Chapter 10
Time Is Crucial
In the spring of 1966, Dr. Aziz Atiya followed an attendant into a storehouse of documents in New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Looking around, he found a file and opened it. What he saw astonished him.
Inside were scraps of ancient Egyptian papyrus. The papyrus was badly damaged, but Aziz could easily make out the image of two men, one of them lying on a lion-shaped couch and the other standing beside him. The portion of the papyrus depicting the arms and torso of the man on the couch, along with the head of the standing figure, was missing. In a crude effort to preserve the document, someone had glued the papyrus to a piece of paper and roughly drawn in the lost parts.
Aziz was not a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but as a professor of history and languages at the University of Utah, he had lived among the Saints long enough to recognize that he was looking at an image from the Book of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price.
Nine other papyrus fragments were stored with this image. As Aziz studied them, he found a certificate affirming that they had once been the property of the prophet Joseph Smith. The certificate was dated 1856 and was signed by Joseph Smith III, Emma Smith, and Emma’s second husband, Lewis Bidamon.
The fragments came from a set of papyrus scrolls the prophet Joseph and other Saints had obtained when they purchased four mummies from an antiquities exhibitor in 1835. Seven years later, he published images from the papyrus along with a translation called the Book of Abraham. Years after Joseph’s death, Emma sold the mummies and papyri, and the new owner divided them up and sold some of them to a nearby museum. For decades, the scrolls had been deemed lost in a fire, but somehow a collection of fragments had found its way east to the Metropolitan Museum.
“These documents don’t belong here,” Aziz said. He knew how important the fragments were to the Church, and he resolved to help reunite them with the Saints.
That same year, fourteen-year-old Isabel Santana was overwhelmed by her new surroundings. She had just left her home in Ciudad Obregón, a city in northern Mexico, to attend the Centro Escolar Benemérito de las Américas, a Church-owned school in Mexico City. The capital was a sprawling metropolis of seven million people, and everyone seemed to dress and speak differently than the people she knew back home.
The way they said “please,” “thank you,” and “excuse me” was so formal. That was not how people spoke in the north.
The restored gospel had taken root in Mexico in the 1800s, and the country now had two strong stakes. Over the past two decades, the number of Latter-day Saints in Mexico had grown from about five thousand to more than thirty-six thousand.
As membership increased, Church leaders wanted to make sure the rising generation of Mexican Saints received every opportunity for schooling and occupational training. In 1957, the First Presidency appointed a committee to investigate education in Mexico and make recommendations for establishing Church schools throughout the country. Finding that urban areas did not have enough schools to accommodate Mexico’s booming population, the committee proposed opening at least a dozen primary schools across the country, as well as a secondary school, junior college, and teacher training school in Mexico City.
At the time, the Church operated schools in New Zealand, Western Samoa, American Samoa, Tonga, Tahiti, and Fiji. By the time it opened two primary schools in Chile a few years later, the Church also had education efforts underway in Mexico. When Isabel arrived in Benemérito, some thirty-eight hundred students were enrolled in the Church’s twenty-five primary schools and two secondary schools in Mexico.
Benemérito was a three-year secondary school. It opened in 1964 on a 287-acre farm north of Mexico City. Isabel had first learned about the school while attending a Church-run primary school in Obregón. Although she did not like living more than a thousand miles from her home and family, she was eager to attend classes and learn new things.
The school was staffed entirely by Latter-day Saint teachers from Mexico. Students took required classes in Spanish, English, math, geography, world history, Mexican history, biology, chemistry, and physics. They could also enroll in art, physical education, and technology classes. The seminary program, which operated separately from the school, provided students with religious education.
Isabel’s father, who was not a member of the Church, supported her desire to attend Benemérito and agreed to allow her and her sister Hilda to enroll together. Hilda was a year younger, but she and Isabel had been in the same grade since primary school because Isabel did not want to go to school alone.
Isabel and Hilda had traveled to Benemérito with their mother. The school was still partly under construction when they arrived, with dirt grounds, few school buildings, and fifteen cottages for students to live in. Even so, Isabel was struck by the size of the campus.
