that typified many of our subsequent conversations. He was the face and sensibility of Ralph Fiennes atop a Trevor Southey mannekin, with equal parts of Ryan O'Neal from "What's Up, Doc?"

He was a runner, running from the desert palms of Indio and the Coachella Valley to the hills of Provo and the beaches of Rio and beyond. And he had an amazing facility for languages (as a freshman he came into BYU with the high score on the National Spanish Exam). He had a restless spirit, an inquisitive mind, and a generous heart, all gifts to those who knew him well.

Somewhere at the bottom of the Amazon is my copy of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" loaned to him, with copious notes in the margins.

Brett came back from his mission to Brazil not knowing whether to go into medicine (as his father and oldest brother had), or law (as another brother had). He eventually finished his degree in English at BYU, married well, violinist Kelly Clark, and went off to Tulane to medical school. I was working at the University of Utah Medical Center some years later when I saw her perform in concert on local television, with images of Brett in the audience and their newborn son.

Many years later I became friends, quite coincidentally, with one of his former missionary companions from Chicago; to identify that person with the "Elder West" in Brett's always colorful missives from Brazil was somewhat of a disconnect.

Dr. Brett Parkinson is now a radiologist practicing in Salt Lake City, Utah, and one of the leading authorities in the field of breast imaging. He recently led a medical mission to establish the first breast imaging and breast cancer clinic in the African nation of Tanzania.

Hight Proffit

2008-09-01T22:35:00.000-07:00

The first southern gentleman I ever personally met was my Uncle Hight. He and Aunt Dorothy had a ranch just outside Evanston, Wyoming, on the way to the High Uintas. Uncle Hight was a transplant from the Carolinas whose ancestors were all very much on the south of that Mason-Dixon line, and listening to him as a child was the first taste I had of the realities of the Civil War, that there were actually people who'd been on the southern side of it. It was all so very real.

He was the first person to sit me down on a milking stool and teach me to milk a cow, the first to show me baby lambs, the first to put me on the back of a seasoned old mare.

I loved going to their ranch in the summertime, loved Aunt Dorothy's boiled raisin cookies with chocolate chips washed down with fresh milk (okay, the fresh milk took some getting used to), their horses, the interesting things in the ranch house and the barn. I loved all of it. They were radiant and loving as a great aunt and uncle, and he managed to fit into the wilds of Wyoming in spite of being a Carolina boy.

Hight Moore Proffit.

Hight Moore Proffit was not just a rancher, or a Dixie charmer. He was a servant of the people. He served eight years in the Wyoming State Senate and two years in the House of Representatives. His wife, Dorothy Ardell Marsh Proffit, succeeded him in the Senate when he was unable to complete his term due to ill health.

He died January 30, 2002, at the age of 90.

David Obey

2008-08-27T18:29:00.000-07:00

Dave Obey is a son of Wisconsin. Most people don't realize he was actually born in Oklahoma; he's so ingrained in Wisconsin soil, so much a part of Wisconsin's story.

Most people also don't realize that Obey was originally a Republican. He's so ingrained in Democratic soil, so much a part of Democratic history.

Central Wisconsin has claimed Dave as its own for over fifty years, a former realtor who decided to run for office to see if he could do some good in the greater community. From 1963 to 1969, he served admirably in the Wisconsin State Assembly.

In 1969, he was elected to Congress to fill the seat vacated when Melvin Laird was tapped to be Richard Nixon's Secretary of Defense. Only thirty years old at the time, he was the youngest member of Congress then serving. Since then, he has been re-elected eighteen times, and is the longest serving member of either branch of Congress in Wisconsin's history.

David R. Obey.

David R. Obey is, and has been all these years, the face of Wisconsin's 7th District in the United States House of Representatives, a well respected, hard working, straight talking, passionate member of Congress, and current chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. He is also the author of "Raising Hell for Justice: The Washington Battles of a Wisconsin Progressive."

When not busy doing good in Washington, he's playing the harmonica. With the Capitol Offenses.

He has been a friend to many in our community for many years, and as a member of the Riordan family, I share in support of his efforts on behalf of those he's lifted throughout the years and express appreciation for the same.

King Fahd

2008-08-26T07:00:00.000-07:00

I've long said that Rochester is the great leveler.

When people come to Mayo Clinic in the cornfields of Minnesota for treatment, they come from all corners of the world and all walks of life, kings and presidents, priests and paupers. I recall being in town many years ago when then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in Rochester to meet with Jordan's late King Hussein, who was undergoing treatment for cancer at Mayo Clinic at the time. There were banners across the main downtown street, Broadway, welcoming both men to town.

Around that same time, several years ago, my husband and I were in town for routine medical care and staying in a hotel which was hosting several members of the Saudi Royal Family on its top floors, including King Fahd. As only Rochester can do, it brought us face to face, in a way that would not have been likely, or even possible, in most of the rest of the world. My husband and I went into the Concierge Lounge that morning for breakfast, prior to our planned checkout later that morning, and there were only two other diners in the room--King Fahd, and a male attendant. The all too young manager of the hotel was standing over the pair fussing to try to discern what it was that was required. Two female employees from the concierge staff also busily stood at the ready. But no one could understand what it was that His Majesty wanted, and there was clear and present frustration.

I stood up, begged pardon and asked if I might be of assistance, then explained to the hotel manager what it was that His Majesty wanted.

"Sweet milk," I explained.

King Fahd nodded at me in appreciation as I explained to the hotel staff what this was. His companion thanked me most graciously.

Anywhere else, that act of assistance, that encounter, might never have taken place, but in Rochester, we were all children of the Almighty at the mercy of our quest for competent and compassionate medical care, in the cornfields of Minnesota.

King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz al Saud.

I felt a special sadness later when I read of his death. Our paths had crossed, if only briefly, in this life in a simple act of compassion for a fellow traveller on the journey.

Martin Capp

2008-08-16T14:50:00.000-07:00

I was visiting my sister and brother-in-law in Logan, Utah, several years ago when he was showing us family pictures of his childhood.

"And this was the Capp home we built and lived in," he said, pointing to a picture of his family home.

It was phenomenal to me to actually meet someone who'd lived in a Capp pre-built home. Because Marty Capp was a friend of ours.

Flashback to days just after World War II.

Martin Capp was a young man from Wabasha, Minnesota, who decided to build homes. He needed windows for those homes, and contacted a window company in Wausau, Wisconsin, to see if he could get them. The person he ended up talking to initially at the time was my husband's father, Thomas Riordan, of Chicago.

His first request to get windows was unsuccessful.

Some time later, my husband placed a call to Marty Capp. Montgomery Wards had refused a shipment of a carload of windows--did he want them?

Many years later, at Marty Capp's 80th birthday party, eighty people were flown in for a week of festivities in Las Vegas,and at the black tie gala night I heard Marty Capp tell this story, right after comedian Red Buttons entertained us. It was the finest tribute I'd ever heard anyone give my husband. At Marty's high school graduation, he said, he'd been in charge of getting the entertainment, and hired a palm reader. That palm reader apparently told his fortune, and everything that person told him has subsequently come true. Including, as he told it, that an angel would come into his life and change his life forever. "That angel was Larry Riordan."

That transaction started a business relationship that co-existed as a deep and powerful friendship lasting well over fifty years. Marty was my husband's best customer, and my husband helped Marty when he was first getting his start in the construction business. It is a mutual admiration society that runs silent and deep.

Marty became one of the most successful builders of pre-built homes, Capp Homes, and later Martin Homes, and went on to build a number of office buildings and hotels in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. Several years ago, he bought a winter home in Las Vegas, where he also continues to do business as a builder and developer, well into his nineties.

He owns two hotels in Minneapolis currently, including The Millennium Hotel on Nicolet, the former Capp Towers Hotel. Their philanthropic efforts in Minnesota and elsewhere are well known and have benefited many.

Marty Capp.

I've had some great times with Marty and his lovely wife Esther. Some of them I can't repeat (something about Jaguars heading for the Mexican border, and professional women in Vegas tapping the wrong man's shoulder comes to mind, but it's a blur). Whether we've seen them in the Twin Cities, or in Vegas, at weddings, bar mitzvahs, or in their kitchen, we've had enormous fun, and their friendship is treasured. They were among those most faithful, most salt of the earth, during our protracted ordeal at Mayo Clinic, and I will forever be indebted to them for that.

