I Will Miss President Holland

 

President Jeffrey R. Holland’s passing has left a hole in my heart. My association with him goes back decades to when he was university president and I was teaching operations management classes in BYU’s Marriott School of Management. I somehow managed to squeeze nine years out of a one-year contract, but all along I knew that the business school would eventually get rid of me. I was filling empty faculty slots after completing an MBA, and it was just a matter of time before the temporary shortage of LDS PhDs in business ended.

The only important thing I learned in the MBA program was that I was not the corporate type, so when I heard that the operations management group needed someone to fill an empty faculty slot, I jumped at the opportunity. During my first few years working for the Marriott School, I alternated between full-time and part-time teaching for the Business Department, supplementing the part-time semesters with teaching introductory German classes while working on a master’s degree in German. I had vague plans to earn a PhD in German, but my heart wasn’t really in it. To be honest, I had no idea what I wanted to do for a career, but I enjoyed working at BYU, so one day, as I recall, I sent President Holland a letter, asking him if he could find a spot for me in some sort of staff position at the university. I obviously didn’t know much about how BYU employment worked, but he kindly directed me toward the employment office, where I found job postings, some of which interested me. Fortunately, I suppose, none of the departments were interested in me or my meager qualifications.

But after I had taught business classes for a few years, somebody in the administration apparently heard that I liked to write, and it just so happened that Paul Timm, a management communications professor who had been the editor of Exchange, the Marriott School’s alumni magazine, was going on sabbatical. They needed a replacement, so they asked me to edit the magazine in addition to my teaching duties. I had never edited anything before, but I figured I could learn, and I did, on the fly, and thanks to Byron Bronk, my copy editor at University Publications, I apparently got pretty good at it.

At some point during my stint editing Exchange, Karl Snow, an associate vice president over outreach at BYU caught wind of my writing proclivities, and he asked me to write a few fund-raising letters for President Holland. I have no idea whether he actually used them, but I suppose this put me on his distant radar again. Before long, though, President Holland’s term as university president came to an end, and he moved on to Church leadership positions. About that same time, the dean’s office asked me to accept a new appointment, a full-time administrative job with the impressive title Director of Publications. I spent the next two years not only editing Exchange but also creating all sorts of other publications for the business school.

Then came the fateful phone call. The university employment office called the dean’s office one day and said, basically, “What is this director of publications position? It doesn’t exist.” The dean’s office had apparently funded it with “soft money,” but even though it came with full benefits, it had never been approved. So that was that. My nine years at the Marriott School came to an abrupt end. Well, almost.

For the next six years, I bounced around a bit. I ran a small literary agency for a year, started a small company that produced a wacky day planner, and was hired back part time at the Marriott School for three years to edit Exchange again. I also did some free-lance editing. The day planner almost had several big breaks, but they all fell apart, which is probably good, because after a few years the Palm Pilot came along and destroyed the paper day planner market.

At that point, I needed a real job. I had one teenager, with three more coming. They all needed braces, and life was getting expensive. After a fairly lengthy search, a job basically fell on my lap straight from heaven. I got called as ward executive secretary, and at my first bishopric meeting, the bishop handed me the Church employment list that came in the weekly packet from Salt Lake and asked me to post it on the bulletin board in the hallway. I looked at it, and the first job listed was associate editor at Church magazines. I called the next day, and the Church employment office asked me to fax them my resumé. Yes, fax. This was December 1998. Well, I faxed it and got a call back the same day. They said the job was closing, but they had passed my resumé along to Marv Gardner, the managing editor of the Liahona, the Church’s international magazine. He called either that same day or the next morning and asked me to come to the Church Office Building the next day for an interview and an editing test.

I must have done well on their test, because they had a lot of applicants for that editing position, and I guess my editing for the business school, my master’s degree, and my nine years of teaching at the university looked better on paper than in real life, because they hired me on the spot. I actually had to fill out an application for the job after they had hired me, just to make it official. But that was the beginning of a quarter century of editing for the Church and BYU.

I have written in past years on this blog about my adventures with Church bureaucracy, which is everything it is rumored to be, but I have nothing but high praise for the people I worked with at Church magazines, first at the Liahona and then at the Ensign. These are some of the finest people on earth.

During my seven and a half years with Church magazines, I had some interaction with Elder Holland, and at some point, I began corresponding with him sporadically by email. We were, after all, relatives. His wife, Patricia Terry Holland, and my dad were second cousins (technically, half second cousins through polygamy) and both grew up in the small southern Utah community of Enterprise. Pat came through Thomas Sirls Terry’s first wife, Mary Ann Pulsipher, daughter of Zera Pulsipher, who baptized Wilford Woodruff. My dad came through Mary Ann’s younger sister Eliza Jane, who also married Thomas Sirls. My dad claimed he had babysat Pat when she was a baby, but I have to doubt his memory. He was seventeen when she was born, and by then he had dropped out of school and gone to Las Vegas to find work. I suppose it’s possible that he was in Enterprise for a short time after the war, when he was 20. But he left for St. George and then Salt Lake City soon after returning home from Europe to resume his education at Dixie Jr. College and the University of Utah.