She and her group were directed to house number two. There they were warmly welcomed by a cottage supervisor, who showed them the washing machines, wardrobes for storing their belongings, and bedrooms, each with two bunk beds. The four-bedroom house also had a dining room, kitchen, and living room.
Isabel spent much of her time observing the other students and trying to adapt to an unfamiliar culture. Benemérito had around five hundred students, most of them from southern Mexico. Their life experiences were different from Isabel’s, and she found that their food was also more diverse. She was surprised by the spicier flavors and choice of ingredients.
Whatever the cultural differences, every student at Benemérito was expected to abide by the same rules. They followed a strict routine of waking up early, doing chores, and attending classes. They were also encouraged to develop strong spiritual habits, like going to church and praying. Having grown up in a mixed-faith family, Isabel and her sister had never done these things regularly until they came to Benemérito.
Within a few days of her arrival, Isabel noticed some students growing homesick and leaving. But despite the newness of the people, food, and customs, she was determined to stay and succeed.
“It doesn’t seem possible that I am approaching my ninety-fourth year,” President David O. McKay recorded in his journal on January 1, 1967. He had passed the day quietly at home, reflecting on his many experiences. “It has been a happy, interesting life!” he thought. “What a long time, and yet how quickly it has passed.”
But even as he looked forward to the new year, the prophet was concerned. “The old world is fraught with troubles,” he wrote. Every day, newspapers and televisions relayed reports of wars, racial and political unrest, and natural disasters. Tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union remained high. And many people across Asia, Africa, and Central and South America were caught up in fierce regional conflicts that threatened to topple governments and divide communities.
President McKay was especially concerned about a civil war, now more than a decade old, in the southeast Asian nation of Vietnam. In an effort to prevent communism from taking root in the country, the United States had recently deployed 450,000 troops to South Vietnam. Now the guerrilla-style war was escalating rapidly, and countless soldiers and civilians on both sides of the conflict had been killed.
In Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, the Church had several branches where around three hundred local Saints met with some of the four thousand Church members serving in the American military. Elder Gordon B. Hinckley of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and Elder Marion D. Hanks of the First Council of the Seventy had recently visited the war-torn country. During a district conference with the Saints, Elder Hinckley had dedicated the land for the preaching of the gospel and prayed for peace to return to the country. “Hasten the day,” he pleaded, “when the noise of battle may cease.” Later in the evening, Church leaders bore their testimonies as artillery fire boomed in the distance.
President McKay hoped to see less chaos and strife in 1967, but that was not to be. In June, war erupted between Israel and its neighbors, unsettling the region. The following month, Nigeria’s ongoing political instability erupted into civil war. Rising casualties and the unpopularity of the war in Vietnam, meanwhile, helped spark frequent and sometimes violent antiwar protests in the United States. Racial tensions also reached a breaking point across the country, and a wave of violence rocked many major cities.
The prophet worried about the effect of this unrest on youth. Some young people, disheartened by world events, were questioning the values and culture of their parents and grandparents. Many youth experimented with harmful drugs, engaged in sexual promiscuity, and used crude language.
President McKay loved the youth of the Church, and he did not want them to fall prey to these trends. He encouraged Latter-day Saint youth to attend some kind of weekday religious instruction—seminary or institute—where they could develop Christlike character while surrounded by others who shared their values and standards. Recently, the Church had also produced a pamphlet called For the Strength of Youth to help young men and young women know, understand, and live the Church’s standards for clean living, dating, dancing, dress, and manners. But he believed parents and Church leaders also had a duty to teach and demonstrate to youth that moral living could bring happiness.
At the October 1967 general conference, President McKay’s ill health kept him from delivering his talks personally, so he asked his son Robert to read them to the Saints in his place.
“As I think of the future of this Church,” the prophet declared at the opening session of the conference, “I feel impressed that there is no more important message to give than ‘to be one,’ and avoid things that may cause a rift among members.”