So if you pass a building in the Twin Cities that was built by Marty Capp, raise a glass to him for me. And remember, that behind every successful man, there is a woman as incredible as Esther Capp.

Bettye Olson

2008-08-12T19:50:00.000-07:00

It seems appropriate to continue a Scandinavian theme, which leads me to Bettye Olson, Swedish-German by heritage, Norwegian by marriage, and very much a Minnesotan.

Bettye and Howard Olson have been friends with my husband for decades, and I was fortunate to inherit them when we married. No truer friends exist anywhere. Howard was best man at our wedding. They were steadfast in support of us during Larry's long and difficult hospitalization at Mayo Clinic, and made the journey down from St. Paul to Rochester on numerous occasions to be present personally.

I am fortunate to know Bettye, one of Minnesota's, and indeed the United States', premier watercolorists.

Bettye Olson is a Minnesota treasure. Her vision is singular and translates with seeming effortlessness to canvas. Part Emily Carr, part Georgia O'Keefe, Bettye sees the world, whether it's running water, a meadow, mountains, flowers, or rocks, and puts her own inimitable flourish of color on it for our enjoyment. In her career spanning over six decades, she has travelled the world, from Santa Fe to Sitka, Norway to New Mexico, bringing that vision to others.

I am blessed to have a number of Bettye Olson's paintings on the walls of my homes, some of which were already there when I married my husband, and others I've acquired since. But Bettye's paintings grace far greater venues, including major corporations in Minnesota and throughout the Midwest, and a number of universities.

Bettye Olson.

Bettye has had numerous shows and exhibitions worldwide and been active as both an artist and an educator, including as Director of the College of the Third Age at Augsburg, a position she held recently for several years. In late 2006 St. Catherine's College hung her show, "Persistence of Vision: Bettye Olson's Work in Retrospect."

Mark Sandberg

2008-08-12T09:10:00.000-07:00

I think of Mark Sandberg in soundbites.

What did Theodora's father do for a living?

Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc'd
Tereu

O do not ask "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.

When I met him, Mark Sandberg was a mild-mannered prodigy freshman at BYU who'd come in with off-the-charts test scores. We both haunted the fifth floor of the library and shared a common major at the time, Humanities, and had several classes together. He'd come from St. Paul, Minnesota, one of the three children then at BYU of well known educator, scholar and author Karl Sandberg of St. Paul's Macalester College. Together we were part of a motley assemblage of ragtag braniacs and liberals known as the "Fifth Floor Study Group," a core part of which came from the Twin Cities. I frequently had lunch with Mark, his brother Dave, and other Minnesotans at the Cougareat, and listened to them argue which was side of the river was superior, Minneapolis or Saint Paul, and whether or not Hardees truly had the best hamburgers. Together we studied existentialism, and art history, and pondered the great mysteries of the universe.

Like what Theodora's father did for a living.

Those were great times, with a million embedded memories. Kant and Hegel and Sartre and Camus and Art Bassett and James Faulconer and International Cinema and Cougareat.

I think I got pulled over once coming back from seeing Young Frankenstein at a drive-in movie theater in Springville, with Mark and his sister Stephanie in the car. We'd been laughing hard, and the car was weaving and bobbing in the pouring rain. What had I been drinking? the officer asked when he pulled me over to the side of the road and asked me to walk a straight line.

"Milk," I replied.

Mark Bennion Sandberg.

Mark went off to Norway on a mission and wrote back interesting tales of the midnight sun, and townspeople coming out after a long dark winter to chant, "Sola, sola."

Mark is now professor of Scandianavian Studies at the University of California at Berkeley and acknowledged expert in Scandinavian film studies. He is the author of Living Pictures, Missing Persons: Mannequins, Museums and Modernity, published by Princeton Press in 2003.

Judy Collins

2008-08-12T08:20:00.000-07:00

Judy Collins saved my life in high school. Of course, she didn't learn that until many years later.

When I finally met Judy Collins face-to-face, she looked a lot like this, with lots of miles both behind her and ahead, and wearing the bloom of a newlywed bride.

In high school, I survived by playing her albums, endlessly. Colors of the Day, Whales and Nightingales, The Best of, Judith. Sure, I listened to Joni Mitchell, too. And Carly Simon. But I was immersed in the life and music and words and wildflowers and mountains and dreams of Judy Collins, whether singing Leonard Cohen's lyrical magic or her own original semi-autobiographical folksongs. I can still sit down to a piano and play "My Father" from memory.

Carol Crockett and I used to sing "Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye" as a duet in high school, on long hours sitting in the back of a bus on school trips, or in the band room during choir practice. We always vowed we'd sing it at each other's weddings, wearing long gauzy dresses blowing in the breeze and flowers tucked in long flowing hair. We didn't.

But many years later, I was sitting in a hotel ballroom in central Wisconsin sharing wedding pictures with Judy Collins. And I presented her with my very well worn copy of her Judy Collins Songbook, dogeared and well travelled and practically memorized, still with wildflowers and notes falling out of the pages, for her to sign. She was visibly moved that I'd hung onto it all those years, and that it had meant that much to me. She'd come as the guest of Dave Obey, our local congressman who's a family friend, to speak about political issues. She signed my book.

I told her Carol Crockett had signed the back of her high school picture to me, "Judy Forever."

She understood.

Never did I imagine that when we'd finally meet, it would be like a couple of schoolgirls sharing wedding pictures.

But it was.

Judy Collins.

Joyce McKinney

2008-08-11T20:28:00.000-07:00

Joyce McKinney's name is rarely associated with anything tasteful anymore, barely uttered and difficult to find on Internet searches without turning up sordid tales of infamy, but when I first met her in 1973 I was a freshman in college, and she hung out with my roommate at the time.

Both of them were Osmond groupies. My roommate Karen was younger of the two, by four or five years, and would hang around Joyce, a former beauty queen with a southern accent and bleach-blonde hair, like an older sister. Both would hoof several hours to Vegas most weekends just to see the Osmond Brothers perform.

Joyce had a thing for the oldest of the performing Osmond Brothers, Alan, and then subsequently his younger brother, Wayne, which became relatively well known and teetered on stalking. My roommate Karen, from southern California, was self confessed as someone who'd converted to the LDS Church predominantly because of her devotion to the Osmonds (a well documented byproduct of the Osmond mania of the early seventies). She played their albums incessantly in our dorm room and regaled us with details of her trips to Vegas and encounters with the Osmond clan.

There was something more of fanatacism than fan in both of them, but Joyce particularly, and possibly even at least one screw, if not more, somewhat loose. But never would we have dreamt that sometime later, Joyce would become a household name in the tabloid press, when she kidnapped an LDS missionary in England and forced him into sexual bondage.

I remember well when the story surfaced in the late 1970's in Provo, although a continent away. I was administrative assistant to Dr. Marion J. Bentley at the time, and he remembered casting her in performances in the Theater Department. We all shook a collective head and clucked a collective cluck. Cluck.

Joyce McKinney.

Joyce McKinney went from beauty queen to Osmond chaser to missionary chaser to sleaze queen. Rarely is mention found of her anymore without a reference to something entirely distasteful in obscure press, and rarely can a picture be found of her anymore worth reposting.

When I knew her she was slightly more interesting. Never did we dream she'd be infamous.

Just this past week, a news story hit the media about cloned puppies, and their owner, Bernann McKinney.

As it happens, "Bernann" and "Joyce" are one and the same.

Sam Houston Allred

2008-08-06T20:38:00.000-07:00

My path crossed Houston Allred's on the high seas, in a much entangled tale of transatlantic crossings, tea concerts, and fateful encounters with destiny.

Somewhere between New York and London I first heard him perform Jerome Kern songs to a room full of mostly wide eyed fading ingenues, older women on board in search of adventure and romance, or any combination of the above, and perfectly content to take it served up in piano keys and cabaret crooning. Not long after, the ship's entertainer was joining our dinner table as the guest of my travelling companion, and our eight-day passage read like a well cliched script of a 70's TV show.

I left my past on one shore and met my future on another. But in between there was caviar and champagne, laughter and dancing. There was even a birthday party, my 36th. Houston Allred was there.

We docked in Southampton. I went off to Surrey with friends. My travelling companion went off to London to meet my future husband. Houston Allred later came to our little community back home to perform a series of dinner concerts at the local social club.

Sam Houston Allred.

