Fifty-two years ago this month, I
received a letter in the mail from an organization that called itself
Outstanding Teenagers of America, headquartered in Washington, DC. I suspect this
organization was primarily in the business of selling books to the parents of
high-achieving high school students, and the books were rather pricey. This
organization would gather all these names from high schools across the country
and list them in their book, which they then sold to the proud parents. But
they also awarded a rather hefty trophy to one student in each state who was
named the “Outstanding Teenager of (fill in the state).” The letter I received in
March 1974 informed me that I had been selected as the Outstanding Teenager of
Utah and that I would receive the award in person from “Governor Calvin L.
Ramptom” (actually Rampton). The governor’s office would contact me to schedule
a time.
On the appointed date, my parents
and I trekked to the capitol building in Salt Lake City from our home in North
Ogden and met with Governor Rampton. A local television station had even sent a
reporter and a cameraman to film the event, so I ended up on the evening news.
This was sort of the final straw in a long year of awards and honors. My friends
were so sick of me winning everything under the sun that they mostly shunned me
for the next little while. So, after winning this heavy trophy and meeting the
governor, I hid the trophy away and tried to vanish from sight. And that trophy
has been in a box on a high shelf in the basement until a couple of weeks ago,
when I pulled it out and showed it to the grandkids, just to entertain them
with a little ancient family history.
How this rather impressive high
school career happened was all somewhat accidental. I didn’t go seeking all
this attention. I was a painfully shy young man who was more interested in
sports and girls (not necessarily in that order) than in being Utah’s
Outstanding Teenager. There were a few problems with my reticence, though.
First, I was a good student. I ended up being co-valedictorian at Weber High. Second,
I was pretty good at basketball (and am still playing, if you can call it that)
as I approach 70. Third, my high school counselor was really into promoting top
students for regional, state, and national awards, and she was very good at it.
Fourth, I also was senior class president, which happened sort of on a lark. My
friend Bruce and I were starting guards on the high school basketball team, and
one day we were talking and one of us (I don’t remember who) said, “Hey, we
ought to run for senior class president and vice president.” We didn’t actually
know what that would entail, but we decided to go for it. I would end up the
valedictorian, but Bruce was the smart one. He talked me into running as
president, which meant I had all the responsibility, and he was just along for
the ride.
Anyway, all this meant that I
looked darn good on paper. I had the grades. I was senior class president,
starting point guard on a reasonably good basketball team, shortstop on the baseball
team, the school’s Sterling Scholar in foreign language, a member of lots of
school organizations, an Eagle Scout (thanks to Mom), an eventual National
Merit Scholarship winner, and who knows what else. And my school counselor took
one look at this list and decided to go into full marketing mode.
The Elks Club at that time
sponsored a state and national youth leadership contest. The counselor and my mom
helped me put together an impressive book of my accomplishments, which I happen
to have sitting here next to me at the computer (I pulled that out of the
closet today too). The counselor knew just which buttons to push, so my
application won the local contest, placed first in the state (worth a $300
scholarship), and took third place in the nation (worth a $1,500 scholarship,
and that was big money back then when my tuition at Utah State the next year
was $117.50 per quarter).
By the end of my senior year, as I
said, everyone was sick of me winning awards, including me. The awards assembly
at the end of the school year was not good for a still shy kid who didn’t want
to show up his friends. I was glad when high school was over and I could just
forget about it all until fall, when I trundled off to Logan for college. That
was another strange thing. I had two full-tuition scholarships to BYU (one from
the university and the other a National Merit award), where my sister was
attending, but I didn’t have any friends going to Provo, and I was pretty
insecure. So, when USU offered me the same money as BYU, even though tuition in
Logan was a notch lower than BYU’s, I jumped at it. I had three good friends (including
my co-valedictorian) going to USU, so I joined them, and we had a fun year
living together, except for the cold winter.
After our freshman year, we all
went on missions. The other three returned to Utah State, but as I’ve recounted
in an earlier post, one winter morning during the first year of my mission, we
were tracting in a largely empty apartment building, and as I was walking between
doors, a voice spoke to me, not audibly but in my mind, and it said these
specific words, “Roger, you don’t want to go back to Utah State. Go to BYU.” I
hadn’t even been thinking about college, but my reaction was, “You know, you’re
right.” I had fallen in love with the Provo campus while in the LTM (Longest
Two Months, I was told), so I had my mom transfer all my credits to BYU, and
that was that. I ended up getting two degrees from BYU and working there three different
times, for a total of about 31 years.