Over the past few years, the Church’s correlation efforts had sought to unify the Saints by coordinating programs and emphasizing the role of priesthood, home, and family. So far that year, Church correlation had standardized the content of its international magazines and introduced a uniform curriculum. In response to worldwide growth, President McKay had also called sixty-nine “regional representatives of the Twelve” to assist in training stake presidencies, thus helping the Church operate efficiently and consistently around the world.
As the Saints confronted social unrest and shifting values in society, President McKay and other general Church leaders hoped that correlated programs would provide a unified message and stable foundation for people throughout the world.
“The challenge is before us,” President McKay told the Saints. “Unity of purpose, with all working in harmony within the structure of Church organization as revealed by the Lord, is to be our objective.”
That same year, Hwang Keun Ok was caring for about eighty girls at the Songjuk Orphanage in Seoul, South Korea. When the all-girls’ orphanage hired her as superintendent in 1964, she did not tell its Protestant sponsors that she was a Latter-day Saint. The Church was not well understood in South Korea. In fact, when Keun Ok was baptized in 1962, the Christian school where she was teaching fired her.
There were now around thirty-three hundred South Korean Saints. Kim Ho Jik, the first Korean Latter-day Saint, had joined the Church in 1951 while studying in the United States. Before his death in 1959, Ho Jik had returned to South Korea, become a university professor and administrator, and introduced the restored gospel to some of his students. These students, together with American servicemen, helped the Church grow in the country. A Korean translation of the Book of Mormon was published in 1967.
Despite not telling her sponsors about her Church membership, Keun Ok was not ashamed of being a Latter-day Saint. She served as her branch Relief Society president and taught a junior Sunday School class. She also welcomed visits from Church members who wanted to help at the orphanage. One day, an American serviceman named Stanley Bronson called Keun Ok on the telephone. He was a Latter-day Saint stationed in Seoul, and he wanted to visit the orphanage and sing some songs to cheer up the children.
Stan came a few days later. He was nearly six and a half feet tall and towered over everyone. The girls were excited to hear him sing. He had recorded an album of folk songs before being drafted into the army, and he hoped to record another album while in South Korea.
“Before you play your guitar,” Keun Ok said to Stan after everyone gathered, “the children have prepared something for you.”
She often had the girls sing for guests, and they were well practiced. As they sang a few songs for Stan, his jaw dropped. Their voices blended in perfect harmony.
Stan began visiting the orphanage regularly to sing with the girls. Before long, he suggested they record an album together, with the record sales benefiting the orphanage.
Keun Ok loved the idea. She had vowed as a young woman to devote herself to improving the world. A war refugee from North Korea, she had lost her father at a young age and knew how difficult it was for girls to succeed in Korea without strong family and community support. Many people in the country looked down on orphan girls and did not expect them to amount to much. To get her education, Keun Ok had struggled against poverty and the loss of a parent and a home. She hoped that performing with Stan would help the girls in her care realize their value—and help other Koreans realize it too.
Stan found a recording studio, and for the next few months, Keun Ok helped him and the girls rehearse and record songs. When the army gave Stan a thirty-day leave, he went home to the United States and had the recordings made into vinyl records. He then returned to Korea and arranged to perform with the girls on a popular American television special being filmed there.
The album, Daddy Big Boots: Stan Bronson and the Song Jook Won Girls, arrived in Seoul in the early months of 1968. Keun Ok wanted to make the album release a major event in Korea, so she invited the South Korean president, the United States ambassador, and the commander of the United Nations forces in Korea to attend a release party at a local girls’ high school. While only the ambassador could attend, the other dignitaries sent representatives in their place, and the release was a success.
Before long, the singers from the Songjuk Orphanage were in high demand.
Meanwhile, in the United States, Truman Madsen, a philosophy professor at Brigham Young University, received a memo from his colleague Richard Bushman, a professor in the history department. Richard was concerned about an academic article he had just read. Its author, Wesley Walters, was a Presbyterian minister in the midwestern United States. He claimed to have disproved Joseph Smith’s First Vision.