Named for the first president of the Texas Republic, the person born as Sam Houston Allred in 1937 began auspiciously enough, born in the Sam Houston bedroom of the Executive Mansion in Austin, Texas, where his father was serving his second term as governor. His first magazine spread was at the age of three days, gazing up at First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt from the arms of his mother on the pages of Life.

After a lifelong career as an entertainer, with featured roles on Broadway, in clubs and cabarets, and on cruise ships around the world, Houston can now be found most of the time in the sparkling city by the bay, where he is a popular entertainer in San Francisco nightclubs and cabarets.

Bobby Shew

2008-08-06T19:24:00.000-07:00

The Bobby Shew I knew in the 1970's looked a lot more like this, young, trim, vibrant, and a very talented horn player who went around the country doing workshops for student musicians. I first met him in Rock Springs, Wyoming, the year after I graduated from high school when I accompanied a group from my alma mater to meet him and learn from him.

I was mostly impressed by his lifestyle choices at the time, choosing to give up sugar and red meat, well ahead of the curve on both.

As talented as he was as a musician, he was an effervescent dinner companion, a fascinating student and observer of life and human nature.

We corresponded for a time, then some years later I found myself in a late-night beachfront nightclub in Malibu, California, with a friend, where Bobby Shew and some other musicians were performing. I had the waiter send him a drink, with a note I'd written on a cocktail napkin: "Kathy Lawrence is sitting in the audience and is sending you this drink."

He interrupted his set with a spontaneous, "Kathy, where * ARE you???" and crossed the smoke-and-jazz filled room to join us at my table for catch-up.

Bobby Shew.

It was the last time I saw him in person, but I've followed his career, and his music, and been appreciative than our paths crossed. I still think of him every time I contemplate forgoing sugar, or meat, or think back on reading esoteric books like "The Hindu Yogi Science of Breath."

*Actually, it was probably "Where the (expletive related to the netherworld) are you???"--edited for content.

Marilyn Syra

2008-08-05T23:08:00.000-07:00

Marilyn will laugh that I am including her in a blog on famous people, but she seems to have made her mark.

I remember, as though it were yesterday, growing up with Marilyn. From elementary school through high school graduation, she was a classmate and good friend. I especially remember convincing her to take up playing the flute, something I began in fifth grade with only moderate success. I wanted a friend of mine to also play, so I talked her into learning the instrument, never knowing how well she'd do with it, or how far she'd go in music.

Marilyn thrived on the flute. Literally. She went straight to first chair, while I languished in mediocrity, and then moved on to bassoon my sophomore year of high school, and later tympani. We were together in concert band, stage band, marching band, and choir, all the way through high school graduation. Marilyn did well in solo flute competition and was in the Wyoming All State Band.

I remember early junior high days when we'd listen to whatever latest Monkees album over and over, memorizing all the songs. Some weekends I'd sleep over at the trailer in the oil company subdivision where she lived with her parents. We had some great times.

I lost track of Marilyn for an extended period after high school. We went off in different directions, both of us to college. She declared a major in music, and I studied design and philosophy. Fortunately, she took the musical experiences we had growing up in Big Piney and made a difference in the lives of others with that.

Marilyn Syra.

Marilyn is now the band director at Tooele High School in Tooele, Utah, a position she has held for sixteen years, leading the concert, jazz and marching bands. She is beloved by her students and I have no doubt is an outstanding educator and mentor to them.

Tim Flaherty

2008-08-04T21:27:00.000-07:00

Tim Flaherty is a grandfather to four of my grandchildren, and the namesake to one of them, Timothy Thomas Flaherty. He and his wife have raised a family in Neenah, Wisconsin, while he has been engaged in a successful practice as a radiologist in the Fox Valley area for several decades. In the summertime they enjoy time at their cottage on the lake in northern Wisconsin.

But Tim is better known nationally as a former trustee, and recent Board Chair, of the American Medical Association (AMA) from 2001-2002.

Timothy Thomas Flaherty.

Matthew Tueller

2008-08-04T21:08:00.000-07:00

The first time I ever heard the name "Matthew Tueller," his sister, my college roommate at the time, and I were at the local post office to mail some books to him in Spain, where he was then serving as an LDS missionary. The conversation as I recall it was along the lines of "Where have all the good men gone?" and Anna mentioned that her brother was really something extraordinary.

I had the great pleasure of meeting and becoming acquainted with Matt Tueller (center, photo above) after he returned to resume his studies at BYU, along with several of his siblings (Jan, Anna, Marie and Diane particularly) from a sufficiently large family of ten children that had been raised around the globe, from Northern Africa to Europe to Latin America, as their father had served in the diplomatic service for the U.S. State Department. I really admired their mother. I'll never forget what she told me once, and I've repeated it often to others. She said that wherever she went with her family, even though she knew it was ultimately temporary, she put down roots and made a home. I know that served all of them well.

Matt had some Arabic from living in Morocco, accompanied by good tales and clever folding leather coin purses. He also possessed a good heart and a very human soul, along with the keen intelligence and joie d'vivre shared with his siblings. He was absolutely as his sister had described him, "one of the good ones." There was no doubt he had a big life ahead of him.

The last time I clearly remember seeing Matt we were sitting in a car in the rain in a parking lot in Provo, Utah.

Matthew Tueller.

Matthew Tueller finished his degree in International Relations at Brigham Young University and went on to Harvard, and subsequently followed his father's footsteps into the U.S. State Department, where he has in recent years had a number of postings in the Middle East, including Political Counselor for the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia and Charge d'Affaires/Deputy Chief of Mission for the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait and Political Counselor for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq.

He is currently Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt.

Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke

2008-08-03T17:46:00.001-07:00

I did not know the rural Wisconsin farm boy, youngest of six children, who entered the seminary, went off to Rome, and was ordained a priest by the late Pope John Paul II.

I met the priest who'd been in Rome as a canon lawyer and became a bishop, only to return to serve the people of his rural homeland in Wisconsin, the descendants of European immigrants in the American heartland along the banks of the Mississippi.

My husband had known Bishop Burke's three predecessors well, Bishops Treacy, Frekking and Paul. We had been given a special blessing by Bishop Paul shortly after our marriage prior to departing on our honeymoon. And my husband had known "Father Burke" prior to his departure to Rome as a member of the Diocese of La Crosse.

But I came to know him shortly after our marriage, meeting him for the first time when we attended an anniversary celebration for Marriage Encounter in Marathon, Wisconsin. I was struck then by his intelligence and the strength of his spirit, and came to know over the subsequent years the great depths of his holiness. Whether vacationing on the beach in Sanibel Island or ministering to his flock in central Wisconsin, he was always that rarest of things, a truly holy man.

It was always clear that God had great things in mind for this servant shepherd. And the Mother of God entrusted him with the great task of building a shrine to bring the faithful to her Son.

Divine providence took him in 2004 from the banks of the Mississippi in Wisconsin to the the banks of the Mississippi in Missouri, when he became Archbishop of Saint Louis, and now takes him again back to Rome, as Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, the chief judge of the highest canonical court of the Roman Catholic Church and Archbishop Emeritus of Saint Louis.

On November 20, 2010, he was elevated to the position of cardinal in the Holy Roman Catholic Church by Pope Benedict XVI at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke.

He will always be to us a treasured friend, someone tapped on the shoulder by the divine, servant of God and His people, devoted son to a loving mother, a leader, a visionary, an example.

Secundum cor tuum.

Lola Van Wagenen

2008-07-25T22:39:00.000-07:00

At the end of my freshman year of college at BYU, I injured my left knee in a fencing tournament. That single misstep dictated the next several months of my life, through consequential knee surgery in Salt Lake City, and subsequent recuperation over the summer months at home in Wyoming. Good friends rallied around me and helped keep my spirits high with trips to Jackson Hole and Pinedale, helicopter rides and fine dining, dances, music, and distraction.

When it came time to return to Utah in the fall of 1974, one of those friends, a classmate of mine from high school, decided to drive down to Provo with me, and I took her, en route, on a late August drive up Provo Canyon to Sundance. John Denver was playing on the car stereo, "Rocky Mountain High." Water was rolling swiftly downstream over boulders while the sun, truly, danced through the aspens as we wound up the scenic drive to the place that had become a special place of refuge for me from the intensity of university life, a place where one could hear the air, and the mountain. Timpanogos.

Pam was enchanted. The lure of the setting was so complete, she decided to move to Provo, to work and possibly go to school, instead of staying home working in the oil fields or cattle ranches of Wyoming.