But what about the title to this
post? Let me go back to my senior year in high school and revisit one of the
most humiliating experiences I’ve ever had. Because I was senior class president,
the school administration asked me to represent Weber High at a youth senate program
at the state capitol building. I rummaged around in my old mementos today and,
lo and behold, I found a booklet they gave us for this event. It is titled “The
Human Quest: An Ideal to Be Achieved.” Beneath that, the cover states, “United
States Senate Youth Program” and “State Capitol Building, October 25, 1973.”
The program included a greeting by my future friend Calvin Rampton (a Democrat,
by the way); messages by the president of the Utah State Senate, the chairman
of the state board of education, and the superintendent of public instruction;
a keynote address by Ted Wilson, future mayor of Salt Lake City and, at that
time, assistant to Representative Wayne Owens (another Democrat from Utah); an
orientation by the state school board specialist for social studies; discussion
groups (they divided us up into smaller clusters); a luncheon; a second round
of small group meetings; a film (Why Man Creates); the announcement of
semifinalists; questions for the semifinalists; and the announcement of two
winners and two alternates. I’m assuming the judges met during the film to
decide on the winners and alternates.
I was not one of them. Not even
close. Why? Because, as I said, I looked really good on paper, but not at all
good in person. During the after-lunch small group meetings, we student
delegates were assigned a topic, and they gave us about ten minutes to prepare “extemporaneous”
talks. The topic was “Dignity, Worth, and Fulfillment.” I was extremely shy,
and while I could hold my own in a student council meeting among friends and do
great on homework assignments and ace tests and sparkle at times on the basketball
court, I was not a public speaker or debater. I had never thought about concepts
such as dignity, worth, or fulfillment. I started the ten minutes of prep time
with an empty head and ended with the same empty head. When my turn rolled
around to extemporaneously elaborate on these high-minded concepts, I
extemporaneously confessed that I didn’t have anything to say. Of course, some
of the more loquacious students from other high schools rambled on about these
topics as if they had them for dessert every evening. This was utterly
humiliating. But that’s who I was. Lucky, I suppose, that the good folks from
Outstanding Teenagers of America and the Elks Club were not present.
Now, here’s an interesting
coincidence that I just barely learned for the first time. On the next-to-last
page of the little booklet they gave us for this student senate experience is a
list of “Observer-Judges.” They were the ones judging our participation in the
two breakout sessions where I said nary a word except to turn down the
opportunity to speak. I was looking for a specific name on that list of observer-judges,
and there it was—second
on the list: Dick Peterson, State School Board. You see, Dick Peterson—ten years, nine months,
and one day after this wonderful little humiliating experience—would become my
father-in-law. I’ve known for at least 42 years that Dick was the science
specialist on the state school board. But it never dawned on me until today
that he just might have been present at that student senate fiasco. I suppose
he never noticed me. I was very unnoticeable. And ten years passed before I met
him officially at his home in Midvale. I’m sure he never made the connection.
Thank goodness.
I look back at that experience,
though, and the others I’ve recounted here, and marvel at how a young kid as
clueless as I was could end up in a student senate program at the state capitol
and then be named the outstanding teenager for the state of Utah. It’s pretty
mind-boggling.
Of course, since that time, I’ve
figured out (as no doubt you have too) that I actually have a lot to say about
a lot of topics. I could probably carry on about dignity, worth, and fulfillment
for quite a while. But that’s a topic for another day. Let me just in say in
conclusion that every human being has a certain degree of dignity, although
some of us have squandered it on the fleeting pleasures and distractions of
mortality. As children of God, we all have infinite worth, even if we don’t
live up to our heritage most of the time. And fulfillment, well, it’s something
we all strive for every day, even if we don’t know where or how to find it. I
have learned that I experience the greatest sense of fulfillment through family
and friends and my meager efforts to make a difference for good in the world. Serving
others, in whatever way, is the quickest path to fulfillment. I wish I could
have said that in October of 1973, but it was far beyond my grasp at the time.