Over the years, critics had often tried to cast doubt on the Church’s sacred history, many times using the same unsupported claims to argue their point. But this article was different. “It is a well-written, well-researched piece,” Richard informed Truman. In fact, another colleague believed it posed a serious threat to the faith of the Saints.
Richard sent Truman a copy of the article. Wesley Walters recognized that he could not directly disprove that Joseph Smith had seen the Father and Son in the spring of 1820, so he had investigated the prophet’s claims about the historical setting of the First Vision.
For many years, Latter-day Saints had known of only two accounts that the prophet Joseph had written of the vision. The best-known account, begun in 1838, could be found in the Pearl of Great Price. The other account had been published in the Times and Seasons, a Church newspaper, in the early 1840s. Recently, however, a graduate student at Brigham Young University and a Church archivist had uncovered two earlier accounts of the First Vision in the Church’s collection of Joseph Smith’s papers.
Wesley had examined the four accounts carefully to expose any possible historical inconsistencies in them. And when he investigated the prophet’s claim that a local religious revival had prompted him to seek the Lord in prayer, Wesley had found no evidence of any revivals near the Smith home until almost five years after the First Vision occurred. For Wesley, this meant that Joseph Smith fabricated his story.
Truman was sure Wesley’s findings were wrong. But because little historical research had been done on the First Vision and the earliest days of the Church, he had no way to prove it. As a former mission president, he knew that many people had embraced the restored gospel because of the prophet’s powerful witness of seeing the Father and Son. An attack on the First Vision seemed like an attack on the very foundation of the Restoration.
After reading the article, Truman assembled a small group of historians in Salt Lake City. All of them were respected scholars and committed members of the Church. As they discussed Wesley’s article, they realized that they could use their scholarly training to help the Church. They and other believers needed to undertake a fresh study of Church history, beginning with its roots. Until they did, Wesley Walters’s claims about the First Vision would go uncontested.
With Truman at the head, the group organized into a committee to encourage Latter-day Saint scholars to study the early history of the Church. To respond to Wesley’s article, the committee proposed sending five historians to the eastern United States to research religious revivals and the First Vision. Unfortunately, they lacked funding.
The committee first tried to raise research money from private donors. When this proved only partially successful, Truman reached out to the First Presidency. President McKay and his counselors had supported other efforts to study and preserve Church history. Earlier in the decade, for instance, they contributed funds for purchasing and preserving historical properties in Nauvoo, Illinois, the headquarters of the Church from 1839 to 1846.
The First Presidency had also taken an interest in the Joseph Smith papyrus fragments. Working closely with Aziz Atiya and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, President N. Eldon Tanner had arranged for the papyrus to be returned as a gift to the Church. Newspapers across the United States reported the acquisition, and the Church held a press conference and published images of the fragments in the Improvement Era. At the First Presidency’s request, the fragments were then loaned to Hugh Nibley, a professor at Brigham Young University, for further study. Hugh, the Church’s leading scholar of the ancient world, had found strong historical evidence supporting the Book of Mormon’s authenticity and was sure to do the same with the Book of Abraham.
Writing to the First Presidency in the spring of 1968, Truman requested $7,000 to fund the research trips. “The First Vision has come under severe historical attack,” he informed them. “Time is crucial.”
Initially, the First Presidency decided not to fund the project. In recent years, the Church had gone into debt building more and more chapels worldwide, and since then, Church leaders had been more cautious about spending.
But Truman was persistent. He had recently met Wesley Walters at a conference on Church history, and he sensed the minister’s determination to discredit Joseph Smith.
“He will do anything to get at the sources first,” Truman told the First Presidency. “We feel we cannot wisely postpone action.” This time, he asked for $5,000.
President McKay and his counselors reconsidered the request and agreed to fund the researchers.
On a warm September afternoon later that year, fourteen-year-old Maeta Holiday sat alone on a bus approaching Fullerton, a suburb of Los Angeles, California. She stared out the window at the orange groves spanning both sides of the freeway, a landscape so unlike her home in the sparse desert on the border of Utah and Arizona.