Fall came, the aspens turned their brilliant gold, and the first snow fell.

We went up to Sundance to apply for work.

Shortly thereafter, around the Christmas holidays, I received a post-interview call from Sundance. The good news was, they were offering me the job. The bad news was, the offer was for me, and not for my friend, Pam.

By that time, I'd decided to return to school, so I turned down the offer and asked them to offer the position to Pam, which she happily accepted.

The job turned out to be governess to the children of Bob and Lola Redford.

Pam became an extended accessory in the Redford household in the mountains at Sundance, doing all sorts of odd jobs, including picking up people like Paul Newman at the airport in Salt Lake City when he'd fly into town, helping with the household, and running the then school age children of Bob and Lola Redford here and there.

I went back to school. At that point two roads truly diverged. Pam worked for Redfords for an extended time, then left, living up the canyon. I continued with my studies.

Alone, this would be an interesting story.

But the world, as usual, shrinks to fit.

Another friend of mine also knew the Redfords. Brett Parkinson had family connections, an older brother who'd met Lola in New Orleans when he was a medical resident at Tulane. In addition to being a local dermatologist in Provo, Rick Parkinson occasionally taught creative writing classes in the English department at BYU. One semester I sat in from time to time, and there, among the students, was a slightly older very attractive woman who clearly had a gift for writing. The students only knew her as "Lola," and when she read her essay to the class on someone she knew, "Bob" was to them, just her husband.

They didn't know "Bob" was Robert Redford.

Lola was a striking figure, elegant in simple denim, who carried fringed leather beaded purses, drove a Porsche, fast, and liked to go antiquing.

I attended the Women's Conference at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City in 1977, where, amid controversy over potential passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, nearly 14,000 people converged at the culmination of the International Women's Year. One of the featured speakers was Lola Redford. Brett, unable to be there, had asked me to record her speech for him. As she spoke of her years as a young mother married to a struggling actor in New York, newly involved in consumer issues (she founded CAN, Consumer Action Now, in 1970) I had an epiphany.

This was not "Robert Redford's wife."

He was Lola Redford's husband. She was a force of nature.

Lola Van Wagenen.

Lola's own path subsequently diverged, and Lola Van Wagenen went back to school, got her doctorate in American history from New York University, and became founding director of CLIO Visualizing History. She produced the documentary Miss America: A Documentary Film for the PBS series, The American Experience, and has served on a number of national boards, continuing an over thirty year involvement with educational and consumer action issues that have always been her passion.

Diane Stirland Matthews

2008-07-25T18:53:00.000-07:00

Diane Stirland Matthews (front row above, second from right) became a part of our family when she married my uncle, Elmo Matthews. Together they raised a family of six children in Glendale and Mesa, Arizona, until his untimely death from a heart attack in 1983. Elmo had been left alone at home that day to care for the youngest of their children, Blake, and Diane's life was immediately turned upside down as a result. She successfully raised a beautiful, cohesive family of four girls and two boys to adulthood in the face of the challenges of being an unexpected single parent.

Though I was a young girl, I remember when Elmo first brought Diane home to meet his parents and the rest of the family at the motel my grandparents owned in Evanston, Wyoming. Elmo had been in the military, served an LDS mission to France, and studied both at BYU in Provo, Utah, and abroad in England at Oxford before settling down to marry, and Diane was the woman who eventually won his heart, and made his home.

Diane has always been, from first introduction to the present, elegant, gracious, poised, articulate, and above all, a good mother.

In 1998, it became clear others thought so, too. Diane was recognized for those qualities when she was honored with the title of 1998 National Mother of the Year by American Mothers, Inc.

Diane Stirland Matthews.

Bill McManus

2008-07-25T09:56:00.000-07:00

At the back of my husband's neck, there is a scar he got from being thrown off a wooden raft on the Tippecanoe River in Indiana as a young boy.

The culprit who had thrown the young boy from the wooden raft? A young seminarian named Bill McManus, who was visiting the Riordan cottage in Indiana with his close friend, my husband's older brother, Tom Riordan.

Some sixty years later, I was sitting in a crowded church in a northern suburb of Chicago as that young seminarian was being laid to rest. Over fifty U.S. Catholic bishops were in attendance, as was the mayor of the city of Chicago. As much as funerals can be, it was a glorious occasion, white flowers everywhere, celestial choirs, and I'm sure, the deceased himself very much present. As would be typical for the impish Bill McManus, but not for a priest's funeral, a collection was taken--to support his favorite personal cause, helping young single mothers. Bishops from Alaska to Florida were asked to empty their pockets, generously, at what was otherwise a solemn occasion.

I'll never forget the first time I met Bill McManus, at a hotel in La Crosse, Wisconsin, while attending a jubilee celebration for then La Crosse Bishop John J. Paul. After joining him and Bishop Timothy Lyne of Chicago for dinner and conversation, he paid me the highest compliment I've ever received as a married woman.

"Kathy," he said, "meeting you makes me wish the Pope would change his mind about retired Catholic bishops being able to be married."

It was high praise indeed from someone who had chosen to give his life in the service of God and his fellow man.

Bishop William E. McManus.

Bishop William E. McManus went on to graduate from seminary and was ordained a priest, later to become Auxiliary Bishop of Chicago and Bishop of South Bend, Indiana, a position he held from 1976 to 1985. A close friend of well known sociologist and author Father Andrew Greeley, together they authored a study on Catholic giving.

Bruce Bastian

2008-07-25T09:53:00.000-07:00

Bruce Bastian was, while I was in college, the enormously popular conductor of the BYU Cougar Band, Brigham Young University's award winning marching band. Charismatic, single, and very talented, band members were happy to have him at the helm.

For a time I dated one of his roommates, and at various times I had more than one friend in the Cougar Band, so I would occasionally attend rehearsals.

Bruce Bastian.

Amid some sort of contract dispute, Bruce's tenure as a music major/instructor leading the Cougar Band finally ended, but a software program he developed while trying to choreograph band performances launched him into a whole new world, and life.

With co-founder Alan Ashton, Bruce created WordPerfect in 1978, and is now a billionaire philanthropist and social activist.

Jocelyn Matsuo

2008-07-25T08:31:00.000-07:00

The last time I saw Jocelyn Matsuo, she was a toddler in arms, the firstborn child of the neurologist I was working for at the University of Utah at the time, Fred (Fumisuke) Matsuo and his wife, cardiologist Ruth Ann Smith. I probably have a photo somewhere of me holding her at their then beautiful new home up in Summit Park outside Salt Lake City.

But that was over twenty-five years ago. Jocelyn was a beautiful child.

In March of 1999, a news item caught my attention. A Utah teenager, on a school trip to Costa Rica, had amazingly survived an attack by over 250 killer bees. The fifteen-year-old hiker who had stumbled upon the next of Africanized bees and lived to tell the tale?

Jocelyn Matsuo.

Her life spared from the bees' potentially fatal wrath, Jocelyn Matsuo is now a professional actor, performance artist and mime.

Patrick J. Lucey

2008-07-25T07:35:00.000-07:00

A decade ago, my husband was preparing to take me on a surprise trip to celebrate my birthday and our anniversary, both of which fall at the end of April. The secretive details of this mystery trip were held closely to my husband's vest as we anticipated what promised to be a wonderful journey regardless. Other than the travel agent helping with the arrangements, no one knew where we were going.

I had my suspicions, but I kept them to myself.

The Sunday before our departure, we were invited to join some good friends of ours for lunch. Our hostess had invited her cousin to join us.

Like me, our hostess, and her husband, long time friends of my husband from college days, had no idea where we were going on our upcoming trip, and she delighted in the prospect of guessing. Her cousin was invited simply because he happened to be "in town," and my husband, a former industrialist, had known him for many years.

That cousin was Pat Lucey.

Patrick J. Lucey.

Patrick Joseph Lucey was Democratic governor of the great state of Wisconsin from 1971-1977, when my husband knew him best, working with him in industry. In 1977, then President Jimmy Carter appointed Pat Lucey to become Ambassador to Mexico, a position he held until 1979. In 1980, he was tapped as a vice presidential candidate by Independent candidate John Anderson.

We had a delightful brunch, and spent much of it talking about his time as Ambassador to Mexico, and about Mexico City specifically, a city I had never seen, and the best restaurants there, sights to see and things to do.

Our trip a few days later? You guessed it. And the coincidence was too remarkable for words, so so did I.

