I retired on the
last day of April, after almost 18 years as editorial director at BYU Studies,
which has given me a lot to think about. I’ve had an unusual career, which
ended very differently than it started. But I have had a long and recurring
relationship with BYU that has blessed my life in many ways.
When they
inaugurated Shane Reese as BYU’s 14th president last year, I checked a few
dates and realized that I have now been a student or an employee during the
tenure of half of BYU’s 14 presidents. I guess that makes me old.
So, let me tell
you a bit about my BYU experience. It didn’t get off to a great start. I
graduated from Weber High in 1974 (yes, we’re having our 50-year reunion this
summer) and was awarded two four-year, full-tuition scholarships to BYU—one
from the university and the other a National Merit scholarship. Sorry to say, I
turned them both down. Although my older sister was a BYU student, I didn’t
have any friends coming to Provo, and I was not the adventurous type, so I
joined some good friends and spent my freshman year at Utah State in frigid
Logan.
That next summer I
was called to serve a mission in northern Germany. After I’d been there about
six months, my companion and I were “tracting” one cold morning in the tallest
apartment building in Norderstedt, a suburb of Hamburg. Nobody was home, so my
mind was just wandering as we walked from door to silent door. College was the
furthest thing from my mind. But all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a voice spoke
to me. It wasn’t an audible voice, but it gave me a very clear message in
specific words that I can still remember to this day. This is the only time in
my life this has ever happened. “Roger,” it said (I find it interesting the
voice didn’t call me Elder Terry), “you don’t want to go back to Utah State. Go
to BYU.” That was it. I hadn’t even thought about changing schools, but the
message was not just clear; it was true. I didn’t want to go back to Utah
State. I had spent the previous summer on BYU’s campus and had quietly fallen
in love with the school. This was the year before the new MTC was built, and
the LTM (someone told me that stood for Longest Two Months) was all over Provo
that summer. My district lived in Heritage Halls (the girls’ dorms), but we had
class in Amanda Knight Hall, on University Avenue, so we got to walk through
campus every morning and every night, and it made quite an impression. It
became home, I suppose. The last few days before we flew, the university needed
the girls’ dorms again, so we got moved, with about 200 other missionaries, to
the gym in the old Brigham Young Academy. That was quite an experience.
Anyway, after the
voice’s message, I started making plans. My mom got me accepted to BYU and transferred
my credits. Several months later, I was in a district with a couple of elders
who became my good friends. They and two other elders in our mission had
already planned to room together at BYU, so I asked if I could join them. They
said yes, if I could find a place that would hold five instead of four. My
sister was kind enough to track down an old house on 8th East, just south of
campus, and got us signed up. Rick, one of the roommates, will be forever
grateful that I barged in on their foursome, because he met his future wife in our
new student ward, and they are now in Fiji, serving a mission together.
I sampled a
number of majors before finally settling on German (accounting ran in the
family but not in my blood). I didn’t want to teach German. I’d done that for
three years at the MTC but didn’t want to make a career of it. I thought, “What
can I do with a degree in German besides teach?” The answer I came up with was
international business. So I applied to BYU’s MBA program and was accepted. I
think the most important thing (maybe the only important thing) I learned in
the MBA program was that I’m not the corporate type. Hmm. What to do?
Well, I heard
through the grapevine that the Business Management Department needed someone to
fill an empty faculty slot in operations management for a year. I had done well
in operations management, so I went and talked with Bill Giauque, the head of
the operations management faculty, and he offered me the job. That one-year
slot somehow stretched into nine years. It was during my first two years of
teaching that I met and married my wife, who had returned from a mission and
was in her last year at BYU, so that was an added bonus of staying at BYU after
graduating twice.
After teaching
for a few years at what had now been renamed the Marriott School of Management,
someone found out I like to write, so the dean’s office asked me to edit the
school’s alumni magazine, which was called Exchange back then. I learned
editing on the fly. I would send my edits to Byron Bronk, an excellent copy
editor up at Publications and Graphics, and he would send them back with red
marks all over them. “Oh, so that’s how you do that,” I would say to myself. And
that was pretty much the only editing education I’ve ever had. After a couple
of years of editing Exchange, I was asked to take an administrative
position as “director of publications” for the Marriott School. I worked
directly for the dean’s office. And I still had no idea where all of this was
going.
After I had spent
two years as director of publications at the Marriott School, the BYU human
resources people started sniffing around. They called the dean’s office and
said, “What’s this director of publications position? It doesn’t exist.” They’d
apparently created it out of thin air and funded it with “soft” money
(donations) without university permission, so that was the end of that. Nine
years on a one-year contract. Not bad.
I spent the next
year working for a small agency in Provo and then started my own small
business, producing a wacky day planner, writing fiction, doing freelance
editing, and finding whatever work I could to make ends meet. My wife and I
refer to those six years as the period of my life when I was “self-unemployed.”
Lots to do, but not much money. After a couple of years, I found out that the
Marriott School needed an editor for Exchange, so I returned for almost
four years just to edit the alumni magazine on a very part-time basis.
It was now 1999.
The associate dean I had worked with retired, and the replacement wanted to go
a different direction. My little business was also winding down (the new Palm
Pilot eventually killed the day planner market), and I had kids who were going
to need braces and a lot more, so I started looking for a permanent job. In a
rather miraculous way (a good story but too long to tell here), I was hired by
Church magazines as a senior editor, even though my editing background was not
all that impressive.
I spent the next
seven and a half years at the Liahona and then the Ensign.
In 2006, Jack Welch offered me the job of editorial director at BYU Studies,
and I jumped at the opportunity. I still considered BYU my home. And the past
almost 18 years have now flown by. It has been a great place to work, but it’s
time to retire.
I came to BYU in
1977, when Dallin Oaks was university president. I was both a student and
faculty member under Jeffrey R. Holland, who has been a good friend to me over
the years. And I have worked at BYU for at least part of the tenure of the next
five university presidents.
I will be forever
grateful that a voice spoke to me on a cold winter morning in Norderstedt,
Germany, and told me to go to BYU. I can’t imagine what my life would have been
like if I had not followed that voice.