Maeta was Diné, a citizen of the Navajo Nation. She had grown up on a Native American reservation within the four sacred mountains marking the traditional borders of her people’s ancestral home. In the nineteenth century, the United States government had created the reservation and others like it from lands they seized from Native American groups like the Navajo to make room for white settlers, including Latter-day Saints. Forced to live on the often-inferior reservation lands, many families struggled.
The Navajo reservation Maeta had lived on was vast, and people lived far apart from one another, making it difficult to transport children to and from school. Government-funded boarding schools, meanwhile, were often overcrowded and underfunded. Under these conditions, many Native American parents sought to improve the lives of their children by sending them to schools off the reservation.
Maeta had come to California as part of the Church’s Indian Student Placement Program, and she was on her way to live with a white family she had never met. Maeta’s older sisters had participated in the program, and she wished to do the same. But although she had eagerly signed up, she was anxious about her new foster family.
The placement program had been founded in 1954 under the guidance of Elder Spencer W. Kimball. Like many Latter-day Saints at the time, he considered Native Americans to be the direct descendants of Book of Mormon peoples. He believed Church members had a responsibility to help their Lamanite brothers and sisters gain access to educational opportunities and fulfill their divine destiny as a covenant people.
In the placement program, Native American children left their homes on reservations to live with Latter-day Saint families during the school year. The program aimed to give the students access to better schools and experience gospel-centered homes. By 1968, about three thousand students from more than sixty-three tribes had been placed in homes in Canada and seven U.S. states. While all placement students were Latter-day Saints, some of them had participated very little in the Church before entering the program.
Glen Van Wagenen, who led the program in Southern California, had heard about Maeta while she was living with a family in Kanab, Utah. Maeta loved living with them, and she got along well with their daughter. When Glen invited Maeta to join the placement program in California at the start of her ninth-grade year, she readily accepted the offer.
Maeta was the youngest of six daughters born to Calvin Holiday and Evelyn Crank. Her parents had joined the Church early in their marriage, but they later lost interest in it. Though Maeta was baptized at age eight, she did not attend church regularly, nor did she understand the significance of her baptism. Wanting to improve Maeta’s education, her parents put her in Native American boarding schools in Arizona as soon as she was old enough, so she moved around a lot.
Maeta knew of families on the reservation in which the parents loved one another and the children were happy. But her family was not among them. After her parents divorced, her mother remarried twice. Maeta’s mother had six more children from these marriages, and her long absences forced Maeta to take care of her younger siblings. More than once, Maeta and her siblings were left alone for days with little food and water. She did her best to feed the children, sometimes with spoiled mutton and a few cans of food.
Once, while Maeta made fry bread over a fire outside, her mother looked at her and said, “The only thing you are going to be good for is to make babies.” Maeta’s heart broke. In that moment, she silently vowed, “I will make something of myself.”
Arriving at the bus stop in Southern California, Maeta was relieved to be away from her mother. But she was nervous as she watched a middle-aged couple walk through the door. “They will be my new parents,” she thought.
Her foster father, Spencer Black, was quiet and reserved. Maeta greeted him with some wariness, scarred by the abusive men she had known in her life. Her foster mother, Venna, however, had a comforting spirit about her.
They brought Maeta back to their house, where she met their children, fifteen-year-old Lucy and thirteen-year-old Larry. The Blacks also had three older children who had moved out of the house. Maeta became familiar with her new home, with its spacious fireplace and a garden full of flowers. Having shared rooms with siblings all her life, she was especially thrilled to have her own bedroom.
But Maeta was still not entirely comfortable. The city was overwhelming and choked with smog. And while her foster parents were kind, Maeta wondered if they were using kindness to manipulate her into doing chores, as her mother sometimes had.
She did not regret coming to California, but she missed the quiet of the reservation as she lay in bed that night, troubled by the noisy traffic of the freeway.