Mexico City.

Noall Wootton

2008-07-15T08:56:00.000-07:00

For most of my father's adult life, he worked for a small independent oil and gas company in southwestern Wyoming which was owned by Utahns J. Tracey Wootton, an industrialist and investor who had initially made his mark on local energy in the 1920's with his involvement in coal production, and O. Devere Wootton, a well known Utah county attorney who also served as mayor of American Fork. Though a state away from us, we were aware of the Woottons and their presence in our lives.

When I graduated from high school, I was shown a great kindness by Devere's wife, Nora Prows Wootton, who sent me a string of pearls accompanied by a lovely handwritten note. Sadly, she passed away last year before I had the opportunity to fully tell her how much that gesture meant to me. The last time I recall seeing her she and Devere were passing through Big Piney on their way to Jackson, pulling a fully outfitted trailer behind them (so she wouldn't have to worry about what she thought might be dubious accommodation availability in Jackson hole). It was the first time I'd ever seen a trailer with toilet and shower facilities, and she was happy to give us a tour.

Eventually, Devere's son, Noall, came to work with him at the firm known as Wootton and Wootton in American Fork. My father was fond of saying, "If anyone ever comes after you, tell them you'll just call your personal attorneys--Wootton and Wootton."

Fortunately, that was never necessary. But it made a brave bluff.

Noall T. Wootton.

But Noall Wootton didn't make his mark on the world simply as the son of my father's employer, or even as a small town lawyer.

Noall Wootton made his mark by being the county attorney who prosecuted Gary Mark Gilmore in a landmark case which ended in the first execution after reinstatement of the death penalty. Gilmore was executed by firing squad in January 1977; his story was made famous in Norman Mailer's acclaimed book, The Executioner's Song.

Noall Thurber Wootton died April 27, 2006, at the age of 65 of cancer.

Robert J. Matthews

2008-07-15T07:36:00.000-07:00

I used to spend quite a bit of time at my Grandma Elsie's house in Evanston, Wyoming, when I was little. "Grandma" Elsie was actually my great-grandmother, Elsie Gulliver, who'd converted to the LDS Church in England as a young woman and left, as she described it, "the green lanes of England for the sagebrush of Wyoming." She married my great-grandfather, Roland Matthews, another convert from England, after both had come to this country by way of Salt Lake City, and eventually they made their home in southwestern Wyoming, where Grandpa Roland was a barber.

Grandpa Roland was long gone before I was born, so I never knew him. But I loved my time at Grandma Elsie's little version of an English cottage in Evanston, complete with its own English cottage garden outside. I loved her tales of the Royal Family, her British mannerisms and traditions, her little porcelain bric-a-brac, her cakes, and her love of all things English.

Of all the treasures I remember being in her home as a young girl, I especially remember how she kept a photograph of her youngest son, her baby, Robert, on her dresser, alongside a photograph of his bride, Shirley. She spoke of him frequently and with special tenderness. She'd raised a large family, seven boys and just one girl. My grandfather, Victor, was the oldest of this brood, and Robert, well, Robert was the caboose. She loved him dearly.

So when I think of my uncle Bob, it's framed in the special tenderness of the eyes of his mother, eyes that eventually were clouded over and unable to see clearly except through the heart.

"Uncle Bob" went on to greater things than just his sphere in Evanston, finishing his studies and entering the LDS Church Educational System. Eventually he became Dean of the College of Religion at BYU. Probably his most significant achievement and most noted distinction, however, is in being the first person from the LDS Church that the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (RLDS) ever allowed to view or handle the original manuscripts of the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible (or "Inspired Version," as it has been alternately known), and he was instrumental in bringing the fruits of his efforts back to the LDS Church. He has been a popular educator for many years, in Seminaries and Institutes, and as a college professor. He is a popular speaker at devotionals, firesides and BYU Campus Education Week programs, and a highly respected author and scholar, particularly on the New Testament, John the Baptist, the Apostle Paul, and the Joseph Smith Translation. When the LDS Church decided to compile an Encyclopedia of Mormonism, he was central to that effort.

On the occasion of his 80th birthday last year, several of his collegues honored him with the publication of a collection of essays in his honor, A Witness for the Restoration: Essays in Honor of Robert J. Matthews.

During my own time at BYU, I took both semesters of New Testament from him, and came to appreciate him not only as an uncle but as a New Testament scholar, and a gifted teacher with a wry smile, a twinkling eye, and an ever present sense of humor. He is well loved for a reason. I will always treasure the unique way he autographs books--with a weather report, "Partly cloudy today, some sun. Looks like it might rain. RJM"

Robert J. Matthews.

Susan Cook Northway

2008-07-15T07:14:00.000-07:00

Susan Anne Cook Northway was my vocal music teacher in high school. She arrived the first day of my freshman year at Big Piney High School, along with her husband, Ernie Northway, who taught instrumental music, band and stageband.

Susan Cook Northway.

In addition to leading the concert choir, Susan Northway taught art, and had a great talent for it. She had a sister who was a professional artist, and Susan's own talents in that department were apparent. As I did with her husband, I learned many things from Susan Northway, and particularly honed my skills in music appreciation and listening. When I wasn't singing in the high school choir, groups or solos, I was accompanying them. I still have a little statuette on my piano in Wisconsin that says "Frederick Chopin Piano Award," an award she dubiously bestowed upon me in high school in the absence of any great talent on that score. My piano skills were serviceable, nothing more, but I enjoyed my time at a keyboard, as I enjoyed singing.

I remember well the day she said to me that I was clearly a generalist and not a specialist, sort of good at a number of things but not particularly excelling in any of them. It was true my interests were broad and the energy and tunnel vision required to single in on one of them was lacking. But there are many things if I could go back and repeat those years in high school now I would do differently with the three decades of hindsight.

I got to know Susan Northway outside the classroom particularly when she had her first child, and I babysat for them briefly after my high school graduation. They lived in the "teacherages" then, school district supplied housing across from the high school, and I still remember her list of phone numbers for Poison Control near the telephone, sitting on her front stoop, and visiting with her in her livingroom as she explained to me about liturgical calendars. (Susan and Ernie had come to Big Piney as Unitarians from Iowa, not particularly religious that I could detect, but as time progressed she seemed increasingly involved with the local Episcopal Church and its trappings, and my only introduction to liturgy in that sense was being included with other high school choir members in participation in its midnight service on Christmas Eve.)

I also remember, the summer after my freshman year of college, being asked by her to model for a drawing class that was doing live modeling near Pinedale. I was supposed to wear a leotard, I was told, so I showed up in the only leotard I had--a black one, only to be told later that it should have been flesh colored. If there were flesh colored leotards to be had in all the state of Wyoming at the time, it would be news to me. In any case, my picture was sketched by several there, and my modesty was intact.

Susan and Ernie Northway later moved to Salt Lake City, where they taught in the local schools and raised a family.

She is now Director of the Office of Religious Education for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City, after several years of teaching religion in two local Catholic high schools.

My first introduction to liturgical music came at the hands of Susan Northway in high school choir, although I didn't realize or fully appreciate it at the time, a Unitarian from Iowa in her late 20's with long red hair, braces, short skirts and fishnet stockings who clearly had an aptitude for the divine, as I did, beyond the great appeal of smells and bells.

Patrick Maney

2008-07-15T07:02:00.000-07:00

For more than a half century, Tom and Blanche Maney were two of my husband's closest friends in our community in Wisconsin. So when I married him, his friends became mine, and no friends were more cherished than Blanche and Tom.

I first met their son, Pat Maney, and his wife Elaine, when they were living in New Orleans where he was at the time a professor in the history department at Tulane University. Tom and Blanche wintered in New Orleans, and we'd drive through from Wisconsin on our roundabout route to Florida. My husband, and the Maneys, were pleasantly surprised on our first visit there together that I already knew the Crescent City well, and could find my way easily from the French Quarter and Canal Street to the Garden District, following my nose to Commander's Palace and even a terrific local florist.

Given the surroundings, we shared some remarkable meals with Pat and Elaine, including one where I remember he dined on veal sweetbreads (something out of the range of my own generally wide palate), corn-fried oysters at Commander's Palace, and a particularly memorable dining experience at the Grill Room of the Windsor Court, prepared by Chef Kevin Graham, which we finished with one of the most splendid desserts ever--a chocolate box filled with seemingly endless tiny scoops of brightly colored fruit sorbets, which we passed around our large round table in turn until it was completely devoured.