I had one rather humorous encounter with Elder Holland while working at Church magazines. He had spoken at a conference in the Philippines, and a local publicity person had written a piece for the news section of the Philippines edition of the Liahona. This writer quoted Elder Holland extensively, but I could tell that the Apostle had not spoken those words. He did after all, have a very distinctive style. So, I sent Elder Holland the text, along with my suspicions. He replied that he certainly had NOT said what he was quoted as saying and expressed appreciation for my keen editorial eye. So we deleted that bit from the news section.

In June 2006, I jumped ship and escaped the Salt Lake bureaucracy for greener pastures at BYU Studies, where I was editorial director for almost 18 years. During those years, I wrote Elder Holland many times, but never very frequently. He once told me that the volume of his correspondence was making both him and his secretary physically ill, so I didn’t write unless I felt it was important. I also came to consider him a personal friend, enough so that I felt I could bring up some touchy subjects from time to time, including one that I hope to publish an article about in Dialogue in a few months.

Let me relate one experience. I have a son who suffers from schizophrenia, and from time to time he has felt that he is being pestered by an evil spirit. I suspect it is just the mental illness manifesting itself in this way, but who am I to be sure about what another person is experiencing? This raised a question for me. We read about early Church leaders casting out evil spirits, but I haven’t heard of such experiences in our day. I knew my stake president wouldn’t have a clue how to answer such a question, so I sent Elder Holland an email, told him briefly about my son, and raised this question. Later that afternoon, my office phone rang, and it was Elder Holland on the line. We chatted about this question for about a half hour. He didn’t really have an answer, but he did tell me about a blessing he once gave a niece who felt she was being plagued by an evil influence. His advice was what he has stated publicly: seek priesthood blessings but also seek the expertise of medical and mental health professionals.

A few years ago, I was on our stake high council and gave a fairly lengthy talk in a neighboring ward on the topic of “Dealing with Difficult Questions,” something I know a bit about. After the meeting ended, I had so many people come up and ask me for a copy of the talk that I figured it might do some good if it appeared in print. So, in addition to posting it to this blog, I sent it to Dialogue, and it was published under their “From the Pulpit” feature. A couple of months later, I got a letter in the mail from 47 East South Temple in Salt Lake City. It was from the Office of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. My first thought was, “What have I done now?” After all, I have been rather controversial for quite a while. But when I opened the envelope, inside was a handwritten card from Elder Holland, saying simply, “Nice job with ‘Dealing with Difficult Questions.’”

A few months later, BYU Studies was publishing a special issue on the 40th anniversary of the dedication of the BYU Jerusalem Center, including a speech Elder Holland gave at the conference celebrating the event. So, we were emailing back and forth with edits and such. In the process, I thanked him for his kind note and mentioned that I was surprised he had time to read Dialogue. He said he always looked at the table of contents to see what he ought to read but that he always read anything with my name on it. That was a bit sobering, because I had published some pretty adventurous stuff there. But he apparently wasn’t bothered by any of it.

When Trump came along and lots of Latter-day Saints were falling for the truckload of disinformation the Republican Party was spreading around, I wrote Elder Holland with concerns about three specific areas of disinformation I saw as problematic in the Church: antivaccine propaganda, lies about the “stolen” election, and skepticism about global warming (and science in general). I added a comment that from what I was seeing, it appeared the gift of the Holy Ghost was pretty much dormant among many Mormons. I was in fine form that day, and Elder Holland joked that he was going to give me his speaking slot in the upcoming general conference. But he also asked permission to share my email with his “colleagues.”

In recent years, we have discussed politics, and he has even shared with me some of his personal views, although he swore me to secrecy, saying that he could get in trouble if these views were ever made public. So, I will continue to honor his wish, even though he is gone from this troubled sphere.

My last correspondence with President Holland occurred after Pat died and he had his close brush with death. I sent my condolences about Pat’s passing and asked him if he had any information about a family history matter that I thought Pat might have known about. He didn’t, and he said Pat hadn’t been the family historian in her immediate family, but he assured me that even though he sometimes didn’t answer all his emails because of time constraints, he did read them. I assume that remained true until his final illness and hospitalization.

I will not be sending President Holland any more emails, but he has been an important influence in my life for more than four decades. He was genuinely kind and considerate, even when I was sometimes a thorn in his side. I am happy for him that he can be with his dear Pat again, but I will certainly miss him.