So my thoughts of Pat are frequently turned from history, which is his area of particular expertise, to dining. He is one of the few people I know personally who loves whole garlic.

Pat and Elaine moved on from New Orleans before Katrina's wrath, relocating in Columbia, South Carolina, where he took a position as professor and Chair of the History Department at the University of South Carolina, a position he had attained at Tulane prior to his departure. He held the chairmanship of the History Department in South Carolina until the summer of 2007.

He has served as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston College, and is a Professor of History at Boston College.

Patrick J. Maney.

Dr. Patrick J. Maney is respected not only as an educator but also as a scholar and author, particularly for his books on Bob La Follette ("Young Bob" La Follette: A Biography of Robert M. La Follette, Jr. 1895-1953) and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (The Roosevelt Presence: The Life and Legacy of FDR). He is currently researching a book on the presidency of William Jefferson Clinton.

Jeri Lu Johnson

2008-07-14T19:25:00.000-07:00

Jeri Johnson was an English major from Meadview, Arizona, when I met her in the Honors Program at BYU. She went on to teach Honors Colloquium for a year while waiting to go on to graduate school, and also did a year at BYU Law School, and a summer as a law clerk for Mountain Fuel Corporation in Salt Lake City, while I knew her. Her ultimate goal was to win the Rhodes Scholarship and go on to Oxford.

As part of the Rhodes selection process, she met well known Utah industrialist, philosopher, author and philanthropist Obert C. Tanner (then founder and president of the O.C. Tanner jewelry company headquartered in Utah, and author of the well known LDS book "Christ's Ideals for Living"), who offered to sponsor her first year at Oxford should she become unsuccessful in her quest for the Rhodes Scholarship. As the Rhodes eluded her, she went on to Oxford anyway with O. C. Tanner's assistance, and because of her, I made my first ever trip to England in December of 1979, a few months after my father's untimely death that summer to malignant melanoma.

I remember being colder than at any time before or since in my entire life (no small thing for a girl from "The Icebox of the Nation"), sitting up at night in the house in Hugh College at Oxford, running a bathtub full of hot water to try to stay warm, putting coins in the electric meters, discovering the Bodleian Library, the Ashmolean Museum, wine bars, bookstores, London, Surrey, and most importantly, Christmas at 42 Rectory Lane and the gracious hospitality of Reg and Min Oram, angels who became lifelong friends and hosted my husband and I in their home for two weeks of our honeymoon. There was the concert in Croydon, bells and carols on Christmas Eve at St. Mary's of Beddington, and memories that will last a lifetime.

Jeri always rather struck me as Liza Minelli's incarnation of Sally Bowles in "Cabaret," perhaps because they had the same haircut and some of the same mannerisms, or perhaps because our circles first overlapped at a time when several of us, including Anna Tueller and Alison Craig, went out to see the film version of "Cabaret" together, raising my consciousness at least one notch at the time.

I remember meeting her grandmother in her little apartment in Salt Lake City and watching Jeopardy, going to the BYU Law Library in the evenings to help with legal research for Mountain Fuel, and an ill fated cross country trip to deliver a car to one of her roommates. Somewhere mixed in with that was Keats, Simone de Beauvoir, and A Room of One's Own.

Clearly Oxford agreed with Jeri. Some years back, I noticed she was editing the works of James Joyce for Oxford University Press.

Earlier this spring, there was something of a rumble in the press about J. K. Rowling's venture into a New York City courtroom to take on someone who was undertaking the unwelcome publication of a Harry Potter lexicon. This received widespread coverage in the national and world press, but a particular article in The New York Times caught my eye, "Trial Over Potter Lexicon Ends With an Olive Branch." An expert witness had been called on Rowling's behalf, and details of her testimony spilled onto the page. An expatriate. An Oxford senior tutor (equivalent of academic dean) at Exeter College. And most apparently, a Potter fan.

Jeri Johnson.

Val Holley

2008-07-14T19:07:00.000-07:00

I will never be able to hear an ABBA song without thinking of Val Holley.

Val Holley.

Val and I met through Brett Parkinson, a mutual friend of ours at BYU. They had met two years earlier as missionaries destined for Brazil but serving temporarily in San Diego awaiting visas. The San Diego Brazilians, of whom I eventually met several, were a motley crew indeed.

Val was animated, witty and full of life, always a good time, particularly in the back of cars belting out tunes from ABBA or Saturday's Warrior. Think "Bohemian Rhapsody" in Wayne's World. Plus one.

"Knowing me, knowing you,
Uh-huh"

Yes, Val, to this day I can still see you and Brett en route to Diana Sather's wedding reception in Evanston, Wyoming, nodding your head to that music. When I go to see "Mamma Mia" at its debut next week, I will hear you beside me.

Val went on to law school, became a legislative and reference librarian in Washington, D.C., and is now best known as the current definitive author on James Dean (James Dean, The Biography). He is also the author of Mike Connolly: The Manly Art of Hollywood Gossip.

Robert Loosle

2008-07-14T09:08:00.000-07:00

I met Robert Loosle in the late 1970's when I was working at the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah. He and his brother, Ronald, were Spanish foreign language testers who had been trained to administer Foreign Service Institute-style language tests, and other tests on discussion teaching proficiency, to new missionaries who were learning the language before departing for Spanish-speaking missions.

Robert and Ronald had been raised speaking both Spanish and English, and both had lived abroad in Spanish-speaking countries. Both were extremely polite, well mannered and attractive, generous in spirit and light in heart. I worked with them at a time my father was undergoing surgery and treatment for cancer, and both graciously went to the local hospital to donate blood on his behalf.

When my father died, both came to the viewing held at a Utah County funeral home, and the graveside services in Salem, Utah, along with other friends and co-workers from the MTC. They were a comforting presence.

Robert Loosle.

Robert is now legal attache for the FBI in Mexico City, having most recently served as head of the crime division of the Los Angeles Bureau of the FBI. Prior to that, he served the FBI in Las Vegas, Houston, Jacksonville, El Salvador, San Salvador, and at FBI Headquarters.

Monroe McKay

2008-07-14T07:22:00.000-07:00

As a young girl, I remember sitting in the basement of one of the dorms at Heritage Halls at BYU during a campus Education Week, and listening to my father, my uncle Elmo, and Monroe McKay discuss, or rather debate, politics. Uncle Elmo was pretty much a Republican, my dad generally voted his heart, but leaned Democratic, and Monroe McKay was the most liberal voice I'd heard at that young point in my life.

Monroe McKay was my aunt's brother-in-law's brother.

At the time, he was an attorney in private practice in Phoenix, Arizona, an ex-Marine who'd served as a Director of the Peace Corps in Africa and clerked for the Arizona Supreme Court. It made quite the impression on my young forming consciousness to hear them discuss topics I'd previously never considered, and particularly for my Goldwater Republican uncle to be trading points with someone that far to the left.

Ten years later, Monroe McKay was my last branch president at BYU, from 1976-77 at a time when he was also a professor at the BYU Law School, and in his typical inimitable fashion, made that position quite his own by skirting orthodoxy somewhat (it was before women were allowed to pray in LDS Sacrament Meetings, something he found to be in need of remedy). He was very interested in civil rights issues as they related to the LDS Church, at a time when blacks had not yet been given the priesthood (this happened a year later, in June 1978), and having served an LDS mission to South Africa in the early 1950's, was instrumental in influencing his cousin, former LDS Church President David O. McKay. To have the same person from whose mouth I heard my first liberal musings become an ecclesiastical leader is an interesting phenomenon. I will always remember Monroe McKay fondly for both. He was compassionate, caring, and, yes, a character, larger than life.

Monroe McKay.

Monroe McKay was appointed by President Jimmy Carter shortly thereafter in 1977 to serve on the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, a position he continues to hold today as senior judge. He held the position of Chief Judge of the Tenth Circuit from 1991-1993.

I found this recent post from another blogger also singing the praises of Monroe McKay:
Lynne's somewhat invented life: WORDS OF COMFORT

William T. Close, M.D.

2008-07-13T20:39:00.000-07:00

A country doctor from Connecticut by way of Africa, William T. Close, M.D. came to my hometown of Big Piney, Wyoming, with his wife in 1977 to establish a rural medical practice.

"Rural" doesn't quite describe it. For much of my childhood, Big Piney didn't even have a doctor, unless you count Dr. Burgoon, who was always over playing cards across town and had a dubious medical license. The closest small hospitals were 90 miles away in Jackson or 120 miles away in Evanston, and the closest medical centers of any significance for serious illnesses and injuries were four hours away in Salt Lake City.

Dr. Close had left Africa in 1977 and settled in Big Piney while I was a state away attending college at BYU, ostensibly "to retire," as we understood it, but it was clear he planned to do anything but. He changed the landscape of a community.

More importantly, he arrived just in time to be on the scene when my father, and our family, needed him most, as a persistent backache in early 1979 led my otherwise healthy, athletic 48-year-old father who worked supervising oil fields for a small independent oil and gas company to see a doctor. Dr. Close, in his wisdom, referred my father to a surgeon in Salt Lake City, Dr. Lawrence Stevens, and in the whirlwind that ensued, my father had surgery to remove tumors from his abdomen and spine which were later diagnosed as the progression of malignant melanoma.

We were only about ninety days from diagnosis to my father's untimely death from the disease, a progressive nightmare that enveloped our entire family and held my father in the chains of unspeakable pain and suffering, but Dr. Close was there, in Big Piney, to offer sensitive, appropriate palliative care during the times my father wasn't in Salt Lake City being treated or hospitalized at LDS Hospital. He did the unheard of. He made house calls. Sometimes he brought his daughter, visiting from out of town, with him.

I hadn't had a lot of personal contact with Dr. Close myself prior to that, as I was most of the time away at school, but I do recall a time I went to see him over Christmas break with a persistent bronchitis. He talked to me about stress, about trying to do too much, about burning the candle at both ends, an easy trap of the college student, and then told me about his daughter, and how in many ways she was the same way, and I reminded him of her.

It would be five more years before Glenn Close was a household name, following her performances in "The World According to Garp" and "The Big Chill." We didn't know much about Dr. Close's daughter then, maybe that she was an actress, but once her image became emblazoned across the screen and the world consciousness in roles like that of Michael Douglas' stalker in "Fatal Attraction," no one would soon forget.

In 1988, taken with the local community that her parents had embraced, Glenn Close made a documentary for the BBC and HBO Films, "Do You Mean There Are Still Real Cowboys?" The film, narrated by Robert Redford, who also has connections to Big Piney (an alternate version was narrated by Glenn Close), explores the lives of several ranching families in Big Piney and the apparent disappearance of the American cowboy from the national stage. It subsquently ran on television as part of the PBS series, "The American Experience."

Dr. Close still practices medicine in Big Piney, where he lives with his wife, Bettine, and still continues to look after the elderly, the infirm, and the dying. Last I heard, his daughter is building a home there. He hasn't yet retired, and it's doubtful he ever full will. He's been honored by many over the years for his dedication to practicing rural medicine in an area of the world particularly challenged by geography and climate, and has published a number of books on his life and experiences (his book, "A Doctor's Life," sits on the nightstand in a guest bedroom at my cottage). He is well regarded as a local citizen and author, and a citizen of the planet, someone who has made a difference.

William Taliaferro Close.

Mike Thomas

2008-07-13T15:07:00.000-07:00

Mike Thomas was the cutest guy in the third grade. He was probably the first guy, other than my first cousin, on whom I ever consciously had a bona fide crush. Everyone liked him. He lived across town with his father, the local game warden, and his mother, an artist, and an older sister.

At an early age it was clear he had his own share of artistic talent. His mother occasionally came to our school to teach us about drawing, perspective, and share some of her life work with us. His father's life working for Wyoming Fish and Wildlife as a local game warden, particularly in an area with lots of hunting abuses, was also fascinating.

Mike moved away before we graduated over thirty-five years ago, and I always imagined he'd somehow pursued his art.

He's now one of the premier bronze sculptors of the American West.

D. Michael Thomas.

Those who will be fortunate to own his pieces or have them grace their homes are lucky so-and-sos, indeed.

Margaret Merrill Toscano

2008-07-12T22:32:00.001-07:00

Amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant.

Omnis Gallia est divisa en partes tres.

You'd think after several semesters of Latin that more would easily come to me, but that's what's stuck in my brain.

I'd already had Latin 101 in college when I met Margaret Merrill, who became my Latin teacher for the next few semesters of Latin 201 onward. She was something of a fireball in the Classics Department, and a good teacher and friend. At the time I met her, she was single, but somewhere during that time, she became engaged to her first husband. I recall, as she told me at the time, he gave her two roses--a white one for her purity, and a red one for her passion.

That was long ago.

I enjoyed her classes, and particularly the extracurricular activities. I'd taken Latin primarily because it was a dead language--no danger of conversation--but it turned out to be most useful not only in my chosen primary field of study in the humanities but in later life. I fondly recall Christmastimes going door to door caroling in Latin (Dallin Oaks, President of BYU at the time, wondered what we were doing on his doorstep singing "Tinnitus, tinnitus, semper tinnitus" to the tune of "Jingle Bells"). She encouraged me to play Aphrodite wrapped only in a sheet for a Classics department banquet skit ("The Judgment of Paris"), and somehow I managed to carry it off.

I liked Margaret both as an instructor and as a friend, and held her in high esteem.

Like so many other people at the time, I lost contact with Margaret over the years. Later I heard she'd remarried a man named Paul Toscano. Paul Toscano later became part of the infamous "September Six" who went down in a wave of excommunication, and Margaret later followed.

Margaret and Paul became particularly well known over the years for their work on feminism and theology within the context of Mormonism.

Margaret Merrill Toscano.

Ernie Northway

2008-07-12T22:01:00.000-07:00

These days, if you are a serious saxaphone or clarinet player, an Ernie Northway mouthpiece is a prized possession.

Back in the day, Ernie Northway was my high school instrumental music teacher.

Ernest Vernon Northway.

I remember the first day of my freshman year of high school in 1968, when we learned that several new teachers had been hired, among them a husband and wife straight from Drake University in Iowa by way of Las Vegas to teach instrumental and vocal music, respectively. After getting their degrees from Drake they headed to Vegas, where Ernie was a studio musician for headliner shows in the more prominent casinos, something that gave him a unique ability to lead a band in a small town of 500 people in southwestern Wyoming and take its stageband to a position of Intermountain prominence in its class. Apparently Vegas also lended itself to some choreography skills which Ernie was able to use during his time as faculty advisor to the Puncherettes, our high school drill team.

Ernie did me more than one great favor during my years in high school. The summer before my sophomore year, he took a mediocre flute player who'd been unenthusiastically plugging along with the instrument since fifth grade and waved a bassoon in front of her, a beautiful, big, double-reed instrument, and gave her the confidence to learn something new. He introduced that same girl to the works of Hermann Hesse, starting with Steppenwolf and Siddhartha. He taught her how to play tympani when wind instruments no longer held her interest, and how to change the pitch of the individual drums by ear. He had the confidence in her to make her president of the band and have her schedule travel arrangements for out of town trips, including the famous two week school trip to compete in the Reno Jazz Festival in Reno, Nevada. And before she ever went on to play keyboards or electric bass in the stageband, he entrusted her to run the choreographed lights for the spring stageband concert.

Somewhere out there is an audio tape of the stageband concert in the spring of her senior year, which she emceed. "Ham," I recall, were his exact words to describe that unfortunate combining of 16-year-old and microphone. "Primadonna" was another word I won't soon forget escaping his lips during a long and tedious Puncherette rehearsal. Ernie pulled no punches. He encouraged, sometimes he challenged, but in the end, he raised the bar. He changed many lives during his time in Big Piney. I learned a lot about Wheat Thins, Type A personalities and your heart, Bill Chase, Bobby Shew, hotel rooms in Reno, what worked, what didn't, and above all, listening listening listening during that time. "Northway" was what most of us affectionately called him. That he went on to start a business of handcrafting exclusive woodwind mouthpieces that bear his name is most fitting.

He played many instruments, but I remember him best as a trumpet and saxaphone player, in addition to clarinet and flute. Standing in the back of the room with the trumpet section during stageband rehearsals won't soon be forgotten.

Southwest School District #9 brought a number of people to Big Piney for a few years only to move on again later, as the Northways did. The riches of the local petroleum industry allowed for salaries in our school district, and amenities, that would have been unheard of elsewhere. Those of us who were fortunate enough to be students there abundantly benefitted.

Kurt Bestor

2008-07-12T21:07:00.004-07:00

When I first met him, Kurt Bestor was a gangly 17-year-old kid at Orem High School. I was a 19-year-old college junior at BYU embarking on two semesters of student teaching, one of which was with Mrs. Hill's Honors English class at Orem High School.

Kurt was then as he is now an enormously talented musician, but he was something much more curious at the time, a lone Catholic in a school filled with Mormons. His father, Rollie Bestor, was diving coach at BYU, and the family had moved from Wisconsin to Utah and transplanted themselves in a place where they were very much the minority. Difficult as it might be to believe now, there were parents who wouldn't let their daughters date him because of the difference in religion at the time.

Although I sat in on the instrumental music program while doing my student teaching at Orem High, my primary focus was Mrs. Hill's English class, and the slow, plodding reading we were doing of her chosen paperback for the semester, William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying." Slow. Plodding. Did I say it was slow and plodding? It was.

I stayed up until 2 a.m. most nights grading papers, a task I took seriously, during a semester where I had an extremely heavy load of classes in addition to significant church responsibilities. Kurt was easily my best student, and his papers were a pleasure to grade.

Mornings I would meet him and a friend at the Joseph Smith Fieldhouse on the lower campus of BYU very early, sixish, and watch them dive, then together we would drive out to Orem High School together to spend the day, and repeat the process again the next morning.

I knew Kurt as a trumpet player. I hadn't a clue at the time he played piano, although it would have made sense for that to be the case.

As part of my student teaching, I had to also teach junior high, and did that under the mentoring of Kurt's mother, Phyllis Bestor, who taught English at Orem Junior High. Phyllis was an inspirational teacher to her students and involved them in all sorts of projects, like creating television commercials, to spark their young collective imagination.

At the end of his senior year, Kurt was a finalist for the Utah Sterling Scholar Award in Music, and a violinist friend and I drove from Provo to Salt Lake City to see him compete. He finished as runner-up to Kelly Clark, a young violinist from Provo High School who later married a friend of mine, Brett Parkinson.

After graduating, Kurt came to BYU, where I would run into him from time to time in classes or in the hallway or in the BYU Bookstore. I remember well the day he told me, with great excitement, that he was "being baptized," along with his whole family, as converts into the LDS Church. Some months followed, and again I ran into him, and he told me, with equal excitement, that he was being called to serve on a mission for the LDS Church.

I don't think I saw Kurt again after that. He went on that mission, to the former Yugoslavia, came home, got married.

Sometime later I was living in Wisconsin and went into a local music store in the mall at Christmastime. Beautiful seasonal music was playing overhead, and I asked the clerk what it was.

Kurt Bestor.

For many years since I followed Kurt's career as a professional musician, buying each new Christmas CD as it was released, in addition to others, and noting the many projects with which he was associated, the 2002 Winter Olympic Games, ABC Sports, film soundtracks and original scores. Every year at the Christmas holidays he undertakes a popular concert tour in the Intermountain West that is the season's hot ticket.

I've always fancied a certain symmetry in our lives. Kurt was a Catholic from Wisconsin who moved to Utah and became Mormon. I was a Mormon girl living in Utah who moved to Wisconsin and became Catholic. I've been enormously proud of what he's accomplished with his significant talent, not just in music, but in his writing, and wondered if ever at all there was a time he looked back and thought I had any influence with the red ink scrawled in the margin.

Kurt Bestor Brand Video#1 from Kurt Bestor on Vimeo.

Toni Murdock

2008-07-12T16:45:00.000-07:00

Tulisse Antoinette "Toni" Onstott was my high school history teacher. When she married a local boy, the cowboy son of a famous ranching family who was at the time working as the school custodian, Mike Murdock, she went from being "Miss Onstott" to "Mrs. Murdock."

Toni Murdock.

I loved the sound of her name, Tulisse Antoinette. Very French. Very exotic. There was a little ditty that some of us wrote in the back of a school bus once coming back from one of many long school trips, probably to a basketball tournament or a music festival, to the tune of the children's song "Alouette, gentille Alouette." Her name fit perfectly to the music.

I remember writing a paper for her on "The Heathen Chinee" (Chinese labor used in southwestern Wyoming on building the Union Pacific Railroad line), and participating in many interesting projects and discussions in her classes, debates on welfare reform, and extended school trips to the State Legislature. I also remember a rather uncomfortable moment getting caught passing a note with a friend and classmate (our desks were in a semicircle at the time), and the aftermath of that insensitive lapse in judgment (to this day, I can recall the contents of that note, and her comments following). I wish I had been more interested in history then. I wish she knew how much more interested I am in it now. Still, she apparently had some faith in me, and I remember well her attendance at my high school graduation, where I was valedictorian, and her congratulating me afterwards with tears in her eyes, apparently moved by my speech which was really distinctive only for its brevity.

( I can still remember the high point of that short speech, a quote by Francoise Hardy: "There are so many dreams beyond your night, and so much sunshine beyond your grey walls, but you can't see it because you stay at home. There is so much sky above your roof. Is your door so old that it won't open, or are you staying at home because you're afraid of catching a chill?")

She gave me a record album as a graduation gift. If I'm not mistaken, it was John Denver, probably "Rocky Mountain High." I was touched by her generosity and her kindness on that occasion, and it occurred to me that whatever misdeeds I'd done in her classroom, she genuinely had an interest in me as a person, and yes, it was possible, thought maybe I had some potential.

I left town two weeks after graduation and headed straight for college, and never looked back. Toni, a New Mexico native with a background in social work and aspirations to go to law school, also left Sublette County and moved onward.

I saw some years back that she had become President of Antioch College in Seattle, and more recently noticed that she is now Chancellor of the entire Antioch University system nationwide, and has found herself in the middle of academic controversy spilling out onto the pages of The New York Times.

Bardy Bardin

2008-07-12T13:26:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately the first entry in this blog is dictated by tragic recent events, a young man gone missing in the Wind River Mountains just outside of Pinedale, Wyoming, and the tragic recent discovery of his remains.

Bardy Bardin was a classmate of mine growing up in Big Piney, Wyoming, from grade school until we graduated from Big Piney High School as two of the thirty classmates in the Class of 1973. Bardy was one of those good looking, popular guys that everyone liked. He was an accomplished athlete, a valuable player on many of the sports teams, and participated in a number of other activities. In high school, we were in band, stageband and choir together. He played the trombone in band and stageband, and had a beautiful bass voice that took him all the way to All State Choir. I remember him singing the role of one of the three wise men in a setting of songs from "Amahl and the Night Visitors." He was talented and well liked. All the girls wanted to date him, but his heart eventually went to someone else. Oddly enough, I can still remember the first time I kissed him, at one of those parties famous in Big Piney where everyone pretty much kissed everyone before the night was through so the chances of your getting kissed were pretty good.

The county where we grew up has seen a lot of boom and bust with the petroleum industry in the half century that Bardy and I have been alive. I was reading an interesting article a couple of years ago on that subject in The Washington Post, "Gas is Both Boom, Bane for Wyoming County," when the first four words immediately jumped off the page at me.

Sheriff Wayne "Bardy" Bardin.

"Sheriff Wayne "Bardy" Bardin, who sweeps up criminal fallout from the hottest energy boom in the Rockies, has noticed something new and nasty on barroom floors in his county."

That Bardy had become sheriff of the county, now residing in its somewhat larger (by Wyoming standards) county seat, Pinedale, was not terribly surprising, I suppose. He could have gone on to become a roughneck in the oil fields, and progressed up the ranks of a local energy company, or been a cowboy on one of the local ranches, maybe even had his own, but now he presides over the law enforcement activities in a part of America that is both untamed wild and woolly west and key to the energy resources of our nation and the world. As a result, he ends up in places like The Washington Post.

A more somber headline appeared a couple of weeks ago, when in late June a young Pinedale man, just 24, went missing. A massive search and rescue operation was mounted to search for him, Garrett Wayne Bardin, Bardy's son. The sheriff's department was doing the searching, and the object of the search, sadly, was the sheriff's son. His silver Lincoln Mark LT pick-up truck had been discovered abandoned near Muddy Ridge in the Bridger-Teton National Forest.

Days later, a body was found, in a remote area overlooking the Big Sandy River, and later identified as Garrett Bardin. He was laid to rest on July 9, 2008, after a memorial service at the Pinedale Auditorium, with over 500 people attending.